‘Fake news’ wasn’t invented in 2016

‘Bunk’ details history of lies that caught on

Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News By Kevin Young Graywolf. 560 pp. $30

What is more American than reinvention? After all, only a keystroke separates "making it" from "faking it." Change your name, rewrite your past, hobnob with the right people and occasionally murmur "old sport" and bingo, Jimmy Gatz, that poor kid from the Midwest, is now the debonair and dia- mond-studded New Yorker Jay Gatsby.

Given our fluid identities, little wonder that Americans stew about authenticity. Is image all?

During dark Phildickian nights of the soul, everything can start to seem mere sham, all the world a stage set, men and women merely players. In "Bunk," Kevin Young exhaustively tracks our longtime ambivalence toward "hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies, post-facts, and fake news." In these pages our founding father isn't George Washington, who supposedly couldn't tell a lie, but rather showman P. T. Barnum, who brazenly exhibited an old black woman as Washington's 161- year- old childhood nurse.

Any great humbug, Young tells us, relied on chutzpah. Old-time hucksters and flimflam artists scarcely cared if you believed them or not. What mattered was for you to come away feeling that you'd had your money's worth. Maybe the carnival's Missing Link was authentic, or maybe only a puton, just a black guy dressed up in a weird ape outfit. Either way, you had a good time, especially when your sweetie screamed and clutched you tighter.

Of course, the barker's wink and grandiloquent patter already give the game away: Hoaxing is all about performance, coupled with what that notorious plagiarist ( and immortal poet) Samuel Taylor Coleridge called our own "willing suspension of disbelief for