Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
March 10, 2008

"You've been lying so long you don't know what's real," Bruce Cockburn sang. "You're a figment of your own imagination. And people see through you."

Well, take that, Conrad Black.

And take that, Margaret Seltzer, who wrote a convincing memoir under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones for the same American publisher responsible for James Frey's fraudulent memoir about his miserable life.

Seltzer claimed to have grown up as an abused foster child who dealt drugs for black gangs on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles. She convinced her agent and editor, as well as the books editor of the New York Times and even one of those NYT ladies who come to your home and write about your decor complete with slide show.

It was ludicrous. The self-described funky, hard-assed white 'hood survivor had a cute baby blue Oregon house furnished by Pottery Barn, curtains from Ikea and a little daughter wearing Mary Janes.

But she also had black-eyed peas and pork necks on the stove, and, allegedly, a big pit bull tattoo on her back. She even had the gall to write a rule of street life: "Never speak or act on anything you aren't 100 per cent sure of, or someone will expose your mistake and take you down for it."

Someone did. Luckily it was her older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, who saved her from a fate worse than Frey's humiliation at Oprah's hands. It was revealed that Seltzer grew up in prosperous Sherman Oaks and attended a private Episcopal School.

The Seltzer revelation came just after another memoir, a European one about surviving the Nazis with the help of a wolf pack, was found to be fictional.

This is happening in a world where university professors have to use detective software to spot plagiarism in essays, where journalists are caught with unnerving frequency inventing their stories and where people create fictitious selves on dating sites and Facebook.

In Toronto, Ryerson University has had to take a stand against chemistry students banding together online on Facebook instead of doing work independently.

Students are outraged at this. Ryerson, extra-sensitive because it only recently was given university status, says that a degree declares that you can do the work alone. Anything else is bogus. Like writing a memoir about a life you didn't live. Like Esquire magazine publishing "fiction" about Heath Ledger's last days. I guess the news feature was too dull.

Galloping derangement

I'm not saying more people are lying. I'm saying more people are telling lies so blatant and all encompassing as to signal mental illness. Not incipient mental illness, but full-on galloping derangement that leads to restraining orders followed by care in the community and ultimately … well, hi there Conrad.

The phenomenon is interesting, but the reasons behind it are fascinating. Is it mere animal spirits? Or is it what P.G. Wodehouse called the craze for notoriety, the curse of the modern age?

Yes, that's it. And a hunt for great wads of folding money. Kenneth Williams, the actor who played the mincing shrieker in the Carry On movies, wrote movingly in his diary about the British disease — becoming famous without the wherewithal to create privacy. It led to painful scenes on the bus when he encountered his rowdier fans.

In America at least, there is money in being notorious. But there's rarely enough money to cushion the public stripping you go through when your sister calls your publisher, or the closed-circuit camera films you stealing documents.

The phenomenon of public self-invention is sustained by this: People want your fantasy to be true. It would be lovely indeed if wolves had protected author Misha Defonseca (real name: Monique De Wael) as she ran from the Nazis.

It would mean wolves are noble. And who doesn't want to hear that a girl killed a Nazi with her bare hands? If only.

One wonders if genteel New York editors so passionately wanted Jones to be a heroine because she was white, and books by whites sell better than those by blacks, plus you don't have to cope with a guilt-inducing black author radiating hostility.

But people see

But people see through you. Family first. Conrad Black's first wife was mystified by the pompous, polysyllabic showoff who emerged after his marriage to Barbara Amiel.

Envious co-workers will shop you, the ultimate being David Radler in the Black case, and Giorgio Pelossi, the accountant in the Mulroney/Schreiber case. Not one of Black's so-called friends ever told him the plain truth, that he was being a giant arse. Was it schadenfreude or shyness?

Black said prison would be a "bore." Some might say that's a silly obvious lie that even Black couldn't have believed. But I'll bite. How bad can prison be? On the morning of Black's incarceration, I went from watching the CBC's wonderful Rosemary Barton outside Coleman Federal Correctional Complex to YouTube to watch the U.S. Federal Law Enforcement Training Center's instructional video, How to Conduct a Strip Search in Prison.

Yes, prison can be that bad. They search for hacksaws in your nostrils. I did not know that. And the script is wince-making. Lift your what? Pull those back? Bend how? Observe any constricting of the … ?

Even if people don't see through you, they look at you in a most unpleasant way, whatever courtesies are drummed into the good-looking actor guards of the federal video.

Despite this, hordes of obscure people are even now constructing elaborate, shameless towers of untruth in order to be photographed in shabby magazines, ridiculed online, have their families embarrassed, watch their money melt away, see their own lawyer fall asleep during the trial while the prosecutor delivers the classic, "I submit to you that your entire testimony has been a tis-sue of lies" (British accent essential), and end up looking like death on two legs.

It is insatiable, this destructive force in people, yet it will be fed. So consider transparency as a virtue in modern life. All will become clear.