Telling Lies

A bizarre article by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman (via):

On December 27th, at 11:31 in the morning to be precise, agents of the Homeland Security Department detained me at Miami International Airport and proceeded to impound a speech I was supposed to deliver in Washington, D.C. to a plenary session of the Modern Language Association of America.

This is the story he told to the two thousand university professors of language and literature gathered together at the MLA meeting. But it wasn't true. He made it all up.

All through my talk, I provided innumerable clues that this was indeed a tongue-in-cheek attempt to embody the contradictions of being an intellectual in our present time of turmoil. I wanted to use this "method" to obliquely lay out my ideas without launching into the sort of preachy manifesto I dislike. I made references to Borges and Nabokov, those literary masters of deception and apocryphal manuscripts. I speculated that the agents were part of a special (and hitherto secret) division of Homeland Security dedicated to weeding out alien scholars with dangerous academic leanings.

So what happens? Well, it dawns on him pretty quickly that his attempt to be ironic, witty, post-modern, has fallen completely flat, and the audience has swallowed his fabrication whole.

It was then, as I watched that small gathering of intellectuals nod in agreement, that it finally dawned on me how deeply the fictional account of my persecution by Homeland Security had resonated with unbridled fantasies that seethed inside the heads of so many men and women at that convention -- and unquestionably elsewhere in the country. I doubted that any of the people I had talked to was in immediate danger of being sent to Guantanamo or dispatched to a country where they would be tortured. As one of my fictitious guards had pointed out to me when I tried to persuade him that the United States was on the verge of becoming a police state, I was totally free to say anything I wanted at the MLA, to expostulate even the most outrageous falsehoods. Nobody was going to arrest me -- or my audience, for that matter -- for voicing a dissident opinion.

And yet there could be no denying the paranoia my story had tapped into. If arguably rational academics believed me, it was because in some profound recess of their psyches they had already imagined such a possible world, had already inflicted that nightmare scenario upon themselves in the shadows of their own dread. Perhaps that's why, no matter how much I assured everyone I met that my tribulations had been a hoax, rumors of my ordeal continued to spread at an alarming rate. A former student told me she was writing a letter to the Washington Post to complain about my mistreatment. E-mails began to arrive, commiserating with my plight.

Everybody seemed absolutely ready to credit my absurd story as perfectly real, as not, in fact, at all absurd. When I lamented the naiveté of such a sophisticated audience to friends at the MLA, when I declared my amazement at the reaction I had gotten, the answer was unanimous: I was the naïve one.

Amazed? Why should I be amazed? Of course, people had found my version of events -- to use an Aristotelian category -- a paragon of verisimilitude. Isn't art, according to my master Picasso, a lie that always tells the truth? To those friends, my fraudulent story was terrifyingly plausible, all-too-unfortunately representative of a country where citizens and non-citizens can indeed be kept forever and a day in custody without charges, where illegal wiretapping is rampant, where that obscene word "rendition" (or the even more perverse "extraordinary rendition") has crawled into our everyday vocabulary, where the Vice President insists that certain suspects may have to be tortured in order to defeat terrorism, where the President lies and invades another country under sham pretences and is not impeached, where polls indicate that a majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties in order to be "secure." Had I not proclaimed in my own essays that anything can happen in the United States, that anything can happen anywhere if ordinary citizens are afraid enough to accept the slow destruction of democracy, to justify the worst crimes against humanity if they feel their lives are imperiled? And wasn't I as responsible as my gullible audience? Wasn't I also laboring under the anxiety that this could truly befall me? Wasn't my story, my telling of it, filled with an underlying panic? Wasn't that what had made it so credible?

You'd think Dorfman might be slightly embarrassed by all this - if not for himself, then at least for his audience of dupes, so desperate to believe that they live in some kind of proto-fascist Bush=Hitler state that they'll swallow any old rubbish that might possibly confer on them some semblance of importance as rebels, dissidents - people who matter - rather than face the mundane reality of what they are: a bunch of self-important academics whose views are largely conformist within their own world, and who live in a free society which lets them say pretty much what they like. But no, that's a step too far. He stands at the edge.....and steps back. What he's uncovered, he decides, is that his little lie contains a deeper truth.

Undoubtedly, its credibility was also due to the unfortunate fact that the room I had described, that windowless room in an airport where I had not been detained, where I had not been interrogated, does in fact exist. How can we know what is being perpetrated at this very moment in such impenetrable chambers? How can we be sure that my speech, or any other speech for that matter, is not being scrutinized by some federal agency, transcribed for spying eyes? How can we even find out who is being interrogated at this airport, that terminal, in that other windowless room, right now? How can we be sure that we are not next?

The sad truth about my story is that it comes straight out of the trepidation and terror of September 11th, 2001. Before that date I would not have concocted my chronicle in this manner, not here anyway. I would not have thought about making it up because, quite simply, most Americans would not have understood what I was talking about, because nobody would have found it even slightly realistic.

And he's off on another little story - another little lie:

The sadder truth is that I can invent an epilogue to my story.

Let us suppose that the United States suffers another terrorist attack of even more devastating consequences than the last one, an assault where maybe, who knows, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children die. That day, who can say that there will not be a knock at my door and, when I open it, two men there, one of them tall and gangly with Trotsky-like glasses; the other shorter, beefier, and vulgar?

I can see them right now, right now in my head.

I can see them ask if I remember having spread lies about them, about their efforts to fight the war against terrorism.

And then I can hear them, those two men, demand that I accompany them, just for a few hours, they'll say, just for some routine questioning.

And I am left to wonder if this new ending to my story is really so unbelievable, if it is, after all, so absolutely, totally, impossibly unbelievable?

Isn't it wonderful, this art business? The title of an earlier interview with Dorfman, Telling The Truth Through Lies, says it all. Come up with any old load of rubbish, and if you've got the right audience it turns out you're telling a deeper truth.

Comments

[Juan Goldblado]

He's always been like that. He first made a name for himself casting aspersions on Donald Duck because he was not the father of Huey, Dewey and Louie and nor was he married to Daisy.

[Andy M]

I too have been arrested, roughed up and interrogated by shadowy agents of our fascistic state.

Actually, I haven't really.

Or maybe I have.

Confused? That's just what they WANT you to be!

[Bill]

Rather like Sokal's paper on gravity as a social construct. Or the "shamstansiated" tale of the Little Red Book. Fake, accurate, and more True than the truth.

[Fabián]

Well, Dorfsman always believes that he is living the day that Allende was killed and the CIA is at the door. Is like Groundhog Day for him.

[SnoopyTheGoon]

I read one of Dorfman's books, rather liked his style, although his obsession with Che really grated.

This story shows a real creep. Too bad. Scratch another moonbat.