ArcaMax

Some weeks have themes. The theme for my week was authenticity. I had to make choices about what it meant to live an authentic life, and unfortunately, someone who embodied it better than almost anyone else went to rest this week.

The doomscrolling looked more positive, if only because it was filled with tributes to Dolly Parton. More than anything, people seemed to remember her staunch assuredness of who she was: Like it or leave it. I can't say I was an avid fan, but she encapsulated much of what Americana meant to me as a bicultural kid. Friendly, bombastic, and with her hair teased high, she seemed to embody her own advice: "Find out who you are and do it on purpose."

Dolly Parton lived on purpose longer than most of us have been alive. It should have given her plenty of time to disappoint everyone; instead, she gave out brighter smiles and children's books.

My children were also part of the Imagination Library, and when my second got his farewell letter from Dolly, it hit me harder than it did him. You get used to pulling a book out of the mailbox and putting your kids to bed with it. Then it ends, and there's no book in the mailbox, and they slowly put themselves to bed. You have to find new rituals to mark time.

Increasingly, the death of people in our collective cultural library has become a strange ritual in itself, especially when those people seemed to have a goodness that survived decades. Fred Rogers is probably the patron saint of it. Steve Irwin has settled there too. Bob Ross and his happy little accidents helped us color the world.

Millennials have watched an evolution of celebrity culture, from polished and produced, to accidental authenticity, then to curated and polished authenticity. Authenticity itself became another product that could be optimized, monetized, and sold.

Which might explain why people like Dolly became more valuable. Her image was obviously constructed. The hair, rhinestones, makeup, and clothes were part of a character she spent decades creating, and she willingly acknowledged the artifice. One of the strange things about Dolly was that the more artificial she looked, the more genuine she seemed.

Her Imagination Library gave millions of books to children. She supported education and disaster recovery in Tennessee and donated funds to help fund COVID-19 vaccine research. Her philanthropy became almost inseparable from the story of who she was.

Perhaps this is one reason millennials keep resurrecting these people. We lived through institutions losing credibility, brands pretending to be people, and people turning themselves into brands. Now artificial intelligence can produce a polished paragraph, photograph, song, or video in seconds. Convincing content will become easier and cheaper, but that doesn't make authenticity less important. It makes it expensive, especially in time.

The scarce thing may become the slow accumulation of evidence that someone means what they say. Character has always worked that way. You cannot establish it with one statement, donation, Instagram post, or perfectly phrased apology. It emerges over the years, especially when doing the decent thing is inconvenient, goes unnoticed, or is unlikely to generate applause.

Perhaps millennials are becoming sentimental about people like her because we are old enough now to understand how difficult that is. We have accumulated our own evidence, made choices that cost us something, changed our minds about lives we thought we wanted, disappointed people, been disappointed by others, and learned that knowing who you are is considerably harder than putting it in an Instagram bio.

Being cynical is easy. There is always an audience for identifying hypocrisy or explaining why someone's motives aren't entirely pure. But eventually cynicism becomes its own kind of gullibility, convincing us that nobody means anything and every act of generosity must contain a hidden transaction.

Then somebody keeps sending books to children across the country for decades.

For a generation trained to look behind the curtain, perhaps one of the more surprising discoveries of middle age is that occasionally you pull it back and there isn't a scam waiting there; it actually was just Dolly Parton.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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