THERE’S an old 14th century French proverb: pour savoir vrai de chose toute, yvre, enffant, sot et femme escoute, which translates loosely as: to know the truth about everything, listen only to drunkards, children, idiots, and women.

Said Mrs Portia Simpson Miller about the latest turn in the Government of Jamaica Labour Party/Manatt, Phelps and Phillips affair: “They lied even when they are confessing that they have lied.” That’s deep. Even if you were to try and decipher exactly what that means, you’d still be way off, lost, wouldn’t know what to believe.

At this point, a mea culpa is useless because we’re confused as to what the Government may or may not have lied about and is apologising for. That’s just how sweet a politician’s mouth is.

Take this spoon of sugar: “Lie is a strong word,” said NDM leader Michael Williams, in a panel discussion on CVM TV’s Direct about the MPP saga. “I would say he has been dishonest.” If you didn’t know any better, you would think that Williams was letting the prime minister off the hook.

Were you to have a thesaurus handy, however, you would know that “dishonest” is just another way of saying: “Lying, deceitful, false, untruthful, fraudulent, corrupt, unfair, insincere, mendacious.” It just sounded nicer, the way Williams said it.

The ability to lie might also be an indication of just how smart a politician is. To lie, and for the lie to be believed, requires multiple brain processes: you have to mentally collect sources of information and manipulate the data to your advantage. This requires a great deal of reasoning and thinking on your feet.

Lying, says Dr Kang Lee, director of the Institute of Child Study (yes, it can be tracked to a very early age) at the University of Toronto, is linked to the development of brain regions that allow “executive functioning”.

Executive functioning, we know, is an umbrella term for the neurologically based skills involving mental control and self-regulation — a set of processes that all have to do with managing oneself and one’s resources in order to achieve a goal. Any goal, by any means necessary, in other words.

While regular people can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, it is only the politician of the species that is required to please all of the people all of the time. And the only way to do it is to lie. Just check him at election time. Why do politicians lie? The simple answer is because they can. Why can they? Because we let them, that’s why.

The truth is that we want them to lie. We don’t want to hear the truth: that some of us will ‘get jook’ and some of us will prosper. Come campaign season we want to hear all the promises that will make our lives better. That they’ll fix the streets, put women in decision-making positions, educate our children, curb crime, feed the poor, rid the government of its corrupt practices, give us free health care and jobs, jobs, jobs. We want them to be our superheroes when we fully well know that their feet are made of clay. They lie to us. We lie to ourselves.

We’re wasting time here, calling for a commission of enquiry to determine whether or not they lied. A lie? What’s a lie? It’s not like they killed anyone, is it? That would be worse than a lie, right?

What we really should be looking at in this whole affair is the solicitor general, Douglas Leys, who immediately responded with “I’m not resigning” when asked to explain his role in the Manatt, Phelps and Phillips affair.

We agree wholeheartedly with him. He has publicly stated that he was unaware at the time he sent an e-mail to the man of the moment, Harold Brady, that it was not Brady’s personal e-mail address. But clearly it didn’t dawn on the solicitor general that an e-mail address which ends in “manatt.com” is hardly likely to be the personal e-mail address of Harold Brady.

Resign? Certainly not. With a move like that Leys deserves no less than to be separated from the mental acuity responsibilities which his particular job requires.

Let’s move on, folks, and turn this whole matter of “dishonesty” over to the gods. To Alecto, Megaeara and Tisiphone in particular. Do you know who they are? They are “The Furies”, a construct of the ancient Greeks who, without mercy, would punish all crime, punish anyone who broke society’s rules. They would strike the offenders with madness and never stopped following criminals.

The Furies were the guardians of the law when the state had not yet intervened or did not exist, or when the crime was a crime of ethics and not actual law. These three goddesses of vengeance would collectively and relentlessly hound the liars of the world to misery and ruin.

I say we let sleeping dogs lie and let fate determine their future.

scowicomm@gmail.com