<p>The centenary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land reminds readers of the rumors that the poem was published as a hoax. While pulling off a hoax takes cleverness, invoking the word to dismiss inconvenient facts is an abdication of responsibility that plagues political culture today.</p>
I took the morning TGV from Poitiers to Paris on January 15th to ask Etel Adnan a question. She was about to receive France’s highest cultural honor, the…