Catholic Sensibility: Celebrating Fake but Accurate Photography

So the other day, I noted a whimsical little entry on Mike Flynn’s site. I have no idea what Flynn’s politics are, but I know funny when I see it.

The heart-tugging image of the Last Polar Bear so beloved by climate change enthusiasts begged for lampooning and some authors of some denunciation of of Climate Change Infidels inadvertantly provided the grist for this by accompanying their letter with a photo that was, not to put too fine a point on it, a fraud.

Now comes the puzzling part. Todd over at Catholic Sensibility somehow reads my snickers over the fraud and concludes, not that the authors of Against Doubters of the Sacred Simulations were taken in (or trying to take somebody else in) but that I was “taken in” by the photo. The problem is not that the editors of Science “The world’s leading journal of original scientific research, global news and commentary” were taken in and then shamefacedly had to remove the phoney picture with a lame apology. No. I was taken in. And that by some nefarious Republican whom Todd, sensing vibrations in the ether, just knows is the creator of the hoax.

That would be the hoax I never believed in the first place since, you know, I first saw the picture on Mike Flynn’s blog.

Peculiar reasoning, that. Todd’s logic is that *he* was not taken in by the photoshopped pics. So it naturally follows that, in the immortal words of Pee Wee Herman, “they meant to do that” when they circulated the photo. Everybody was being all post-modern and ironic, apparently.

Of course, there *is* that embarrassed apology from the gatekeepers of The World’s Leading Journal of Original Scientific Research, Global News and Commentary and the quick flush down the memory hole, but that’s neither here nor there. The main thing to remember is that Todd knew all along it was photo-shopped, so it naturally follows that I was taken in, that the photo was “just a symbol” and not an act of fraud and that the people who actually circulated the photo with every mark of having credited it completely are either Republican stooges, postmodern ironists, eco-heroes or some other species of virtuous saint. It can’t be that the photo was a fraud, some suckers believed it (or some frauds knowingly passed it on) and critics of it think that fraud is bad.

“Just a symbol” is Todd’s way of saying “fake but accurate.” “Taken in” is Todd’s way of bearing false witness against his neighbor.