Trump, Smollett and Avenatti deploy similar tactics against scandals
"I have been truthful and consistent on every level since day one," actor Jussie Smollett told the world after prosecutors dropped 16 felony counts that accused him of making a false police report about being the target of a racist, anti-gay attack.
Such certainty across the board. Such vigorous, declarative statements — crystallized, workshopped, simplified into sound bites containing a single message: It didn't happen. I didn't do anything wrong. Case closed. End of story. Incontrovertible. Don't question it. "We have a lot of binary thinking and really overly simplistic storylines that we try to drive to because, for whatever reason, that's how we're wired," she says."We're not comfortable in the space where things aren't so cut and dried."With Smollett, for example, prosecutors made clear that dropping the charges didn't mean they'd exonerated him.
Now, though, humans carry around the ability to talk to the wider world, and Twitter-style fragments abound. Opinions, informed and otherwise, buzz about like gnats. A certainty-based central narrative — the kind that was often calming, but also shut out and silenced Americans by the tens of millions — seems lacking. That can encourage critical thought. It can also sow confusion.
The production code that governed Hollywood movies from the mid-1930s to the 1960s required, for example, that moral order be maintained and"the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin." Style guides for romance-novel writers offered similar strictures — and usually demanded happy endings.
"There is this fondness for absolutes in this country," he says."The upside is you project this aura of certainty. The problem is that reality often moves past it and proves it to be wrong."It's behind the question of why, in the face of what was generally believed to be strong evidence, prosecutors inexplicably let the Smollett case go and moved on, sealing it from prying eyes. It's in the revelations that will emerge if and when Michael Avenatti faces trial.
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