The best criticism of an idea is that it isn't true, why it isn't true, and in what way it's deceptive and consequentially so. Few ideas are entirely untrue, so to cleanly call untruths untrue, it's important to point out what's true about them, or might be, or could be construed.

There's nothing for exposing the spurious quite like tracking the veritable by its footsteps as someone unwittingly lost it. We banish its harms by untangling a few ways perception is harmless, untangling until revealing the proverbial Hell Blvd. No one who ever stepped on the road of Good Intentions ever stepped on it with Bad Intentions first, yet everyone who stepped on it ended up mistaken. It's the nature of a mistake.

When untruths are discerned, there's nothing wrong with them. Most of us love fiction. The only trouble with fiction, paradoxically, lies in not suspending disbelief. The trouble lies in not needing to - in believing the same way too many drink and eat, to excess - in not realizing we've chosen any excess, in not realizing it's fiction. Then we have, ourselves, by failing to see well, made fiction a lie, rather than a craft, a puzzle, a curiouser turn of the head.

There is no one right way to appreciate art, nor is there only one way to find the truth of the matter. Art, though, undertaken well, absorbed intelligently, can inoculate against the ruse of a more mischievous sort, or a more ignorant.