{"id":979,"date":"2008-05-17T06:56:44","date_gmt":"2008-05-17T11:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/wp\/?p=979"},"modified":"2008-05-17T06:56:44","modified_gmt":"2008-05-17T11:56:44","slug":"granfalloon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/?p=979","title":{"rendered":"Granfalloon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat&#8217;s Cradle), is defined as a &#8220;false karass&#8221; (imagined community). That is, it is a group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless.<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Granfalloon\" target=\"_blank\">Wikipedia<\/a><br \/>\nFor an elegant, witty stabbing of the granfalloon that is the Obama campaign, consider this, from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/comment\/columnists\/gerard_baker\/article3941450.ece\" target=\"_blank\">Gerard Baker<\/a>, the US Editor of The Times:<br \/>\n<em>Every decade or so the people who control the way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet.<br \/>\n&#8230;it&#8217;s fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley.<br \/>\nYou will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week&#8217;s Newsweek, which was entitled <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat&#8217;s Cradle), is defined as a &#8220;false karass&#8221; (imagined &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/?p=979\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}