2021.03.31 愚人节曾经让我们发笑

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HOAXES
April fools used to make us laugh. Then came fake news
The history of hoaxes reveals some inconvenient truths



Mar 31st 2021
BY MATTHEW SWEET

What’s the April fool etiquette in an age of fake news? Is pranking irresponsible, given the amount of conspiracist backwash about Bill Gates’s plan to kneecap Lady Liberty and inject us all with nanoparticles? Perhaps we will have more appetite for good-natured deception this year, now the American president is no longer producing 21 false claims a day. Or maybe gags and hoaxes will stay on our list of temporarily relinquished pleasures, like dance floors and tables for ten and big rooms full of applauding strangers.

The best pranks have an unexpected afterlife. In 1983, the producer of “Doctor Who” at the bbc tried to weed out leaks in his team by listing a script called “The Doctor’s Wife” on the office noticeboard – a fake episode which was turned into a real one by his successor, 27 years later. The Swiss tourism board released a video in 2009 about the Felsenputzer, cleaners employed to scrub the Alps, that became so popular a cable-car company began offering real courses in mountain-cleaning. In 1934, a gynaecologist called Robert Wilson stuck a carved wooden head onto a Woolworth’s plastic toy submarine, popped it into Loch Ness and took a photograph that generated a mythology now worth about £41m a year to the Scottish economy.


There is joy in these deceptions, even those with more mercenary motives. They reveal the things in which we want to believe. It would be fun to visit a holiday island where all the towns are named after typefaces. It would be exciting to excavate the missing link between apes and humans. It would be good to live in a world where miraculous transformations and surprises came with the spring: the monochrome Swedish tv sets converted to colour when wrapped in a nylon stocking; Richard Nixon’s 1992 bid for the American presidency; Burger King’s production of a Whopper for left-handed diners; the Edison machine that spun wine, biscuits and vegetables from air, water and the common earth. These stories suggest that the re-enchantment of life is possible. Next year, we might be ready for it.


Leek House Iolo Morganwg 1770s
If your history isn’t sufficiently satisfying, you can always make it up. Wagner’s costume designer concocted the Norse horned helmets the Vikings are now “known” for. Two Victorian Englishmen wrote “Vestiarium Scoticum”, which purported to be a 15th-century handbook on the tartans of Scottish clans. The Gorsedd of the Bards, a druidic order that legislates the ritual aspects of the National Eisteddfod festival in Wales, held its first meeting in Primrose Hill, North London, on midsummer’s day, 1792, in the house above.

The convenor of the meeting was Edward Williams, a laudanum-imbibing stonemason from South Wales, triumphantly reborn as Iolo Morganwg, antiquarian and authority on medieval Welsh literature – particularly the swathes of it that he forged. Morganwg’s labours in the field of cultural confection were Stakhanovite: poetry, spiritual choreography, an entire antique runic alphabet, which had been developed, he said, for carving discreetly on sticks, beyond the notice of sword-carrying English culture warriors.

His forgeries were not conclusively exposed until the 1920s, by which time they had spent over a century buzzing in the matrix of Welsh art and music. Did it matter? Ritual is a matter of process, not proof. Morganwg’s texts were the product of a Romantic nationalist urge, and the persistence of that desire still serves as the best explanation of their existence. The English culture war against Welsh language and literature was real. But Morganwg dreamed of victory and materialised it.


Bone up Piltdown Man 1912
The hoaxer and hoaxed are like lovers, they exchange fantasies and desires. The Natural History Museum in London contains some powerful tokens of doomed romance: skull and jaw fragments, harvested from an Orangutan and an unknown medieval human, filed and primped, assembled with dental gum, and stained with chromic acid to mimic the red gravel beds of East Sussex from which Charles Dawson, an amateur Edwardian bone-botherer, claimed to have extracted them in 1912.

