Collision Course

*****

Sometime last January, my car, my four passengers, and I had our up become down. I remember cursing myself as the car went whirlybird, and then the next moment I was looking up, through the passenger window directly above me, at the big, white, scarred surface of the moon. For the next few days, things were a bit different: I looked at the world through a different lens, I lived each day to the fullest, I appreciated what I had rather than lamented what eluded me, etc. Without putting to fine a point on it, I experienced a basic fundamental fragility and saw how unnecessary it was to the world’s basic functioning that I remained upright and breathing.

The site of the accident was about 15 miles from the nearest town, and that night temperatures dipped into the teens, so the wait for the ambulance to arrive was less comfortable than it could have been. I made a frantic attempt to gather materials to build a fire, before realizing that I was in shock and had no way to make wet rotten wood burn. More than anything, I remember the enforced silence – the girl who was more injured than the rest of you soundlessly crying, the rest of us huddled around her with sleeping bags and occasionally stamping our feet to keep warm. Not saying anything wasn’t a choice or a reaction, like the silences that come in the wake of a racist joke or someone slipping and falling. It was a silence enforced by the shock the crash elicited, and the sense that making any kind of noise was apt to fuck with the precarious in-betweenness into which we had settled. The tears of the injured girl were fine, labored breathing could be dealt with, blood was not beyond the realm of the manageable, but saying something was beyond the pale.

*****

When I was little, I used to try to make myself stay awake. Sometimes I wanted to watch late night television after my parents had gone to bed, or to sneak around the house playing some kind of spy and/or war game. So I would try to scare myself, and at some point I realized that I didn’t need Jason Voorhees, Freddie Krueger, or God to scare myself; I just had to think about death. First it would be abstract death-as-nebulous-gray-space, then a personal me-my-life-this-body-going-to-die. Very much imprinted on my memory is the realization I had at a young age that someday the pictures were going to stop.

In January, it was more like I couldn’t get the pictures to stop. Hollywood has nothing on my internal replay of the crash – facial expressions, slo mo, a soundtrack (I was listening to a tape (a tape!) of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief for some reason on that night) multiple angle flashcuts, etc. that continued to keep me awake for days after I felt any physical effects from coming to a very abrupt stop. That was the one thing that lingered like a hangover, and continued to prevent things from resuming the normalcy to which I had been accustomed. And, curiously enough, for the month or so that the images held sway, so did the silence.

****

But why the fuck am I bringing this up? From whence does the nostalgia spring? Yesterday morning individuals from my normal carpool had an accident. A very bad, made-for-TV accident. Two girls, co-workers with whom I normally share the 30-mile trip to work, were going in early because they had a meeting with their landlord at 3:30. So no carpool yesterday; the five of us break off into two cars, housing one group of two and another of three.

Picture two large hills, shaped like breasts of a female torso on its back. Picture a road that demarcates the one hill-breast from the other, leading you down about 200 feet on a steep grade before snaking to the right into an S curve. There are no guardrails, and a thin skin of ice greases the road.

Picture our two girls, better thought of as women perhaps, but girls in this picture nonetheless. They silently descend into the cleavage, except – you guessed it – they slide across the skin of ice, and plunge DOWNWARD fifty or so feet into a gully, narrowly missing a large tree and flipping once before coming to rest beside the creek.

The girls stagger out, claw their way up the face of the gully, bloodied and in shock but remarkably none the worse for wear in terms of skeletal damage/irreparable puncture wounds, and flag down a car going back into town.

Five minutes later, the second car, caring two other carpoolers and I, see the tracks leading off the edge of the road. We stop. We see the car, or what remains of the car, and unwisely attempt to run down the hill rather than take the natural switchbacks. But there is no one in the car. What the fuck?

*****

You can guess the rest. A very silent car ride to work. Extreme relief when the phone call came explaining that the two girls were at the hospital and were fundamentally OK, albeit uncomfortable. The return of the no sleep syndrome last night. Incidentally, my usual seat in the car that crashed was vaporized. Assuming you follow the “what if” sequence to its logical conclusion, my face would be like that squashed rat you saw in the alley in Chicago that one time when you were taking a shortcut to get to that party before she left and went somewhere else.

