I wonder if the current purveyors of political porkers realise they come from a long line of liars. The Devil himself, as Jonathan Swift reminded us, is the father of them all, his first lie being purely political, employed for the purpose of undermining his Prince and seducing a third of His subjects from their allegiance to Him.
Ah, Swift! thou shouldst be living at this hour: Ireland hath need of thee. In his 1710 essay entitled The Art of Political Lying, the Dean discusses first the birth of the political lie:
"It is often born an infant in the regular way and requires time to mature; it often sees the light in its full growth, but dwindles away by degrees. Sometimes it is of noble birth; and sometimes the spawn of a stock-jobber. Here, it screams aloud at the opening of the womb; and there, it is delivered with a whisper."
Great adventures are bound to follow such miraculous beginnings. The political lie "can conquer kingdoms without fighting; can sink a mountain to a molehill, and raise a molehill to a mountain; has presided for many years at committees of elections; can wash a blackamoor white; make a saint of an atheist, and a patriot of a profligate; can furnish ministers with intelligence, and raise or let fall the credit of a nation."
Entertaining lies
What a sight to behold, if you could actually see the lies. How admirably a person "might entertain himself in this town; to observe the different shapes, sizes, and colours, of those swarms of lies which buzz about the heads of some people, like flies about a horse's ears in summer."
Is there any difference between your political liar and your ordinary fabricator of fiction? As an occasional common-or-garden dissembler myself, I am very well aware, through painful experience, that a good memory is an prerequisite of success in the field of fibbing.
Not so for the politician who needs, according to Swift, "but a short memory, which is necessary according to the various occasions he meets with every hour, and swearing to both sides of a contradiction, as he finds the persons disposed, with whom he has to deal."
Trying to find the source of a political lie can be as difficult as finding the source of a politician's wealth. "Few lies carry the inventor's mark; and the most prostitute enemy to truth may spread a thousand without being known for the author. Besides, as the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often happens that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it.
When the facts eventually emerge, it's like "the man who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead." It's too late, the tale has had its effect. "Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it."
Truth will out?
Considering it is a man's natural disposition to lie and for many to believe him, Swift wonders what to make of the maxim, so often heard, that "Truth will at last prevail":
"By means of perpetual misrepresentations, we have never been able to distinguish between our enemies and friends. We have seen a great part of the nation's money go into the hands of those who by their birth, education and merit, could pretend no higher than to wear our liveries."
The truth, in 1710, was considered by Swift to have been buried under a heap of stones. In 2000, our various tribunals proceed painstakingly to dismantle our own heaps, stone by stone. Can we hope that, however late, the "Truth will at last prevail"?
Or, out of the Machiavellian labyrinth of double-dealing that that has been an integral part of our political system, will only part of the truth emerge? Just enough of it to persuade us there are no more lies? William Congreve, another Irish writer of 300 years ago, wrote in his play The Double Dealer: "No mask like open truth to cover lies/ As to go naked is the best disguise".
And what are the chances of the tribunals exposing the lies of omission - the most pernicious of them all? "You didn't ask the right question." Ah sure, whatever you say, say nothing.
Wit and humour
No-one since Swift has captured the nature of what he called "that animal called man" with such wit and humour. His Gulliver's Travels is arguably the greatest piece of satire on the human race ever written.
If he can look down today from a better world on our current political shenanigans, he must appreciate the exquisite irony of the fact that, almost 300 years ago, he published a pamphlet entitled: Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions and Enormities in the city of Dublin. One can only stand in awe of a grand master.