“Hello,” He Lied. “Shut Up,” She Explained: Integrity

“Despite my respect for the truth, if a badly dressed lunatic crawls in an open window, waves a knife under my nose, and demands to know where my wife is, I’ll tell him whatever lie springs to my faithless lips to balance that lethal teeter-totter. And if Immanuel Kant had ever married, he categorically would have done the same thing.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger

I. “Doubts on Publication
For William Wycherley
I toast the candor of one who betook
in his ‘Errata’ to put ‘the whole book.’”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—November/December 2024—I was about seven when I found a quarter on the cloakroom floor of the Sunday school Mother insisted I attend. After placing a dime of my allowance in the offering, I figured the quarter was God’s way of repaying my unblemished attendance. I was fine with my windfall until she found the coin in the wash. “Where’d you get this?” she demanded.

“Sunday school—I found it on the floor.”

“Put it in the offering plate next week. In the meantime, go to your room and think about what you’ve done.” I thought hard about my quarter, but I knew that look she’d given me, so I told her I was sorry.

Some 60 years later, Dad told me the following story:

One day, at the Jupiter offices of the Florida Inland Navigation District (FIND), a young FedEx employee entered and asked my father if he’d sign for a delivery. Hurriedly, Dad signed, thanked him, and put the unremarkable envelope on his desk without opening it. Later, he discovered a “Pay to the bearer” check for $2.2 million! The envelope was addressed to a bank a block away—1413 Marcinski Road (FIND was located at 1314 Marcinski Road). As images of that yacht he’d dreamed of bobbed in the harbor of his head, Dad called the bank manager and arranged to hand the check personally to him. He also spoke on behalf of the delivery man.

Framed but not shaped by these two tales, I’m in debt to my parents and many others who brought me to the realization that honesty is respect for the truth, the gold standard, as George Orwell argued, that trumps free speech. Who are those many others? Here are the ones I recall; I’m sure there were others.

• There’s the Spanish teacher, whose name I’ve forgotten, who found my beloved Vineyard Vines cap, looked up my address (my name was inked on the liner), mailed it to me, and would not take a reward.
• There’s the anonymous Southwest Airlines clerk in Tucson who’d found a stack of my joke cards in a seat pocket, somehow located my name, and called me at my brother-in-law’s home. (We always have a few jokes to swap.)
• There’s the stranger who needed something to read at the Manhattan YMCA and who had every opportunity to steal $700 tucked in a book I’d loaned him but was kind enough not to.
• And finally, there’s Ms. Jessica Bush, a former student, who emailed me that she’d spoken to another student who’d taken her final examination early and who’d inadvertently revealed one of the exam questions. She asked that she be given another topic to write on. Though she was free and clear, she came forward lest she receive an undeserved advantage, and I was happy to oblige.

These four above directly affected me, but there have been several other cases in which I wasn’t personally involved, when all I could do was read or watch in awe at the example they set:

• There was my boyhood baseball hero Stan “The Man” Musial, who demanded and received a 20 percent salary cut because his numbers were off from the year before.
• There was “Judge” Keller, who ran a small “general store” for decades in Clemson and who tallied every sale in pencil on a paper bag before he bagged a customer’s items. Once he’d completed his calculations, he asked the customer to check his math.
• Finally, there was my colleague John Idol, who was the executor for Tom Douglass, another colleague, who died very young but not unexpectedly. John agreed to send all that he raised in the estate sale to an ailing sister who lived on the West Coast. Browsing through Tom’s extensive book collection that John had hauled to the site of the sale, he found one he’d loaned Tom years earlier. John’s name was on the inside cover as was the price he’d paid, but rather than slip that volume into his briefcase, he put $40 in the till.

