Not Even a Liar, Worse

"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." - Harry Frankfurt

I have resisted writing some version of this post for quite a while. It seems time, though, to go ahead and clarify some terminology. I regularly use the word bullshit here. I typically do so with a particular meaning of the term in mind and I have, in the past, sometimes referred readers to this interview for clarification. That seems insufficient in light of my last post which addresses a notorious peddler of bullshit.

In 1986 Harry Frankfurt who has for many years taught philosophy at Yale, wrote an essay entitled “On Bullshit" and published it in the relatively obscure journal called Raritan. He republished it a couple of years later in a collection of essays entitled The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge UP, 1988). And, even more recently, Princeton UP re-issued the essay as a very small book (pictured here). You may have seen it on display at Border’s or Barnes and Noble. I recommend it to you.*

Frankfurt is concerned with both the nature of bullshit and the consequences of bullshitting. These topics seem germane to how we assess Bill Kristol and other right-wing ideologues. So I thought it might be useful to share with you some of Frankfurt’s insights. I think we need to be concerned with the consequences of putting up with - to say nothing of praising - bullshitters like Kristol and his chums.

Frankfurt proceeds by differentiating between bullshit and several closely related classes of speech act - hot air, humbug, bluffing and, most importantly, lies. It therefore is a bit difficult to summarize his perceptive and entertaining argument. Regarding the nature of bullshit, however, he is quite succinct:

“It is just this lack of connection to a concern with the truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”

He expands on this statement in the following way:

“What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes them to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends on upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something that he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, 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. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.”

Having in this way identified this central feature of bullshit, Frankfurt turns his attention to the consequences of purveying it, that is to the consequences of bullshitting or being a bullshitter. Again, the crucial contrast is with lying.

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter all these bets are off; he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except as they are pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Frankfurt interjects here a discussion of Saint Augustine before proceeding as follows:

“For most people, the fact that a statement is false constitutes in itself a reason, however weak and easily overridden, not to make the statement. . . . For the bullshitter it is itself neither a reason in favor nor a reason against. Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth the way bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a normal person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing opposite sides, so to speak, of 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 those 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.”

Frankfurt clearly believes that those who peddle bullshit run a serious risk. He is concerned that due to “excessive indulgence” their own ability to face reality might atrophy over time. This seems to be the case with Kristol and other neocons. I am less concerned with them - Kristol and his ilk are beyond rehabilitation - than with impact of their behavior on those who are exposed to their bullshit. It hardly seems unreasonable to extend Frankfurt's concern for the fate of bullshitters to concern, not only for those who are subjected to bullshit without knowing it, but for those who, for one or another reason, and however begrudgingly, recognize the bullshitters in their midst but tolerate their bullshit.

Shouldn’t we worry about those who, though perhaps not bullshitters themselves, nevertheless indulge purveyors of bullshit? Do the acquiescent not run a risk, even if unsolicited, that is similar to the one that besets bullshitters themselves? Shouldn't we worry that even those confident in their own ability to spot bullshitting when they see might, over time, actually diminish their own ability simply by virtue of having put up with so much bullshit? That, I am afraid, is what has happened to the folks who make hiring decision at The Times editorial pages.

Frankfurt suggests that we typically respond to bullshit in more “benign” ways than we do to lies. “We may seek to distance ourselves from bullshit, but we are more likely to turn away from it with an impatient or irritated shrug than with the sense of violation or outrage that lies often inspire.” Like Frankfurt, I am not terribly concerned here with why this is so. I am more concerned with the consequences for individuals and groups over time of shrugging off bullshit, of meeting its indifference to truth with indifference toward those who purvey it. This prospect is especially troubling because, while bullshitters assume their own risk, those around them do not voluntarily incur the corresponding risk. They have it thrust upon them. The results, as is the case with much of the bullshit Krisol and other neocons peddle, can be disastrous. (Think of the costs in human and monetary and other terms of invading Iraq.)

