Legends, Lies, and Fairytales

Mark Twain once said that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth even has its boots on. Of course, he was only thinking of that obsolete nervous system, the telegraph, when he said it. If he could have foreseen the web of fiber optics and microwave transmissions encircling the globe, he’d have known that the lie would make it around the world so many times that it would have festered into fact long before the truth had even gotten up off its ass to head out the door.

By the time we’ve actually done the research and looked into the last lie to be churned out into the world, two more have been born. At least. And each of those spawn two more, and so on exponentially, so now fact-checking is basically a full-time job. Sadly, the agencies we rely on for that often have their own political agendas and can’t always be trusted. Intuitively, the invention of the internet seems like it would make it easier to discover the truth. Unfortunately, the web's Groupmind often makes the truth harder to find, because it sifts down into the morass of comforting narratives and palatable lies. Of course, this only amplifies the natural human tendency to draw conclusions based on whatever we’ve heard repeated enough times.

For example, as everyone knows, you eat 4 spiders a year in your sleep. Or is it 8? Neither. It’s actually zero. You eat zero spiders. Not only would they find the temperature and moisture in your mouth repellent on an instinctual level, but the whole stat was purposefully made up by a journalist named Lisa Holst for an article she wrote for PC Professional magazine in the mid-90s. She was attempting to illustrate how easily disinformation—even preposterous claims—could spread via the Internet (even as rudimentary as it was at the time) and other electronic means, so she purposefully fabricated an absurd statistic for her illustration. Unfortunately, she proved her point a little too effectively, such that there was no defense against it becoming a “fact” after enough years of ignorant repetition. She started off trying to show how easily lies become the truth and now her invention is more believable than the truth itself. Now the truth sounds wrong, because EVERYBODY KNOWS…

Here are some other things that everybody knows that are also totally wrong:

1.      Richard Gere never had that infamous liaison with a gerbil.

2.     Half of marriages don’t end in divorce. Not even close. Divorce rates in the US peaked in 1984 at 41% and have been declining steadily ever since. They’re now down to about 15% nationally. A couple of the Midwestern states actually have about a 2% rate.

3.      Al Gore did not invent the Internet. He also never actually claimed that he did. But it’s funny, so let’s keep this one going.

4.      Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile.

5.      Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb.

6.     Penguins don’t mate for life, and those famous gay penguins at the Berlin Zoo were really just good friends. When they went to the next zoo, they both mated with other females and the caretakers at the first zoo later admitted that although the penguins were noted to have performed mating rituals, and even babysat a rock together, staff never actually witnessed the two having sex with each other.

7.     The Great Chicago Fire wasn’t caused by a cow kicking over a lantern. That was invented by a reporter.

8.     Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds did not cause any mass panic. That was also invented by newspapers that saw the radio as a competitor for news. Wells and the radio station decided that it worked in their favor and began repeating the hyperbole themselves.

9.      The Earth is not round, it's actually… Uh, wait. It is round, right? OK, scratch that one.

10.  JFK did not refer to himself as a jelly donut. Berliner is a nickname for a confection, but also for the residents of Berlin, in the same way that a subway is a nickname for a kind of sandwich but also a form of conveyance. If you told someone you took the subway to work, they wouldn’t assume you rode a sandwich to the office, any more than the Germans assumed JFK meant he was a jelly-donut.

11.  The Declaration of Independence was actually signed on August 2, 1776. The language was approved and distributed for signatures on July 4^th. It took until August 2^nd to gather all the signatures.

12.  Pasta wasn’t invented by Italians, but by Arabs from current day Libya. It was introduced to Sicily in the 9^th century during an invasion.

13.  Gum doesn’t take 7 years to digest. It passes right through, just like everything else. Although gum is only about as digested when it comes out the other end as that penny you swallowed when you were 5. What’s that? That was just me? Alrighty then.  

Also? Mark Twain never said that bit about the lie being halfway around the world. That’s been attributed to any number of people from the 1700s on—most popularly to Twain, although he’d been dead for 10 years by the time he was supposed to have said it. See? I started off with a lie about lying. Now you don’t know if that business about the gay penguins, Al Gore’s Internet, or the divorce rates are even true. You just can’t trust anyone these days. 

Or is it that you can’t trust just anyone?