Sinceritude

Its not what you say or even what you do, its how your mere presence makes people feel that counts. You dont have to tell the truth, you just have to seem like you really care. Not sincerity but Sinceritude. Sometimes this TV truth, this hunk of video wisdom, this pop adage lurks beneath the surface of a turbid everyday reality. For example, as the clownish Algore repeats his faith in the hockey-stick temperature graph visions of The Late Medieval Warming and The Little Ice Age flow into our brains until we realize we love the chubby devil because he can say things like 'no controlling legal authority' and 'Bill Clinton is the greatest president in American History' with the same cherubic mongoloid look on his face that he uses to defend the Hockey Stick. None of its right, none of its true, we know that, he probably knows it too but there he is, staring into the camera, never blinking, with that weird grin on his face. Sinceritude.

And what has Sinceritude gotten the egregiously misguided Algore. A thriving business telling people that the money they send him will be used to plant trees whose carbon dioxide absorbing properties will soak up the excess CO2 and save their homes from tidal waves and brush fires. In this age of Green Chumpery that's like a license to print money. Sinceritude. He's probably not even planting trees either but running a chain of Medical Marijuana growhouses where each of the cloned buds are counted as a Carbon Offset. The best thing about Sinceritude is the recognition you receive for it. Algore cannot sing; he has a Grammy. Algore looks like an overripe mandarin orange on TV and stumbles in his delivery; he has an Emmy. Algore knows nothing about filmmaking and cant act; he has an Oscar. Algore's biofuel idiocy has caused world food prices to rise, causing riots and starvation across the globe; he has a Nobel Peace Prize. Does he have a Pulitzer? In all this excitement I kind of forget myself. Its Sinceritude if he does.

But then it happened. Oh yes, it happened in the dead of night, while us unsuspecting citizens were sleeping and dreaming our workaday dreams. I awoke and turned on the television and heard the awful news...Epperson had been dumped from Project Runway. Blonde, Aryan Heidi Klum was handing the tall, charming, dreadlock-wearing Epperson a one-way ticket to designer Palookaville. Auf Weidersehn! Epperson. OK his entry in the Wedding Dress challenge was a total disaster and that shirt-dress monstrosity from last week wasnt any better. But he was so cool about it all! I had been wading through John Bagot Glubb's 'The Empire Of The Arabs' when my wife's watching of DVR episodes of 'Project Runway' lured me away from the madcap antics of the Umaiyad Khalifs in the 8th Century. Go figure.

C'mon, we all know Irina's gonna win. That chick is hot! Razor-sharp and coolly calculating but very lacking in Sinceritude. She wants to win. Epperson just has been cruising through the show, almost forcing everybody to like him. So it turns out he's a zero, a mediocrity. Shouldnt they have given him First Place just because he's an affable, tall, charming, post-racial black guy with Mucho Sinceritude? Its happened before.

So now what, Epperson? Now that Heidi has shot down every dream you ever had how are you going to survive in a country in which, even though the Stimulus Bill, legislation with a lot of Sinceritude, has saved millions of jobs, there is still a paucity of employment opportunities. Where does a young minority male, on the streets with little skill, less enthusiasm, and a provincial and incurious view of the world go to earn his daily bread? Where is a hand reached out to the true owners of Sinceritude? The Illinois Legislature, that's where!

You go sit in the front row of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church and when he yells 'God Damn AmeriKKKa' you stand up and you yell, "AMEN!" real loud. You hire William Ayres to write you a great autobiography. Soon your feet will be up on the desk, your lovely young assistant standing by, waiting for instructions and you'll be voting 'Present' with the best of them. Politics is way better than dress designing, where I'm told people who have jobs are expected to actually do something from time to time. That'll never happen to a politician with lots of Sinceritude. Look at Charlie Wrangle, he made at least double his measly Congressional salary with his funny real estate transactions and didnt pay taxes on any of it, but he has the Sinceritude to weather the political, racist insinuations lodged against him by the Crackpot Christian Terrorists in their campaign to destroy AmeriKKKa.

So you go for that legislative sinecure Epperson. You never know; a lifetime of phony achievement and total mediocrity if accompanied by a dollop of ruthless ambition and a generous ladleful of Sinceritude can lead a guy to the Nobel Prize at the end of the rainbow. I'm not fooling. Its happened before.