Bullshit!

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WASHINGTON (CNN)- "Shortly before the House began debate Wednesday on an energy bill aimed primarily at making the country less dependent on overseas oil, a House committee chairman involved in the legislation bluntly dismissed a key provision to boost the use of hydrogen fuels. "House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-California, a key proponent of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, whispered, "This is bullshit," to House Majority Whip Roy Blunt as the two men stood listening to Rep. John Doolittle, R-California, talk about the benefits of hydrogen fuel at a crowded Capitol Hill news conference. The House energy bill focuses on diversifying supply and increasing production, but is not likely to provide immediate relief at the pump." See House Resources Chairman Disses Key Provision of Energy Bill. And speaking of "bullshit", in yesterday's e-mail, we received the regular openDemocracy newsletter (a good one to subscribe to), wherein they make an apology of sorts for having delved into the murky world of bullshit - in a previous issue of their Internet postings."A number of opendemocracy readers have expressed concern at the use of the Anglo Saxon term for bovine faecal matter in the weekly e-mail of 14 April 2005. Some suggested this betrayed a gratuitous desire to gain attention or to shock. We would like to assure our readers that nothing could be further from the truth. The offending word is part of the title of a book (On B******t), written by Harry Frankfurt, emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton university. The book was the starting point for Tom Nairn's reflections on the degradation of public discourse - a topic we intended to analyse rather than embody. We are sorry if we unwittingly caused offence."Bullshit, along with chickenshittedness, have always been of concern hereabouts, particularly due to the Cheney-Bush White House neocon Election 2000, 9/11 and Iraq war advent, which started, as did these pages, on December 13, 2000.

Don't vote for Bullshit
By Tom Nairn

Tom Nairn offers his advice to voters in Britain's general election...

Inquiring at an Oxford bookshop about the latest tome from Harry G Frankfurt, Princeton's emeritus professor of philosophy - On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) - I expected a delay, or maybe an expedition to the basement. Instead, the info desk attendant just reached round to the other side of the till, and handed my copy over from the top of a large pile. Today bullshit is popular, and big business.

And so it should be. As Frankfurt observes, we constantly swim in the stuff, yet lack "a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us". In the context of New Labour's 2005 re-election campaign, the question has become of even greater importance. The author begins by pointing out that bullshit must not be confused with lying. It is far worse: a gladdening substitute for truth, capable of seeping into the very foundations of discourse. The medium is indeed becoming the message, but in a way far fouler than Marshall McLuhan imagined almost forty years ago. "I am the Word", it assures us, "...and there is no alternative, no other word any longer makes sense".

Far from decrying it, the pensée unique of the bullshit world fetishises sincerity. Its British ringmaster, known to his colleagues as "TB", is a champion of feigned sincerity, most in command when affecting to stumble over just the right, novel term - the flash of non-inspiration capable of reiterating what each listener or viewer knows already. Each reiteration of course confirms such non-knowledge, making it seem more natural than before. "Insofar as this is the case" (I quote Professor Frankfurt's conclusion) "...sincerity itself is bullshit". This echoes the argument Anthony Barnett is developing in his openDemocracy election blog.

As St Augustine noticed seventeen centuries ago, passage into the bullshit underworld includes a borne from which no traveller returns: the soul thus lost falls in love with deceit, and ends up feeling it to be more real than the world left behind. One can recover from Francis Wheen's Mumbo-Jumbo, but not from naturalisation into pseudo-land. [See Harper Collins review]

The professor traverses much of this dark domain, right up to Max Black's The Prevalence of Humbug (1983), and notes its modern military dimension. See accompanying commentary. This too was typically British: "Unnecessary routine tasks or ceremonial, excessive discipline or 'spit-and-polish'" (OED), a character-formation intended to prepare the feckless for total, reflex obedience. The bullshit universe, comments Frankfurt, is "a matter not of falsity but of fakery". And because fakery is a genuine art, it calls for analysis in its own right: one turd can be compared to another. This is why "bullshit artist" is such a common appreciation, notably at election time.

No one believes bullshitters; but in an odd way, that's the point. As Frankfurt says: "However conscientiously... the bullshitter is also trying to get away with something" and the message is invariably a certain impression of him or herself. He or she is to be trusted. Bullshitting aims at the formation of trustworthiness, as Eric Ambler's character in Dirty Story discovered at an early stage in life: "One of the first things my father taught me was, Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through". There definitely is such a thing as society, in other words; and it's an everlasting confidence-trick. See accompanying commentary.

Although Professor Frankfurt covers the philological ground admirably, he is less convincing about its contemporary causes. "Why is there so much bullshit?" he asks plaintively near the end. Partly because there's more mass communication, clearly; but there must also be "deeper sources" of plagues like neo-conservatism and New Labourism. Bullshit inclines naturally towards the general, the inclusive "-ism". And the profounder cause at work must be the emergence of a new would-be global governing class, searching for its own ism. A "vision" of humanity not yet existent has to be conjured up, alongside absolute trust in the representatives of this fabulous future.

The womb is fertile yet, and providing ideal conditions for a global bullshit takeover. Hence neo-liberalism and the The Third Way: an engineering of mass electronic consent, in which a disabused left (both Leninist and social democrat) has contributed its traditional ideological energies to the economic good fortunes of recrudescent capital. Conception took place in think-tanks, gestation followed in the 1990s, and led on to the most important birth at the millennium, when George W Bush was "elected" by the United States Supreme Court.