*****
But so, again, what is the point? Things – objects – trees – faces – asses – all fodder for my visual perceptive apparatus have once again become wondrous. Enjoy the pictures while you can. Ripeness is all.

Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Piano

is the title of a painting by Salvador Dali. The confluence of Dali, Pink Floyd, and the various other accoutrements of the stereotypical pothead was enough to sour me on Dali for the first 20 or so years of my life, at which time I came across some of his drawings at an exhibition in London. Whatever is to be said about Dali the man and the bacon fat on his mustache, the art I like, sort of. Call me conflicted – there’s a cutesiness that I find off putting, and then there’s the pothead factor to take into account, but the drawings I saw were like little energetic/schizoid dynamos. So, then, with the paintings there’s wariness; the drawings fascination. Here is a for/against, or against/for list, from our man Salvador.

Against For
simplicity complexity
egalitarianism hierarchization
politics metaphysics
nature aesthetics
mechanism dreams
youth maturity
spinach snails
Buddha the Marquis de Sade
the sun the moon
Rembrandt Vermeer
savage objects ultra-civilized 1900 objects
medicine magic
philosophy religion
mountains coast line
phantoms specters
women Gala
men myself
scepticism faith

Keeping with my tradition of encountering the hot shit months or years after it was declared hot, I just began my introduction to Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth. My response, in list form,

1) This album has a song called “Babies with Guns.”

2) Aesop Rock has always provoked a bodily response in me: head nodding, head swaying, knee bouncing, whatever. I used to prowl around Hyde Park with swagger, which I should never really have, b/c of this Rock. Sometimes the voice of said Rock aggravates, but that’s no reason to write it off.

3) Syncopation, alliteration, and big ball-ed beats, hell YEE-AH!

4) Song with a sample that sounds suspiciously like that Onyx song I used to like to rock while practicing ollies in my garage in fifth grade, hell YEE-AH!

5) “We’re Famous” is of the fuck-you-anonymous-rapper-I’m-better-than-you-more-underground-than-you-more-inventive-than-you-etc school. Songs about or arising from beef usually involve authenticity claims, and sometimes give the artist the opportunity to completely defy your expectations e.g. if you haven’t heard LL Cool J’s utter annihilation of Cannabis, you should, but be warned – it’ll be hard to think of LL in the same terms again; shit, maybe it wasn’t even about Cannabis. I forget – regardless, LL is HARD in this song.

Field Notes

On that same old shit:

"Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was the focus of evil during the cold war. I believe that the judiciary is the focus of evil in our society today," Keyes declared, slapping the lectern for emphasis.

What, pray tell, does it mean to be the focus of evil?

“Until we have a court that reflects a majority," Schwartz (chief of staff for Sen. Coburn, OK) continued, his voice rising steadily, "it is a sick and sad joke that we have a Constitution here."

Michael Schwartz, if I was going to play along with your rhetorical game, this is the point where I become creative in my description of how wrong you are, and drop an elaborate adjective-laden rant regarding your notion that the Court’s proper function is to reflect the will of the majority. Said rant may include references to Kierkegaard on Christendom, the Constitution itself – like, for instance, what it tells us about separation of powers – and ruminations on what it must be like to be a persecuted Christian in this country of, um, Christians. This may even be the point where I try to imagine what you and your circle jerk coterie of false prognosticators talk about when you’re not being persecuted. I hope you get interminable diarrhea, Michael Schwartz, so your ass knows what it’s like to be your mouth.

On The Broom of the System –

The analogy might be Josh Beckett in the World Series: too young to know that one is too young to be doing what one’s doing. This book is young in general. I kind of like it, despite the preponderance of self-other philosophizing, Descartes-Wittgenstein themes, and narrative 1^st person 3^rd person spoken written ensemble bricolage self-important techniques. I am about 1/3 of the way through.

On “Deadwood” –

Other than Sunday Night Baseball, the one show on television I watch with regularity. I read the New Yorker article about the main writer, who seems to have perfected the practice of channeling creativity via incessant self-loathing. “Being vulgar has rarely been so musical,” is the basic take on the dialogue of the show, but the various motivations and rationalizations surrounding its violence.

