Yesterday Falls Apart . . . True Fake
In the slacker life of your erstwhile correspondent (writing under the barely disguised pseudonym E.R. Muntrem), yesterday framed out like any other. Arise. Coffee. Walk somewhere for more coffee and to work, writing these posts included.
But within that frame, everything went nowhere. Typing yesterday felt, in one of my father’s phrases, like pounding sand.
Why? Waking up on the wrong side of the bed? The cumulative effect of my self-serving schedule? Some invisible demon?
How, Dear Reader, do you explain your inexplicable days, assuming you have them?
True Fake
After a play ends, Romeo and Juliet say, and the curtain goes down, the actors come back out and take a bow. This sends a clear message: What you just watched was fake. Romeo dying, Juliet’s death, all the love, and all the fuss . . . all fake.
But not false. Romeo loved Juliet, no less than Juliet loved Romeo.
If the theater crashes down the actors may die but the roles live on. Real bleeds, fake does not, that’s the difference.
Jake Tapper, if you are having lunch with him, is real. So too (maybe) is Tucker Carlson. But mediated, over the airwaves, both are fake. They play a role. And just as with Romeo and Juliet, the role is where the power is. And the danger.
Indeed, these pixels on this screen are fake such that I can use them to say anything. 2+2=5 and 2+2=4 are equally fake but one is notably less true than the other.
All of this is to say that the opposite of true is false, not fake. Our challenge is to distinguish the fake-true from the fake-false.
This is not easy to do on two accounts: First, more and more of our art starts from a false premise: people have superpowers, chase magic rings, etc. (Yes, you can say that Captain America deals with his powers in a way that would be “true” to such a person, but at some tipping point of the fake you fall so far over into an escape from which there is nothing to be learned or gained. No one goes to Romeo and Juliet to learn about fair Verona, but if young love can occlude everything else, the hypocrisy of the parental world especially, then the escape comes with wisdom.)
Second, the internet feeds imaginative impulses constantly. This is different than saying, as is often said now, that everyone gets their thinking from a source that already agrees with them, which they certainly do. It is to say that since the curtain never goes down and we never talk, in real space, about what happened in the play, we never have to ask if the fake was false or true, or, more accurately, how true the fake was.
This is a reminder that there is often not a singular reality reported on truthfully or falsely, but more a world or true or false we report into existence. January 6th was tourism if we all say so and The President can have whatever documents he wants if we all agree. A rose by any other name.
Luckily, the conversation we have would never allow such falseness to be made true, which is the conversation’s value, even and especially in a world of fake news.
These distinctions may be too fine to matter or be absurd from the start. But to put it another way, we have always struggled to control our thinking. Now the discourse of our art and the internet encourages us, constantly and unrelentingly, not to do so.
And by “control our thinking” I refer to David Foster Wallace:
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Tomorrow: Not spending too much on a French Press Coffee maker.