This was a perfect example of the general formula summed up by Frankfurt:

"Hot air seems an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit... Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, a representation of death that we ourselves produce and that, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives."

Just to get by, global subjects must learn to think and speak excrement, in Anglo-American if possible. The ideal of the reborn Free World is all-round self-colonisation, with accountable captains of bullshit at every helm.

There is only one big problem in the way: democracy. Because of its origins and timing, global bullshitification has to include formal democracy, while simultaneously neutralizing it. It can't just ignore it, like old-time colonialism. So far, the trick has been managed by the grotesque inflation of anachronisms like the United States, United Kingdom, and Australian constitutions. Postmodern newness has dragged the early-modern back into service.

Yet there are obvious limits to the tactic. And in fact a massive intellectual reaction against it is under way. The popularity of essays like On Bullshit and The Prevalence of Humbug shows this, as do Wheen's How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World (2004) and Don Watson's two outstanding volumes from Australia, 1592401406Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words and Management-speak are Strangling Public Language (2005) and Gobbledygook (2004). See accompanying commentary.

In addition, there are the new edition of Raymond Williams's Keywords (1988), New Keywords: a Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (2005), and Michael Quinion's invaluable guide to Ologies and Isms (2002). See accompanying commentary.

Death to bullshit: the overall message is plain, and one crucial aspect of this turning cultural tide is recognition that "plain English" (Orwell-speak) is no longer an answer. New languages are indeed required, in the plural, and must be worked at. The assault on "political correctness" was bullshit's attempt to defuse this dangerous change. "Plain speaking" was long ago ideologised into the "obvious", as distinct from the comprehensible. That is, into ideas not only received but consecrated, and (as Watson demonstrates) recyclable into the pseudo-new of management-speak and smartass last-wordism. New Labour is no more than a second-rate variant of the latter.

Don't vote for bullshit, wherever you feel its presence. Get a copy of On Bullshit instead. It's only the size of a passport, and will fit into most inside pockets. Over the past week of unadulterated representations of death (Pope, Blair and Brown at Longbridge, pseudo-Royal nuptials) I have found its presence quite reassuring. It can also be easily taken out and waved at bullshit vendors crossing one's path between now and the 5th of May.

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt * Slouching Toward Nirvana : New Poems by Charles Bukowski

WEIRD ASS BLOWS UP PLANE

Dunne's tale of Chandra fate - from the NY Post The Arab thing (as in bullshit) has been going on for eons STOP Nothing new there STOP Used to deal to them STOP some married the cocktail waitresses, so what? Their life STOP The clue here is by Gary's own words STOP She's driving me crazy STOP What, to be a sex slave, to go to Arabia, to go to a sex orgies STOP No, she was pregnant and was threatening to tell all if Gary didn't bow to her calling STOP He sent a buddy that knew her, she went with him, they pulled the hit and she is dead and long gone STOP And speaking of bullshit stories DOT DOT DOT Now for our fearless but mostly stupid "shoe on a bomber" STOP I can visualize a terrorist packing a prophylactic with plasteen, stuffing it up his butt, pulling the cord between his legs, then trying to light a fire in his crotch STOP How are they going to print that in a fashionable manner STOP WEIRD ASS BLOWS UP PLANE DOT DOT DOT go to the depot and have your cavity search STOP Some background on Condit/Levy gossip: MISSING intern Chandra Levy is dead, and shortly after she went missing on April 30, her body was dumped over the Atlantic Ocean, according to Vanity Fair sleuth Dominick Dunne. On Thursday night, Dunne was a guest on Westwood One radio host Laura Ingraham's show. Dunne said that although Rep. Gary Condit - relieved to be out of the spotlight after Sept. 11 - is running for re-election in California, he is still under suspicion in the Levy case. Dunne said on the air that he was working with the FBI on the case and has "uncovered new leads" which show that Levy may have stumbled into a noxious ring of prostitution, sex slaves and Middle Eastern sheiks in Washington, D.C., which might have contributed to her disappearance. Dunne - who has a habit of finding the most bizarre witnesses to violent crimes - claimed he was contacted this fall by a world-renowned American "horse-whisperer," who helps prepare racehorses for Middle Eastern businessmen. According to Dunne, the horse expert met an impeccably dressed, well-connected Middle Eastern man this summer who claimed to have seen Levy being put on a plane after her disappearance. Described as a "procurer" of young women for Middle Eastern diplomats in Washington, the man told Dunne's American source that on or after April 30, he saw Levy being put on a private jet, surrounded by five men, "but she wasn't walking." The Middle Easterner, whom the FBI is trying to identify, supposedly said, "Rep. Gary Condit was a frequent guest at the Middle Eastern embassies in Washington" where young women would be brought for "nocturnal pleasures." The procurer supposedly told Dunne's contact that some time before April 30, Condit confided to one of his Middle Eastern friends that he had been involved with a woman and wanted to end it, but that she was "threatening to talk." According to the second-hand account, an exasperated Condit allegedly said, "She's driving me crazy." Dunne's source was convinced that "Condit created the atmosphere that led to Chandra's disappearance." Dunne had so much faith in his source that he even traveled to Dubai several months ago to catch the horse races and meet with the mysterious Arab - but the man never showed. The FBI, which had previously described the case as cold, is now working to track down the names and whereabouts of the individuals in Dunne's tale. Neither Condit's office nor Dunne returned calls by press time.Also see chickenshit or chickenshittedness.