The Piltdown remains are now exhibited as evidence of a deception that derailed palaeoanthropology until the 1950s, when new dating techniques revealed the fraud. But the longing they reveal still compels: the need to fill a blank space in the fossil jigsaw, the desire to demonstrate the superiority of the earliest Englishman.


Piltdown Man was cited in the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, when Darwinists in Tennessee went to court to defend their right to teach evolution to schoolchildren. But if Dawson, Piltdown’s architect, had been tried for fraud, he might have called some distinguished contemporaries to the witness box. In 1903 an archaeologist called Arthur Evans dug the ancient city of Knossos from the soil of Crete and augmented the site with wild speculations in cement, gravel and paint, topping them with some entirely fanciful Minotaur bullhorns. Same instinct, different materials, and still, today, a guidebook full of seductive vagueness.


Immaculate deception Bruno Hat 1929
Art fakes are rarely valueless. After the laughter and the blushes fade, the market gets to work. Tom Keating, a painter and decorator from south London, was tried at the Old Bailey in 1979 and later got his own television series. In 1989 his version of Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire” sold for £27,500, to a builder who put it over the mantelpiece of his retirement home in the Algarve.

Even more famous was Nat Tate, an American painter who was the subject of a biography published on April 1st 1998 by William Boyd, a writer better known for his novels. Gore Vidal and David Bowie were in on the joke, but the best twist came last. In 2012 a Tate drawing – also Boyd’s work – was bought at Sotheby’s by Ant of Ant and Dec, a British tv-presenting duo.

Before all of these came a canonical hoax: Bruno Hat’s “Still Life with Pears” (1929), auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2009. Hat, his sponsors claimed, was a largely self-taught painter born on Germany’s Baltic coast and discovered working in a village shop in Clymping, West Sussex. It was hard to obtain more details. The moustached artist who rolled by wheelchair into his first London show, in the summer of 1929, spoke very little English. (Mainly because he was actually the socialite Tom Mitford, who spoke very little German.)

The show was a stunt by a sniggering coalition of Bright Young Things. Evelyn Waugh wrote the catalogue notes. (“Bruno Hat may lead the way in this century’s European painting from Discovery to Tradition.”) Brian Howard, a model for Sebastian Flyte in “Brideshead Revisited”, was the chief curator. (He and the artist John Banting supplied the work.) Their successful joke haunted Howard: his contemporaries saw it as the principal achievement of a wasted life. But the war redeemed him. At the end of 1940, MI5 assigned Howard to spy on his own class. He toured West End grill rooms and English country houses, hunting for genuine Quislings. Only the truly gifted can make a career out of deception.


Red scare “War of the Worlds” 1938
Orson Welles never said that the Martian invasion of 1938 was real. His Halloween radio adaptation followed H.G. Wells and let terrestrial microbes slay the monsters. The star adaptor even ended the hour by slipping out of character to apologise to anyone who thought he’d said “boo” too loudly.

The devilry was in the detail: when the production staged by Mercury Theatre on the Air feigned a live cut to a CBS reporter describing an alien landfall at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, the actor playing the journalist asked “Am I on?” as if checking that the microphone was live.


Reports spoke of 20 families in Newark who ran from their houses wrapped in wet towels and handkerchiefs, fearing an alien gas attack. The next day a photographer from the New York Daily News took this photograph of William Dock, a 76-year-old farmer from Grover’s Mill, raising his rabbit gun in defiance.

But was he one of the believers? Over the years this photo, like the panic itself, has acquired its own mythology, with the claim that Dock shot his neighbour’s water tower under the impression it was a war machine from the Red Planet. Coverage from the night was less sensational. When he posed for the Daily News, Dock said that he went looking for invaders, “but didn’t see anybody he thought needed shooting”. So he’s not a man duped into taking arms against Mars, more an honorary company member of the Mercury.


Strung along Spaghetti trees 1957
The Spaghetti tree incident of 1957 revealed two things about the British public. First, their belief in the bbc, which had proved its intellectual independence during the General Strike in 1926 and its calm authority during the second world war. Second, it showed their culinary parochialism.

