Though Advent inclines toward Isaiah, Frank Rich clearly prefers Jeremiah with his morning coffee. His latest reads like an updating of Auden's "low dishonest decade."

If theres been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, its that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggards megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this centurys history so far. Thats why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decades flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

Though perhaps overwrought (as jeremiads are wont to be), Rich may offer something worth meditating upon in this last week of Advent:

As cons go, Woodss fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the reality television craze exemplified by American Idol and Survivor both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.

Reality? truth? Beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion of the Pilates of this world: "The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

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