There are no princesses in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” no mermaids or princes or witches or evil enchanters or talking animals.
Yep, I'm ready for the talking cat. But what if the emperor in our case is actually the tailor, and the rest of the world refuses to point out that we're, as a nation, naked? What then?!
Ugh, yes, that twist also highlights the insidiousness of any con that no only doesn’t care about the truth but has also been orchestrated in advance to prevent reality checks from working. Where I’m trying to get to is imagining what kinds of infiltrators WE could become in the narrative: painters whose unflinching portrait of the emperor will outlast the invisible “clothes” AND the Emperor himself . . . ?
Yep, I'm ready for the talking cat. But what if the emperor in our case is actually the tailor, and the rest of the world refuses to point out that we're, as a nation, naked? What then?!
Ugh, yes, that twist also highlights the insidiousness of any con that no only doesn’t care about the truth but has also been orchestrated in advance to prevent reality checks from working. Where I’m trying to get to is imagining what kinds of infiltrators WE could become in the narrative: painters whose unflinching portrait of the emperor will outlast the invisible “clothes” AND the Emperor himself . . . ?