NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams apologized this week for a lie he’s been telling for more than a dozen years. He says he “misremembered” the incident in Iraq when he and his news team came under enemy fire and their chopper was forced down and protected by a platoon.
Great story! The only problem is, it didn’t happen that way. A chopper about an hour behind the one he was riding in actually took the enemy fire and had to land. Williams and his crew later landed beside the shot-upon chopper due to a sandstorm.
It’s funny how memories can work. It’s one of the reasons why police say eyewitness accounts are actually unreliable, when you’d think they would be the most dependable evidence you could have.
But Mr. Williams prompted me to come clean with a lie I’ve been living with since I was a child.
I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a kid. I would actually go on to win a poetry contest with a little ditty I wrote about Remembrance Day. But before that, I stole a poem from Mad Magazine and passed it off as my own. I didn’t enter it into a contest or anything like that. I simply recited it to some people and claimed that I wrote it. I did not! Blair asked me if I could recite it and I could, instantly, because I had to commit it to memory if the lie was going to work. So for the record, this poem is a creation of a writer at Mad Magazine, sometime in the late 1970s:
I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree.
But then again I’d hoped there’d be, a tree still left for me to see.
Some lumber firm from out of town came in and chopped our forests down.
But I’ll show up those dirty skunks. I’ll go and write a poem called Trunks!