As the United States nears the twenty-first century, many of its citizens are troubled by the sense that something is wrong. Even though it is argued that our national situation is good, there persists the widespread feeling that somehow we are on the wrong social and historical track. It is the contention of this book that much of this dis-ease stems from our construction of a phony culture, a culture dominated by the value of the confidence man and woman.

The book demonstrates the transformation of America into a culture of artifice, where the practices of confidence tend to make everything and everybody into a phony. The author explores the various dimensions of our cultural phoniness, ranging over phony language, phony people, phony places and things, phony events, phony deals, and phony politics. The work is rich in examples of our phony culture, including such topics as the Washington pundits, malls and theme parks, psychobabble and academese, prosperity theology, and school as a phony deal.

The reader should come away from the book with a conceptually informed idea of the extent and depth of phoniness in American life, and an idea of how to understand and cope with the artifices one encounters in daily life.