-- Barbara Kingsolver, "Animal Dreams"

The first lie, like the first murder, is the hardest.

"I am not a crook."

"I did not sleep with that woman."

"My Daddy died this year in Iraq."

After that, it apparently gets a lot easier.

It must get easier.

If it doesn't, then why do politicians and public officials continue to do it?

Why, after the lessons of Watergate and Monica Lewinsky and the fabricated stories by journalists vying for a Pulitzer prize -- and all the other incidents of this type, and there are many -- why would people in the public eye continue to lie (in the first place) and then try to cover it up (in the second place)?

How many times have we heard, "Nixon might have served his full second term if only he'd come clean about Watergate."?

How many times have we heard "I have never taken performance-enhancing drugs."?

I don't like the lying at all, but there something about all this that bothers me even more than the lying.

It's the arrogance -- the apparent belief by the liar that the people being lied to are too stupid to catch on.

Maybe we don't "get it" right away.

Maybe it's just a vague impression that we're being fooled.

But eventually ... inevitably ... "murder will out."

Your mother knew, as mothers always know, that it is better to tell the truth. For one thing, it's just plain easier.

If you don't lie, you don't have to remember who you lied to or what you lied about.

If you don't lie the first time, it won't be necessary to create another lie (and another and another and another) to hide the first one.

And, better still, you won't find yourself in the position of asking others to lie on your behalf.

It's true that most people lie at some points in their life. Virtually no one would claim they've never told a lie.

Social lying ("No, honey, those pants don't make you look fat.") is still lying -- the fact that we're trying to make someone feel better doesn't make it less of a lie.

The kind of casual lying people do all the time ("The check is in the mail.") is relatively harmless, but still a lie. It's not that you don't intend to pay the bill, only that you're too lazy to drop it in a mailbox, and you don't want to say that out loud, now do you?

Psychologists say that people lie for a lot of reasons -- financial gain and avoidance of embarrassment and/or punishment being chief among them.

I've had some experience with lying to avoid punishment.

As an awkward and unattractive teenager, I wasn't often asked out. But even before I was, my mother one day told me that in the event I was ever asked out on a date (which to me seemed highly unlikely at the time) I was under no circumstances to be lured to a drive-in movie. In the early 1960s, most parents considered a drive-in a sure invitation to, uh, let's just call it "unacceptable" behavior.

It was quite some time before I had an opportunity to go anywhere with a member of the opposite sex, but when the moment arrived, I was more than ready, of course, to get to that drive-in and see just what it was I was not supposed to see.

Giving my parents the name of a downtown movie theater as our intended destination, my date and I headed for the nearest drive-in movie. We sat next to each other in the front seat, at least a foot apart, for the entire movie. Absolutely nothing occurred that I could not have published on the front page of the newspaper.

I concluded the "drive-in hysteria" was considerably overblown.

When I arrived home later in the evening, I kissed my mother goodnight and toddled off to bed, secure in the knowledge that she would never, ever know what I'd done.

Fat chance.

The following evening, it was my turn to clear the dinner table and wash the dishes. My mother was still in the kitchen, too, doing her share of the tidying up.

I was leaning over the table, with my back to her, wiping down the table with a dishrag when she said, "Mrs. Wallace said she saw you and Joe at the drive-in last night."

In that moment, two things became quite clear to me.

First, my mother was a whole lot smarter than I gave her credit for when I was 17.

Second, I knew I would never be able to pass a lie detector test. I am convinced beyond a doubt that those clever gadgets can spot a liar in nothing flat. They measure "galvanic skin response" to pick up the sweat drenching your palms. They measure heartbeat and respiration to pick up your racing pulse and pounding heart. They can detect the flies whisking in and out of your mouth, since your jaw has dropped open and cannot be convinced to shut again.

I felt lucky to be standing in front of the table. Holding onto it kept me from falling down. My knees had suddenly turned to jelly. I knew if I turned around and she saw my face, she'd know I was lying, so I kept cleaning that table, cleaning it as it had never been cleaned before.

It took more than a few seconds to choke out a response, with a lighthearted tone in a voice even I thought was pretty shaky: "Oh, Mom, you know that's impossible! You told me I couldn't go to a drive-in. We went to see 'Donovan's Reef' downtown."

"Well, Chastine said she's sure it was you -- she recognized that big white Lincoln Joe drives."

"Oh, c'mon, Mom. There must be dozens of white Lincolns around here."

This sort of mild back-and-forth went on for another minute or two and then Mom laughed and said, "I was only kidding. I just wanted to see what you'd say."

Again, I gave thanks for the table I was hanging onto for dear life. It was a couple of hours before I could breathe properly again. I congratulated myself several times on how clever I'd been, and how thoroughly I'd fooled her.

Except I wasn't and I didn't.

Not at all.

Many years later, I decided to 'fess up to the lie. I don't remember why I wanted to unburden myself, but for some reason, I thought she ought to know.

It took her quite awhile to stop laughing at me, which, I must say, was not the response I expected.

See ... the thing is, she'd always known I was lying.

When I asked her why she didn't confront me at the time, she said she figured I'd been punished enough -- and she was right.

It's not that we never, ever lie ("No, no, really, sweetheart, I just love watching every single bowl game with you...").

What's wrong with lying by politicians and other public officials is that they're playing the lying game with OUR money, not their own. That they are accountable to the public, not just to themselves. That they often seem to believe we are too inattentive or too lacking in intelligence to know when we're being bamboozled.

Except, like my mother, we're not.

Contact Kathy Fairchild at marshallhealth@socket.net