Some years ago, a magazine asked me to write about the Texas Prison Rodeo.
Never having visited a penitentiary, I asked the only college professor I knew with a Marine Corps tattoo for etiquette tips. Should I ask convicts about their crimes ? If I didn’t, he said, they’d take me for a coward. Actually, that’s not the word he used. A former prison superintendent, my friend was not given to polite euphemisms. He said there was one big thing to remember. He leaned back, put his boots up on the desk and lit a cigar for dramatic effect. “I don’t think you’re a naïve person,” he said slowly. “But some of those boys will lie to you.”
Would that somebody at Doubleday or the Oprah Winfrey program had gotten that advice before dealing with James Frey, author of the allegedly non-fiction memoir of drug and alcohol addiction “A Million Little Pieces.” Actually, it’s doubtful they’d have listened. After 17 publishing houses turned down his lurid, sentimental tale of woe and redemption as fiction, Doubleday proposed packaging it as a true story.
Frey went happily along.
Largely because Oprah, the queen of daytime TV talk, featured the author on her program, “A Million Little Pieces” became a huge best-seller. The paperback sold 1. 77 million copies last year, more than any non-Harry Potter book. Its sequel, “My Friend Leonard,” the story of a mobster Frey supposedly met in rehab, is currently at No. 9 on the New York Times ’ hardback bestseller list.
It will be interesting to see if the books remain on the “non-fiction” list, because last week, the sleuths at the smokinggun. com Web site posted the result of a careful investigation into the facts behind “A Million Little Pieces.” As some skeptics had suspected, they’re mainly fabrications.
An author who repeatedly writes, “I am an Alcoholic and I am a Drug Addict and I am a Criminal,” also turns out to be a Big Liar like almost everybody else down at your friendly, neighborhood state penitentiary. Except, get this : Frey’s never actually been to prison, unless you count a few hours in a small-town Ohio lockup waiting for a frat brother to bail him out on a DUI charge. Shoot, I’ve spent a lot more time in jail than he has, albeit only as a journalist.
According to smokinggun. com, “documents and interviews show [Frey ] wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms and status as an outlaw ‘wanted in three states.’”
There’s no evidence Frey was ever wanted anywhere.
That crack-fueled brawl with redneck sheriff’s deputies that left him beaten half to death and facing felony charges of “Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Assaulting an Officer of the Law, Felony DUI, Disturbing the Peace, Resisting Arrest, Driving Without a License, Driving Without Insurance, Attempted Incitement of a Riot, Possession of a Narcotic with Intent to Distribute and Felony Mayhem” ? Never happened. The cop who booked Frey for DUI says he went along like a little lamb.
That FBI cocaine-dealing probe Frey claims targeted him at Ohio’s Denison University ? He wasn’t targeted, and no feds were involved.
“We’re not talking Detroit here,” says the local cop who conducted the probe. “It’s like Biffy and Buffy saying, ‘I think we should steal a stop sign.’”
Even that heartbreaking tragedy straight out of the classic corn-ball song “Teen Angel” turns out to be bogus. Two high school girls died in a tragic train-car collision in Frey’s hometown years after he says it happened, but neither was his girlfriend and he wasn’t involved.
Like another dry-drunk ex-frat boy I could name, if I were in a partisan mood, who swaggers around telling tall tales to gullible audiences, Frey’s a big faker. If he’s ever even been in a fistfight, I’m sure he lost a one-punch KO.
My guess is that Leonard, the warmhearted hit man, is either purely imaginary or just another big-talking addict, along with Lilly, the suicidal crack whore with a heart of gold. So what happened when Frey got caught ? He went on “Larry King Live” to alibi that, well, he’d been drunk or loaded when most of the events happened, so maybe he got some details wrong. He compared himself to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Then Oprah called in to say she stands by him. They said they loved each other. “What’s relevant,” Oprah said, “is that he was a drug addict who spent years in turmoil... [and ] stepped out of that history to be the man that he is today, and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves.” What’s dangerous, say experts in addiction, is Frey’s contemptuous dismissal of 12-step recovery programs and psychiatric intervention. And what’s downright alarming is an American culture that increasingly rejects hard truths for emotionally satisfying fables.
