Lies My Teacher Told Me

I was about to read Lies My Teacher Told Me. I was reading the Introduction, but so many illegitimate children tried to use it as their flag that I just couldn’t get any further. I started to think it should be lies my friends told me as I recall a lot of mis-truths the buddies laid on me in college.
Why do people lie? To fit in? To make themselves look better? To hide unappealing facts? To escape hard truths? I don’t know.
I love it when men lie about women. Like how they slept with this one and that one or how their baby was a virgin when they went to bed with them. Yeah, my favorite is of the 17 year old virgin who met the wild and undisciplined lusting rock and roller in her first year of college. Not only was she a virgin but she was on the honor roll, whatever that was, at the university. Not the honor roll exactly, but I was informed of a “president’s list.” Simple things like getting a scholarship to go to school do not suffice for the drug addled rock and roll culture – or liars. I never met a student going to school on a scholarship. It was important though to impress me with what an elevated citizen I was encountering and by association what an elevated citizen the buddy boy was.
Indeed, by my second year in school, the year I met the incredible virgin, I had forgotten my civics and the importance of good citizenship. The war had become a non-issue with Nixon’s re-election and racial desegregation had never done me well with “the boys,” who despite their McGovernite associations still looked pretty suburban white to me, distrustful of young black people trying to succeed. It was odd how these dopers and partyers could dis thing black. I had met them while McGovern was campaigning for President. I was a Lindsay supporter, but I had little against George McGovern except that he wasn’t very attractive. I liked a little Elvis with my folk rock and I just didn’t see it in Sen. McGovern. Besides that I had grown up 50 miles from NYC and under a republican Governor who was continually re-elected throughout the 50’s and 60’s, Nelson Rockefeller. Lindsay and Rocky weren’t good friends despite their being in the same party and Lindsay had left the party to gain re-election. He had failed to clean up the snow that once and that was really the end to his serious presidential ambitions. He decided to run anyway in 1972. I don’t know if he was ever offered or even considered for the vice-presidential nomination which ended up dooming Sen. McGovern but he ran and I voted for him in my first vote for any elected official in my life.
When you are in high school, it is perhaps easier to see the differences between people. Not everyone is alike though they may be hanging out together. One man’s brother is not another man’s friend.
So, what difference do the lies make? Oh maybe it’s easier to lie than to get a bodyguard that beats the crap out of those inquirers we wish to have nothing to do with. Like rock superstars might have them, but the ordinary man can’t have the security deal with inquirers. And, of course, the image building.
More on that later. It’s something I really must study and reflect upon. Our images. Why are they so important? Of is it something deeper we are trying to protect, a deeper self, a self or life we hope to experience.