Joe Wilson: “You lie!”

Treated with good humor on the Rachel Maddow Show in this piece by Kent Jones, maybe such an outburst as Rep. Joe Wilson’s can be easily laughed off.

My grandmother, now dead for 20 years would be horrified by such an outburst as was a small part of me. It’s not just the lack of respect for the Office of the President, let alone such a great, promising leader, but also the nature of the epithet itself.

Grandmother took seriously (as her intellectual honesty would allow), the meaning and words and the parallelism of the Ten Commandments. For her, each one was weighted more or less equally. To her, you didn’t call anyone a liar, unless you could find it in yourself to condemn them the same way as a murderer or an adulterer or blasphemer. It made no difference.

Grandmother had an out, though. She’d studied literature and knew that fiction genre relied on made up stories. They weren’t literally true, but she could distinguish that they weren’t lies, like the false denial, “no I didn’t kill him,” or, “no, I didn’t steal the money.” So then she had a way to cope in a world full of lies and half-truths and great storytellers.

If I told Grandmother, “the dog ate my homework,” She could tell it wasn’t on the same level as say, killing the teacher. But the commandments were parallel evils. So she’d say, “Don’t story to me!”

She was a stern enough grandmother that one warning was generally enough. The truth would out, and no one was going to Hell on that day.

When Joe Wilson shouted out in the joint session “You lie!” To Grandmother’s ears, it would have sounded like “you deserve the punishment of Hell!” Serious Hell, not story Hell. I’m glad Grandmother didn’t have to hear it, but her grandson was shocked on her behalf.