QUOTE:
"We live in inauthentic times. Symbols overwhelm substance. Plausible, and even implausible, deniability governs public behavior. Lying comes with little consequence."
Pinocchio Nation
“It’s not what you are that counts,” Joe Kennedy allegedly reminded his children, “but what people think you are.” The Kennedy patriarch’s amoral advice seems almost quaint next to the prevailing ethos of today’s famous, rich, and influential.
It’s not even what people think you are but what you can say you are, while keeping a straight face, that now counts.
Take Jussie Smollett, who says that he has “been truthful and consistent on every level since day one.” Nobody, not even anyone with the last name Smollett, believes that. But he can say it because the state’s attorney for Cook County, a supernatural place where the dead vote and defendants perform community service prior to trial in psychic anticipation of the court’s desires, nullified a grand jury by refusing to prosecute the Empire actor for orchestrating a hate crime against himself. Believing Smollett means believing he mistook two African-American friends of his for white Trump enthusiasts while innocently seeking a submarine sandwich at 2 a.m. on one of the coldest nights of this or any year in Chicago, a city with as many Trump supporters as Green Bay Packers fans — and that he left that noose around his neck long after the fact not for effect but just, well, because.
The parents fixing it so their middling children attend elite universities strike as another example of appearances trumping reality. People care far less for the education than the piece of paper attesting that they received the education. So, rich and famous parents bribed their children into college. Instead of Gucci sandals or Louis Vuitton handbags, this instance of what Thorstein Veblen dubbed “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class involves education.
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https://spectator.org/pinocchio-nation/