Human beings lie. This is part of who we are. This does not mean we do not tell the truth. We do to many and varying degrees. But to deny the former is to invalidate the latter.

In other words, it can’t all be good. If it all were, then the very definition of the word good would be meaningless if you took in the actual events of everyday life.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. Did you watch him? See him? Hear about it? I thought so.

Relax, this is not going to be about him – though in his alternate reality speak everything seems to be. Or at least told in terms of him. Which is what we all do to varying degrees (Note: See paragraph #1). But it’s all about degrees, isn’t it? And what we say – and to whom.

Harper Lee, who wrote one of the most famous and iconic books of any American author, To Kill A Mockingbird, has a new novel coming out this week – her SECOND at the age of 89. Rather, it is her first book (Note: As far as we know) but her second PUBLISHED novel.

See how tricky this lie thing is?

Ms. Lee’s latest is entitled Go Set A Watchman and she has been getting a lot of flack – or perhaps it’s just press – for daring to take Atticus Finch, the father figure (admittedly based on her own father) she immortalized as possibly the most principled man – certainly lawyer – on the planet in TKAM and portraying him as a racist in her new/old novel.

Now let’s set aside the fact that for whoever he might be based on Atticus is a fictional figure and that Miss (Note: She famously prefers Miss to Ms.) Lee actually wrote Watchman more than several years prior to her most renowned creation – which was first published in 1960. The real question that seems to be eating reviewers, readers of advanced copies and now the general public is:

Has Harper Lee been lying to us all these years? Is Atticus Finch really a….RACIST? A guy who she apparently chronicles in the new book once attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting and then later denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. the Board of Education decision that desegregated the American school system?

Okay, well, maybe that’s really two and a half questions. But really it all boils down the first – is she LYING to us? For if we cannot believe in the heroism of Atticus Finch, a guy who took on a whole Southern town in the 1930s and dared to successfully defend a Black man falsely accused of raping a White woman then – well – what else is NOT TRUE?

Um, A LOT.

And, well, OF COURSE SHE’S LYING. As well as TELLING THE TRUTH.

None of this stuff is simple. The question we should be asking ourselves is: What is the broader truth and how do we recognize THE BIG LIE???

As a writer it amazes me to think anyone truly believes that Atticus Finch was the exact representation of Harper Lee’s real father. He couldn’t possibly be because:

1. He is a written representation of a flesh and blood person from one subjective storyteller’s (individual’s) point of view – meaning he’s one-dimensional and frozen in place at the author’s whim rather than three-dimensional and able to roam free on his own
2. He was played by Gregory Peck in the movie… and
3. The movies are cultural representations of some of our most convincing lies, though not always our biggest ones, and people who win Oscars for these roles cannot possibly be entirely telling the truth since THERE IS NOT A LARGER THAN LIFE MOVIE HERO THAT EVER, EVER, EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD EVER existed in real life as they do when they’re rendered 22 feet tall and 52 feet wide.

That we, or so many of us, could truly believe Atticus Finch was indeed real is the secret of the movies and what makes them great, enduring and an art form that will probably never disappear no matter how hard the major movie studios try to make this so with the financial choices they’ve been making as of late.

Yet all the shock and disbelief that a white man of the Deep South who was raised at the turn of the century and practiced law in the 1930s would ever have had a racist thought in his belief system truly does take me aback. Of course, it also surprises me that there are tens of thousands of people across the country who believe Donald Trump when he categorizes illegal Mexican immigrants as rapists sent here purposely by its government who are killing innocent Americans walking down the street en masse.

In the interests of fairness – and we here at NOTES always attempt to give equal time to opposing views no matter how nutty (Note: I didn’t say we didn’t editorialize) – it is certainly true there are among illegal Mexican immigrants a few rapists and others who do kill innocent Americans walking down the street. Mr. Trump, in fact, found one or two examples of such he reiterated to a room of crazed red meat conservatives and libertarians this weekend in Las Vegas at a Freedom Fest Convention. But it is also true that the vast majority of illegal immigrants – either from Mexico or other countries – are NOT rapists and murders. If this were so we would see a spike so high in crime statistics that no amount of real life Atticus Finches could exonerate from our daily lives and minds (Note: That is, if he did ever exist, which, I might remind you again, he did not).

To put it in terms Miss Lee might see fit to approve of – why can’t Atticus Finch be both a wonderful man, father, attorney and humanitarian yet also be a person who, through his life, espoused, hosted or otherwise considered, any number of less than admirable thoughts and views? This does not make him a bad person – simply a real person.

Yet if one were to measure him as a whole person one must consider whether his dark views represented him in the majority or if his life’s work – both professionally and personally as a father – took up the lion’s share of his existence and was not the true portrait of who he was. In the case of Atticus Finch, who among us would not say that even with what we know of him he’s still, when all is said and done, a pretty moral guy. We were not told a BIG lie about him – instead what we got were a bunch of truths that need to now be balanced against, well, a whole group of other, more disturbing facts.

This is not the case with Donald Trump – or at least it doesn’t appear to be given the information we now have about him on hand.

He traffics in THE BIG LIE. The celebrities who win the top prize on The Apprentice are not really hired by him. His proclamations that our Southern borders are the most unsafe that they’ve ever been are not borne out by current day statistics which show that today’s murder rate in a border town like El Paso, Texas, for instance, is at an all-time low. His continual claims that Pres. Obama has failed to create jobs, especially compared to his recent Republican counterparts are also untruths. In fact, the economy has gained FIVE times more jobs than under Pres. George W. Bush and the unemployment rate (5.6%) is below the historical average.

None of this is to say the economy is absolutely great, Pres. Obama is faultless or that illegal immigration ceases to be one of many issues needing to be addressed in a more efficient manner.

It is only to proclaim that in each news cycle Donald Trump and many others like him (Note: You be the judge of whom – this has nothing to do with political affiliation) do tell THE BIG LIE. They use bluster, emotional manipulation and all kinds of sophisticated theatrical trickery in order to prove ill-conceived points, devoid of or carefully shading the facts to their own benefit and, specifically in Mr. Trump’s case, to advance whatever narrative he’s choosing to publicly spew at the moment.

I’m familiar with what he/they do because these are all part of the arsenal any writer uses in his or her work daily when creating compelling characters and/or watchable situations. Miss Harper Lee also knows about this – A LOT MORE about this than I do. But in entertainment – and literature – these are merely tricks of the trade.

For Donald Trump and others like him they are divisive weapons being used to take the reigns of the ACTUAL world by any BIG LIE necessary.

Watch out for them, they’re dangerous. As for Trump himself, well let’s just say he’s no Atticus Finch – no matter which of Miss Lee’s novels you choose to read.