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07/07/2005: "The Age of Bullshit"

--excerpted from "Mother Jones", July/August 2005, "L'Epoque Bullshit", by Dave Nuttycome, a review of Harry G. Frankfurt's recent book, "On Bullshit".

"Frankfurt makes an important distinction between bullshit and lies, which is that while bullshit does not have to be untrue, it is always phony. Bullshit is a process, the byproduct of a person’s uncaring attitude toward the facts at hand. And what makes bullshit the “greater enemy of the truth than lies” is that a liar actually knows and cares about the truth. He needs to know which facts he’s trying to hide. The bullshitter just wants to get over.

The person who lies on a resume is in danger of not getting the job. But the person who bullshits effectively in the interview has a pretty good chance of getting hired. (That’s how I got all my jobs. And that’s pretty much how I keep them.) The bullshit artist cares more about what people think about him than the veracity of his own words; he values the appearance of “sincerity” over “correctness.” That we can even use the seemingly honorific term “bullshit artist” without blinking is a dispiriting example of how we’ve come to privilege spin over substance."

I'll let you contemplate this on your own after pointing out, in case you hadn't noticed, that damn near everything you've heard from the Bush Administration from day one has been bullshit. Everything you hear on FOXNews is bullshit. Most of what you hear from the mainstream news media is bullshit.