We're all balloon boys now

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 the electronic forest.

One can argue that all this reality bending remains harmless. Much of it’s just entertainment and the rest is reversible. People adjust. Living deep inside this new electronic forest, the human animal has learned to adapt. But the one presumably important area of life that seems to be having a hard time adapting to the reality of pandemic doubt is politics…

The current president seems taken aback that so many could doubt his good intentions. But politicians trying to sell big things, whether ObamaCare or privatized Social Security or even wars, need to get better at what they do. We are all balloon boys now, learning every day how to make sure the clever people don’t take us for a ride.