Last week was chock-full of accusatory speculation surrounding the sordid details of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s romantic tryst with recently passed Lennay Kekua, who had not actually passed — in so many words — since she had never actually really been alive, in so many words. Minutes after the hoax surfaced to its seedy veneer of lies, thousands upon millions of self-righteous hypocrites took to prodding questions and angry suspicion all over the blogosphere. But I say, who are you to cast such aspersions? It’s almost as if these pharisees had never mourned the death of a loved one they never had really met because he or she was absolutely a work of fiction. Excuse me if I’m not so quick to draw the executioner’s sword on this 260-pound Samoan teddy bear (and not just because he would promptly knock it out of my hand and eat me).
Tell me. What is really so messed up about this whole thing? If you’re in my camp, the only thing that keeps you up at night is the thought of the twisted rapscallion who lured Te’o into the most tragically star-crossed relationship that he would never have in all of his life. But Manti? Sweet Manti is a victim here, folks.
How do you really know that your loved one is real? You don’t. One day you wake up and realize your sweet girl is an evil, robot succubus (“Transformers 2”). Or maybe you discover that the person of your dreams is actually a smoothie-making, sentient, computer-programmed hologram (“Smarthouse”). Better yet, the one that captures the most ardent admirations of your soul was dead the whole time (“Casper”). At best we have only a small degree of evidence to say that our significant other is a genuine, thinking thing with full-fledged ontological status. Maybe your darling is nothing but the puppeteered manipulations of a malignant god or a construct of your own solipsistic psychosis. You see, Manti is no different than me.
So what Te’o’s delusions persisted even after clear and decisive evidence that his dearest Kekua’s existence was on par with that of Gandalf? Put yourself in his size 16s. Imagine you’ve found the love of your life — albeit with Control+F on the web browser of your fancy. Nevertheless, you grow to deeply love the virtual manifestation of the person you believe to be sitting on the other end of that Facebook chat. Then one day you are struck to the bone in a moment of breathless despair when you receive the dreaded phone call that the woman you earnestly (though falsely) believe exists, has passed away. Perhaps you mourn the thought of a love cut short, or you mourn the loss of the one you had created, but you mourn nonetheless.
And then, on a quiet, lonely night, you receive a phone call. Is it her ghost? No. Is this some cruel trick? Yes. What else is a man to do in the cold, animal hours of a sleepless night? My friends, Manti Te’o did only what we fear of ourselves. How could he fabricate a summer day in Oahu, bathing in the sun with Kekua? How could he engineer the sublimity of her eyes glistening in the stands? My friends, in his darkest moments, how could he not?
