Pants-on-fire Nation by Sal Moriarty

A lie took two parties – the weaver of the tale and the sucker who so badly wanted to believe it. Jodi Picoult

If you look around the table and can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you. Mark Van Doren

It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble, and know that you yourself, and no one else, has made it. Sophocles

On a slow day, for fun, while watching a program with advertisements, make a note of each commercial (NFL games are great for this experiment). Write down the brand names. You'll have a considerable list in very short order. It may seem random: Taco Bell, Ram trucks, Cialis, AT&T, Walmart, etc. But they all have something in common.

When you have a few minutes, go through the list and ask yourself this question: did anything in the commercials bear even the slightest resemblance to what I actually experience when interacting with those brands in real life?

Do Taco Bell chicken soft tacos actually contain deliciously tender white meat, covered in tantalizingly colorful fresh veggies? Are AT&T mobile contracts as customer friendly, with no hidden fees, as they appear when presented by paid actors? Will Cialis transform a man into a wonderfully vibrant late-in-life stud-muffin, gallivanting across a pristine beach, holding hands with an equally vibrant ladylove?

Or were you unaware Taco Bell even serves chicken, assuming – from appearance, texture and taste – the tortilla is actually wrapped around small sections of cardboard, spray painted in shades of off-white to approximate the look of a dead and cooked chicken? Did you – like many – have to take an online course in advanced calculus just to kind-of understand your monthly AT&T statement? Where Cialis is concerned, are you less likely to think of vibrant baby boomers on a sunny beach, but instead conjure the mental picture of a pot-bellied septuagenarian, standing in his underwear, squinting under a florescent light in the bathroom, trying to read the directions?

So, what's going on? Are we to assume every commercial we encounter is nothing more than a lie?

Yes.

Every day, without exception, we are bombarded with lies and, hence, liars. They are so ubiquitous, we don't even notice most of the time. If we were to lay out in the sun daily for ten hours, what would ultimately happen to our bodies? That's what exposure to endless lying does to our minds.

How long since you bought a vehicle? Lots of blow-outs happening. Always making room for new inventory. Everything is reduced.

Ever meet a person who admitted signing off on a bad car deal? Everyone seems convinced they're getting the deal of a lifetime, but there's a reason you never read the twenty-page contract with the dealership before you sign here, and initial there. You're not getting a great deal. You're the sucker at the table.

Drive from here to Lake Charles. The lovely farm country is riddled with gigantic billboards, claiming this or that casino has the LOOSEST SLOTS. Loose slots? Good lord, first time I saw that phrase on the side of the interstate, I thought it was a porn advertisement.

Admittedly, one has to be a real piece of Samsonite to be taken in by such deception, but the billboards are investments, made by liars.

Then there's the lottery.

Every time I hear someone mention the pointlessness of playing the lottery, some pinhead pipes up, “Somebody has to win!”

Well, yeah, but a person is much more likely to be struck by lightning than win big bucks on the lottery. So, should everyone go around worried about, literally, being struck by a bolt out of the blue? For a person who regularly plays the lottery, maybe. They strike me as the kind of folks who might stand in a field during a lightning storm, holding an umbrella.

Sports betting sites. Millionaire celebrities and athletes glamorizing schemes to separate factory workers and waitresses from their money. They employ the same tactics as drug dealers. That's what all those introductory offers are about – getting you hooked. They're liars.

Lies are all around us, all the time. They can be found in the unreadable, small print that flashes on the TV screen for three seconds, or by the guy who speaks absurdly fast at the end of those commercials. When you're sitting at a red light, there's a lie over there, and over there, and back over there.

They exist because they work. We like to think of ourselves as strong, independently minded citizens. There are many who know better.

All too often, we are the ones responsible for populating the space around us with lies. In fairness to the aforementioned sellers of cars, how many of us have traded in an old car and prayed (ironically) for the chewing gum and duct tape to just hold up till the end of the deal.

If lying benefits us, we're usually OK doing it. I mean, if you were in trouble with the law, who would you want defending you? A Johnny Cochran type lawyer or those clowns he took to the woodshed during the O.J. trial?

Are all those Facebook pages, filled with smiling faces, and exciting vacations, and self-portraits taken with the aid of an app that removes facial blemishes, an approximation of the truth, or just baloney (aka lies)?

If there's a theme to the stuff I write, I hope that it's most of the problems in the world start with the person in the mirror. If we could ever get that guy right, things would get better. No shortage of lies in the world, and we own our place in it.

Sure, I could have brought up religion, but my fingers are tired and shooting fish in a barrel just ain't no fun (if you'll forgive the double-negative).