Kristol has proven himself a inveterate bullshitter ~ indifferent as to whether what he says is true or false. The problem with the decision by The New York Times to hire Kristol is that they are providing him with a forum for spewing it wider and deeper. Insofar as the newspaper relies upon some respect for truth (and, therefore, some ability to distinguish it from falsity) it is, by providing Kristol a forum, undermining the terrain it purports to occupy. In the process the folks at The Times are endangering political discourse in the U.S. and beyond.
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* I also recommend G.A. Cohen's "Deeper into Bullshit" (with a reply by Frankfurt), in Sarah Buss & Lee Overton, eds. Contours of Agency (MIT Press, 2002).

Palin's Performance: Incoherence, Bullshit, Amnesia & Causality in the Vice Presidential Debate

Some good bits from the transcript ....

(1) Incoherence.

IFILL: Has this administration's policy been an abject failure, as the senator says, Governor?

PALIN: No, I do not believe that it has been. But I'm so encouraged to know that we both love Israel, and I think that is a good thing to get to agree on, Sen. Biden. I respect your position on that.

No, in fact, when we talk about the Bush administration, there's a time, too, when Americans are going to say, "Enough is enough with your ticket," on constantly looking backwards, and pointing fingers, and doing the blame game.

There have been huge blunders in the war. There have been huge blunders throughout this administration, as there are with every administration.

But for a ticket that wants to talk about change and looking into the future, there's just too much finger-pointing backwards to ever make us believe that that's where you're going.

Positive change is coming, though. Reform of government is coming. We'll learn from the past mistakes in this administration and other administrations. [. . .]

Some questions here: First, just what "huge blunders" are we talking about? I can imagine what Palin might be referring to, but I sincerely am interested in knowing what she has in mind. Second, How does Palin propose to "learn from the past mistakes of this administration" if she is so averse to "looking backwards?" In order to learn from experience or from the past, one needs to examine it. And, third, as a further follow up, is saying that someone committed a huge blunder in the performance of public duties blaming them?

(2) Bullshit. Let's set aside the astounding assertion that McCain and Palin and Obama regularly endorse - namely, that "the surge" in Iraq is working or has worked or will work. I've noted the idiocy of that claim here before on numerous occasions. Why do the press not challenge the claim? Ever?

All along I have found the parsing of terms about our Iraq fiasco to be bullshit. We have military types and politicians trying to differentiate between tactics and strategy in ways that seem usually to be wholly self serving. But now Palin inserts a new distinction.

The surge principles, not the exact strategy, but the surge principles that have worked in Iraq need to be implemented in Afghanistan, also. And that, perhaps, would be a difference with the Bush administration.

What are those principles? How do they differ from the "exact strategy" and, assuming one could differentiate the two, from the military "tactics" we've pursued in Iraq. This is piling bullshit upon bullshit.

(3) Amnesia.

PALIN: I beg to disagree with you, again, here on whether you supported Barack Obama or John McCain's strategies. Here again, you can say what you want to say a month out before people are asked to vote on this, but we listened to the debates.

I think tomorrow morning, the pundits are going to start do the who said what at what time and we'll have proof of some of this, but, again, John McCain who knows how to win a war. Who's been there and he's faced challenges and he knows what evil is and knows what it takes to overcome the challenges here with our military.

He knows to learn from the mistakes and blunders we have seen in the war in Iraq, especially. He will know how to implement the strategies, working with our commanders and listening to what they have to say, taking the politics out of these war issues. He'll know how to win a war.

If I am correct, John McCain has been in precisely one war - Viet Nam. Most of the time he spent as a P.O.W.; I do not make light of that experience in any way, even if I do question how it qualifies him to be president. But let's be clear, if he (or we) learned anything about Viet Nam it is not "how to win a war."

(4) Causality.

IFILL: Governor, I'm happy to talk to you in this next section about energy issues. Let's talk about climate change. What is true and what is false about what we have heard, read, discussed, debated about the causes of climate change?

