Word: disbelief
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...this leads us to an unpleasant conclusion. You can be lied to only if you suspend disbelief. Author Charles Ford asserts that "politicians are mouthpieces for the self-deception of the people. Wittingly or unwittingly, they tell us that which we have asked them to tell us." Ergo, we have all been enablers for Bill Clinton. Poll after poll reveals a populace that doesn't want to know the awful truth. "Lie to me," sings Sheryl Crow, "and I'll promise to be true." Bok says that because we expect to hear hypocrisy from our leaders...
...warm-weather weeks, they decided to give New York a lovely present: a midsummer, Mideastern night's dream. "We said, 'Let's make a great place to go on a hot evening,'" he recalls, "a space with seductive sights and sounds and smells, where you could suspend your disbelief and go with this fantastical tale. It'd be there for just a couple of months--and then evaporate...
...gape in disbelief at last month's electricity bill, it may be of some comfort to know that all that air conditioning wasn't an extravagance. July 1998 didn't just feel like the hottest month the world has known since records have been kept; it really was. New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association puts the average global temperature at 61.7 degrees (not all that hot, but remember this includes Antarctica), which is half a degree higher than anything we've ever seen...
...cites an offending item from a long ago Earl Wilson column: "'Would you believe that not once has Joey Bishop sat down to dinner or drinks with Frank Sinatra without being invited?'" The slight isn't that Wilson got it wrong, exactly. What rankles Bishop is Wilson's mocking disbelief. "I'm the comic on the bill. He's having dinner, O.K.? If he wanted me present, he would invite me. How do I know he's not talking business? I knew my place. You people"--journalists--"don't believe the truth...
Yale law professor Stephen Carter calls this "the culture of disbelief," the oppressive assumption that no one of any learning or sophistication could possibly be a religious believer--and the social penalties meted out to those who nonetheless...