Authors: David Samuels
Another notable fact about James Hogue that can be established beyond even a shadow of
doubt is that he had a peculiar lifelong fixation on Christmas. He hoarded albums of Christmas music both sacred and profane, from liturgical classics to recordings by Nat King Cole, the Beach Boys, and the Pretenders. Christmas was his favorite day of the year.
The Hogue family made a special point of celebrating the holiday like no other day on the
calendar, with large helpings of Christmas ham and turkey, and side dishes of potatoes and
sauerkraut, in memory of the family’s German roots. There is footage of Jim’s mother, Maria, playing the piano on Christmas with a dopey, miraculous grin stretched across her face, the same irrepressible grin that would cross Jim’s face whenever he thought about his favorite holiday. So widely shared is the Christmas mystery among even the most secular-seeming American
households that few people neglect to pay homage to the family-oriented demands of the
holiday, which is that everyone comes home at least once a year and pretends to live out a
storybook version of ideals of domestic harmony and generational interconnectedness which
hearken back to the dimly remembered experiences of grandparents and great-grandparents who grew up in much more family-oriented societies than ours a century or more ago. Children wake up on Christmas morning to find that their yearlong prayers for new bikes and dolls have been answered and rush to compare notes with their friends.
In most American families, Christmas is a masquerade that begins when children are very
young and in which adults are often more invested than the children for whose benefit the
festivities are often aranged. Christmas is a child’s first introduction to lying, beginning with recitals of the lie of Santa Claus and extending to the pantomime of perfect familial relations that are hardly replicated on the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year. Christmas is the ultimate American holiday, not because we are a Christian country, but because it is the annual spectacular culmination of our ardent national desire to wake up brand new.
Hogue’s mother, Maria, grew up in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, as a member of one of the
rural German communities that lived in relative isolation amid the prejudice of many of their neighbors in the years before, during, and after the First World War. For all her intelligence, it was easy to get Maria’s goat, and her children, her husband, and her grandchildren all indulged in the sport of winding her up by contradicting something she previously said, or saying
something that she might regard as strange. She met Jim’s father, Eugene Hogue, while the two of them worked as shipping clerks for the Union Pacific railroad in Kansas City, tracking the progress of freight cars across the Midwest. In private, Maria was lively, opinionated,
high-strung, and frankly a bit odd. Gene was a former college runner with a sly, deadpan sense of humor who mostly kept quiet. In public, their roles were often reversed: Maria was the shy one, while Gene did most of the talking.
Yet while the marriage of two railroad shipping clerks might seem like a recipe for
stability, the Hogue family had more than its share of secrets. Marias two older daughters, Vicki and Teresa, had two different fathers, neither of whom was Gene Hogue. Vicki’s father, Ross Rogers, was Marias first husband. Teresa was born out of wedlock to a man whose name was not preserved in the family memory. The story the family told was that Vicki’s father had been a Catholic, and that both the Catholic and the Lutheran clergy had advised the couple against marriage, because of the strain that conversion to another Christian denomination would place on the family. Faced with the refusal of either clergy to marry them, the couple split up, and Maria moved to Kansas City, where she met Gene, the son of a rancher named Arthur Hogue from
Laramie, Wyoming. Remembered by his friends as a lover of winter sports, especially skiing, Arthur Hogue craved the wide-open spaces of the West. When he wasn’t alone, he got married, to several different women, and was rumored to have enjoyed girlfriends on the side.
There was a streak of wildness, of rule-breaking, that ran deep on both sides of the family and that resisted the attempts of Gene and Maria to give their children a stable, happy life. Their first daughter, Betty, was indulged by both parents, and had early problems with drugs. One Christmas, she stole the $100 bills that her parents had given to each sibling, denied any
responsibility for the act, and then spent the money on drugs. Eventually she descended into a spiral of addiction that led her to heroin. Living off the charity of her parents, she made occasional forays into prostitution and died young. Both Vicki and Teresa got divorced; Vicki also died young. Jim, the baby of the family, became a runner like his father. Forced to take Betty running one afternoon by his parents, Jim hit her over the head with a tree branch and left her bleeding in the forest. His parents called the police.
Vicki’s son, Brian Patrick, who holds a PhD in biology from Kent State University and
was a particular favorite of Jims, contrasted the slippery and utilitarian approach to reality that characterized the Hogue family with his father’s family, which was more sober-minded and
conservative. “The surface of the law was really not something that was terribly important to anyone,” he remembered. “It was just something intrinsic to the family. They lived in a world that was very different from the world that I grew up in.”
By the late 1990s, Marias world had unraveled completely. A lifelong obsessive, she
collected tin cans for her church, plundering the Dumpsters and trash cans of her neighborhood in North Kansas City where she became such a familiar figure that people left their cans out in plastic bags and made her gifts of clothes and food. After the death of her husband, she began collecting plastic take-out containers, newspapers, and other useful things that her neighbors had unaccountably thrown away. When her hot-water heater and refrigerator broke, she refused to allow a path to be cleared through her hoardings, and chose to live in a squalid mess of old food containers and eight-foot-high stacks of magazines and newspapers with only a narrow pathway cleared between the front door and her bed.
