In a field where divinely enabled delusion is an occupational hazard, Fox's unwillingness to polish away jaggedness and doubt, his consciousness of the beautiful human mess involved in producing even a Bible, may be his boldest contribution.
We laugh at the leading lady – a vainglorious socialite with scant self-consciousness whose godawful wailing became one of the first examples of ironic appreciation by the public – yet we must also like her and those enabling her delusion.
At the heart of any scandal is a mystery, the mystery of the self, and Kipnis scours the transcripts of her chosen debacles, finding quotations that best illustrate the delusion enabling so many implosions.
Cawley attempts to shock Teddy out of his delusion by enabling him to act it out in glorious detail.
The media enables these criminals' delusions.
It provides solace, too, enabling the aghast American to glance from Sarah Palin or Herman Cain to a theater of arguably greater absurdity, with an actor of unsurpassed shamelessness and self-delusion.
The Oscars, unfortunately, remains in denial about the fact that many people are tuning in for the dresses, with the stars' delusions now enabled by the likes of the hashtag #askhermore.
Because it was easier, and it felt nicer, to feign ignorance and to cling to the delusion that doing nothing doesn't enable an alleged serial abuser's attacks on women.
Though Ms. Smith grows a bit long-winded in discussing these groups' millennial schemes, her gift for sympathetic characterization enables her to satirize her peoples' vanities and self-delusions without ever seeming patronizing or judgmental.
The work of mental change is to enable someone to move from death to life, from compulsion to recovery, from delusion to reality.