The “Panorama” programme, already a respected flagship for bbc reporting, brought news from southern Switzerland, where a bumper spaghetti harvest was being gathered. Richard Dimbleby, whose smooth mahogany voice had narrated the sacred mysteries of the Coronation, added authority to images of workers pulling armfuls of ready-cooked pasta from a grove of Alpine trees. (Careful cross-pollination, the report insisted, yielded strands of uniform length.)

The report made such levity permissible, though later jokes produced diminishing returns. Few bbc viewers were convinced of the existence of the Lirpaloof, an exotic bi-ped with purple poo, sighted on “That’s Life”, a consumer-affairs programme. And when “John Craven’s Newsround”, a children’s news show, brought a newly laid panda egg into the studio, Brits remained unfooled.

Some adults in the 1950s may have believed that pasta was a cultivated fruiting body dispatched from mainland Europe in tins of tomato sauce, but by the 1980s kids knew painted polystyrene when they saw it.


Journal’s end Hitler diaries 1983
Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. Konrad Kujau, a raffish East German illustrator who graduated from producing fake luncheon vouchers to forging 62 volumes of Adolf Hitler’s diaries, did the same.

One of the Führer’s wartime entries reads: “Have to go to the post office to send a few telegrams.” Kujau began his magnum opus in 1978, using Gothic script, teabag juice and a copy of “Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945”, to produce enough material to attract the attention of Gerd Heidemann, an employee of Stern, a German news magazine. Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times came in on the £2.5m deal.

In April 1983, just as they were ready to publish, authorities in Germany pronounced the acquisition a fake, and not even a good one. Consequences came swiftly. Kujau was tried for fraud and jailed; Heidemann, also imprisoned, was exposed as a Nazi fanboy who had bought Hermann Göring’s yacht and dated his daughter; and Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, lost his job. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the distinguished British historian who had identified the diaries as “an archive of great historical importance”, suffered an irreparable blow to his reputation. Murdoch was the only person to emerge from the affair with a shrug. “After all,” he is said to have remarked, “we are in the entertainment business.”


Sign of the times Ciao! A lifestyle supplement 1993
In 1977 the Guardian published the prog-rock gatefold-sleeve album of newspaper April fools: a seven-page feature on the fictional island of San Serriffe. A less well-remembered sequel in 1993 went even bigger. Ciao! was a pull-out supplement, like a post-doctoral edition of Hello!, in which moral philosopher Bernard Williams explained “why I went back to Wittgenstein” as though rescinding a decree nisi, and Jacques Derrida, the daddy of French deconstruction, spooled out his thinking on interior design. (The Laura Ashley curtains, very much in fashion in early 1990s British suburbia, gave him a particular tingle of jouissance.)


It was a smart choice: Derrida’s intellectualism possessed an unreachable glamour. (When a documentary filmed him eating crisps in 2002 it seemed faintly scandalous.) Three decades on, Ciao! seems even smarter. Derrida argued that binary concepts such as good and evil, truth and fiction, are not clean and good and natural distinctions, but words trapped together in arranged marriages.

His detractors accused him of popping the bolts and rivets from the structure of time-honoured ways of thinking about the world. A liberating academic pursuit but one that also expanded the freedom of crackpots, conspiracy theorists and politicians with an equivocal attitude to the truth.

“I read post-modernist theory in college,” said one leading Pizzagater. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” We can’t blame Derrida for Donald Trump but, in a concession to older intellectual traditions, let the signifier of his Laura Ashley curtains stand for the signified of contemporary life’s alarming uncertainties.


Little shop of horrors Guns with History 2015
Provenance can confer an occult aura on the most utilitarian objects. (“She likely had numerous pairs,” reads the melancholy note on an auction-house listing for a pair of stockings once owned by Marilyn Monroe.)

