The Confidence Man

My best friend in my last year of high school was a compulsive liar. I came to know Shannon Singh, as he was then known (he was half Indian, half Irish) in Chemistry class; he had an extremely bad relationship with his father, needed  to move out of home and so I offered to let him live in my house. Through Shannon, I met my first girlfriend and through Shannon I was introduced properly to art-house film. We would watch David Lynch films, drink cheap vodka and sit and smoke pot together on the roof of my house. When I say that Shannon was a compulsive liar, I am not speaking loosely or hyperbolically; he was and still is genuinely a compulsive liar. I remember once arriving at school prepared to proffer words of comfort or solicitude (he'd had some family fight, I can't remember precisely what now) and him upending all my expectations by telling that he'd had a threesome with two girls the previous night.

After we finished school, we stopped seeing each other as much. Shannon changed his name to Gabriel Ash and moved overseas but would return to New Zealand about once a year, always with outrageous stories of  how he was employed in the different countries he ended up in, telling me once for instance that he was dealing narcotics to film stars in Hollywood. Often, I noticed, he would take urban myths and pretend that they happened to him. The last time I saw him, just last year, having returned to New Zealand because of the death of his father, he told my mother and me that he was the Head of the Law School for the University of the South Pacific; my mother, as savvy to him as I was, performed a little elementary research and couldn't find any mention of him on the university's website at all. During this visit, when we were driving around somewhere, he received a call on his cell phone about some mysterious "package": when the call finished, he justified himself to me extemporaneously by saying that he had a heart condition, was in fact at death's door, and that the package was a special device he required to stay alive. I half suspect that Gabe made what little money he had smuggling drugs internationally.

It seems odd to me that my best friend in Seventh Form was a compulsive liar because I am compulsively honest. The foundation of my friendship with Shannon/Gabriel was that even though I knew he lied all the time, I never called him out for it. The issue of fakes, of liars and phonies, has bothered me since though: I was trapped with a psychiatrist for many years who often gave off a palpable impression of mendacity. These days the psychiatrists I see seem to have a problem accepting such simple facts as that, when I first became ill in 2007, I was put on 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone or that I was taking 10mgs of Olanzapine from the end of 2009 until the beginning of 2012. If a person lies with enough audacity, he'll be believed. Unlike my friend Shannon, who lied because he wanted to be respected or liked, some psychiatrists seem to lie simply because they can. In 2013, I wrote a letter the paper saying that this first psychiatrist I saw was a sociopath and, although it caused me serious problems later, I wouldn't take it back.

When one looks at another country's culture, one always does so from the perspective of one's own. New Zealanders seem much more practical and grounded than Americans who seem to me much more adrift in a world of unanchored high ideals and gaudy lights. It's a country of con-men and the dupes they con, of hustlers and swindlers and snake-oil merchants, of deceivers and those deceived. Shannon/Gabriel would fit in well. As that great American P.T Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute" and America has been this way for a long time. The Confidence Man, Melville's last novel and my favorite by him, was first published in 1857. The American penchant for being taken in by hucksters, by con-men and liars, is arguably part and parcel with the American Dream and its blind optimism, Americans' feeling that even if things seem bad now some simple solution must exist that will improve their situation. The American Dream gave birth to Manifest Destiny, Revivalist Christianity and the self-help movement. It results from a combination of personal unhappiness and the conviction that some amelioration of this unhappiness can be easily achieved. It is a culture that enables con-men to thrive.

This strand in American culture has reached its apotheosis with the election of Donald Trump. To say that Trump is a con-man is to say nothing new. Trump campaigned on the platform that America under Obama had never been so bad and that only he could fix the country; he intimated that he had a grand secret plan for defeating Isis which he didn't want to tell anyone; towards the end of the campaign he was pledging that he was the only one who could end Washington corruption, "drain the swamp". "I will be the greatest job-producing President God has ever created" he said once.Trump is certainly a kind of con-man but what goes less said about Trump is that he is just as much a dupe and a gull as a con-man. For instance, he honestly seems to think Putin likes and admires him, although it is obvious to anyone paying attention that Putin really regards Trump as a puppet, a useful idiot, a bit of a tool. Trump is the American Dream personified, the proposition that someone can rise all the way from the position of humble property tycoon to the highest office in the world. Trump is both the beneficiary and victim of this dream and of his colossally inflated ego.

It can seem that the world is completely full of con-men, of liars. One practical way to cope with this is to try to exercise one's critical faculties. Don't get you news from spurious stories posted in Facebook. Don't believe everything you hear. Work out who to trust, such as reputable newspapers and shows like John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, and put your faith in them. Above all, be suspicious of anyone who seems to good to be true. Con-men thrive on gullibility.

I would like to finish this post by giving one of the reasons I had for writing it. I am just in the process of finishing Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell, a book largely concerned with con-men and people's willingness to be conned. It is a fantastic piece of journalism - Martin Amis says about it "If Borges had been a New Yorker, he might have come up with something like Joe Gould's Secret. But this, alas, is a true story." I don't want to give anything else away by talking about this book here but I recommend my readers have a look at it. It's brilliant.