Sharon Olds has argued that poetry is the best place for a writer to be honest. As a versifier for many years, I think that is one reason I chose to write a creative dissertation and teach poetry composition to hundreds of students for over 40 years. I found it difficult to write another essay on The Scarlet Letter when my job was on the line, but my heart wasn’t in it. The best poetry has the candor I recognized when I read what one lawyer told a witness, “I am an honest man, sir, and I will tell this court nothing but the truth, but I am under no obligation to tell the whole truth as you are.”

II. “Diogenes Searches the Strawberry Fields Forever
Berry-stained lovers who graze in the patch
and pay with a weak smile are easy to catch.”—The Wordspinner

In May of 1995, my wife hosted a kaffeeklatsch for the Clemson Women’s German Club at which a friend made a shameless confession: Hedwig, who’d worked for the Bundesbahn, the German state railway, in the 1970s, told the gathered that if she as a former ticket vendor came up short at the end of a day’s work, she had to make up the difference out of her own pocket.

That didn’t seem fair, she said, because often there was a crush of travelers demanding tickets and pushing wads of cash at her because their train was about to leave, and German trains famously do not wait for anyone. She, therefore, devised a way to protect herself. Because the old five-mark and two-mark coins looked very much alike, if a customer in a great hurry was due five marks in change, Hedwig would slide a two-mark coin his way and pocket the fiver. It was out of this slush fund that she made up any shortfalls. She said all the cashiers did it.

Hedwig’s character revelation seemed to cast a spell on the klatchers until someone mentioned the weather.

Cheating and lying often seem the modern norm when one hears stories like Hedwig’s. Before long-distance calls cost as much as those across town, it was common for a parent to tell a traveling child to call home collect and ask for “Max.” When the call came, the parent would say Max no longer lived there and decline the charges, knowing the child had arrived safely. My wife and I must have done that a dozen times and never thought we were swindling Ma Bell, meaning Diogenes would have shined his light in my face and walked quietly away. Poor man; no wonder he was a cynic. Here are other places he might have shined his lantern and come up short:

• In April of 2019, 19 percent of conservatives said lying is acceptable to land a job; 31 percent of liberals said it was acceptable.
• Adolescents who take “virginity pledges” usually honor them for about 18 months. Once the pledge is broken, the pledgees have more sex than non-pledgees.
• In May of 2024, 33 percent of hiring managers admitted they ask illegal questions during interviews.
• In 2006, three psychologists at Newcastle University in the UK decided to test their coffee club’s honor system. Over a ten-week period, the researchers quietly alternated two large posters behind the coffee pot. One poster featured flowers; the other was a close-up of two human eyes. Over the weeks when the eyes were on the wall, psychology students, staff, and faculty contributed almost three times as much as they did when the flowers were staring back.
• During Donald “I will always tell you the truth” Trump’s White House tenure, the former President told 30,573 lies according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. Trump averaged six a day the first year, 16 the second, 22 the third, and 39 the fourth. One memorable day, he told over 500, earning himself the nickname “The Bottomless Pinocchio.”

Despite my respect for the truth, if a badly dressed lunatic crawls in an open window, waves a knife under my nose, and demands to know where my wife is, I’ll tell him whatever lie springs to my faithless lips to balance that lethal teeter-totter. And if Immanuel Kant had ever married, he categorically would have done the same thing.

III. “Red Handed
A frank plea of guilt often spares the shame
a plea of innocence brings to a name.” —The Wordspinner

There’s something bracing about heart-cockle honesty. I’m thinking of people such as the following:

• Whoever wrote this recruiting ad for the Peace Corps, “Bad pay and long hours, but at least you’ll be hungry and in danger.”
• New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, who said, “[I’m a] pinko faggot, a bleeding heart, and a do-gooder, but that’s what I am.”
• A homeless man at a busy intersection off I-85 whose sign read: “Why lie—I need a beer.”
• The famously wooden Hollywood actor Victor Mature who said: “I’m not an actor, and I have 70 films to prove it.”
• Tennis star Maria Sharapova, who said that off the court she was “a cow on ice.”
• And former President Barack Obama, who when asked if he’d used marijuana said, “When I was a kid, I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”

Obama was, of course, alluding to former President Bill Clinton’s truncated admission that he’d smoked marijuana but did not inhale.  Clinton was widely ridiculed for what appeared to be a lie, but I’m here to tell you that I too have placed marijuana on my lips, but so help me, I did not inhale my classmate’s reefer when it was passed around a circle of partying friends. Of course, a few molecules may have reached my lungs, but they found their way down there entirely on their own, a reflex like my heartbeat I had no control over.

