Vice President Al Gore is in trouble for telling whoppers. The other day he stretched the truth so far that when he lost his grip and the truth snapped back, it knocked him across three states and into the plaid-skirted lap of a startled librarian in Sheboygan, Wis.
More Top Picks Washing Machines
OK, so that never happened. But isn’t it much more amusing to contemplate than actual facts, which include the reality that Gore is plummeting in the polls because of his propensity for exaggeration?
Pro-Gore people say that all politicians tweak the truth. Anti-Gore people respond that the vice president’s fibs are more pathological.
Allow me to suggest a middle path: Sure, Gore and his political brethren occasionally wow the crowds with a stem-winding story or two. But they’re simply part of the great American tradition of padding the facts to make a better story. That impulse knits the backbone of our folklore tradition, of our urban legends, tall tales and campfire classics.
Some voters would argue that a political campaign is no place for a modern Mark Twain. But I say we need those deliciously convoluted narratives, the kind that make bug-eyed kids sit up straighter to beg, “And then what?”
Am I serious? I’m every bit as serious as Pecos Bill was when he “roped the raging cyclone out of nowhere/Then he straddled it and settled down with ease./While that cyclone bucked and flitted, Pecos rolled a smoke and lit it/And he tamed that ornery wind down to a breeze,” according to the ballad recorded in 1947 by Roy Rogers.
A critical distinction is being lost in the criticism of Gore. There’s a big difference between sprucing up an anecdote to make it more appealing and telling a deliberate lie. None of Gore’s distortions concerns his fiscal policies or his plans for Social Security reform. Nor are they an attempt to get himself off the hook for some ethical snafu, such as a tryst with an intern or a sweetheart business deal to buy a baseball team.
They’re harmless yarns about things Gore did or didn’t do, such as saying he invented the Internet, or that the couple in “Love Story” was based on him and Tipper Gore. Actually, Gore spearheaded legislation enabling the creation of the Internet, and while he was a partial model for the Erich Segal novel, Tipper wasn’t. Embellishments? Sure. But lies? No.
Moreover, as has been pointed out by others, Gore’s not the only storyteller on the stump this year. If Gore is Mr. Whopper, then Texas Gov. George W. Bush is Whopper Jr.; the latter has displayed a similarly creative hand with the facts. According to The New York Times, when Bush was asked to name a favorite book of his childhood, he cited “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” which was written when Bush was in his 20s. President Reagan, too, had a yen for telling tales, but he was unabashedly a product of Hollywood, not an expert on facts and figures, as Gore casts himself.
Part of the blame for the current habit of blurring the distinction between a yarn and a lie must rest, of course, with President Clinton. To cover up his misdeeds, he twisted the gentle art of embellishment into the grim mechanics of self-justification. He wasn’t trying to entertain; he was trying to save his own skin.
Politicians, it is true, are not storytellers. But the qualities required to spin a story–a kind of audacity of imagination–are some of the same attributes we look for in our leaders, who must spend a good deal of their time dealing with what doesn’t exist: the future. And surely there are worse flaws in a leader than an irresistible urge to doctor up a tale.
Maybe it wasn’t Pecos Bill, after all, but Gore who “lost his way while travelin’ in the desert/It was 90 miles across the burnin’ sand./He knew he’d never reach the border, if he didn’t get some water/So he got a stick and dug the Rio Grande.”