In recent days many commentators have lamented that it is dismaying to know that Mortenson’s a phony. No, what’s dismaying is that so many people were taken in in the first place. What’s dismaying is that so many people don’t seem to recognize a huckster, a con artist, a flimflam man when they see one — and, by the same token, don’t seem to recognize authentic virtue, selflessness, and humility either. Have we become so coarsened by celebrity culture, so accustomed to slick showbiz packaging and self-promotion, so habituated to feeding the ravenous narcissism of the famous, that we’re no longer capable of detecting what Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof called “a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity”? Hemingway said that the one thing a writer needed most of all was a foolproof “bullshit detector”; are twenty-first-century Americans’ bullshit detectors hopelessly out of whack? Have the glossy, streamlined, highly polished and tidily ordered versions of human reality served up on all too many “reality” programs and Oprah-type talk shows destroyed our very ability to separate the genuine from the bogus, the real article from the counterfeit, and even caused us to turn our noses at the imperfect, unprocessed, clunky, smudged, and pockmarked real thing? Do we want to be fooled?

Some might suggest that the elevation to the presidency of Barack Obama, an empty sales pitch in a snappy suit, answered these questions definitively. Others might point to cases like that of Al Gore, who despite his Mortenson-like fondness for private jets and his humongous carbon footprint (he’s used “more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year”) is still somehow getting away with his absurd environmental-hero act. One thing that has particularly stunned me in the wake of the Kroft and Krakauer revelations is the readiness of many of Mortenson’s longtime fans to react with a “Yes, but….” Yes, they say, Mortenson may have lied, cheated, stolen, leveled false accusations, and so forth — but he’s also done some good. Right — and Mussolini made the trains run on time. One can only hope that the shock of so many of these fans over the exposure of Dr. Greg’s perfidies will in time translate, in at least some cases, into a somewhat diminished credulity, a hesitation to embrace personal narratives that seem just too good to be true, and an increased willingness to approach every truth claim in a spirit of (dare one say it?) critical judgment. Admittedly, it’s a slim hope — but then Easter is the season of hope, isn’t it?