carpe diem 11-03

here's my column from saturday.

CARPE DIEM 11-03

A few years ago, a retired philosophy professor named Harry Frankfurt wrote an essay entitled “On Bullshit.” It quickly spread on the internet and was later published as a book.

It is a short book, only because what it lays out is one of those ideas that is stunningly apparent, but only after the fact: much of what we are surrounded with is bullshit. We know this to be true, but until Frankfurt’s paper came out, it was never defined and dissected so succinctly.

The book is an invaluable tract to anyone who would like to have a better grip on the unreality that has become our reality today. The way Frankfurt defines it, “bullshit” isn’t a synonym for a “lie,” but rather: “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.

In other words, if you are lying, you are at least aware of the truth, if only in terms of saying the opposite of what it is. If you are “bullshitting,” in Frankfurt’s view, you are completely removed from the concept of truth versus lie.

And I would take the idea a step further and say that we have finally gone round the bend, passed a magic threshold, accumulated a critical mass of bullshit to the point where it has in fact become our reality.

Hannah Montana started as a fictional pop star who sells millions of records, and is played by actress Miley Cyrus on the Disney Channel show of the same name. Now, Miley Cyrus playing Miley Cyrus playing Hannah Montana sells millions of records and sells out arenas like the Pepsi Center in a matter of minutes.

Fox News Channel is still called Fox “News” for some reason, despite the company’s lawyers fighting and winning a battle in a Florida courtroom, proving to the satisfaction of a judge that there is “no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States.

And of course there are people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, doing what they actually call “fake news.” Sadly enough, there is more truth, more slicing away of the layers of bullshit on their comedy shows than there is on the “real” news, where “real” reporters dutifully relay talking points just as they were instructed to.

Which brings us to the poorly-thought out FEMA “news conference” last week in Southern California, wherein FEMA employees were the only attendees—er, “reporters” who asked any questions of FEMA’s spokesman. Actual reporters were notified of the news conference, but only 15 minutes prior to it starting. And as anyone who has ever lived in, visited, or even heard about Southern California knows, 15 minutes isn’t enough time to even get to the freeway, let alone get anywhere on it.

The department’s chicanery was duly exposed—FEMA spokespeople apologized, Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff gave the hoax’s authors a public tongue-lashing. And the whole thing made for great entertainment, and fodder for late-night talk show hosts.

But really, why not stage fake news conferences? In this era where public relations, image, and spin are always going to trump truth anyway, why not indeed? What the hell, we’re not going to hear anything remotely close to the truth from these people—we might as well get a good show out of it.

And if we’re all a little dumber for it, well…you get what you pay for. That’s your government hard at work, twisting and pirouetting and twirling around the truth till you can’t tell what it is anymore. And it’s easier to keep the populace in line when they not only don’t ask questions, but are actually so ignorant they don’t even know what questions to ask.

That's entertainment.

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