PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : When Lying Creates No Guilt or Even Embarrassment, I’m Scared

You gotta love kids. At least they’re honest enough to tell you they lie.

“How many of you would cheat on a test if you knew you could get away with it?” I asked my 12th-grade English students recently, not at all sure that I wanted to know the answer. Nearly every hand in the room went up.

Their shamelessness was disturbing, but in some ways unsurprising. After all, their heroes, their leaders, their media, their entertainment idols, their government, everyone, lie. They lie to get rich or to get ahead or to get out of trouble. They lie because it’s easier than telling the truth. They lie because they can’t tell the difference between lies and truth or because they don’t think the difference matters. All this public deception doesn’t excuse children’s dishonesty--but it makes it easier to understand.

I got to thinking about kids, lies and film the other day listening to H.R. (Bob) Haldeman criticize the movie “JFK” before an audience of high school journalists, some of them mine, at the Nixon library. Bathing in irony, Haldeman--who earlier bade the students “don’t believe what you read in history books”--attacked “JFK” as revisionist history.

The students would have done well to apply the skepticism the former Nixon aide prescribed to Haldeman’s own remarks--he cast himself as a hapless sheep thrown to “wolves,” misled by his lawyer and convicted by a jury on a witch hunt led by a “so-called judge.”

Only about 100 students had the opportunity to have their doubts raised about the official story by a Haldeman holding up a Wall Street Journal article listing factual errors in widely used textbooks. Many more, however, have seen the line between fact and fantasy turn gray amid the grainy black and white frames of Oliver Stone’s “JFK.”

My students, however, need not travel to a movie theater to see the line between fact and fiction blurred; for such “infotainment,” they need go no farther than the nearest television set. If they tire of sensationalized “tabloid TV” in the “Hardcopy” genre, perhaps they will switch to the evening news, where they might see network employees acting out a “simulated” event--one recreated to show what an event might have looked like if the network had managed to have a camera there.

It was such a simulation that depicted U.S. diplomat Felix Bloch, who was suspected of espionage, handing confidential documents to a Soviet agent. Bad enough that ABC News got its facts wrong: It showed Bloch turning over a briefcase on a Vienna street, not a suitcase in a Paris restaurant, as was suspected. Worse, ABC at first aired the tape without noting that it was a simulation using actors. (To date, Bloch has not been charged with any crime.)

It was only shortly after the Bloch incident that one of my 9th-graders submitted a term paper that opened with a graphic description of the ambush and execution of a Latin American leader. The problem was, the leader had, in fact, died peacefully of natural causes. Confronted with the facts, the student replied brightly, “It’s a simulation!”

More often, though, the lies are in the message, not the medium. Americans are accustomed to being deceived by most everyone, and particularly by the U.S. government. Admittedly, the record of honesty among public officials has never been spotless in this country. But the Vietnam conflict marked a turning point for the government in both the cynicism and regularity of its lies to the public.

If the pattern was set in Vietnam, it was sealed by Nixon, Haldeman and their cronies in Watergate. Since then, governmental lying has become commonplace. Add George Bush’s monikers: the environmental President and the education President.

It is the simple absence of morality in these falsehoods that disturbs me most, and which I believe has infected my students. It is not so much the fact of their cheating but their lack of a sense of guilt or even embarrassment about it that scares me. One student argued that he deserved credit for the questions on which he had not cheated.

I was shocked at the time, but perhaps I should not have been. When society--its leaders and heroes included--doesn’t recognize or care about the difference between right and wrong, maybe it’s not so surprising that children don’t either. And they don’t. According to a 1986 study, 73% of California high school students admitted cheating at least once on a test, and a majority had done so a few times or more. When it comes to right and wrong, one of my students recently told me, “Maybe we don’t know the difference.”

What about morality?

“It’s not that important,” she said. “There isn’t time for it.

I heard the other day that the people who gave us “JFK” are putting together a “study guide” to accompany the film for use in schools.

But that’s OK. Haldeman will set the kids straight.