Washington's False Faces
Nollson, John
John Nollson WASHINGTON'S FALSE FACES Highly placed, ultraconfidential sources yield shocking reports of the latest threats to privacy in America. Caught out by the rapid proliferation of...
...But then they began to notice, as the years wore on, that he appeared to be getting no older at all, and he soon acquired a reputation for remarkable vigor and fitness, even though he had a dangerously high cholesterol level...
...Accordingly, in order to even out this expected curve, the Board of Cosmetic Surgery has undertaken a new campaign to bring the benefits of cosmetic surgery to the young when they really need it but don't realize that they need it...
...But the obvious trend toward the election of younger people to office has the Capital's cosmetic surgeons a bit worried...
...More and more political figures are beginning to understand the advantages of having their faces lowered at the beginning of their political career rather than having their faces lifted when they are near the end of it...
...No fewer than 16 prominent political personalities and their wives are reported to have had face-lifts in the past four months, and this does not include work done on their children to correct defects of face and form...
...Thus, 20 years ago, one prescient 32-year-old congressman acquired the face of a man in his late 50s...
...Scientists attached to the White House Press office are already experimenting with the machinery as a way of intimidating errant journalists...
...Thoughtful constitutional lawyers are already arguing among themselves whether the machinery is a threat to fundamental First Amendment protections...
...There is nothing less at stake here," said Harrison R. Harrison, legal counsel to Time, Inc., "than the public's right not merely not to know, but to remain unsure...
...Sociologists, media consultants, and advertising agencies would be well advised to begin studying the implications of this social revolution, for soon all politicians, without exception, will appear to be exactly the same age-54-no matter whether lifted or lowered into that appearance...
...They thought they would drive us out of office as soon as they tuned in on the President with those psychological stress evaluators," one top White House aide was heard to chortle, "but we've got those bastards now...
...Designed as an attachment to the standard office copying machine-whether Xerox, IBM, or Toshiba-the device will immediately detect any lies which appear on the printed or written page...
...What is feared is that every home in America will soon be equipped to scan the stories in the morning news...
...Indeed, the ravages of the decades can be compressed into a single four-hour operation, and an aspiring politician need no longer worry about the problem...
...We ran the latest issue of Newsweek through the system, and that goddamn machine damn near blew its damnself damnup...
...In fact, this new face-lowering procedure gives the appearance that the aging process has been retarded, not the other way around as once had been believed...
...All this has grievous overtones for the sanctity of the editorial process...
...His colleagues did remark that he seemed a bit tired, but they attributed this to an extended debate on a bill establishing a new Department of Instrumentation...
...Cosmetic surgery is becoming more and more of a godsend to aging politicians...
...The key to it all is the new surgical technique of face-lowering...
...Caught out by the rapid proliferation of miniaturized psychological stress evaluators which, unbeknownst to a speaker, can detect falsehoods in human speech by measuring minute changes in the voice pattern, government scientists are hard at work on a new machine which will give them a leg up in hunting out private prevarication...
...Powerful insiders in the journalistic community have held a series of hush-hush meetings, hoping to organize a campaign to destroy the machine and its blueprints and drawings...
...Preliminary tests show the device's capability, even when scanning a chart of statistics: Six arithmetical errors were found in the President's fiscal year 1980 budget submission...
...Actuarial analysis shows that for the next 20 years or so there will be a rapid dropoff in the requirement for face-lifts, with a rapid rise after 1999...
Vol. 12 • June 1979 • No. 6