Class self-consciousness, Jim Nantz, and the Ontology of a Three Foot Putt

1) I am a golfer, and will remain one until I die. And in my leftie youth, I saw golf as class war. There were country clubbers, and there were the rest of us, and anytime anyone from the latter group represented in full I felt a little tinge of pride. I did not contemplate the idea that being able to spend four hours hitting a little white ball into a hole three or four times a week was indication enough of inherited unearned privilege, because I still worked forty hours a week and those fuckers with the pink collared shirts and the brand new clubs didn’t.

When I was a sophomore, I pulled a great round out of my ass (five birdies eight bogies five pars) and got myself in the last group of the last round of the biggest tournament of the year, as well as two lines on the front page of the sports page. I bombed the next day, and a very rich senior won the tournament and the acclaim, and a bitter young man was I. I knew him; he spent his summer days alternating between the golf course and his family's cabing. He was nice, a good person, and my entire team and I hated him.

My point is not to wax nostalgic on my experience of high school golf on the blustery plains of South Dakota, but to argue for a view of golf as a site of conflict, and not the boring equivalent of the sports world’s Christian right. CBS’s coverage of the Masters does what it can to convey the idea that golf is a game for rich people in tastefully colored clothes worn by people so refined that they cannot go below business casual even when playing a game. I submit that golf is more complex than that. Of course, it takes a tremendous amount of leisure time to play and practice a game that lasts four hours. But many of the greatest players were exposed to the game by caddying at exclusive clubs and exacted their revenge later on by working over the sons and daughters of those for whom they toiled. Sam Snead played barefoot in his father’s pasture, using the wide round discs of dried cowshit as launching pads. Chi Chi Rodriguez learned to play with a stick and range balls he stole from nearby course. Most tour pros now are reactionaries, but some – e.g. Notah Begay, Rich Beem, for whom I worked when I was 14 and he was a club pro in SoDak, and a few others – have breathed a spark of populism into the game’s highest levels.

Playing golf is not leisure time if you make money doing it, and it is ever the more satisfying when you’re taking money from people with six figure incomes and egos as large as their Chevy Tahoes. I played with guys who worked on the grounds crew, who took the game and its tradition very seriously, and saw the golf course as their place of work, and an apparatus through which a more equitable distribution of wealth could be realized. I played for money as a kid – my boss at the time would back me, and if I won I’d get 10% of the winnings and if I lost I would pay 10% of the losses – I loved it. There was nothing better than being handed money by doctors and lawyers who I had a hand in besting, not just because they were doctors and lawyers but because they were assholes, pure and simple. [In retrospect my very bourgeois upbringing makes whatever “class war” type affiliations I had with golf quite suspect, but there is nothing to be done about that now. When you’re 15, you try to look poor. (Cf. that one song by the Silver Jews)] So I get a little

2) Jim Nantz is no poet, his voice is not syrupy, and his whispered delivery comes at exactly the wrong time. Golf, like baseball, is best viewed when the television announcers have a healthy respect for the idea that silence is the mother of suspense. Just let it unfold, let the viewer give all of his/her energy to the gaze, and let the guys with the actual talent tell the story in bold strokes of action. Jim Nantz is . . . God, I cannot put into words how schlocky and cliché-ridden he is when covering the best golf tournament in the country. The Masters does not need human interest stories; it has Augusta National.

3) Three foot putts are not like free throws in that you do not look at your target. There is a strange “in your mind’s eye” effect with putting that is most tautly present with the short ones, the three to four footers you should not miss but nevertheless shake your knees. Three foot putts that you must make to win the $50 you’re playing for are like when your fourteen at a party holding a Budweiser and the girl you love moves in to kiss you: things should go smoothly, all but the easiest steps have been taken, and yet it is at this moment that you are held in the grip of potential paralysis, especially when you only have $20 on your person.

gravitas is overrated

MoMa: is it weird that you have to be immensely educated to get that white male novelists suck i.e. that you have to have digested, or at least have a historical understanding of, the progenitors of formally innovative (you might say superficially formally innovative) fiction with whose shadow this current crop is still boxing?

