On Fantasy Island

Steve Rannazzisi, a Hollywood personality by way of Manhattan, confessed last week to lying about his 9/11 brush with death, apparently on the eve of being outed about it.

He used to like to tell how working for Merrill Lynch at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and surviving changed his life and caused him to embark on his acting career.

If you decide to tell a really big lie is it more important if you get the main premise correct or the lesser aspects?

Devil in Details

Turns out he never worked for Merrill Lynch, but then again, they never had an office at the WTC, either.

Perhaps he thought that the incorrect details would invalidate the whopper.

They didn’t, probably because he became rather fond of re-telling it.

He should make a good actor as he can apparently construct an alternate reality and then inhabit it.

But, I guess we all do that to some extent.

We just don’t anchor our’s in the deaths of 3,000 people.

Maturity

Now, as a middle-aged man, Rannazzisi blames his indiscretion, in part, on the fact he was an immature young man.

That claim raises the issue of when the statute of limitations expires on claiming youthfulness as a defense for a lack of integrity.

He was in his mid-twenties and much later when he was doing his “9/11 thing.”

That’s a bit late for the “immature young man” ruse and here’s why.

Lo, these many years he has spun his web of deceit, thousands of immature young men, at least according to Rannazzisi’s criteria, have fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq in defense of America.

In an act fully worthy of Hollywood fantasy his excuse for trivializing the deaths of thousands manages to trivialize the deaths of thousands more.

You couldn’t make it up.

Except he did.