David Brooks isn't entirely wrong in his assessment of "The Sad Tales of George Santos," his latest column for the New York Times: "If you don't have a real story, you don't have a real self," is spot-on. But when he muses that Santos — the Republican congressman-elect from New York, whose many and convoluted fabrications about his life and career require the sort of murder-board treatment one usually needs to follow a years-long "Real Housewives" feud — feels different from earlier all-American identity scammers like (fictional) Jay Gatsby, he's wrong about why that is:
I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn't experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.
