The truth is there are many bloggers and other internet users who don’t know what the truth is. There’s some controversy about a quote that Walter Mondale attributed to Will Rogers during the presidential debates back in, uh, whatever year it was that Walter Mondale participated in the presidential debates that went, “It ain’t what you don’t know that bothers me, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Will had a certain kindness even toward those who didn’t always tell the truth, and that was what the controversy was about. The director of the Will Rogers Museum, here in Claremore, said he could not confirm that Will ever said that for the very reason that it sounded too mean spirited for something that Will would have said. Regardless of whether Will said it or not, we all have ambivalent feelings about the truth. We all want to hear the truth all the time, but we don’t always want to tell the truth. We have even developed a rating system for truth to justify some of our dishonest ways. There are harmless fibs, little white lies, bald faced lies, my favorite since I wear a full beard, bold and/or brazen lies. There is the partial truth, the naked truth, the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the cross my heart and hope to die truth and even the honest to God truth. The problem is there is no way to distinguish one from the other. Of course, if someone says "That's the truth, I cross my heart and hope to die," and then keels over dead, I suppose one could make some assumptions. Or in the case of the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, there is usually a judge and a couple of lawyers present to insure that it is what we say it is, which is a whole other blog in itself. You might suspect a grammatical error in a sentence that contains is 4 times but since my style is conversational, I certainly don’t mind setting grammar aside, and I hope (don’t care if) you don’t either.
I have been accused of exaggeration, which is another level of untruthfulness, less serious than the fib I should think and therefore relatively harmless but still not the truth in the purest sense. I also believe that “what goes around comes around” and since like most people, I want to hear the truth, I also know that each time I speak or write an untruth, I stand a better chance of hearing one. Not that I ever listen to myself or read what I’ve written, but because of the goes around comes around thing. But, because the truth is mostly boring, hence the invention of fiction, and needs embellishment, especially to invoke humor, I have come up with a technique which I cleverly introduced at the end of the last paragraph and cleverly named Subliminal Truth. As you might expect, since I came up with it, it is utterly simple (brilliant) and involves nothing more than placing the truth in parenthesis any time something is embellished or abased to imply humility as in this last case. This allows me to play fast and loose with the truth, not for malicious deception but for humor, while maintaining my holier-than-thou integrity regarding the truth. See, you can have it both ways. If you find this annoying, remember the word subliminal means “inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception” so I can only assume that there is something wrong with you for even noticing. But that’s ok. You can blame it on me. I can take it. I have one reader that complained that she only had time to read half of my blog. She wanted a synopsis at the top so she could get the jist of it instead of wasting (investing) the whole 5 minutes or less that it might take to read it. I truly appreciate (ignore) those kinds of suggestions and will begin (forget) including the Cliff’s Notes version right after the title, starting with this very issue.
So now that you know how this subliminal truth thing works, it’s best if you try to forget about it. After all, it’s supposed to be subliminal. If you’re conscious of it, it just won’t work. To paraphrase what Will might or might not have said, “It’s not so much what I wrote that bothers me. It’s what you thought I wrote that just ain’t there.” Wink, Wink.
