Russell and Carol - hayle and hearty

“True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true.”

—? Salman Rushdie, The Golden House 2017

  “Is that true?” I asked. “About Dostoevsky?”

  That was all she needed. She nodded earnestly, waved her cronut at me while she chewed the piece in her mouth, swallowed, and was off. “True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true. The question is, can I lie better than the truth. You know what Abraham Lincoln said? ‘There’s a lot of made-up quotes on the internet.’ Maybe we should forget about making documentaries. Maybe mix up the genres, be a little genrequeer. Maybe the mockumentary is the art form of the day. I blame Orson Welles.”

  “Mercury Theatre on the Air,” I said, joining in the fun. “War of the Worlds. Radio. That’s a long way back. People still believed in the truth back then.”

  “Suckers,” she said. “They believed Orson. Everything starts somewhere.”

  “And now seventy-two percent of all Republicans think the president’s a Muslim.”

  “Now if a dead gorilla from the Cincinnati zoo runs for president he’ll get at least ten percent of the vote.”

  “Now so many people in Australia state their religion as ‘Jedi’ in the census that it’s an official thing.”

  “Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He’s the one not to believe because he’s the elite and the elites are against the people, they will do the people down. To know the truth is to be elite. If you say you saw God’s face in a watermelon, more people will believe you than if you find the Missing Link, because if you’re a scientist then you’re elite. Reality TV is fake but it’s not elite so you buy it. The news: that’s elite.”

  “I don’t want to be elite. Am I elite?”

  “You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual.”

  “Is that the same as fictional?”

  “Fiction’s elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It’s what people want.”

  “I blame truthiness. I blame Stephen Colbert.”