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Truth and Consequences

"Truth is truth." "...while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!" I didn’t say those things.

"Truth is truth."

"...while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!"

I didn’t say those things. Well, I might have said the first one in a cheap, tautological attempt to define truth when called on in a class I’d been napping through, but the second is way too cool to have come from me. William Shakespeare said both of them, or rather, penned them long ago and far away. They’re just snippets from a couple of his plays and, as such, are taken grossly out of context. To put them into their actual context would take this whole column. As appealing as that is – since it would relieve me from thinking up anything more to say – it probably wouldn’t be within the spirit of my agreement with Mr. Barnett, which is to come up with something marginally original every week. Unless I decide to rerun something because a new president was inaugurated in the US who has less intelligence than a Popeil Pocket Fisherman.

Originality is a tricky concept. Some years ago, an aspiring actor-playwright did a one-man show off, off Broadway. It consisted of him, sitting at a small table, under a bare bulb, sipping unidentified liquid from an oversized coffee cup and reading the New York phone book white pages. The only other prop was a lacquered bamboo backscratcher. The show ran some three hours and closed, surprisingly, after its first night. He is, today, doing community theatre in Lincoln, Nebraska, and working in an abattoir to make ends meat.

But truth has been on my mind a lot lately, largely because it seems to have become a much more slippery concept than it used to be. Choosing to tell the truth or tell a lie used to be pretty much a binary choice. If you were predisposed to tell the truth, whether for reasons of scruples or simply because you couldn’t keep your lies straight, you just told the truth and let the consequences flow. If chronic truth-telling became apparent early enough in your life, some benevolent guidance counsellor might have tried to steer you into areas of endeavour where truth wouldn’t be a handicap. Cheesemaking, for instance, or maybe woodworking.

If lying was your long suit, you probably thought you were better at it than you really were. Sooner or later, everyone around you clued into your modus operandi and came to regard you as a liar. They may well have continued to be your friends and even liked you but they tended not to completely believe you in matters that counted. If your lies were relatively harmless and interesting to listen to, you may have been encouraged to become a writer. If they were too wild to be misconstrued as fiction or hinted at a pathological predisposition to lie, careers in marketing, investment banking or politics might have been strongly recommended.

Lies perpetrated by marketing types have often amused me and certainly contributed to the cynicism some misguided people say I demonstrate to this day. The first ad that separated me from my hard-earned allowance – and still one of my favorites – was the come-on for X-RAY SPECS. Anybody who read a comic book between 1948 and 1968 probably remembers this ad and may still have a pair of these ridiculous horn-rimmed fakes somewhere in their attic.

The ad promised to allow you to see through things. There was always a picture of a guy looking at the bones in his hand while a comely girl looked on nearby. The promise implied by the picture was that when he looked up, he’d be able to see through the girl’s dress. At 11 years of age, I was a little fuzzy about just why I wanted to see through girls’ dresses but just the thought that I could fuelled a desire that probably hasn’t been completely extinguished to this day. I sent away for the glasses. They didn’t work. When I looked at my hand, I could faintly see the pattern of bones. When I looked at girls, I could faintly see the pattern of hand bones. Rats!

SEA MONKEYS™ didn’t work much better. Countless ads for SEA MONKEYS™ showed cute drawings of happy little creatures who looked like a cuddlesome cross between Mr. Muggs and the Grinch. Whole families of these happy, frolicsome animals would grow and form themselves into colonies, providing hours of pleasure. All I had to do was dissolved some powder and granular bits in a fishbowl of water.

Having gotten over the X-RAY SPECS fiasco, I sent away for SEA MONKEYS™ and followed the directions carefully. All that eventually grew was algal slime so potent it permanently etched my mother’s glass mixing bowl and a couple of disgusting brine shrimp that died immediately and created a suspicious odour that still has unpleasant associations for me.

It was with this background – and believe me, it took a lot more squandered allowances before I learned not to trust ads – I found myself wondering, recently, about an ad for cell phones. On my personal list of "must haves", a cell phone falls somewhere below artificial heart and just above pre-paid funeral services. But the ad was big and splashy and took up a full page in the newspaper. The word FREE appeared frequently. It promised a free phone, free weekends (the ultimate dream), free time, free activation, free, free, free.

How free, you ask? I wondered myself.

"Hi. I’d like to know about your free phone offer."

"It’s $25.95 a month."

"For how many months?"

"Thirty-six."

"What do I get for free though?"

"You get a phone, free weekends and 100 free minutes a month."

"Great, that’s all I want?"

"What do you mean?"

"The free stuff. I don’t care about the other stuff; all I want is the free stuff? How much is the free stuff?"

"$25.95 a month."

"What’s free about that?"

"Click."

If I don’t make long distance calls and only call in the FREE time, this FREE deal will cost me about twelve hundred dollars. I can’t afford that much freedom. That’s as much freedom as a season’s pass at both mountains. Or a month and a half of rent. Or the difference between eating and starving. Or taking yet another Whistler job to pay for the freedom to call somebody from a place phones shouldn’t be allowed to begin with.

So, if you had any doubt left, free definitely doesn’t mean the same thing to marketers as it may mean to you or me. But there are lots of words like that these days. It will be interesting to see how our local elected officials will define terms like zoning, bed-unit cap, permissible variance, amenity and other interesting words that go into the soup of development now that we’re within sight of the what we’ve thought of for years as the end.