Truth? or Lies?

From Judith McDaniel

In previous blogs I’ve written about my frustration with stories that are “made up” or blatant lies and then promulgated as truth to the gullible.  There seems to be no limit to what is allowable.  Lee Iacocca’s writing criticizing the Bush administration is cut and pasted into an critique of the Obama administration—in spite of having been published two years before Obama’s election. Letters about immigration, social security, health care, it doesn’t seem to matter what the truth is as long as the writer can scare the public into rejecting a certain point of view.

So Glenn Beck lied about whether or not he had actually held a document signed by George Washington in his own hands.  The archivist said, No way!  And then Beck said, well, it didn’t matter, since it was the emotional truth of the story that was important—his account of how profoundly affected he had been to see this document.

Well, there is real life (that’s a fact) and then there is fiction.

I read a novel last week about an U.S. soldier who had served in Iraq who was court-martialed for killing his commanding officer in a domestic related dispute once they were back in the U.S.

The testimony in the trial about what this soldier experienced in Iraq was detailed, horrible, and completely believable.  I believed every word of the soldier’s story…about commanders who were out of touch with what was happening on the ground only a few miles from the protected base, about commanders who ordered battalions into battle based on personal vendettas, about soldiers dying in an attempt to carry out an order that was both impossible to achieve and meaningless to the military effort.

Does it matter whether the author had experienced battle himself?  Whether or not he had been in Iraq?  Or even in the army? 

Not to me.  I used to tell my creative writing students, “I tell the truth about my life in my poetry.  In my fiction, I tell the truth by lying.”  It was a shorthand way of saying that there is an emotional truth at the center of good fiction.  That is quite different from lying.  You won’t be able to check the truth of my novels by checking my facts or looking for evidence. 

But it does seem to me that when a political figure or even a political wannabe is giving a speech to thousands of people, unless he announces that he’s proposing a “what if” kind of story, that he owes us the truth.  Not just the emotional truth, but the actual facts.