do you have to be hyperliterate to be critical?is it weird to think of aesthetic refinement as a force inversely proportional to the pull effectedby the elitist vacuum that homi "don't play that" bhaba (however the fuck one spells the man's name) might have left upon his departure from the land formerly defined as Great Booksto the more rarefied air of the East?

the fact you filed your post under "snobbery" and that potato vodka, yourself, and I had one night I shall not forget (Crash, boom) is enough to signal that your pomo critical theory grad school indoctrination shall not efface the commone sense you've gleaned from baseball, hangovers, bong hits, Ol Dirty Bastard, and civil war-memorializing facial hair. that said . . .

In English: i just reread the sound of waves by mishima. i first read the book because someonei respected said he was the shit, and being the sycophant that i was, i ran to the bookstore,bought the book, and read it straight through with occasional glances at the gargoyles. i'mnot biting on your shit, but i wonder if you would agree that the reason you gave for sloggingon these white guys - they dont dig on alterity - is predicated on having the time to be either talented enough, bookish enough, or taught enough to know what alterity is and how to apply it in an argument.

i'm glad i have the sound of waves, and i'm glad i reread it, but i know, and will always know, thati read it to appease my inner "i'm smart too" voice. seems like one criticism that can be launched, and it seems to me now that you may have launched it, at these pale men, is thattheir "i'm smart too" voice overpowers the voice they have that moves us. personally, i'dlike to bitch slap franzen, and if that speaks to conflicted misogynistic or repressed homoeroticimpulses i have, it would still feel good to turn his cheeks red. wallace i think only getsbetter, and unlike whet i dont think his statement concerning an outright aversion to late capitalist (i had to bite my cheek to type that out) American tourism is personal/confessional, anddoes not come enter into the novelist's equation. but, for the sake of argument, or polemic, either one, who cares: if wallace wrote a novel whose themes and characters evoked something out of john edgar wideman, would that be better? cause i bet he could sell it, and i bet that the fact that he knows he could sell it and the fact that he hates others whose purpose is to sell is one of the great unconscious Gordian knots in the guy's head. If you could sell snow to Eskimos, in what respect could hold yourself?

when you chose the OC (the OC, mo? really? i get the whole "portrays class in America with more perspicuity than anything else out there" concept, but you still have to watch the shit.) over fiction, or literature in general, i didn't get it. isn't there something about buying into the Image that gives class such a thorough representation that strikes you as, I don't know, inauthentic?

Personally, I dont care, and I hope you dont either. i hope you have no qualms about watching television in the evening and talking baudrillard in the day ( i hope you don't have to do that; for some reason i have a very negative view of grad school), 'cause that meretricious bullshit about authenticity strikes me as uninteresting. anyway. to be vastly unfair and simplistic, and thereby expose myself to a counterargument that would justly provide you with reason to tear me a new asshole, you seem to think stuff' sgood if it's critical or chock full of alterity; i think stuff can be good if it's chock full of nothing but descriptions about living in a walltent in yellowstone, poaching moose, snowshoeing, and learning how to love being alone.


in the hopes of continuing the conversation some time when i'm not being pulled out the door to go be an imitation redneck . . . .

Is April the cruelest month?

1) Lies I’ve told recently, on a continuum of white to black:

what I said to my employers: that I was taking Monday off in order to adjust to moving into a new apartment and because I had an appointment

the truth: Monday was baseball’s opening day, and I had an appointment to be at the Club Bar at 11 am.

color coding: they knew. Of course they knew. I lied out of respect for the fact that they knew and it didn’t matter because in certain aspects my job is not a real job and my employers do not exist in that capacity, but as diaphanous wraiths who flit in and out of the office in between vacations. Plus I told the lie by proxy. Very white, very little, lie.

what I said to myself: that current sacrifices made in the name of possible future phenomena were justifiable and ought to summon the old put your head down and plow forward attitude. Sacrifices entailed reading mind numbing texts ostensibly intended to help me, but which angered and drained me of energy to be anger at the same time.

the truth: this is bullshit - vanilla-flavored, un-extra-ordinary bullshit at that.