PALIN: Yes. Well, as the nation's only Arctic state and being the governor of that state, Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it's real.

I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.

But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.

Well, first, while I do know that many people attribute climate change to human activity. Here Palin asserts the reverse, attributing "every activity of man" to climate change. So. maybe she misspoke. OK. But then we are left with an echo of our earlier question. If we do not identify the causes of climate change we will likely waste a lot of resources and time. If we hope to remedy a problem it is typically useful to identify the underlying causes that generate the problematic phenomenon. The know-nothing attitude she displays is troublesome not simply because it brings to mind our current fearless and thoughtless leader, but because it is surely going to prove counterproductive in terms of remedying problems we face.

A colleague passed along this essay from The New Yorker. It would be funny if it didn't capture so accurately the general tenor of her performance last night. Actually, it is still funny! Thanks Kevin!

Bullshit (First in an Irregular Series) ~ CREDO Mobile Advertisement

credo ~ noun (pl. credos) 1 a statement of a person's
beliefs or aims. [. . .] -ORIGIN Latin, 'I believe'.

A week or so ago this flier arrived in the mail. It is an advert from CREDO, a mobile phone service being peddled by Working Assets. The CREDO marketing slogan is "More than a network. A Movement." The campaign (which, from what I can tell, began late last spring) is being run by Duncan/Channon a San Francisco based advertising firm.

Here is the text from the back of the flier I received in the mail::

Did Your Phone Help
Elect Bush/Cheney?

Sorry to say, but AT&T's political action committee contributed the maximum amount allowable by law to the Bush/Cheney campaign — twice. So, go ahead, check out your mobile phone. And then check out the mobile phone alternative you can trust. It's called CREDO Mobile, and it's mobile phone service that stands up for your values, brought to you by Working Assets.

On the other hand, if you're happy with your mobile service just the way it is, accept this photograph - suitable for framing - as your gift from a real, ahem, Richard.

To get your phone in line with your values,
get in touch ASAP.

credomobile/cheney
877.76.CREDO

And here is a (slightly different) version of the advert I lifted from the DC web page:


Well, initially, I just tossed the advert in the trash without even looking at it. But my friend Susan - smart and observant as usual - fished it out and said she wanted to keep it to bring to discuss with her class. When I looked at the mailing I thought, well, it is pretty funny. But Susan pointed out (in terms considerably more polite than I use) that it really is bullshit in the technical sense. And so I want to use this to inaugurate a semi-regular feature aimed at puncturing purveyors of bullshit. It is especially useful to start with the self-righteous.

What is the problem with the advert? First, while it does not exactly lie, the CREDO advert presents facts selectively, thereby exaggerating the partisan nature and potential impact of AT&T's 2004 campaign activities.

(1) How much did the AT&T PAC contribute to Bush/Cheney in 2004? One might think it was an enormous sum. After all, the words scrawled across the photo of Dick Cheney proclaim "Thanks a Million!". But, according to the Federal Election Commission, during the 2004 election cycle the AT&T Inc. Federal Political Action Committee (AT&T Federal PAC) gave just $5000.00 to Bush/Cheney campaign. They had done the same prior to the 2000 election. That is the "the maximum amount allowable by law." The AT&T Corp Political Action Committee (a distinct entity) gave similar amounts in the respective years. This hardly is a huge amount of money. If we keep in mind that Bush-Cheney '04 raised over $260 Million it appears for what it is ~ literally a drop in the bucket. And, like it or not, such contributions are legal. Ask Barack Obama.

(2) If we look at the contributions the AT&T Federal PAC made in 2004 to all candidates in federal campaigns, including not just the Presidential race but House and Senate contests too, the split is nearly even between Republicans and Democrats according to OpenSecrets.org. The PAC made a total of $394,000 in campaign contributions ~ 51% of that amount went to Republicans, 49% to Democrats.

