Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan, sigh.

As you probably know, the 42 year-old fitness enthusiast and Ayn Rand fanboy, is the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. He’s supposed to be vigorous and youthful, and in him we’re to see the hopeful amplification of our aspirations. He’s sort of like a Christian rock band that’s been distilled into a Bro Politician, if that makes any sense. Whatever he’s wearing looks as if it was designed to appeal to somebody else, like a costume, and not something that was an organic manifestation of who he is. He just has the look of somebody who cares more what you think of him than what he thinks of himself.

One thing that drives me crazy about him is that he went for a photo-op at a soup kitchen in Ohio and washed clean dishes for the cameras. What sort of asshole does that? Couldn’t he find a single thing to do that was needed or useful, couldn’t he have reached down deep into the abyss and summoned something sincere? But maybe I’m just blaming Ryan for a political advertising machine that disseminates symbols of intent rather than the actual results of intent. As Ryan would likely say to me in some offensive, imitation gangster accent, “Hate the game, not the playa!”

Fine.

But he lied about the time in which he ran a Marathon back in 1990. It was the only marathon the guy had ever run, and his recorded time of just over 4 hours is really impressive for a normal human being. I mean, if I had ever achieved that I would be immensely proud of the fact and it would be the first thing out of my mouth at every cocktail party I attended.

But Ryan said in an interview that, “I had a two hour and fifty-something marathon,” which he did not. This was not a mistake. This wasn’t a situation where a busy man forgot a small detail about something that took place decades ago amidst the swirl of a chaotic and fantastic life brimming with stunning victories. It was a conscience, willful lie. People who finish one Marathon have that time burned into their brain. Getting the time wrong, by over an hour, would be like forgetting you climbed Mt. Everest. And the difference between a 4-hour Marathon, which is roughly where most fit but not elite runners finish, and breaking the three hour barrier, something that would have placed Ryan 85^th in the Men’s Marathon at the London Olympics, is huge.

I presume that Ryan is a smart guy and that he had to know it would be easy to fact check this, so the only explanation for his lie was that it was a reflex–a primitive  spasm. He didn’t think, but followed the reptile instinct that told him to take this opportunity to make to make himself look better, and so he did, oblivious to consequence. This suggests a kind of compulsion to me, a conscienceless narcissism that would not be out of place amidst the preening amorality of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.