A Crisis of the FAKE

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet“

William Shakespeare

That is, if it wasn’t a fake rose.

Does calling something that is fake by another name make it any less fake?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you noticed something but you are afraid to point it out?

Kind of like the situation of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Plot

“Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as weavers, they offer to supply him with magnificent clothes that are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. The emperor hires them, and they set up looms and go to work. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the looms are empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool. Finally, the weavers report that the emperor’s suit is finished. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that everyone has been fooled. Although startled, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever.”

Everyone saw but it took a little while before someone (a child, no less!) pointed out that he had no clothes on!

Why are we hesitant to name and point out things of concern and frustration?

Probably in part because we, too, partake in the thing to some degree.

We are like the frog that starts out in cold water

and is slowly brought to a boil.

With that in mind, I slowly raise my hand and say, do you know that we are in a crisis of FAKE?

Upon waking today and slowly percolating my mind, this was the first summary of things, after glancing at some comments on…you guessed…social media.

We are all currently engulfed in a dangerous level of inauthenticity and synthesized experiences.

The word FAKE seems more succinct.

Yesterday there was a discussion I was involved in…among real people having a real conversation on a platform that promotes a lot of synthetic human interactions.

It seemed generally concluded (by me, and maybe others) that the places one might think would (or should) have buying power for more authentically produced artist works have gone the way of cheap and nameless art which says very little other than “we don’t want to invest in some luxury to make the experience of humans in our facilities a little bit more pleasant and human.”

Also yesterday I noticed two friends using some type of app that turned a photo into something that looked very close to a good illustration that could have been done by an artist 50 years ago. The results looked GOOD, and that is why, as an real, live artist…the images got my attention. (And I’m not blaming people for trying apps like this that are made available, somehow, to them).

We now can daily encounter fake voices answering important phone calls we make, or, phoning us.

These fake voices asking us fake questions to which we give fake answers have one purpose and that is to make us hang up and not reach a real human being.

It is like the hedgehogs the Germans put on the beaches of Normandy.

As for War, we go to War without calling it War.

It is both a fake (proxy) War and a very real War with very real consequences.

In War, we now have capacities to fake ourselves into a sanitized narrative of the real violences perpetrated. A drone allows a soldier to execute bloodless bloodshed…at the end of a button pushed from half way around the world.

__________

I recently saw an ad for blog writers needed – indicating that some bloggers hire other people to write their blogs.

We have fake music. The ability to synthesize musical sounds and even full symphonies through a one- person mechanical operation.

We have fake news and fake news photos, faked in authenticity in Photoshop.

We have fake nutrition, supplements to fake our bodies that we are eating authentically, fake vaccinations to (very possibly) an arguably fake pandemic (not fake in the sense of real death and destruction but possibly fake in natural origins).

We have sometimes find ourselves in fakish-churches, fakish- communities…and even fakish-families.

If we look hard enough we can see that we are engulfed and enmeshed in so many forms of fake stuff it would make our heads explode.

The exploding factor (at least in my mind) is because we can see and identify it yet it is virtually impossible to extricate ourselves from it entirely.

Because like any fake or counterfeit thing there can be some amount of authentic something that comes about in and through this fake thing.

All counterfeits possess enough of the real thing to give it a good or fair rating but keep it from being considered in any way, shape or form an “A+.”

(And, especially…never hoping to near the A+++++++++++ that little Ralphie’s essay garnered!)

So we settle and accept the synthetic because we see that there is nothing any singular person can do about this to make any broad, sweeping changes.

And of course, it is a house of cards, also.

Even back in 1985, during my final college days, I wrote a short little poem one morning after the power went down in Newark, Delaware…observing how fragile and dependent our ways of life were…

Today, thanks in great part to social media, we all seem to have a mixture of real and fake friends and a mixture of authentic and synthesized relationships and interactions. Like bone and marrow, it can be hard to separate, but on some human level, I still believe we know the difference.

As long as we remain human, we have the capacity to discern the human factor and distinguish between authentic and fake experiences and interactions, even in a fake forum and fake scenarios.

And, I suppose, that is a good thing!

Like many of us, sometimes I resort to selecting my emotional responses to very real expressions of others from seven or so pictorial emoticons.

Now, I’ve noticed that when I go to type a human response both my phone text and social media auto- suggests or even starts to auto-fill my words, as I type a certain part of a word to complete my thoughts (my human thoughts) and substitute a contrived, streamlined response.

And even the canned, somewhat fake responses can be punctuated to look authentic, such as:

“oh, okay.”

Because, somewhere someone thinks that if we receive that text rather than just “ok” – it will appear as though the human on the other end of a phone intentionally formed it.

The terrible part is that sometimes we go with it.

Because, we are busy people.

I suspect if it could ever be shown (which it cannot), that the collective of those who produce such canned, fake responses are also somehow on the same end of pulling the strings that keep us all so busy in this globalized situation, it might change things?

But likely, it would not change anything.

Because, it seems…there is no going back…from wherever it is we find ourselves herein…

And that, is such the sad part and in fact, THE CRISIS.

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So with this reflection I want to end with two things:

• 
  As I made my coffee and cleared my kitchen counter this morning I saw the small bouquet of dandelions and wild ferns my 33-year-old son presented me on Mother’s Day when he got out from his vehicle.  I was about to pull off what looked at first to be a rubber band so that I could add these flowers to my garden compost and then I noticed it was tied with a piece of natural string.
  I thought about my sons as children, picking wildflowers and handing them to me, as most mothers have experienced.  And I found an amount of pleasure and joy in these thoughts that my grown son had done this for me.

• The last thing (and I almost hesitate to include here) but as my mind ruminated on the word fake and was somewhat free associating about all kinds of fake things, a famous scene about fake things in an old, classic romantic comedy came into my mind. Giving the heads up it is PG-13 or greater…Ha.  I suppose I wouldn’t be too authentic if I censored myself from including this, too, on the subject of ‘faking!’ I do think this is a pretty funny scene…though…a little racy for some, perhaps…