Color coding: a bit on the gray side. For motivational reasons, perhaps necessary; for heteronormative reasons, quite shady. (I just like the way “heteronormative” rolls off the tongue)

What I said to the person to whom I owe something more than money: Count on it.

The truth: who the fuck knows

Color coding: Gray speckled with darkish lint-like particles.

Very little harm was done by these lies, but enough harm to warrant half-hearted contrition.

2) Entry on the employee phone list:

Alex Hagen (Utility Infielder) 2221 Home: 406-859-7676 alex@____________

3) I have been losing sleep over the idea of having a vocation. I used to take it seriously. I used to have no conception in the tenuous hold happenstance wields over what I do; now happenstance is sui generis. But I digress.

What are you going to be when you grow up? I am done growing, and yet there are so still so many things to be. What fun!

4) So many baseball moments to recount I don’t even know where to start. Rusty Staub continues to resurface in trivia conversations/recollections I’ve listened in on.

5) Television is the old white. Lists of things to do/enact/adopt in the name of self-improvement are the new what you use to light the kindling. Canada is, um, still Canada. A culture of death is the new the Japanese are taking over. Eyes are the new magnetic compass that breasts used to be. Lip biting is the new collar pulling, or the old lip licking (context dependent.) Whereas damage control continues to be the new responsibility, honesty continues to be the old swims with the fishes. Paper Rock Scissors is the old Scattegories. Dependency is the old sympathy. Parents of preadolescent girls in tubetops are the new old dirty men. The ownership society is the new Great Society, except that dredging the bottom has been supplanted by the climbing up the gold locks of what’s her name from that fairy tale with the girl in the castle and the hair. Tennis is the old Dungeons and Dragons. Trends are the old sureties. Sureties are the new saber-toothed tigers. Eyebrows are the new handshake. Alterity is the new navel, set lists are the old synopsis, and – obviously – cleverness is the old boredom.


6) An article i found on a book i'm reading, both of which pieces of writing i've enjoyed

HEADLINE: Whatever

BYLINE: Jonathan Lear

BODY:

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and is the author, most recently, of Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (Other Press).

On Bullshit

By Harry G. Frankfurt

(Princeton University Press, 67 pp., $9.95)

When I was a graduate student at the Rockefeller University, Harry Frankfurt, who was then a professor there, came up to me one day and announced that he had devised the following principle: people naturally gravitate toward the study of that which does not come naturally to them. Thus people who work on ethics typically find it difficult to be good, logicians tend to be muddle-headed, and so on. And he had an explanation for his principle. It is precisely because the impulse to do a good deed seems so odd to a person, Frankfurt claimed, that he finds it fascinating. "Why would anybody in their right mind want to share? Hey, I think I'll write a book about it!" Though he believed that the principle had universal validity, he claimed to have derived it by reflection on a single case: a person who worked on the theory of responsibility.

Frankfurt's principle has since become legendary in philosophy circles. If it is true, then Frankfurt is someone to whom bullshit does not come easily. For while it may be an exaggeration--bullshit?--to say that he has devoted an entire book to the subject--this volume is an old essay that has been re-published as a very short book--he has found the phenomenon worthy of reflection. This is how he begins:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory.

Frankfurt's theory is easy to state. Both the truth-teller and the liar have it in common that they care about the truth. The person who aims at the truth tries to figure out what the world is like and to communicate that to others; the liar attempts to deceive. But by his very attempt to mislead others, the liar betrays his own concern, however perverse, with how things are. As Frankfurt puts it, the truth-teller and the liar are playing opposite sides of the same game.

The bullshitter is in a different game altogether. He simply does not care about the truth or falsity of what he is saying. "The essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony." Consider this classic from ancient history: "I didn't inhale." I think the utterance was true, but it was bullshit nonetheless. If it had been false, the utterer would have said the same thing. For this reason, those who do not believe the statement also do not get to the heart of the matter when they say that the speaker is lying. In both cases, if what he said was true and if what he said was false, the president was bullshitting--for in neither case would the truth or the falsity of what he was saying have mattered to him. Frankfurt is correct to insist that it is a "fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit" that "although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong."

