DENY, DENY, DENY, AND THEN PLEA BARGAIN

Yesterday, I celebrated St. Patrick's Day. I am Irish by background. Seriously.

My mother's maiden name was McGill. The maiden name of my father's mother was McIntosh. While Newton, I am told, is a Scottish name, I have some Irish blood flowing through me.

Really. I'm not kidding. I can prove it.

Honestly.

Honest ... now there's a word that doesn't get much of a workout these days. Honest is the sort of adjective you see in campaign advertising when candidates are trying to avoid the issues or they have an opponent familiar to grand juries.

There was a day when honesty was implicit in one's mere being ... when word was a bond, when eyes locked throughout a conversation, when a handshake was good as a contract.

Now, there are spin doctors, public relations gurus and every variety of consultant who can put the best face on even the most forbidding scenario. A public figure is only as upstanding as the last set of clippings, with alibis, justification and ultimately aggrandizement supplied by those of his own employ.

None of this is exactly new to our modern times. When Marc Anthony spoke of Caesar's assassins as "honorable men," he did so for political purposes, and the masses indemnified his deceit.

A generation or so ago, the chasm between what a president said and the truth had a formal name: "credibility gap." In coffee shops and beauty salons around the nation, where grassroots Americans roll their eyes at such rhetoric, there is a less generous appraisal of such fabrications: "whopper." (Actually, there is a barnyard reference that applies here, but community standards prohibit its use in this instance.)

Later, the term "executive privilege" became familiar to Americans, that being the expression dished up every time a particularly relevant (and usually damning) document was kept under wraps by the White House "for the national good."

Goodness, as Mae West so aptly put it, had nothing to do with it.

This comes to mind with the admission of Tonya Harding Wednesday that she willfully hindered the investigation into the assault of fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. By entering a guilty plea and conceding to the court that she kept quiet about information she held concerning the attack, Harding retreats from her previous contention that she knew nothing about the crime and did nothing wrong.

When this wild story began taking shape, Harding greeted the first questions by reporters by saying, "You know me better than that." Well, we do now.

Harding kept the condemning information to herself, repeating the mantra of innocence, and reassuring her fans and anyone with a microphone that she had no part in shenanigans that would leave a fellow skater hobbled.

The prospect of sure imprisonment finally loosened her tongue. In the end, confession not only cleansed the soul and cleared the docket, it proved no more personally traumatic than a broken lace.

In reading this, don't detect in my words any naivete. I might have led you to this thought: "Surely, you're not surprised that she was guilty." No, I'm not ... which is my point.

During all her denials, most people assumed Tonya Harding was lying, and the real surprise would have come if she was somehow fully exonerated. She trotted out her lawyer and her coach and her choreographer with statements in an effort to suspend our collective disbelief, and dodged questions as if that were an Olympic event, but our grim expectation was that she was completely in cahoots with the band of thugs she called her entourage.

None of this is about figure skating or the soap opera the sport presented in recent months; Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were placed in a high-profile morality tale, good versus evil, and both have turned out to be flawed human beings, only one criminally so.

Instead, this is about our times, when agendas are driven, self-gain is paramount and lies are told ... and we know about it more than ever, even assume it. We've all lost a bit of faith. And those who haven't are generally taken for saps; ask members of the Tonya Harding Fan Club.

The pattern seems all too routine, whether for an ice skater or for a state attorney general or for a U.S. House postmaster: deny, deny, deny, then plea bargain.

In the aftermath of a day when many people claim they are Irish, I contend I am. Trust me. I know, because the state of things sometimes gets my Irish up.

Ken Newton is editor of the Southeast Missourian.