You'd think that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o would be overjoyed to learn his internet girlfriend's death was a hoax, that the person with whom he spent days and nights on the phone is alive and well, even if her name isn't Lennay Kekua. If it's true the NFL hot-property had never met this posthumous paramour, but fell in love with her over the course of years on the phone, you'd think the bond would be super-ordinary and he'd be on the first plane to meet his miraculously restored Ophelia. The death "hoax" could have a fairytale ending! (Maybe I'm overestimating the emotional availability of a football player, but that exclamation could be a pun and a twist.) Evidently Manti Te'o presumes his fabled "Lennay Kekua" by any other name will not smell as sweet. That's certainly the conclusion a TV audience is meant to infer. The football star's sagging enthusiasm for his ex phone pal enamorada suggests he might already know her identity doesn't it? His business-of-football associates don't seem to show much curiosity either. Is it that Lennay Kekua's real identity and physical appearance have to be vetted by Notre Dame or by the NFL before they approve a re-engagement with the Manti entity integral to their business plan? No doubt American Football might also not ready for a gender switch, if the phone passed around the locker room in the persona of "Lennay" turns out to be Manti's "prankster" friend Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Macho Manti Te'o is entitled to the private life of his choosing, but when the media money machine plumbs real-life drama to pull the nation's heartstrings, we're entitled to see what comes up at the end of the line, especially the more feverishly they try to cut it. Because isn't there a real chance here for something transformative? Imagine if Manti Te'o is revealed to be gay, what that could do for traditional divisive stereotypes, blessed by football. Reality television teases us with the charismatic potential of witnessing real life, but carefully scripts what we see to preclude an unpredictable outcome.
Tag: Hoax
Um, embarrassing “Bin Laden papers” found during assassination raid give new life to CIA al-Piltdown melodrama
Ignoring that a recent BBC investigation had determined that "al-Qaida" was an intelligence community fabrication, US media trots out bin Laden papers "seized during raid" for latest Borat-style mocking of Islam.
Sure enough, Amina Arraf al Gay Girl of Damascus hoax is a fat man in Georgia
Following a variety of digital trails, internet sleuths have triangulated the source of "missing" Syrian blogger Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari to Thomas MacMaster and Britta Froelicher (possible alias Paula Brooks), of 5646 Crestwood Dr, SW, Stone Mountain, GA 30087, currently infiltrating a Palestinian Rights group in Edinburgh, Scotland. Circumstantial evidence points to the two who've not only hoaxed thousands of Facebook worriers, NPR and the MSM, but poisoned the impact of future authentic appeals and jeopardized real Syrians. This wasn't as nefarious as the NEDA hoax which aimed to slam Iran, but it was no doubt partisan. Are these accusations confirmed? So long as MacMaster & Froelicher refuse to answer inquiries, wouldn't it be prudent to blow their cover as unscrupulous provocateurs, regardless their allegiance? Who but an imposter would think the fight against tyranny lacks for real heroes or victims? 22:00GMT UPDATE: MacMaster apologizes and claims to be "sole author" of GGD posts, but it smacks of damage control to me. "Paula Brooks" still looks like sock puppetry aiming to protect Britta Froelicher's cover as an activist with the American Friends Service Committee.
Boy in the Striped Propaganda-jamas
What's wrong with imagining that a German youngster could traverse a maximum security perimeter to charm readers with his innocent observations, for example, mistaking dirty excrement- encrusted forced-laborer uniforms for striped pajamas? And more, sneak under the wire, to suffer and thereby confirm, the inmates' inhuman fate? This year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 20, arrived with a new tale to beguile the kiddies: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The photograph above depicts a concentration camp inmate killed between rows of barbed wire. At the Dachau Memorial its caption pronounces: "Suicide," conjecturing that this inmate chose to rush the fence and be shot by guards sooner than endure any further brutalities. While the scene amplifies the savagery of the camps, it also puts to the lie the poetic liberties which imagine that camp inmates could linger in the no-man's land between fences, or that likewise nearby locals could approach to within even hailing distance of the prisoners. Angel at the Fence, Herman Rosenblat's purported camp memoir, was debunked because the author asserted that he met his wife during the war, across the fence of a concentration camp, and that she saved his life pre-maritally, by throwing pieces of bread to him. Oprah called it the single greatest love story ever, but under scrutiny Rosenblat confessed his fabrication. Now he's determined it should be redistributed as fiction, because it's a magical tale that people still want to hear. Striped author John Boyne paints a similar scenario for younger readers, where two pre-adolescent boys meet on opposite sides of the fence of no less than Auschwitz. The German boy is fascinated by the other's pajamas. Cute? Like a boy in another hemisphere being intrigued at a slave laborer's dark black tan, or dirt under his fingernails? Eventually Boyne's young protagonist crawls under the wire to join his new Jewish friend, and they die together in the darkness of a gas chamber. Will this prove to be the ultimate aim of Holocaust Rememberers? To drag us all across an impassible divide, over a bridge that stretches credulity, by means of so false a memory that we suffer the Holocaust ourselves through a regression therapy assault on our psyche?