So, let's say that I want a mobile provider (or credit card or a soup manufacturer or whatever) that reflects my "values." Does that mean that I want one that 'sorta, kinda' tells the truth? Do I want one that sets criteria of truth and falsity aside in order to market its products? And, more practically, what attitude would I expect such a company to adopt in communicating with its customers about say, terms and conditions of service? This is an especially important question if, as the CREDO folks encourage me to do, I am looking for a mobile phone service provider I can "trust."

Second, of course, is the question of what "a movement" of cell phone users looks like. We are dealing with illusion here. The CREDO advert wants to make us feel like we are acting politically. But it is unlikely (and here I am being charitable, since I actually think it is impossible) that the "values" I might express as a consumer are anything like the judgments and concerns and interests that animate political action. Politics requires acting in concert and, typically at least, acting in public. Choosing a service provider for my cell phone is an individual and a private act.

So in the first instance, the CREDO advert contributes to the erosion of public discourse. It does not lie. Like all good propaganda it is careful to avoid saying anything that might be shown to be false. The advert is not playing on the terrain of truth and falsity. It wholly abandons those criteria and it does so, moreover, for blatantly commercial purposes. And in the second instance the advert further injects moralism into our politics. It invites people to feel like they are acting politically, inviting too a sense of superiority on the basis of consumer choices. (Is this different from the superiority middle schoolers feel when their clothes or gear is properly branded?) This layer of moralism makes it even less likely that those who receive the advert in the mail will look for the truth. And it is just the sort of self-righteousness that fuels a politics of resentment against those whose choices are informed by anything less than my refined moral sensibilities.

How, in other words, do you sell mobile phone service? First peddle bullshit, then distract your audience from the fact that that is what you are doing. What a credo!
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Disclaimer: Nothing I say here should be taken as a defense of Bush or Cheney. If you read the blog even sporadically you'll know that I consider them shameless liars, dangerous ideologues, and, arguably, war criminals. Nor should my criticism of CREDO be taken as an endorsement of AT&T or its political activities. I use a different service provider. Nor, finally, should anything I say here be taken to imply that I find the existing way of financing elections in the U.S. attractive or justifiable. Money, after all, is not speech. Try paying the I.R.S. with words next April. More modestly, try paying your cell phone bill with words next month. That said, as Susan repeatedly has impressed upon me, PACs in particular and campaign finance more generally, arguably are less threatening to democratic politics than other sorts of financial influence.

Bullshit (2nd in a Very Irregular Series) ~ etown.org

It has been a long time since I promised "a semi-regular feature aimed at puncturing purveyors of bullshit" flowing from the moralistic and self-righteous. You can find the first installment here. And you can find a discussion of what I mean by bullshit here ~ it is not just catchy advertising! And while it surely applies to the loathsome right, it hardly applies only to them.

This time out I want to talk about a radio show I heard for the first time this evening. It is called etown. It is hard to argue with "music.ideas.community."! You can find their website, where I lifted the logo above and the following statement, here.

about us > what is etown?

etown's mission is to educate, entertain and inspire a diverse audience, through music and conversation, to create a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable world.

etown is an exciting weekly radio broadcast
We're heard from coast to coast on NPR®/public, commercial, and community stations. Like old-time radio variety shows, every etown show is taped in front of a live audience and features performances from many of today's top musical artists as well as conversation and information about our communities and our environment.

etown is a community builder
By featuring diverse music and interviews with a wide variety of authors, poets and policy-makers, etown creates a constantly expanding "community on the air." With the addition of inspiring e-chievement awards, listeners all over the country are reminded that individual efforts really do make a difference. etown is a place where respect for each other and our natural environment go hand in hand.

etown is a great live event
Whether at the Boulder Theater or one of the many other venues around the country where the show is recorded, etown is an entertaining, informative and downright inspiring live show. Hosts Nick and Helen Forster lead the show seamlessly, mixing music and message with humor and energy to create a one-of-a-kind live show. The show includes two musical guests, an interview guest and the presentation of the e-chievement winner. At the end of every show all musical guests collaborate on a one-of-a-kind exciting finale.

