LIAR,LIAR PANTS ON FIRE

The act of lying has increased greatly. Perhaps it's the old joke in action about a guy in Manhattan who gets lost and inquires"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The answer he got was: "Practice, Practice, Practice!".

We see lying going to new heights - or is it new lows - as practiced by our politicians. Folks, this ain't even "spinning". It's outright lying. We have become a culture of consummate liars,i.e., the
politician who lied and told folks he was a Vietnam veteran and the other politico preaching the benefits of abstinence while boffing a woman on his staff.

And, they weren't even the good liars.

Years ago as a young insurance claim representative we were called adjusters - but some insurance companies dropped the term as it appeared to suggest some devious activity on our part . Plaintiff attorneys successfully convinced juries that if we were "adjusting claims" we obviously weren't paying what the claim was worth.

Yeah, it was a lie but no more than what you hear everyday from the large law firms who continue to insist that insurance companies and their employees are Lucifer incarnate.

The first frequent exposure to lying began for me in the 60's when I started out adjusting (oops) -handling claims and it wasn't me doing the lying. My good Irish Catholic mother taught me what the consequences of lying were. That was enough to scare me half to death. I was too old and too proud to have my boss sticking Fels-Naptha soap in my mouth for telling a lie.

I was sort of naive and believed all or at least most of the stuff I had heard from Mom. When I became part of the insurance claim business I quickly learned life wasn't exactly a level playing field and the insurance employees were the ones struggling to catch up with the bad guys.

The first instance that this reality rattled me was a claimant from a mid-eastern country who was building his claim by over treating - exaggerating his injury - and insisting we insurance guys were truly thieves. At one point I sat with the man and reviewed all of his medical bills. There were many listing dates of treatment that preceded the accident we were discussing.

I said, "Sir, these bills have nothing to do with the accident. We simply cannot consider most of them." He looked at me , smiled and said, "OK, but how about all these other bills?"

My point is he did so with no shame and apparently no need for an apology either. There was a disconnect in the man's mind between what the mouth was saying and what he knew to be a lie. In truth (pun intended) he saw nothing wrong with what he was doing.

At the risk of offending some mid-eastern friends most of whom I both respect and enjoy, I believed it was more of a cultural display that demonstrated a different interpretation of lying from that which I was taught.

This conclusion was next ratified by a guy from Yemen now living in Pittsburgh's South Hills.. Discovering that I had recently purchased a home, he offered to have the yard sodded and purchase a new refrigerator for my wife if I was willing to overlook some real holes in his claim.

Now, many who read this would find a faulty syllogism in what I just wrote. They would defensively declare it wasn't the culture of the men - it was just a couple of guys trying to make a dishonest buck. They would insist that it didn't allow me to excuse the Irish, German, and English claimants with whom I was negotiating (oops, there it is again!) and lying through their teeth.

And they might well have been right but my experience was fairly consistent with the group I've referenced.

Not all Muslims are making bombs. But, the fact that the examples I just listed kept coming up again and again caused me to keep my guard up when dealing with folks from the Middle East and I wasn't disappointed in my pre-convictions.

My final example was a married couple from the Middle East claiming to be doctors. They billed excessively and apparently were very dedicated to their work as it was not uncommon after careful examination of their bills to find that they were reportedly seeing patients on Easter, Christmas, and Thanksgiving.

They were later exposed as neither of them had a medical license, but, in the meantime they had swindled thousands and thousands of dollars from "insurance companies". You know the ones who the Attorney ads tell you are the real thieves. Lying to accident victims: Bad. Lying to Insurance companies- Good.

No! The truth is that lying is not the special privilege of any ethnic group nor profession no matter how you might have felt about the press conferences of the little guy with the white hair and bushy mustache, Tarik Iziz, Deputy Foreign Minister of Iraq under Hussein. The man told outrageous lies and appeared to be genuinely offended that what he was saying would not be believed.

Now, this guy was g-o-o-d!

Actually, Tariq Aziz was not his birth name. It was Mikhail Yuhanna. (Michael John). He was born to a Childean Catholic family but changed his name to avoid hostile sentiments against his Christian heritage.

Here we go. Now I'm going to hear about it from my Catholic friends.

Ah well, maybe I'll just tell them I lied.

But, I didn't. No Fels-Naptha soap for this old guy.