Fake Cormac McCarthy fools Twitter... again

See the child. The child presumably controls Twitter’s recently reinstated verification process, since it bestowed the social media app’s hallowed (and/or hollow) blue checkmark a few days ago upon @CormacMcCrthy. While the account was first created back in September 2018, from its inception it was obviously a parody for the famous author of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road, Suttree, and a whole host of other work. We know this because:

A). Anyone who has read the briefest bit of McCarthy’s work knows the only “Twitter” the author is interested in are the twitters of small starlings as they soar above a dying Western dusk light stretching its frail embrace towards its disenchanted, silent child — the land.

B). This has happened before.

C). The account’s very first tweet.

And yet... As brought up by Alex Shephard, a reporter with The New Republic, the parody account at some point received the supposedly authoritative verification check. To be absolutely sure (not that it was needed, but we admire his journalistic diligence), Shephard reached out to McCarthy’s agent and publisher to confirm that, no, the 88-year-old living legend does not use Twitter. “I can confirm that this is definitely not a genuine Cormac McCarthy account,” McCarthy’s agent reportedly replied.

@CormacMcCrthy’s blue checkmark was removed not long afterward, prompting a flurry of jokes and memes on Twitter that marginally improved an otherwise hellish social media app — one that we’re sure McCarthy himself could probably wax poetic about, were he informed of its existence. He’d probably say something really profound and linguistically astounding, tying our reliance on it to some sort of primeval drive that reminds us all of mortality. Or something. We clearly aren’t as verbose as the living legend, so we’ll just say this:

Twitter done showed its ass again and it was a pretty funny oopsie-goof lolol.

This isn’t the first time — As we mentioned earlier, faux-McCarthys have fooled Twitter before. More specifically, they’ve fooled Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, who seems to be a huge Cormac McCarthy fanboy — a fact that should surprise absolutely no one. “Join me in welcoming [McCarthy] to Twitter! We have the best authors in the world right here,” Dorsey tweeted back in January 2012 while linking out to a now-defunct, other parody account. The man is thirsty for a McCarthy endorsement, it would seem.

Meanwhile, I can’t get verified for the life of me over here, so maybe I should pretend to be a different cornerstone of American literature... hey, someone go see if @RealThomasPynchon is taken.