Tonight the show featured Bruce Cockburn who, while I'd not claim to be a huge fan, I generally like. And it was broadcast from Montpelier, Vermont. After singing the first number Nick Forster the show's host chatted with Bruce about his trip to Iraq and eventually noted how the point of the show was to connect the dots (or something to that effect) between ideas and music and ... well, you get the point. Also, during his intro this evening, Nick had noted to the audience that Montpelier is maybe the only state capital in the country that does not have a MacDonald's restaurant. (An observation met with enthusiastically self-congratulatory applause.) There is a point to relating this last point, but for now, back to this evening's show.

One of the things the etown folk apparently do each week is present an 'e-cheivement' award to someone who has been nominated by a listener. This week the recipient was Paul Rice. Here is what the etown web page says about him:

Paul Rice, TransFair USA: As a young man, Paul developed deep concerns regarding issues of global hunger, poverty, sustainable agriculture, and the challenges of rural economic development. Building on the broad experience gained while living and working in developing countries around the world to address these issues, he founded the nonprofit TransFair USA in 1998. It's the only third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the U.S. TransFair USA audits transactions between U.S. companies that offer Fair Trade products as well as international suppliers from whom they source. Annual inspections ensure that strict socioeconomic development criteria are being met. They ensure that farmers and farmworkers are paid a fair, above market price for their product. TransFair USA has certified several million pounds of coffee, providing farmers in poor countries with over $140 million more than if harvests were sold to local intermediaries.

Website: www.TransFairUSA.org
Email: info@transfairusa.org
Address: 1611 Telegraph Ave. Ste. 900, Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: 510-663-5260

Well, that is terrific. And it seems as though Rice is doing good work. So, to this point I am thinking, this is not a bad show. A bit treacly perhaps, but not bad. Then came a word from the sponsors. Here is the set of sponsor logos from the etown web page:

Note the logo in the upper left hand corner. Then, go to The Rocky Mountain News and you can learn from this story that from 2001 through 2006, McDoanld's Corporation was the major shareholder in Chipotle. Yes, the same McDonald's that Nick Forster derided in this opening comments, was the underwriter of Chipotle's growth for the better part of a decade. Damn those golden arches - it makes me feel soooo good to be moralistic.

Things don't get much better, though, once you dig a little deeper. Once you've read the RMN story, go to The Nation and search on 'Chipotle.' What you'll get is this set of links to stories about how the firm - which turns out to be a local Colorado outfit, started roughly at the same town as etown itself was launched - deals with farm workers here in the U.S.A.. Let's be charitable and just say the bottom line is 'not very well.' (And, let's be clear, this is not a new issue. Chipotle has actively resisted dealing with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers which represents farm workers in Florida. In other words their exploitative behavior is not just an oversight. It is ongoing and willful.)

So, on the one hand we are giving an e-chievement award commending a fellow for trying to do right by poor farm workers in developing countries while on the other hand we re accepting underwriting funds from a corporation who not only owes their current financial well-being to McDonald's but is actively engaged in mistreating farm workers here in our own developing counties.* The RMN story relates the self-satisfaction of the Chipotle brass for purchasing free-range pork. It is more important, apparently, to worry about the welfare of animals than to deal in a fair way with the farm-workers who are putting the veggies on the table.

So, here are the questions I have for Nick Forster- when you connect the dots for us, can you explain why you are are lauding 'fair trade' with agricultural workers in developing countries while taking money from Chipotle? How about helping build community among the farm workers in Florida? Community is not just about feeling good. It is about organizing and solidarity. In other words, it is about political action informed by political principles. Next week Nick, will you speak out on the air about the way Chipotle underwrites the exploitation of farm workers? Or perhaps you could bestow an e-chievement award on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers!
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* Although I am not certain about this, I believe that McDonald's has had an agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers since early 2007.

