If there's one word missing from the lexicon of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair it's remorse.

It was bad enough that he deceived his editors and the newspaper's million-plus readers during a puerile, multi-year adventure into the realm of fiction, fraud and folly.

But now that he has been exposed as the liar he is, he has decided to go on the offensive and add the sin of pride to his warped and apparently compulsive habit of deceit.

In an act of brazen, in-your-face arrogance, he bragged in an interview to the New York Observer that he "fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism."

He described his bosses as "idiot editors" and said he "just couldn't stop laughing" at his fraudulent description of the view from former POW Jessica Lynch's home in West Virginia. Blair had written the house "overlook[ed]…tobacco fields and cattle pastures."

In a subsequent article written to correct the fabrication, The New York Times reported that the house overlooked no such thing. The Observer reported Blair's reaction was to say, "That's my favorite, just because the description was so far off from the reality. And the way they described it in The Times story-someone read a portion of it to me-I couldn't stop laughing."

Admittedly, it would be easy to get away with committing journalistic fraud. A laptop computer and the availability of e-mail make it possible to write and file stories from virtually any location in the world.

On a recent trip to China, I wrote a series of stories on my laptop and then filed them with the editors who run my column on a regular basis on their opinion pages. I e-mailed the articles from various hotel rooms in the cities in China where I stayed; Beijing, Nanning and Guangzhou. Several of the articles contained colorful quotes from interviews with people I thought would add an interesting point of view.

But not one editor actually verified that I was in China or that I had spoken to the people whose names appeared in my columns. I could have fabricated the entire trip in one fictional installment after another.

A lot of what goes on between people today involves trust. It used to be something sacred-you'd shake someone's hand and you were taken at your word. But now I am afraid trust has become a rare commodity. And not just in newsrooms but in the workplace, in politics, in churches, among friends, and even within families.

We have employment contracts and pre-nuptial agreements acting as legal shackles in case someone changes his mind-all because we no longer take our words seriously.

When I signed up to coach Little League this year I had to consent to a background check to ensure I have no police record, presumably because other coaches have lied about their backgrounds. In our church, Sunday school workers have been warned not to "touch" any child. So now it's verboten to put an arm around a kid who may need to be consoled and shown some love for fear its intentions could me mistaken and result in a lawsuit.

Solomon wrote in the book of Proverbs that the words of a man "are deep waters." Deep water can be refreshing or it can drown a person. A man can literally sink or swim in his own words.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; [email protected]. Visit our website at www.amyfound.org.