Six years ago, campaigners against gun violence in America set a moral trap for prospective firearms owners. They opened a gun store in Manhattan, fixed every weapon with a neat label bearing the details of a real documented incident and filled the premises with candid cameras.

This, the sales assistant told a customer, was the Smith and Wesson semi-automatic handgun with which a two-year-old accidentally shot his mother in a North Idaho Walmart. That was the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle used to murder 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

The ad they produced shows customers recoiling and rethinking their desires. But beyond its strong and simple moral lesson lies a darker field, where atrocity itself can be dismissed as a hoax. We know there are some who believe that nobody died at Sandy Hook, or that the murders were staged to serve the enemies of the Second Amendment. And they are not few. For them, the whole world is a trick. And it is uninhabitable and unredeemed by laughter.■

Matthew Sweet is a regular contributor to 1843, and a writer and broadcaster in London

images: alamy, bridgeman images, getty, sotheby’s, bbc, states united to prevent gun violence




恶作剧
愚人节曾经让我们发笑。然后出现了假新闻
骗局的历史揭示了一些不方便的真相



2021年3月31日
作者：Matthew Sweet


在假新闻时代，愚人节的礼仪是什么？考虑到关于比尔-盖茨计划将自由女神跪下并给我们所有人注射纳米粒子的阴谋论的大量背景，恶作剧是否不负责任？也许今年我们会对善意的欺骗有更大的胃口，因为现在美国总统不再每天制造21个虚假声明。或者，也许插科打诨和恶作剧将留在我们暂时放弃的快乐清单上，就像舞池和十人桌以及充满掌声的陌生人的大房间。

最好的恶作剧有一个意外的来世。1983年，bbc的 "神秘博士 "制片人试图通过在办公室告示牌上列出一个名为 "博士的妻子 "的剧本来清除团队中的泄密者--27年后，他的继任者将这一假情节变成了真情节。瑞士旅游局在2009年发布了一个关于Felsenputzer的视频，这些清洁工被雇来擦洗阿尔卑斯山，这个视频非常受欢迎，一家缆车公司开始提供真正的山区清洁课程。1934年，一位名叫罗伯特-威尔逊的妇科医生将一个木头雕刻的头颅贴在伍尔沃斯的塑料玩具潜艇上，将其放入尼斯湖，并拍摄了一张照片，产生了现在每年对苏格兰经济价值约4100万英镑的神话。


这些欺骗行为是有乐趣的，即使是那些具有更多市侩动机的欺骗行为。它们揭示了我们想要相信的东西。参观一个所有城镇都以字体命名的度假岛会很有趣。挖掘猿人和人类之间缺失的环节将是令人兴奋的。如果生活在一个奇迹般的转变和惊喜伴随着春天到来的世界里，那将是一件好事：瑞典的单色电视机在被尼龙袜包裹后转换成了彩色；理查德-尼克松在1992年竞选美国总统；汉堡王为左撇子食客生产了一个Whopper；爱迪生机器从空气、水和普通地球中旋转出葡萄酒、饼干和蔬菜。这些故事表明，生活的重新改造是可能的。明年，我们可能已经准备好了。


Leek House Iolo Morganwg 1770年代
如果你的历史不够令人满意，你总是可以编造它。瓦格纳的服装设计师炮制了维京人现在 "闻名 "的北欧角质头盔。两个维多利亚时代的英国人写了 "Vestiarium Scoticum"，据说是一本15世纪的苏格兰部族格子呢的手册。Gorsedd of the Bards是一个德鲁伊教团，负责管理威尔士国家Eisteddfod节的仪式，于1792年仲夏日在伦敦北部的Primrose Hill举行了第一次会议，地点就在上面的房子。