Actually, on Frankfurt's account, the bullshitter does turn out to be a liar after all--but at the meta-level. He needs to mask his own indifference. The bullshitter need not deceive us about the facts, but "what he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise." As Frankfurt explains, "The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides ... is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it."

Consider, in this context, the recent Democratic campaign for president. Whatever else one might say about Howard Dean, Richard Gephardt, and Joseph Lieberman, they each had clear and sincere views about how to go forward. One was for the war in Iraq, another was against it; one wanted to protect the unions; another wanted to try out school vouchers. The early and tightly spaced primaries served to eliminate them all. The candidate who emerged was someone whose actual views no one could figure out, but at every stage--whether the task was to fix things, or to do things right, or to stay until we get the job done, or to bring our boys home, or not to let "them" get away with it again--his opaque claims were made with apparent sincerity and real indignation. Precisely because the candidate did want to win, he had to look as though he cared about the truth of what he was saying. And with all the post-election hand-wringing about why John Kerry lost, one overwhelmingly plausible explanation was overlooked: Kerry was not very good at bullshitting.

On the subject of speaking one's mind, the current commotion at Harvard has already been analyzed from every angle, except that of the theory of bullshit. From this angle, the problem begins not with the actual content of Lawrence Summers's speculation about the incidence of women in mathematics and the sciences, but with his claim that it represented "my best guess." There's the bullshit. Those three little words indicate that--at least at the time of utterance--the issue did not really matter that much to him.

If the issue were something that, say, put the American economy at risk, would Summers be satisfied with the same amount of research as the basis for his best guess? This fits very well with Frankfurt's diagnosis of one of the prevalent sources of bullshit:

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to the topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled--whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others--to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.

But Frankfurt does not prepare us for what comes next, for the dialectic of bullshit. Having gotten into trouble, what is the president of Harvard to do: admit that at the time of speaking he was, if you'll pardon the expression, shooting from the hip? That would be to admit that such a serious subject had not really mattered to him. So what does he do instead? He calls Bill Clinton! The New York Times reports that Summers consulted Clinton and the "political counselor" David Gergen to help him with "damage control." The Times seemed willing to go along for the ride: "He is reading tomes about leadership. He also recently took his children to see Hitch, a new movie, as it happens, about men who are trying to improve their social skills. At the age of 50, Lawrence H. Summers ... finds himself trying to become a new kind of man." Deep in the article Gergen tells us that "it's a good thing when a male demonstrates vulnerability." Note that the issue here is not whether the male is vulnerable; it is whether he gives the appearance of being vulnerable. This is a page straight out of the Clinton playbook. After a politically correct mea culpa, we can all move on. It would be unfortunate if Summers's "journey" goes from politically incorrect bullshit to politically correct bullshit.

But the richest moment came when Gergen said of Summers, "He takes a very Socratic approach." Anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes with a Platonic dialogue would know that Summers looks much more like one of Socrates's interlocutors: a brash, honor-loving person like Thrasymachus who is willing to put forward an idea that he hasn't really thought through. Socrates is the one who exposes the pretense. But of course the truth of the analogy does not matter to Gergen; he is un-Socratically concerned with the creation of an image. In order to succeed, he at least must go through the motions of appearing sincere. Polite society calls this "damage control."

All this raises the question: is bullshitting bad? And, if so, why? We already have a fairly clear grasp of the moral worth of truth-telling and lying. In general, truth is good, lying is bad; for we value knowing what the world is like, and we value sincere relationships. We are offended when others try to dislodge us from reality. Yet we also recognize important exceptions: truth-telling can be used in order to embarrass others or in the service of other forms of cruelty; lying can be used compassionately to protect another person's privacy. But what is the moral valence of bullshitting? Obviously, if the bullshitter is also not telling the truth, there are all the familiar problems with being misled. But, as Frankfurt points out, a bullshitter can be telling the truth and believe that he is telling the truth. "The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or what he takes the facts to be." All that matters, on the Frankfurt analysis, is that the bullshitter does not really care about the truth that he is speaking--and that he hides that fact about himself. But why should the fact that he doesn't care matter to us? I don't think Frankfurt can answer this question, because he does not take his analysis of bullshit deep enough.

