Trojan Horse

The whole debacle about Julian’s last name boils down to dismissing my feeling on the subject by alleging that I had known of the fact prior to the delivery of the birth certificate. Yes, Connie mentioned her intentions on doing so twice in a year full of bigotry and fights, and she did so in the middle of a heated argument. One of such arguments, more than six months ago, when she complained that if I wasn’t divorced before the baby was born, she’d go ahead and do it, and another time when she was mad at me for having partied the night before she was to be discharged from the hospital, and I picked her up a few hours late. We were in the middle of a dispute with the hospital for having administered the tuberculosis vaccine regardless of the fact that we had denied it on paper. I thought that was the battle of that day, but somehow she managed to call me and tell me the nurse had come by again to insist she'd give the baby the vaccine, and I reminded her we had already decided not to give it to him.
She had said the day she made me signed the birth certificate papers that she had “decided” to give me another chance but later specified that she was referring to the fact that I was “given the chance” to appear as the father. When the birth certificate paper came on the mail, she didn’t show it to me immediately, she had with her for some time and never made mention of it right up until the moment she decided to go to Michigan. As if that wasn’t enough, she had put on facebook’s timeline the day J.R. was born; no mention of any James.

Her intention was, not so much to give me one of the two copies which I rightfully was supposed to be handed, but in order to assure me that she had no intentions to abandon me. See, thing is, I never thought she was leaving me, but I did take seriously the fact that she threatened to do, only to say later that she didn’t really meant it. So, it’s not that I was worried she’d actually do it. How on earth is a birth certificate paper avoid her from leaving me? How on earth is it supposed to alleviate my hypothetical doubts? Thing is, I hadn’t paid much attention to the paper, and upon a closer look, I discovered the James, and no Amar. Couldn’t the two last name be placed there? Of course, she’d argue she had said that to me but she couldn’t possibly argue that I was okay with it.

See, that’s an intricate lie. Otherwise known as “deception”: it isn’t a blunt lie because she did mention her intentions and we did have an argument about it and we never spoke of the subject until that day after she was discharged from the hospital. Deception is what women are generally known for, by the way. Say you meet a girl and she tells you she has a boyfriend, in order to forewarn you (by the way, some will tell you of it as you’re making out with them; hey, thanks for letting me know now, weirdo!). Say you end up having something to do with that girl who has a boyfriend. Only then she can claim no responsibility based on the fact that she had told you about having a boyfriend and things kind of “just happened.” What happens is, she saves face because she put forth her machiavellic agenda.  

I guess you get the point of what the difference between actually lying and deceiving someone are; deception is a dressed-up lie that smiles at you and stabs you in the back the minute you look away. There’s no need to beat a dead horse, unless of course that horse happens to be Trojan. The Greeks argued, more than a thousand years before Christ came along saying that the truth shall set you free, that lying was not just limited to the act of saying things that aren’t true; lying is a far more complex question. Greeks argued lying was also ‘not stating’ your true intentions, so if you had in mind something that is not true and you didn’t mention it (agenda), then you’re lying. Sophism was popular in Socrates’ Athens; the representatives of this philosophical school argued that you can make use of rhetoric in order to advance a particular agenda. Facts were irrelevant, what mattered here was how clever you were in making your argument. Of course, this is where Socrates shined, by ridiculing these heralds of deceit and exposing their crooked ways in the public market place.