IV. “Expediency
When the gas leaks near the stove in the den,
one need not discuss the matter on end.”—The Wordspinner

In December of 2018, when a Brinks’ armored truck wrecked and spilled $510,000 on a New Jersey highway, 63 percent of the money was collected and returned a month later. Many saw this as confirmation of our nation’s fundamental integrity; to me the missing 37 percent was a sign that we are deeply split—ethically and economically.

Many claim honesty has been the quintessential American norm since six-year-old George Washington confessed to his angry father that he’d used his small hatchet to damage a cherry tree. More recently:

• In 1988, 250 lost wallets a day were being placed in New York City mailboxes.
• In September of 1996, the owner of a North Dakota gas station told a reporter investigating the state’s low crime rate, that he’d given 42 of his patrons keys to the pumps. While the station’s owner was employed full-time at the Sentinel Butte post office, he’d never lost a nickel.
• In 2001, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, said fewer than .01 percent of all the millions of transactions conducted on eBay were fraudulent.
• In a well-funded, international study completed in June of 2019 in which 17,303 wallets were “lost” in 355 cities, 72 percent of the wallets containing $94 each were returned; 61 percent with $13 were returned, and 46 percent with no money were returned.
• In February 2022, the Nevada Gaming Control Board tracked down the winner of a jackpot who’d failed to collect because the slot machine he’d used malfunctioned. After the error was discovered, the board mailed the winner a check for $229,386.52.

Scrupulously honest as these examples are, expedience may be closer to the norm. As the following examples drawn from some of our finest minds and their experiences over the last five centuries suggest, there’s nothing wrong with leveling the playing field when you’re playing uphill:

• “You are permitted in times of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.” Bulgarian proverb
• When Galileo was threatened with prison and torture by the inquisition, he lied in his recantation (“Jupiter has no moons,” etc.) and was placed under house arrest. Living reasonably well, he spent the rest of his life writing the physics text used by the next generation. (d. 1642)
• The German poet Heinrich Heine was born a Jew in 1797 but became a “Lutheran” for “professional reasons.”  (d. 1856)
• “We do what we must and call it by the best names.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (d. 1882)
• “If the circumstances are right, any principle can be sacrificed to expediency.” Somerset Maugham (d. 1965)
• “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” Isaac Asimov (d. 1992)

One of my friend Harold’s favorite childhood haunts was the gas station and garage on the corner nearest his home in High Point, North Carolina. The owner was a family friend who allowed six-year-old Harold to pet his scrawny goat, feed it, and take it for walks through the neighborhood.

Unexpectedly and with no strings attached, the garage owner gave Harold the goat, which he quickly walked home and tied to a tree in the backyard. After a few weeks, however, Virginia, Harold’s mother, reported that the goat had to go: it was eating too much; it was destroying their apple trees, and it had a rancid odor.

So, the following weekend, they drove the poor beast to Uncle Olen’s farm outside of town. Virginia’s childless brother and wife were glad to have the animal but promised Harold that he could come and visit any time he felt like it.

A few weeks later, when Virginia and Harold visited, Harold immediately inquired about the goat. Said Uncle Olen, who was not starving, with brutal concision and honesty, “We et ‘im.” Not, “Oh, we’re sorry, but we gave him to a petting zoo,” or “the circus,” or “a poor widow,” just, “We et ‘im.” An expedient lie would have been ever more “honest.”

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.