Editor's Note

This issue's New Democracy Forum focuses on money and politics--how best to reform the way we finance our elections. As Joel Rogers and I indicate in our note on the Forum (see page 4), the real problem in the campaign finance area is political equality, not the corruption that is currently all over the news.

But corruption of another kind is a large topic in this issue. Marjorie Perloff's essay "In Search of the Authentic Other" is an important contribution to the emerging field of hoaxology: the study of deception, both deceivers and dupes, particularly in contemporary cultural production. The field owes its rapid growth to the continual emergence of striking new discoveries: Alan Sokal's postmodern physics parody in Social Text, the award-winning "autobiography of an aboriginal woman" that turns out to have been authored by a white Australian man, and--Perloff's topic--the strange case of Araki Yasusada. I won't describe the Yasusada affair, lest I spoil Perloff's wonderful account of it. Suffice to say that she focuses on the dupes, and asks why editors and discerning readers so quickly assumed, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, that Yasusada was for real. Perloff's provocative answer is that this lapse in judgment reveals a blinding pre- occupation with writers' socio-cultural positions.

We have invited response for our next issue from many of the editors Perloff criticizes. In any case, the hoax craze has important implications for editorial responsibility. We owe readers compelling expressions of reason and imagination. More elementally, though, readers must able to trust what they read here as neither inauthentic nor intellectually fraudulent. With a very small staff, and practically no fact-checking capacity, it is a difficult responsibility to discharge. But we take it seriously--though not a professional journal, we often send articles out for review--and promise vigilance in fighting the intellectual corruptions that Perloff's essay so powerfully depicts.

--Joshua Cohen