We Will Just Call it Truth
Standing in line, waiting for some ice cream over the weekend (a weekend full of swimming and hiking and thoughts on Nature), a chatty lady with a purple plume in her hat began a conversation. We covered our jobs, where we live, etc., and then, I can't remember how, we got on truth. Or Truth, perhaps. We didn't call it truth, but that's what is was, in a way. Remember the author of "A Million Little Pieces" being exposed being raked across the coals by Oprah, whose become the premiere forum for confessionals and purification?
We didn't talk about it in that way, but what the woman said, how James Frey lied, how what he wrote was peddled as truth but it was all lie, that surprised her so much she recalled it to me nearly seven months after Frey's public excoriation in the church of Oprah. But didn't the publisher insist in changing the book's genre from fiction to memoir in order to sell more books?
Maybe I'm making that part up but what does this say about our attitudes toward truth in a time of "reality TV" and 24-hour confessionals? With a war in Iraq, the origins and reasons of which are muddled, and world where language is made opaque by newfangled corporate adages and bureaucratic vernacular, how can we possible know what is true? Is Frey another witch burned at the postmodern stake? We aren't sure what's true anymore, perhaps. I need some more time think about this with Foucault.