Raging Red

Yay Charlie!

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.”

I suddenly have the urge to take a quick weekend trip to NYC.

“Satiric Dancer” (1926), André Kertesz and the Jeu de Paume/French Ministry for Culture and Communication.

Last night Devil Duck ventured outside and built a snowduck.

Lately, my bed has been extra cozy in the morning for some reason, which of course makes it harder for me to get out of it. I’ve also been having really vivid dreams all week and I get annoyed when my alarm clock goes off and interrupts them. It’s like when someone walks into a room and just starts talking when I’m watching a movie, only my brain doesn’t have a pause button. I wonder what causes a person to have or not have vivid dreams on any given night. I have noticed that when I sleep in an unfamiliar bed (like when I’m on a trip or, uh, somewhere else for some reason) I tend to have more vivid dreams than usual. Why would that be? It snowed this evening, which makes being inside feel nice and cozy, even though it wasn’t that much snow. I can tell it’s going to be hard to get out of bed tomorrow morning. Good thing it’s Friday.

I have been dreaming for the past four years, right?

(Don’t ask. I’m in a silly mood, I guess.)

Have you seen this? I don’t really know what to say, other than, I hope that was the ball that went over the edge, not the ball boy.

As part of Bush’s kiss-and-make-up tour of “Old Europe,” he had planned to stage one of his fake town hall meetings with regular German folks asking carefully screened and pre-approved questions of our dear leader. Turns out the Germans wouldn’t go for it.

The Germans, though, insisted that a free forum should be exactly that. Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, explained to the New York Times last week: “We told them, don’t get upset with us if they ask angry questions.”

So with the Germans saying “nein” to propaganda, Bush decided to just scrap the whole thing.

In an editorial published today, Nicholas Kristof recounts something that the late Senator Paul Simon said after the genocide in Rwanda:

“If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different.”

It’s pretty sad to think that the difference between saving 1,000,000 lives and not saving 1,000,000 lives might have been (at least in part) 53,500 pieces of paper.

It is estimated that in Sudan 200,000 people have died and 1.6 million people have been displaced from their homes. Congress has declared that the killings amount to genocide. If letters to Congress could make any amount of difference for the Sudanese people, then I feel compelled to send them.

To make it even easier to do this one small thing, SaveDarfur.org has sample letters that you can use. They also provide links to the web pages where you can easily find addresses for your Senators and Representatives. Though sending a few letters feels like a pretty helpless act, it’s an incredibly simple one to do, so my feeling about it is, why not?

Just what do you think some person from Pakistan was looking for when he/she searched for “girls wearing theirs chairy,” for which Google produced my site as the #1 result?