It is unusual for the author of a newly published book to express anything less than delight with it. "When I reread it recently," Frankfurt told the Times, "I was sort of disappointed. It wasn't as good as I'd thought it was. It was a fairly superficial and incomplete treatment of the subject." This is not bullshit. And though Frankfurt's discussion is everywhere illuminating, I think he misunderstands the crucially important concept of the bullshit artist.

Go back in your visual imagination to the image of Bill Clinton biting his lower lip. We do a disservice to his mastery if we think this is just a phony attempt to appear sincere. That would be ordinary bullshit. What takes Clinton to another level, I think, is that he expects us to recognize his gesture as bullshit and he expects to get away with it precisely because we do. His openness about his own bullshit is meant to be endearing. This is a level of bullshit that Frankfurt's analysis cannot account for. Indeed, it runs counter to Frankfurt's thesis that the bullshitter must hide his indifference.

The run-of-the-mill bullshitter goes through the motions of hiding his indifference to the truth or the falsity of what he is saying, but the bullshit artist revels in the fact that he can put his indifference on display. Since nothing is hidden--the bullshit has in effect been declared to be bullshit--the only thing that can sustain it is the bullshit itself. I am surprised that Frankfurt overlooked this phenomenon, since instances of it are not all that difficult to find in the academic world. Frankfurt reports that he originally wrote this essay to present at a humanities center. It begs credulity to think he was not trying to confront his colleagues with an exercise in collective self-criticism. But he seems to have blinked at the crucial moment.

This is all the more surprising since Frankfurt gets right to the nub of the problem: "The contemporary proliferation of bullshit ... has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are." Actually, skepticism is not the same thing as bullshit. There are genuine and deep ways of wondering about the reality and the possibility of objective truth. Skepticism can be an honorable calling. But in the contemporary world it often degenerates into a received attitude, a hip pose, a rhetorical ploy, a kind of academic party trick. Imagine such a skeptic coming to the humanities center: what kind of paper is he or she going to give? An earnest argument that there really is no such thing as truth? Of course not. Such a paper would lack "irony," which is these days the great validator of intellectual authority. (I put "irony" in scare quotes because the current version has almost nothing in common with real irony.) So the paper will inevitably be an "ironic" performance that the truth simply does not matter to the speaker. This is not skepticism, it is bad theater. And the point that the "ironists" are making is that in their bullshit-artistry they can get away with it. (It is not unusual for such speakers to draw attention to the fact that they have actually been paid to come and spread their bullshit.)

In this way, the bullshit artist raises a host of ethical problems that do not arise at the level of ordinary bullshit. For bullshit artistry demands our complicity. It is, in its own way, a demonstration of power. The bullshit artist in effect says, "This is bullshit, but you will accept it anyway. You may accept it as bullshit, but you will honor it anyway." In this respect, the bullshit artist is a knight of decadence. Frankfurt ignores this example; indeed, his analysis of bullshit rules it out as impossible. And in this way he fails to confront the most interesting--and influential--style of bullshit in our time.

But the problem is even worse. For once we recognize that the bullshit artist flaunts his indifference, we have reason to go back to the ordinary bullshitter and ask whether it really is true, as Frankfurt asserts, that he must hide it. Think of Gergen's claim that Summers reminds him of Socrates. I think that any intelligent reader would see through the claim at once. This is not artistry, this is spin. So I think that Frankfurt is wrong even about ordinary bullshit. It may be true that the ordinary bullshitter needs to go through the motions of pretending that the truth of what he says matters to him--but this itself is bullshit, and it may be easily recognizable as such to us all. In this way we are all drawn into a complacent and rundown theatricality. We all know that what we are reading is spin; we all know that the person quoted is not really committed to the truth of what he is saying; and yet we are all somehow willing to go along with what we instantly recognize to be ersatz news. This is the problem with bullshit: it is contagious. It invites us all to grow more detached from the real, to give up caring about what is true and what is false.