会议的召集人是爱德华-威廉姆斯，一个来自南威尔士的吸食鸦片酊的石匠，胜利地重生为伊奥洛-摩根沃格，他是古董学家和中世纪威尔士文学的权威--特别是他所铸造的那一大片。摩根沃格在文化糖果领域的工作是斯塔汉诺夫式的：诗歌、精神舞蹈、整个古代符文字母，他说，这些都是为了谨慎地雕刻在木棍上而开发的，超出了携带剑的英国文化战士的注意。

他的赝品直到20世纪20年代才被确凿地揭露出来，那时它们已经在威尔士艺术和音乐的矩阵中度过了一个多世纪。这有关系吗？仪式是一个过程的问题，而不是证据。Morganwg的文本是浪漫主义民族主义冲动的产物，而这种欲望的持续存在仍然是对它们存在的最好解释。针对威尔士语言和文学的英国文化战争是真实的。但Morganwg梦想着胜利，并将其变为现实。


骨头上的皮尔登人 1912年
起哄者和被起哄者就像恋人一样，他们交换幻想和欲望。伦敦的自然历史博物馆收藏了一些注定浪漫的有力证据：从一只猩猩和一个不知名的中世纪人类身上采集的头骨和下巴碎片，经过锉刀打磨，用牙胶组装，并用铬酸染色，以模仿东萨塞克斯的红色砂砾床，查尔斯-道森是爱德华时代的业余骨肉采集者，他声称在1912年从那里提取了这些碎片。

Piltdown遗骸现在被作为一个欺骗的证据展出，这个欺骗使古人类学脱轨，直到20世纪50年代，新的测年技术揭露了这个骗局。但是，它们所揭示的渴望仍然迫使人们：需要填补化石拼图中的一个空白，渴望证明最早的英国人的优越性。


皮尔登人在1925年的斯科普斯猴子审判中被引用，当时田纳西州的达尔文主义者到法庭上捍卫他们向学童教授进化论的权利。但是，如果皮尔登人的设计师道森因欺诈而被审判，他可能会召集一些杰出的同时代人到证人席。1903年，一位名叫阿瑟-埃文斯的考古学家从克里特岛的土壤中挖出了克诺索斯古城，并用水泥、砾石和油漆进行了疯狂的猜测，在它们上面加上了一些完全虚构的弥诺陶洛斯牛角号。同样的本能，不同的材料，到了今天，仍然是一本充满诱惑的模糊不清的旅游指南。


无懈可击的欺骗 布鲁诺帽子1929
艺术赝品很少是没有价值的。在笑声和脸红消退后，市场开始工作。来自伦敦南部的画家和装饰家汤姆-基廷于1979年在老贝利法庭受审，后来有了自己的电视系列片。1989年，他创作的特纳的《战斗的泰梅尔》以27,500英镑的价格卖给了一位建筑商，他把这幅画放在了他在阿尔加维的退休住宅的壁炉架上。

更有名的是美国画家纳特-泰特，他是威廉-博伊德1998年4月1日出版的传记的主题，博伊德是一位以小说闻名的作家。戈尔-维达尔和大卫-鲍伊也参与了这个玩笑，但最好的转折是在最后。2012年，泰特的一幅画--也是博伊德的作品--在苏富比拍卖会上被英国电视主持人组合Ant and Dec的Ant买下。

在所有这些之前，有一个经典的骗局。布鲁诺-哈特的《梨子静物》（1929年），2009年在苏富比拍卖会上被拍卖。他的赞助商声称，Hat是一个基本上自学成才的画家，出生在德国的波罗的海沿岸，被发现在西萨塞克斯郡Clymping的一家乡村商店工作。很难获得更多细节。1929年夏天，这位大胡子艺术家坐着轮椅进入他的第一个伦敦展览，他的英语说得很少。(主要是因为他实际上是社会名流汤姆-米特福德，他的德语说得很少）。

