GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
Is there any truth in truthiness?
February 4, 2006
There's a new word going around town that wonderfully characterizes America at this moment in its history. It is truthiness, and it seems to shed philosophical light on everything from Google's kowtowing to its Chinese lords to Oprah being taken in by a con man so obvious I wouldn't let him in the front door.
Now, truthiness you will not find in the dictionary. Apparently invented only recently by satirist Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, a show which really is truthful, the word was meant to denote all the slimy half-truths that we live by today.
Truthiness easily slides sidewise into an American society no longer troubled by absolute lines between history and fiction, or between true biography and TV interpretations, whether in Oprah's studios in Chicago or in the White House in Washington.
Truthfulness, the old guy, was tough, upright, uncompromising, whether in the light of noon or the dark of midnight; truthiness, on the other hand, slithers around in the dusty cracks of our society, endearing itself to many because it asks so little of them and even cleans out some of their dirty corners for them.
Take Oprah and her motherly embrace of James Frey's book about his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces. When it turned out that there were a million little falsities in the book, she and Doubleday broke out into a million little embarrassed cries. But how could they have not known, or asked, or demanded proof of this guy's narrative?
Publisher Nan Talese, supposedly one of New York's top editors, was quoted as saying: I mean, as an editor, do you ask someone, 'Are you really as bad as you are?'
The answer is yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! In fact, that is just what editors, who are supposedly the gatekeepers of our journalism and literature, are supposed to do.
I worked for 11 years on The Chicago Daily News, and there was not one editor or reporter who would not have instinctively recognized this guy as a phony. But New York publishers, apparently, are extremely naive and easily had so long as the theme of the book is one that touches the heart, like these pitiful stories about drug addiction, the bad society that allows it, and personal triumph against all the odds.
Indeed, when I was writing my biography of Fidel Castro, Guerrilla Prince, my editor, one of the most famous in New York, was going to Cuba to get him to write his autobiography. Such innocence about human character would be laughable were these editors not choosing what America will read and thus, think.
Then, Google. I asked the president of DuPont eight years ago in Dover, Del., and I asked the American ambassador in Beijing a year and a half ago, if American companies were making money in China. The answer was always no; but right on top of that no came the eternal disclaimer: But it's a huge market, and someday they will. Instead, what really happens is that the technology is passed to a Chinese company and the Americans are eased out.
Now we have Google, whose mission has been to make information universally accessible and whose famous motto is Don't Be Evil, agreeing with the Chinese to actively censor searches by individuals to avoid offending Beijing's propaganda world. Yahoo is even worse; it has acknowledged helping Chinese authorities to prosecute an outspoken local journalist by giving over information on his e-mail account. There is much more.
Finally, we have the idea floating around that we don't need newspapers anymore because people can get their news from the all-knowing Internet, or they can read Oprah's carefully chosen books. Well, one truth, at least, stands: The only way Americans, or any other people, are going to get a full, comprehensive and integrated view of their societies is through newspapers. And they are fading.
Quotes from a man of wisdom shed light on what is happening. In a recent British book on culture, Decadence, edited by Digby Anderson, he writes that Britain, Europe and the United States have traded in their old personal morality for a new, experimental, collective and highly politicized quasi-morality. He writes that, in place of the classic individual values of courage, love, fairness, honesty and prudence, we now have the modern, politicized virtues of equality, anti-discrimination, environmental concern, self-affirmation, a caring attitude and a critical mind-set.
It would seem to me that those new values, collective and politic, have set the stage to lead us from the hoary truthfulness to the newly birthed truthiness. Who knows? Maybe a New York publisher will publish a book about it.
Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
