Phoniness and authenticity

A letter to the International Herald Tribune:

While on my way home a few nights ago, I stopped off at the local convenience store. While walking about, I noticed that the television behind the checkout counter was tuned to a local news station reporting on the death of J.D. Salinger.

After the report, the camera returned to the anchor who made a personal comment about how much “Catcher in the Rye” had meant to him when he was in high school. But then, this nice, scrubbed and smiling image of the successful, all-American male, ended by saying, “And now here I am, another phony in a suit.”

This fellow really does deserve some kind of formal recognition.

Richard Margolin, Hoboken, New Jersey

Does he deserve it? I mean, if the declaration comes that easily, why doesn't he do something about it? How different is this from Kierkegaard's remark about the ambitious young man who wakes up with great plans only to end up making clever and witty excuses to stay in bed. Only here it is a self-deprecating remark to avoid facing moral responsibility. Maybe the guy isn't even a phony, he just wants to shutdown any self-examination before it can get started.

That raises another question: What is the opposite of phoniness? Particularly if you consider that the biggest phony in The Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield. He is, in fact, the only character in the novel we can reliably say is a phony given that the alleged phoniness of all others is only known to us through Caulfield's probably unreliable testimony.

Phoniness in Catcher prefigures the current obsession with hypocrisy. An odd moral concern when you consider that everyone is a hypocrite. If hypocrisy is professing a higher moral standard than what you yourself follow, what does it signify when a hypocrite accuses someone else of being a hypocrite.

That's the big problem with Salinger for me. Is the whole thing some terribly arch joke or is Salinger as clueless as his creation?

H/T The Gypsy Scholar, who is considerably kinder about the "phony" anchorman than I am and has some interesting things to say about Salinger.