这场展览是一个由聪明的年轻人组成的冷笑联盟的噱头。伊夫林-沃写了目录说明。("布鲁诺-哈特可能引领本世纪欧洲绘画从发现到传统的方向。") 布莱恩-霍华德（Brian Howard）是《重访布莱德赫德》中塞巴斯蒂安-弗莱特的模特，是首席策展人。(他和艺术家约翰-班廷提供了作品。）他们成功的笑话困扰着霍华德：他的同时代人将其视为浪费生命的主要成就。但战争救赎了他。1940年底，军情五处指派霍华德对自己的阶层进行监视。他巡视了西区的烤肉房和英国的乡村别墅，寻找真正的魁首。只有真正有天赋的人才能以欺骗为职业。


红色恐怖 "世界战争" 1938年
奥森-威尔斯从未说过1938年的火星人入侵是真的。他的万圣节广播剧改编遵循了H.G. Wells的做法，让陆地上的微生物杀死了怪物。这位明星改编者甚至在结束这一小时时，跳出角色，向那些认为他说 "嘘 "的声音太大的人道歉。

邪恶的是细节：当水星剧院上演的作品假装现场切入哥伦比亚广播公司的记者描述外星人在新泽西州格罗弗斯米尔登陆时，扮演记者的演员问道："我在吗？"似乎在检查麦克风是否是现场的。


报道说，纽瓦克有20个家庭裹着湿毛巾和手帕从家里跑出来，担心有外星人的毒气袭击。第二天，《纽约每日新闻》的一名摄影师拍摄了这张照片，照片中的威廉-多克是格罗弗磨坊镇的一名76岁的农民，他举起他的兔子枪以示反抗。

但他是信徒之一吗？多年来，这张照片，就像恐慌本身一样，获得了自己的神话，有人声称，多克射杀了他邻居的水塔，因为他认为那是来自红色星球的战争机器。当晚的报道没有那么轰动。当他为《每日新闻》拍照时，多克说他去寻找入侵者，"但没有看到他认为需要射击的人"。所以他不是一个被骗去拿武器对付火星的人，更像是水星的一个荣誉公司成员。


1957年沿意大利面条树串联
1957年的意大利面条树事件揭示了关于英国公众的两件事。第一，他们对英国广播公司的信任，该公司在1926年大罢工期间证明了其知识的独立性，在第二次世界大战期间证明了其冷静的权威性。第二，它显示了他们在烹饪方面的狭隘性。

全景 "节目，已经是bbc报道的一个受人尊敬的旗舰，带来了来自瑞士南部的新闻，那里正在收获丰收的意大利面条。理查德-丁布尔比（Richard Dimbleby），他流畅的桃花心木声音讲述了加冕礼的神圣奥秘，为工人们从阿尔卑斯山的树丛中拉出一臂的熟面条的画面增添了权威性。 报道坚持认为，精心的异花授粉产生了统一长度的面条。

报道允许这种轻松的做法，尽管后来的笑话产生了越来越少的回报。很少有英国广播公司的观众相信Lirpaloof的存在，这是一种具有紫色便便的异国情调的双足动物，在消费者事务节目《生活》中被看到。当儿童新闻节目 "约翰-克雷文的Newsround "把一个新产的熊猫蛋带进演播室时，英国人仍然没有被骗。

20世纪50年代的一些成年人可能认为意大利面是一种栽培的果实体，装在番茄酱罐头里从欧洲大陆运来，但到了20世纪80年代，孩子们看到聚苯乙烯就知道它的颜色。


日记的结尾希特勒日记1983
汉娜-阿伦特（Hannah Arendt）写道："邪恶的平庸性。康拉德-库约(Konrad Kujau)，一个狂妄的东德插画师，从制作假午餐券到伪造62卷阿道夫-希特勒的日记，也是如此。

元首的一个战时条目写道 "必须去邮局发几封电报"。库约在1978年开始了他的巨著，使用哥特式字体、茶包汁和一本《希特勒。1932-1945年的演讲和宣言》，制作了足够的材料，吸引了德国新闻杂志《斯特恩》的雇员格尔德-海德曼的注意。鲁珀特-默多克的《星期日泰晤士报》参与了这笔250万英镑的交易。

