Thursday, May 27, 2010Opinion

The Brownsville States-Graphic

page A4

Calvin's Corner

By Calvin Carter, Staff Writer

By 28th Judicial District Circuit Court Judge Clayburn Peeples

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BrownsvilleSTATES-GRAPHICSTATES-GRAPHIC

Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

Calvin Carter,Rebecca GrayStaff Writer

Sara Clark,Josh AndersonGraphic Design

Terry ThompsonSales Manager

Leticia OrozcoReceptionist

Vicky Fawcett,Office Manager

Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

Vicky Fawcett,Offi ce Manager

Terry ThompsonSales Manager

Ceree Peace PostonReceptionist

Calvin Carter,Staff Writer

Sara Clark,Graphic Design

Josh AndersonGraphic Design

Julie Pickard,Staff Writer

A couple of years ago, an ex-girlfriend, along with my parents decid-ed to chip in and pur-chase me a guitar for my birthday. The instrument came with a book full of songs, and a couple of free lessons from a guitar teacher.

Jeff was his name.A local musician in his

mid to late 30’s, Jeff had an easy aura about him, as if The Big Lebowski’s “The Dude” wasn’t just a character, but a way of life. The guy oozed “carefree” and slacker.

Yet any idea of slacker-dom disappeared when-ever he started playing his guitar. Jeff could play anything just by hearing a song once. He could then map out the “musi-cal architect” via guitar tabs or notes.

While Jeff could play and teach just about any-thing, his favorite genre to mess with was of course metal.

This of course meant a few things, namely that my first song to learn wasn’t going to be “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

Jeff asked what song would I like to learn how to play. Off the top of my head, I figured that he could teach me a Black Sabbath song. I don’t know why, but for some reason I suggested Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

Instead, Jeff intro-duced me to an era of

Black Sabbath that had Ronnie James Dio as their lead singer. The song he taught was “Heaven and Hell,” whose main riff didn’t hesitate to strike a chord with me.

I was equally impressed with the vocal talent and delivery of Dio. You ask me what’s my favorite era of Black Sabbath, and I’ll imme-diately answer back with Dio. Sure Ozzy is of course much more popu-lar and has been touted as an entertaining front man. But my money will always go towards Dio.

In case you haven’t heard, Dio passed away last week. He was bat-tling stomach cancer, and although showed initial signs of a full recovery, succumbed to it.

I haven’t played my guitar in quite some time. But I’ve been getting an urge to at least strike a few of the chords of that particular song, my for-mer teacher taught me just well…because why not?

West Memphis

I’m not going to express into great detail over the tragic shooting that happened recently. I will say that my prayers go out to the families of the slain officers in West Memphis.

We take for granted the services of officers every-day. Just think that these

are men and women who have taken on the task of risking their lives just make sure our laws are upheld so that other lives aren’t lost.

It was senseless and heartbreaking what hap-pened to them. And I couldn’t even begin to imagine the pain their loved ones are experienc-ing right now.

As I said, my prayers go out to them. I do hope that your prayers will go out to them as well.

Oil Spill

Not wanting to end this column on a sad note, I will point out something of notice that Haywood County should be proud of. An exchange club product, brainstormed by John Gallaspy, will help pro-vide shirts and clothing to volunteers that have been dealing with the recent B.P. disaster oil spill.

It was mentioned that a huge collection has been taken so far, thanks to residents in Haywood County.

It’s always pleasant to see when a community comes together to help others. This is no excep-tion.

Let me sincerely say thank you Haywood County for continuing to renew my faith in humanity.

So somebody hands me a card the other day, and here’s what it says:

(1) This sentence con-tains five words.

(2) This sentence con-tains eight words.

(3) Exactly one sen-tence on this card is true.

“Which sentences are true?” the man asked.

“Well,” I think to myself, “the first sen-tence does contain five words, so it is true. The second sentence also contains five words, so it is false.

Then I read the third sentence. “Exactly one sentence on this card is true,” it said. Exactly one.

“O.K.,” I say to myself. “Sentence one is the only true sentence.” I almost said so, but then I thought, “No, if sentence three is correct, it’s true too. That would make two correct sentences, so it can’t be correct. And if it is not correct, it has to be false. But it’s not.

“But it can’t be true either, because that would make two true sentences on the card, and it says there is only one.”

What a mess! What the man had given me was a modern version of an ancient puzzle known as a liar’s paradox, or liar paradox. A liar’s para-dox is defined as a state-ment of facts that asserts its own falsity. Another example would be, “I am lying now. This statement is false.” If the speaker is really lying, the state-ment is true, but if the statement is true, then the second statement is a lie.

Trying to figure out such philosophical brainteasers is a lesson in futility, but for more than two millennia, philoso-phers of all sorts have tried to do just that.

The first of these liar’s paradoxes began in the sixth century BC when a Cretan poet/philoso-pher allegedly said, “All

Cretans are liars.” As a Cretan, any statement he made would have to be false, because he said, “All Cretans are liars.” Well this linguistic dilem-ma kept ancient philoso-phers so stirred up, one of them, a poet/gram-marian named Philetas of Cos, allegedly died, in 270 BC, from insomnia he suffered from trying to figure out the liar’s paradox.

While no one else has taken it quite that serious-ly, many, many serious articles and even a few books have been written about it. The quest to dis-cover the truth seems to be hard wired into our DNA.

Just as solidly as our effort to avoid telling it is. In spite of the extremely high value we claim to put on honesty, the truth is, we all live in a world of lies.

Which is amazing, considering that just about everyone claims to be honest. “I’m a lot of things,” I’ve heard countless people say in one way or another all my life, “but a liar is not one of them.” Nobody wants to be thought of as a liar. As a matter of fact, calling someone a liar is about as good a way as any I know of to get yourself punched in the nose. We take our reputations for truthful-ness very, very seriously.

But we each get to define the term for our-selves, and not surpris-ingly, the misleading statements we utter never seem to fall within our definition of lying, no matter how egregious they may be.

Part of the reason we get away with this is that there is no uni-form agreement as to just what a lie is. We gener-ally agree that a lie is an untruthful statement made to deceive others, but then we carve out exceptions, usually to

excuse the falsehoods we find it necessary to tell.

What about telling children Santa Claus is watching them? Is that a lie? Or what about telling your mother-in-law how much you are looking forward to her weeklong visit next month? Surely that’s not true, but is it a lie?

Or how about the dilemma everyone has faced at one time or another. You answer the phone, and as you pick it up, someone says, “Tell em I’m not here.”

I’ll never forget one night many, many years ago when I was out at a business location helping to investigate a homicide. Several law enforcement officers were there, and so was a representative of the business.

The phone rang. The business employee answered it and said, “Is there an Agent _ _ _ _ here?”

“Agent _ _ _ _, a crusty old TBI officer with a cigar in his mouth, removed it and said, “Tell em I’m not here.”

The employee paused. “Would you mind step-ping just outside the door so I won’t be telling them a lie?” he asked.

Everybody froze, wait-ing to hear the agent’s response. Begrudgingly, he opened the door and holding it open, stepped across the threshold, waiting.

“I’m sorry,” the employee spoke into the phone. “He just left the building. Yes, I’ll tell him when he comes back.”

As he hung up the phone, the agent stepped back into the room. The employee told him to call soinso and then left for another part of the build-ing.

But the lie he didn’t tell hung in the air for the rest of the evening, thicker even than the smoke from the agent’s cheap cigar.

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