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As we have stated for the record, a dozen times or more, one of the biggest problems, if not THE the biggest problem in America is that Americans have become so accustomed to all kinds of people bald-faced lying to them about everything from the quality of tires, to the sexiness of Beer and a gazillion other seemingly non-consequential issues, that they have, for years, accepted being lied to, as a part of their daily lives.
How many times have we heard Americans comment that all politicians are liars? I know I have said those exact words more times than I can count, when at my most frustrated and cynical. My father used the exact same words, except he often added "crooks" as well. (I am sure he would feel quite vindicated these days, in his rather cynical opinions of yesteryear, were he still alive.)
We have been much too tolerant of lying for far too long.
It is high time for the pendulum to swing in the other direction. We need to go on a truth crusade of sorts. (No insult to our Muslim friends is intended by the use of the word crusade.)
This will not be a crusade against any religion or for any so-called holy ground. What we want is to be told the truth by advertisers and politicians, car salesmen and repairmen, the News-media (broadcast, cable, print and Internet).
We want to be told the truth by government and corporate employees, when they know that laws are being broken, huge lies are being told and cover-ups are going on, and that people are getting seriously hurt or killed, as a result of the deceptive, corrupt practices of their bosses.
In Christian and Jewish scripture, Seven Deadly sins are listed. There are actually 9 Deadly Sins. They are also called Cardinal Sins. They are:
1) Pride: By this, we do not mean "pride" as in " taking pride in one's work"; in other words, doing one's work with a sense of responsibility to oneself, to one's craft, profession, vocation, avocation, whatever, and to the customer, client, patron, whoever. Actually, there is not enough of that kind of pride today.
What we are talking about is false pride, which often results in an unhealthy desire for perfection in oneself and in others; to the severe judgment of others and to behavior that is hypocritical in the extreme. (a form of dishonesty which is, often, very dangerous.) Example: Jimmy Swaggart when caught with prostitutes. In these days of fatal and chronic sexually transmitted disease, just ask his wife how dangerous this kind of hypocrisy is...
2) Vainglory: The best way to explain this very old word, that almost no one uses anymore, is a form of giving to get, while convincing oneself that the actions are altruistic. People who have a tendency to commit this particular "deadly" want to be loved, more than anything else, for what they do. They are not as selfless as they want to believe they are.
They want others to see them as selfless and loving, but just try and get away with a simple thank you for a "favor" rendered and see how far you get, before you are punished for your lack of loving gratitude. Oh, and by the way, these folks often do for you what they think is best for you, even if the act is actually totally anathema to your needs and/or goals.
Yet another form of hypocrisy, eh? A damned passive/aggressive one at that. Yuk!
3) Envy: This one is listed in the Big Ten No-nos of Moses. Thou shalt no covet thy neighbors ass, or anything else for that matter.
4) Greed: Ah, yes...the "deadly" that Marx forgot about when writing his Communist Manifesto, and the Capitalist Clowns seem to have fallen prey to as well. Greed is often about money and resources and that is bad enough, but it can be even worse, when it is about knowledge or information that others should have, in order to function well in this life. The latter type of greed can only be redeemed/forgiven when there is total transparency.
5) Gluttony: Most folks think of gluttony as over-indulgence in food or drink. That is one form of this "deadly." But even more dangerous, is the form known as extreme consumerism, especially of resources that are not limitless; of goods and services that are not limitless.
6) Lust: Closely connected to greed, is lust. We commonly think of lust as sexual, and it may well be. But there is also lust for power, absolute power over others. greed and lust are closely tied in our world today, because money is power, as is information.
7) Sloth: Usually thought of as laziness in general, this "deadly" becomes more so when it manifests as laziness in self-development and the negligence that results. Neglecting one's roles and responsibilities in life, such as one's social and political roles. Ignoring problems will not make them go away. Denial is not a river in Egypt.
Now, here is a surprise for most of us!
There are two more Cardinal Sins. They are:
1) Deception 2) Fear.
If a nation can be guilty of Cardinal Sins, America's number one favorite Sin has always been Deception.
Lately, our government has taken to Fear as well, which always leads to fear-mongering, when combined with Deception.
They represent the two gateposts of hell.
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