1983年4月，正当他们准备出版时，德国当局宣布这次收购是假的，甚至不是好的。后果很快就来了。库约因诈骗罪被审判并入狱；同样入狱的海德曼被揭露是一个纳粹迷，他购买了赫尔曼-戈林的游艇并与他的女儿约会；《星期日泰晤士报》的编辑弗兰克-吉尔斯丢了工作。著名的英国历史学家休-特雷弗-罗珀（Hugh Trevor-Roper）认为这些日记是 "具有重大历史意义的档案"，他的声誉受到了不可弥补的打击。默多克是唯一一个从这一事件中走出来的人，他耸了耸肩。"据说，他说："毕竟，我们是在做娱乐生意"。


时代的标志 Ciao! 1993年的生活方式副刊
1977年，《卫报》出版了报纸四月愚人节的前卫摇滚封套专辑：一个关于虚构的圣塞里夫岛的七页专题。1993年，一个不太被人记得的续集甚至更大。Ciao！》是一份拉出式增刊，就像《你好！》的博士后版，其中道德哲学家伯纳德-威廉姆斯（Bernard Williams）解释了 "为什么我回到了维特根斯坦"，就像撤销了一项强制性法令，而法国解构主义之父雅克-德里达则阐述了他对室内设计的思考。(劳拉-阿什利（Laura Ashley）的窗帘，在20世纪90年代初的英国郊区非常流行，给了他一种特别的快感）。


这是一个明智的选择。这是一个明智的选择：德里达的知识论拥有一种难以企及的魅力。(当一部纪录片在2002年拍摄到他吃薯片时，这似乎是一种微弱的丑闻）。三十年过去了，《Ciao！》似乎更聪明了。德里达认为，善与恶、真相与虚构等二元概念并不是干净的、好的和自然的区别，而是被安排好的婚姻中困在一起的词语。

他的诋毁者指责他从关于世界的历史悠久的思维方式的结构中弹出螺栓和铆钉。这是一种解放的学术追求，但也扩大了疯子、阴谋论者和对真理持模棱两可态度的政治家的自由。

"我在大学里读过后现代主义理论，"一位领先的Pizzagater说。"如果一切都是叙事，那么我们就需要替代主流叙事。" 我们不能把唐纳德-特朗普归咎于德里达，但作为对旧知识传统的让步，让他的劳拉-阿什利窗帘的符号化代表当代生活令人震惊的不确定性的符号化。


恐怖小店 枪与历史2015
出处可以为最功利的物品赋予神秘的光环。(玛丽莲-梦露曾经拥有的一双长筒袜在拍卖行的清单上写道："她可能有很多双"）。

六年前，反对美国枪支暴力的运动者为未来的枪支所有者设置了一个道德陷阱。他们在曼哈顿开了一家枪支店，在每件武器上都贴上了印有真实事件细节的整齐标签，并在店内摆满了坦率的相机。

销售助理告诉顾客，这是史密斯和韦森公司的半自动手枪，一个两岁的孩子在北爱达荷州的沃尔玛超市用它意外地射杀了他的母亲。这就是2012年在桑迪胡克小学用于谋杀20名儿童的布什马XM15-E2S步枪。

他们制作的广告显示顾客退缩并重新思考他们的欲望。但在其强烈而简单的道德教训之外，还有一个更黑暗的领域，暴行本身可以被当作一个骗局来否定。我们知道，有一些人认为桑迪胡克没有人死亡，或者谋杀案是为了服务第二修正案的敌人而上演的。而他们并不在少数。对他们来说，整个世界都是一个骗局。它不适合居住，也无法通过笑声得到救赎。

马修-斯威特是《1843》的定期撰稿人，也是伦敦的作家和广播员。

图片：Alamy, bridgeman images, getty, sotheby's, bbc, states united to prevent gun violence