Put your Facades where I can see them

Okay, okay, so we can learn a lot from the world of appearances.  

Barack Obama said, in his inauguration speech, that the time has come to put away childish things.  My dad said that this was from Corinthians, in the Bible.  

Quick facades-game:  Obama probably wrote some of his inauguration speech.  He also spoke it literally.  With his own input, he used a patchwork of quotes, but he probably used speechwriters, too.  He could have had a great deal of impact on writing the speech, or he could have had very little;  he could have only spoken the speech.  I don't mean any offense to Obamaniacs, but I just want to consider the different values of the speech.  

Quick point against things-in-themselves:  I dislike when anyone talks of intrinsic values.  Intrinsic means inside something.  If you ever have a true love who tells you about the intrinsic value of your combined love, get out of the relationship.  It means that he or she does not know what they like about you except that they should.  

There's still a lot of work to do with appearances, is all.  Likewise, there is something that college age indie rockers like myself do when we assess an artist's talent(s).  For example, Ween is a good band under this assumption because they write their own original songs, but opposing this is Britney Spears who does not always write her own material.  Somehow my friends and I don't like Britney Spears for this reason (among others).  There is a legerdemain (sleight of hand;  magic trick, shell game) that we are not getting exactly what we see.  It is especially part of the cognitive dissonance that part of us actually wants to know that Britney feels it when she says she loves her boyfriend, when in actuality she does not.  Combine this with new technology, where Britney's voice can be and increasingly is just played on the computer in order to write her songs, and now we have something where the singer does not even sing;  and the whole enterprise is something akin to pornography.  This is way too close to home with Britney Spears.  

But I disagree with this!  In the history of music, people have generally covered songs and used other writers.  The person who reads the speech is the one who is liable!