11–14.07.26
I experienced severe cognitive dissonance Saturday morning upon turning on the news and hearing that Lindsey Graham, 71, senator from South Carolina—and one of TFG’s* stanchest supporters (except when he thought for a moment that it didn’t benefit him and longer)—had shuffled off to Buffalo.
In the days leading up to the senator’s unexpected exit, the rumor mill had been spinning in overdrive regarding the viability of Kentucky’s seven-term legislator, Mitch McConnell, 84. A month-late report dropped stating that EMTs had been called to his Capitol Hill residence on June 14 where CPR was “in progress” on an unnamed unconscious individual. This was followed by a neighbor’s video of an individual being loaded, in no particular hurry, into a waiting ambulance, the patient’s bare feet sticking out like a butchered hog.
Completely apropos to nothing, I am sure, the Vice President’s motorcade was spotted at Louisville Airport, hang on, this just in… he wanted to play golf. Now, I obviously don’t know Senator McConnell personally, only by his voting record, and I have to say that I am not a fan, nor am I impressed by a party machine that would keep a man in office who is so unwell, if only to keep their numbers up. It is verging on elder abuse, and/or necrophilia depending on whether or not the senator is “pining for the fjords,” or not.
The rumors were a-swirling until a single cellphone photo was released showing Mr. McConnell with his wife, apparently back from her whirlwind trip to China, sitting back smiling like a real boy. Needless to say, this hostage-style documentation, in which Mitch held a nondescript sports page, did little to assuage suspicions that Kentucky’s own was an ex-turtle.
All of a sudden, everyone with an internet connection and a wicked sense of humor was having a field day with the latest AI tools, placing the happy couple everywhere from the Grand Canyon, to the top of a theme park log ride right before the plunge. And that’s where we find ourselves, unable to ascertain the physical viability of one of our country’s top legislators for a month. I thought about going into HR at work and asking how long it would take them to demand proof of life if I just stopped checking in. I realized that I didn’t want to know.
I knew this moment was coming since the first time I used Photoshop at my college newspaper in the early ’90s. At a local shop, I found a black-and-white postcard of a crowd of people on a Greyhound bus wearing Popeye the Sailor masks. I cloned my own face onto one of the passengers, printed it, and sent it off to my parents.
A couple of days later, I got a call from my mother wondering where I had gone with all those Popeyes. I immediately realized that there were generations of Americans that would not have the tools to discern truth from fiction in the years ahead. The instruments of deception have become unfathomably more powerful in the interim, while our grasp on consensus reality has become more and more tenuous.
I don’t know what the answer is here. The turtle is out of the cage, so to speak. There may be an existing way to watermark manufactured media already in place, but I’m sure that requires some forensics, something that takes time. Time being the one thing that our quick twitch media environment doesn’t allow.
Pay attention out there. Take the time to figure out what’s real.
*This Fucking Guy
Román Leão 
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