A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post-Facebook
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hamsphire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1814
Growing up I wanted to be a Hitchcock blonde. Not only because they were witty and beautiful and were dressed by Edith Head, but because they would happen upon a vault of cash, stuff it in a bag, drive off in a Cadillac convertible to
start an entirely new life — or try to.
I don’t advocate breaking the law, yet the possibility of reinventing one’s self seems a dying art. Human resources checks all your references and degree credentials. And the Internet means all your lies will be exposed provided someone cares enough to learn the truth about you. Only professionals — con men — can really get away with it.
Last month, NBC aired a Dateline episode on con artist 2.0, Gemase Simmons. The extent of his reality tv charade is almost unbelievable. Pretending to be a former model (his height and appearance alone contradict his claimed experience in the industry,) he recruited a dozen people to appear on the so-called television model search using Craigslist and Myspace. Services were provided free in exchange for advertising when the show was to air. A full crew was hired (they left after a few weeks, when they didn’t get paid,) so all of his bizarre antics are caught on tape. He had them stay at a campground, and made them go through the kinds of optical course challenges reality tv is known for. People grew suspicious even before he made sexual advances on the participants — male and female — when the cameras weren’t rolling.
Simmons has spent his life reinventing himself. He wasn’t just a “model/actor” but a political consultant, a writer, an R+B producer –with ten outstanding arrest warrants, (a mugshot showed him with a Catholic priest’s collar.) This guy was born to lie, and dreamt big enough to get away with it (And he would have, if MSNBC hadn’t heard of him — the only reason they did is one of the cameramen he hired had a connection to the news program.) Simmons, by the way, denies every charge.
Compare that to story of Hope Ballantyne, recently profiled in Radiolab’s “Deception” episode. She’d move in a new place, write a bad check and move again. She conned dozens of Bay Area residents out of thousands of dollars. From a 2000 article in the San Francisco Examiner:
[A former roommate] led the search for Hope after finding spiral notebooks scrawled with names and phone numbers amid the woman’s left-behind bags of designer clothes and make-up.When Nuccio began contacting the people listed, she learned that complaints about Hope stretched back at least three years to Los Angeles - giving a frightening context to her own rental rip-off…
“What’s frustrating about the whole thing is that she continues to screw people,” said Mara Soucie, 30, who works in production management at cable music channel VH1 in Los Angeles. “She seems so normal, a bright girl. Always could think on her feet.”
I don’t think Ballantyne could get away with those things in today’s San Francisco. A few blog and Facebook posts could prevent her from ever striking again. But that there’s no further news on Ballantyne, following an arrest in 2004, doesn’t mean she’s changed her ways so much as that she may be using another name.
For the rest of us, lying just doesn’t pay off. Even with the best intentions — say your boss is a sexist pig and fired you for some arbitrary reason — you can’t explain it in a resume, and you can’t lie without the risk of getting caught (Your former boss, on the other hand, is entirely welcome to lie to a human resources manager about your work ethic and skill set.) It’s only going to get harder, as web presence becomes a necessity. The white lie is dead.
The hoax, of course, persists, but with many complications. “Myth-busting” is such a popular blog sport, that truths to the tales are thrown out with the falsities. Barack Obama isn’t a Muslim… but his father was. Similarly, Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk, who I even posted about earlier with some confusion, isn’t entirely a hoax. The trouble with that meme starts with his name: it’s written both Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk or Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas, or some variation of either, so googling with quotation marks only gives you a sample of the results. There’s a petition to ban him from Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008, which doesn’t appear to exist. Or is it the Central American Biennale? Google suggests, “Central American Biennial.” Lesson one: don’t trust sources in translation.
There is a Central American Biennale and there is an artist named Guillermo ___ Vargas, but the dog didn’t die (the most likely sources say.) What’s missing in the cries of “hoax” is that he did starve a dog in an art show (or maybe he did?) He did it, apparently, to drum up exactly the kind of protest he’s receiving now: to show that people will care about an animal dying in a gallery, but not the billions dying in the streets. World Society for the Protection of Animals has some updates on it.
And I wonder how the Internet is impacting espionage. One of the best episodes in Errol Morris’ First Person — The Little Gray Man — is about Antonio Mendez, former spy. He talks about being an invisible man, the kind of guy you just never look at — if you’re used to the checkout lady noticing the person behind you in line before you, then you’d be a great spy. He’s written two books, and his life story is soon to be a movie. Twenty years from now, when even middle aged office employees are in social networks — will we still be able to create false identities for CIA operatives?
Related link:
- Doublethink on The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastic Adventures of the Ivy League Imposter James Hogue.
Previously: Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
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