Fiction and reality 20 June 2005

Frank Rich expresses hope that Americans are becoming fed up with the massive manipulations to which they are exposed (“Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks,” New York Times, 19 June 2005). He says they are unlikely to take seriously Tom Cruise’s loud pronouncements of his love for a much younger co-star – in contrast to members of an earlier generation who in 1938 ran into the streets at Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds hoax. I truly wish Rich were right, but I have my doubts. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between different degrees of spin and degrees of removal from “reality” in all kinds of news/information sources (as made clear in Thomas de Zengotita’s brilliant article, “The Numbing of the American Mind” –Harper’s, April 2002). I am thinking, for example, of that movie starring Tom Hanks which ostensibly displayed God’s phone number (Bruce Almighty). In fact, this was the number of a radio station which received thousands of calls – many from pranksters, but some from people who really thought they could get in touch with God. Curiously, Hanna Arendt once thought that individuals who cannot distinguish fiction from reality – rather than ones who ardently embrace pernicious ideologies – are the aptest subjects of a totalitarian regime.