Seymour Hersh is coming! This Tuesday evening, Hersh will speak in Charleston as part of the WVU/Gazette Festival of Ideas. Be there or be square (i.e. Republican)!
I haven’t read Chain of Command, but the Gazette reports that the book concludes thusly:
“There are many who believe George Bush is a liar, a President who knowingly and deliberately twists facts for political gain. But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there.
“A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for the president beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility.”
This sounds remarkably similar to philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit,” which has been popping up in newspapers and magazines a lot recently because it has just been published for the first time.
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. [emphasis mine]
In fact, Frankfurt uses an example to illustrate the distinction between lying and bullshit that sounds so much like he is describing President Bush that it’s eerie (considering it was written almost twenty years ago).
Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about “our great and blessed country, whose Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.”
Frankfurt characterizes this as bullshit. The orator isn’t lying, because he’s not trying to convince the listener that what he is saying about the founding of our country is true. Rather, the orator is trying to convey something about himself.
What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.
Sound familiar? I will never again call Bush & Co. liars. They are worse than liars; they are bullshit artists. I believe that every single day since Bush took office, they are proving Frankfurt’s statement that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
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