![]() Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. View MoreĮach of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s-the main decade of my childhood-I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. I don’t trust books-they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen-the gut.” Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. ![]() In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. ![]() People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. W hen did America become untethered from reality? Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
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