Decked Out In New Togs

Daniel Henninger thinks the American public may have acquired a collective festive new set of togs: Protective coats of cynicism: With fakery everywhere–some of it amusing, some of it not funny–people’s ability to know where things fall on the spectrum between fact and falsity becomes so compromised that they retreat into a shell of cynicism about everything. And there is a lot to process: 9/11 deniers, Iranian Holocaust deniers, Obama birthers. Lily Tomlin provided the epigraph for our age: “I try to be cynical, but it’s hard to keep up.” The antidote of choice for many of us in a suspect world is irony and satire. The Onion, Jon Stewart or “Saturday Night Live” end up closer to the truth than the original material. CNN’s “fact-check” of a SNL comedy skit may have been goofy, but it’s hard to blame CNN for losing its way in... [read full story]                    

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