V. The Escape Artist
The idea of leaving your old life behind and becoming a new person is too deeply rooted
in who we are to simply dismiss Hogue’s behavior as one man’s defective adaptation to reality, though it was also that. The disease that took over Jim Hogue’s life might be diagnosed as a low-grade fever in tens of millions more. There is no shortage of people like James Hogue who walk among us disguised as people like ourselves, having made themselves up from scratch and then acquired credit cards and mortgages and spouses. The idea that we can be whoever we want to be, regardless of our origins, or the color of our skin, or the beliefs of our parents, is familiar to all of us as a grade-school homily. What James Hogue did with his life is deeply rooted in the Western religious tradition that holds that believers are born again in Christ and leave behind their prior, sinful nature. Escaping from the burdens of the past and becoming a new person is part of the birthright of every American. It’s a deeply disturbing and revolutionary fantasy about the malleability of the individual and the elasticity of fate that has transformed our idea of the past from the solid ground on which we stand into something airy and disposable.
To say that a lie deprives other people of their autonomy to act as fellow human beings is
another rationalization of a preexisting moral schema that comes from your parents. No one
forces you to listen to a lie. You listened to a lie, and believed the lie, according to your own mistaken apprehension of reality. For a while, Hogue’s lies were entirely successful in pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone he met, from racing bicycle manufacturers, to property
owners, fellow dreamers, teachers and administrators at Ivy League colleges, the children of some of Americas richest and most socially prominent families, his fellow runners, to the
residents of Telluride, Colorado. A good part of his success in his various endeavors came from his skill as a liar, a practice with which all of us are in some ways familiar. Compared to you or me, Jim is what might be called an advanced liar, meaning that he can say all kinds of unlikely or impossible things and convince you that they are true. He was so good a liar that he could lie with his eyes, and with a word here and there, so that when you confronted him later on he could honestly say that he had never said anything of the kind.
It goes without saying that Jim’s way of living made him dangerous to others, and would
also qualify him as crazy according to most psychology textbooks. Yet to look on his choices as merely the symptoms of mental illness is to trivialize both the extent and the nature of his misdeeds, and also the troubled idea that he latched on to, the common shorthand for which is the American Dream. His lies were part of a game that he played with reality. The person who was hurt the most by his lies was Jim Hogue. He never hurt anyone physically He always paid his bills on time.
Even those of us who try very hard never to lie can probably recall at least one or two
slips on the path of our otherwise truth-loving existence. Just as our social arrangements depend on the sharing of accurate information, so too do they rely on the activity of liars who grease the wheels of commerce, love, sex, and all other activities in which mankind engages. Adam and
Eve lied to God and to each other. “The check is in the mail” is always a lie, just as “I love you”
is only a partial version of the whole truth. Men and women lie with the justifiable assurance that the lies they tell are variations of the same lies that have been told by their slippery ancestors since the beginning of time. We cheat, conceal, contrive, counterfeit, deceive, defraud,
dissemble, exaggerate, fabricate, fake, feign, impersonate, lie, misinform, misrepresent, pretend, and prevaricate. In most times and places there is also a floating population of those who are lost in illusions of their own making and might see themselves as embarking on a great adventure, but are simply lost.
Respected authorities on the subject of lying usually begin with the general idea that
telling lies is wrong, at least in most cases: they then proceed to explain why and under what circumstances permission might be granted for an occasional lie or two, on the principle that any absolute prohibition against lying would be inhuman or at least inhumane. One striking
characteristic of this type of argument is the ease with which dramatic examples of necessary lies (“a Nazi officer knocks on your door, and demands to know if any Jews are hiding in your
house”) give way to vague generalities like “peace,” “social harmony,” “justice,” or “the greater good of the community” according to which many lies—perhaps even most lies—might be seen
as beneficial by someone, beginning with the liar himself.
The idea that lying is bad or wrong goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who believed
that the truth was noble and lying was a low type of behavior that cheapened one’s character.
Aristotle saw honesty as the midpoint between the flaws of boastfulness and excessive humility, implying that one could lie by understatement just as significantly as through exaggeration. The Biblical texts of the ancient Hebrews enjoined believers to “keep far from a false matter”
(Exodus 23:7) and not to “deal falsely nor lie to one another” (Leviticus 19:11). Contrary to uneducated modern belief, a prohibition against lying is not included among the Ten
Commandments handed down by God to Moses at Sinai, which prohibit “bearing false witness
against one’s neighbor,” a more circumscribed offense. Talmudic sources and later rabbinic
commentators pointed to over a dozen lies told in the Biblical texts by Abraham, Aaron, and other major characters, including God himself, who lies to Sarah. The rabbis agreed that lying was permissible in order to save a life and to preserve peace.
The Catholic Church took an even more flexible approach to lying by identifying the
wrong of a lie with the social damage that it caused, implying that lies could be excused
depending on their visible effects. For the medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, lies were wrong because they caused damage to individuals and to society: the harm caused by a lie was therefore understood as being external to the lie itself. Immanuel Kant insisted that lying weakens the common bonds of trust that hold society together. The German Protestant
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis at the Flossenbürg concentration camp after joining a plot to kill Hitler, argued that lying was a natural inclination that we struggle to unlearn. Truth-telling, Bonhoeffer believed, is a learned behavior that we undertake in order to give the truthfulness that we owe to God some practical form in the world.
The one great exception to the often slippery philosophical and theological discussion of
lying is Augustine of Hippo, the most significant writer of late antiquity. In
De
Mendacio
—written in part to counter the Priscillian heresy, a gnostic belief that insisted among other things that believers were not obligated to tell the truth to strangers—Augustine defined a lie in the lasting way that would be adopted by philosophers and theologians from Aquinas to Bonhoeffer: “A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving.” While Augustine’s definition of lying is the basis for almost every subsequent piece of serious writing on the subject, few thinkers before or since have been willing to concur with Augustine’s
absolute prohibition on all forms of lying no matter how dire the results of telling the truth might be. As a writer, and a flawed believer in the Augustinian approach to truth, I find the absence of any general agreement with Augustine quite puzzling.