Niall Ferguson: Peddling Lies and Bullshit

Well, in his role as drum-major for failed economic policies (namely austerity as a cure for all that ails us) Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has produced this piece in Newsweek that has generated a storm of critical responses: James Fallows, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein and Brad DeLong have deflated Ferguson's attack on the Obama administration. Ferguson remains undeterred.

Among the claims at issue is one where Ferguson insists - putatively on the basis of analysis by the Congressional Budget Office - that the Affordable Care Act will violate Obama's 2008 pledge not to raise taxes on middle-income Americans and that it will contribute to the nation's deficit woes.

It is scant surprise that Ferguson, who was an adviser to the unsuccessful and unlamented 2008 McCain campaign, has little patience for Obama or his policies. (I myself don't have much either!) But it is some surprise to learn - as reported here and here at Politico - that not only do the folks at Newsweek not fact check submissions, but they don't seem to mind that Ferguson seems to have been simply "makin' shit up" for this piece. One would think that a self-respecting journalistic outlet would want essays it publishes to be sound. And one would think that an historian would find it important to get basic facts right. One would think. And instead we get silence from Newsweek and what we can only call the Bullshit defense from Ferguson. Here is an appropriate reply from Brad Delong:

"And his only excuse--now, it's not an excuse for the lie, it's a "I can lie cleverly" boast--is: "I very deliberately said 'the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA', not 'the ACA'".

Fire his ass.

Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast.

Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university.

There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has gone beyond it."

And here, at The Atlantic, is a more temperate riposte, in which their business and economics editor slices and dices Ferguson's claims. Niall? Newsweek?

Andrew Breitbart, “duplicitous bastard”* and the Problem With Liberals

Andrew Breitbart, the reactionary wingnut, dropped dead today, apparently of natural causes. He was relatively young and he leaves a family, including four children. For those children this is very sad.

I never met Breitbart. Thankfully. I know of him only through his serial, very public disregard for the truth and his enraged ranting. While I would not wish him dead, I can honestly say I feel literally no sadness whatsoever at his death. What does sadden me is that some liberals feel the need to talk about how a nice a person Breitbart could be over drinks or coffee. You can find a 'for instance' here at The American Prospect. The author of the piece, Sally Kohn, is described in the sidebar as "a political commentator, grassroots strategist and Fox News Contributor." I do not know her or her work at all. What her self-description brings to mind is self-proclaimed bigot Juan Williams, another person who thought he could play both sides of the fence only to discover that hanging out at FOX distorts your view of reality.

Perhaps Breitbart didn't lie about ACORN or about Shirley Sherrod. In each instance he just knowingly - indeed, gleefully - peddled bullshit in the technical sense of the term. In doing so, he repeatedly established his wholesale indifference to the truth. Arguably, that makes him worse than a liar - because he was 'not even' one. And, of course, snotty prep school kid that he was, Breitbart was especially adept at peddling his bullshit at the expense of those considerably less advantaged than he. I have a difficult time imagining how charming he'd have to be over drinks to compensate for that. The problem with liberals is that they can never quite seem to keep their eye on the politics.
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P.S.: The fact that Breitbart repeatedly and knowingly flaunted the truth makes it disingenuous to compare him - as does the author of this piece in The L.A. Times - to Christopher Hitchens (who could be as much a bully) let alone Jon Stewart. Neither Hitchens nor Stewart can be described as a propagandist. Breitbart was one. Period. Efforts to establish a sort of "Tastes Great! - Less Filling!" moral equivalence on this represents the cult of putative journalistic objectivity at its most mindless.

* This, of course, is how Breitbart characterized Ted Kennedy when he died. It seems fitting to quote him here.

The Charlatan

OK, here is the key passage from this essay/interview in The Guardian yesterday about/with Slavoj Žižek:

"He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. 'I will tell you the truth now,' he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. 'Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.'"

