Don't Get Him Started

Show me a man who can’t trust, he used to say, and I’ll show you an untrustworthy man.

It was lies that broke his spirit and drove him out of the arms of…what? America? The human community?

The lies of culture and commerce, public and private lies, political lies –virulent dishonesty propagated by sociopaths, a strain so fierce and ubiquitous that you weren’t even safe inside your own skin.

How could you not be infected? How could you really know anymore what was true, including and especially the words that tumbled around in your own head and rolled off your tongue?

Somewhere deep in his childhood he’d concluded that trust was the only solid foundation on which his otherwise shaky identity rested or wobbled. Increasingly wobbled, but he had learned early that trust was sacred and hard to come by, and he’d never been able to just give it away. He had it, though, and it was precious to him.

He had a hard time anymore sorting things out, but something had happened. Or somethings. Nothing all that out of the ordinary, yet there was no consolation for him in that; if anything, in fact, this realization just made it seem all the more tragic, that such huge violations of trust could become so commonplace that they could no longer be seen as the forces of destruction they were.

It was perhaps this simple and this complicated: a basic trust is violated in some intimate human theater –a casual lie, for instance, an act of faithlessness or abandonment– and distrust, hand in hand with a possibly protective but nonetheless almost compulsive deceit, is incubated collaterally. The fracture snakes downward and outward, deeper and deeper all the time, like the roots of a huge tree. Something prosaically tragic like that, there was your Pandora’s Box.