Jogging towards the tower of Babel ...

(Above: Singapore Airlines' Sydney lounge).

So here's the thing.

The pond once knew a jogger who turned into a wannabe runner. Don't ask how or why, it's too sordid.

The level of obsession was fixating, at least if you fancied fixating on smelly runners and sweat-stained clothes that had the aura and stench of camel breath.

Jokes about Jim Fixx having a heart attack at the age of 52 were swept aside like petty-minded nonsense.

It all came back in a wave of amused nausea reading Mark Singer's excellent piece Marathon Man for The New Yorker (outside the paywall at the time of this scribble, and well worth rushing off to read, though really you should subscribe to support decent writing, and vote and make up funny captions for the cartoon caption contest, now they're accepting entries from down under and from Canada - wretched Quebecians excluded).

Singer's piece is about a mysterious dentist from Dillon Montana who set about claiming a series of achievements in marathoning, mainly it seems by skipping the bothersome business of actually doing an entire race.

It's arcane, but it's also true that in running, the rhetoric is the same as golf when it comes to cheating, to lying to yourself (don't ask about the pond and golf, it's too sordid).

The notion is that it's you against the course. Lying to yourself is the ultimate lie. The theory is you could run a marathon by yourself and be perfectly satisfied with the achievement. The truth is what the truth is, and the time you take is the time you take. Contrarywise, if you only managed 30ks, be happy with that, don't embroider, don't twist and turn and chafe at falling short.

You can play a golf course by yourself, and the shots you take are the shots you take. As Singer tells it right at the end:

The marathon, no matter where it takes place, remains, as ever, a solitary pursuit in which every runner ultimately competes against himself or herself. Whatever drove Kip Litton was an entirely different battle with himself, one that quite possibly escaped his understanding. One thing, though, he grasped perfectly. Like the most dazzling of magicians or the most artful of art forgers, by withholding the secret of how the illusion worked he retained a power uniquely his own: the spoils of his humiliation, perhaps, but a knowledge that no one was about to take away.

Which brings us to Paul Ryan, and truthiness, and lying to yourself.

Lying about the time you took to run a marathon is the ultimate lie.

And Ryan lied. He didn't disremember, he didn't forget, he fabricated.

Anyone who knows a runner knows this. They count the time taken, by the kilometre, by the marathon, as a holy grail, a truth telling to themselves and others. Oh dear absent lord, the fetishism, the clock watching, the pulse taking, the obsessiveness, the compulsion, the records and the carry on. With power drinks and camel sweat ...

To misplace an hour is more than a lie, it's a sacrilege. It's a distortion worthy of a surrealist dentist wanting to fake an alternative universe.

A few people have pinged Ryan for this - you can read Sophia McClennen in Truthiness Is Not a Joke: Lying and Living It at the RNC, and locally Guy Rundle has also picked up on the truthiness in 'truthiness' grows like topsy in the Republican camp (behind the Crikey paywall):

... by far the most interesting sideshow was Paul Ryan’s marathon-record. The exoskeletal Ayn Randian discipline-freak is, of course, a marathon runner, and appearing on the right-wing Hugh Hewitt radio show some time back, was asked about his running times. Nowadays, it’s de rigueur for hardcore politician-marathoners, such as Sarah Palin, to do the race in four hours, a substantial achievement by an measure. But Ryan said he had done it in three. Indeed, he told Hewitt, he sometimes got into the two fifties.Which was a bit too impressive — 14 kilometres an hour, which would have put him close to the top 100 in the race in question (in Minnesota, in 1991). In fact he came near 2000th, out of 3200 runners. The idea that he would misremember a placing to put himself out by orders of magnitude is absurd, and serious runners began pointing it out in the media. In response the Ryan camp put out a typically bizarre statement from Ryan:

“The race was more than 20 years ago, but my brother Tobin — who ran Boston last year — reminds me that he is the owner of the fastest marathon in the family and has never himself ran a sub-three. If I were to do any rounding, it would certainly be to four hours, not three.”

Deep in his heart, or perhaps shallow in his lying heart, Ryan is lying to himself, and then lying to others.

He is, in his own way, and by his own mouth, revealed to be something of an Eliot Spitzer, delusional and hypocritical. Call it aggrandising 'snipers in Bosnia' syndrome if you will.

This hasn't got anything to do with political allegiance. It has to do with allegiance to self.

Amazingly there are apologists for the ability to sustain delusions:

Talking about a series of studies of students who embellished their grade point average in a leading American newspaper, a UK psychologist said: “Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”
In normalspeak, the studies implied that exaggeration might be a symptom of people setting high goals for themselves into the future.(here)

So much for the nuns that berated the pond and promised eternal hell for naughtiness ... and lying. Turns out one person's lie is just another's exaggeration ...

Truthiness lives!

McClennen brooded about this in her piece:

So given the fact that we have learned that the RNC was full of falsehoods, why aren't the liars suffering from backlash? Why aren't their supporters enraged that the candidates they support were incapable of stating their positions and describing their differences with Obama without lying? Has the Republican Party simply given up on truth and embraced truthiness?

According to the Romney campaign's pollster Neil Newhouse it has. After the media questioned the accuracy of speeches at the RNC, he explained that "we're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

If you can lie to yourself, you can lie to anyone. You can recall that eagle, that hole in one, that perfect sub-three hour marathon, the fire fight in Vietnam, that rescue of an orphan from a storm, anything you might want to concoct to show you as a hero.

You might even be a dentist setting out to achieve a marathon in each of the states that make up the United States, and never mind if you actually ran the marathons. You did it in your head, and surely that's enough.

In short order, here's the pond's conclusion.

The United States is fucked, and right at the moment, it's staring down the barrel at a man who believes in disappearing gold plates and Christ coming to America before disappearing into heaven, and magic underwear that makes all your troubles disappear ... and a man who lies to himself, and then others, about how fast he ran a marathon.

That's the lie of a hollow man, of a man who wants to be king, but really doesn't have the right stuff. There's no shame in running a four hour marathon, or a five hour one (the pond has never run one, and never will). But there's a shame to fabricating the truth.

In sporting terms, the pond's assured that sort of lying is about as rich as a pedophile priest claiming that the child was seductive ... (well with Paul Ryan being such a devout Catholic it seemed like a Catholic metaphor was required).

Now the pond recalls only yesterday saying it was off on a junket and there'd be no more posts for a while. The pond disapproved of blogs that gloated over people taking junkets and travelling.

Damn straight, but the pond just mis-spoke, disremembered, rounded up or rounded down, or rounded the corner.

Here have a look at this snap of what's on offer at the Singapore Airlines lounge.

Nah nah.

Now having lied to self and you, can I be the vice-president of the United States?

It seems the reward for truthiness is upward mobility and glory, and daily the United States shuffles towards the distortions, lies and venality of a Putin ...

But stay, look at that buffet. Squirrel!

(Below: oh okay, the pond is posting this from Singapore Airlines' Sydney lounge, but couldn't be fagged taking and uploading snaps, so copped a few from here. Is this an exaggeration, a distortion, a blatant form of misdirection, or simply admiration for the cheek and gall of Paul "the Rand man" Ryan? We merely borrow and you decide).