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Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Truthiness

Now, I love Jon Stewart as much as anyone, but WOW, Steven Colbert has been awesome lately. He is insanely talented. I know I am late to the Truthiness party, but the genius of Truthiness cannot be overstated. When people ask me about living at the turn of the millennia, I will just say Truthiness and then bitch that you get off my lawn you damn show no respect youngins. The latest in Truthiness is the Harvard sophomore who pretty clearly plagiarized in what looks like a truly horrific book.

Its easy to see how this happens in the Truthiness age. She wants to be an author. Her publisher wants to sell books and thinks she is a great story and will sell a lot of books. Her agent wants a cut, her parents are stoked, Harvard probably thinks this is great publicity. Oooops, but you actually have to write the book. And that is the hard part. We don’t like hard. I want war and tax cuts. I want a Hummer and low gas prices. I want cheap shit from China and keeping jobs at home. So you copy the brunt of the book from some other book.

Now, I have never written a book, but I would imagine someone reads it before it gets out in the wide wide world and that someone who reads in knows a little bit about the genre. There were something like 40 issues. How does this happen? How does the editor not go – wait, I read this before? Truthiness.

In an nice coincidence, the #1 emailed article in the times (which I found getting this link) is about college branding – where colleges are selling a bill of goods to students to make themselves look better to US News and World Report - who has become the most important organization in education. All style, no actual substance. It is a lot harder to actually get small classes and talented professors who give a shit.

From moderately crappy movie “Moulouououun Rouge” I learned the Romantics were all about “Truth and Beauty” Interlude: What happened to Nicole Kidman? She was smoking in To Die For, now, she is kinda overly skinny and creepy looking. She set some land speed record from hot to not. But the Truth and Beauty idea is tragically flawed. We like Beauty so much, so much more than Truth. Truth can be ugly and gritty and generally unpleasant. We will sell Truth for Beauty every time.
Thus, Truthiness.

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