He, of course, is the master himself. I could not have said it better myself. Although, no doubt, I simply am failing to grasp his deep irony and intelligence. Maybe so.

I like to flatter myself that I am reasonably bright. And, over the years, I have worked through a lot of difficult philosophy and social science. I even understood quite a bit of it. In all honesty, though, having tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to read Žižek, I never understood a word the man said. It simply was not worth the effort. On his own say so I guess there is no reason to even waste time worrying about this latest missive.
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P.S.: For those inclined to succumb and enlist in the Žižek fan club I recommend A review essay by Alan Johnson (no relation) in Dissent (Fall 2009) entitled "The Reckless Mind of Slavoj Žižek." It seems that, setting all the irony and self-parody aside, performance art can have dangerous - meaning authoritarian - political implications.

Questions Raised by the Obama Administration's Release of the "Torture Memos" and Subsequent Unwillingness to Confront the Consequneces ...

This past week the Obama Administration released yet more damning documents from the BushCo war on liberty and justice. You can find the so-called 'torture memos' drafted by BushCo's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) here. At the same time Obama's Justice Department announced - quite preposterously for a bunch of "pragmatists" who allegedly are concerned for consequences - that it would not pursue prosecution of CIA agents who had, under cover of the legal opinions presented in these memos, tortured prisoners. Think about it, we trust the CIA to gather intelligence on matters of crucial national security, but we cannot presume that the agents employed by the agency are capable of knowing total self-serving bullshit when they see it! After all, the OLC memos are just that - rationalizations of policies that everyone knows now and knew then presented a pretext for torture which, as everyone also knows, is illegal under American and International Law. So, if the CIA cannot tell bullshit when it is dished out by Government lawyers, how will they be able to discern the difference between truth and falsity when it is dished out by dangerous suspects of secret informants or other spook-like entities?

This week too the Spanish government announced that it would not pursue an investigation or prosecution of those Americans officials who devised and implemented this most recent incarnation of U.S. torture policy. They (perhaps rightly) decided that any such activities should be undertaken here in the States. Except, of course, that the Justice Department has announced that it will not do any such thing. In any case, I simply could not help but wonder, after hearing the decision from the Spanish prosecutors, who had called and leaned on them. I am sure they were lobbied by friends of BushCo. But what about members of the Obama Administration? Did anyone from the Justice or State Department, discreetly of course, make it clear to the Spaniards that it might be imprudent to make good on their intention to investigate American torturers?

Finally, this editorial in The New York Times today rightly recommends that Jay Bybee, author of some of the most egregious of the torture memos, and now a federal Appeals Court Judge, should be impeached. Over at The New Yorker Jeffrey Toobin writes of Bybee: "He was confirmed by the Senate on March 13, 2003—some time before any of the “torture memos” became public. He has never answered questions about them, has never had to defend his conduct, has never endured anywhere near the amount of public scrutiny (and abuse) as Yoo."* I agree that Bybee should be dragged out into the light. I doubt, though, that the Congress has the courage needed to impeach the miscreant. At a minimum, then, I suggest that Bybee be compelled to amend the brief biographical sketch posted on the federal government's web page to read as follows:

Bybee, Jay S.

Born 1953 in Oakland, CA

Federal Judicial Service:
Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Nominated by George W. Bush on January 7, 2003, to a seat vacated by Proctor R. Hug, Jr.; Confirmed by the Senate on March 13, 2003, and received commission on March 21, 2003.

Education:
Brigham Young University, B.A., 1977

Brigham Young University, J. Reuben Clark Law School, J.D., 1980

Professional Career:
Law clerk, Hon. Donald Russell, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, 1980-1981
Private practice, Washington, D.C., 1981-1984
Attorney, Office of Legal Policy, U.S. Department of Justice, 1984-1986
Attorney, Civil Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 1986-1989
Associate counsel to the president, The White House, 1989-1991
Professor, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University, 1991-1998
Professor, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, 1999-2000
Assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice, Special Division for Justifying War Crimes, 2001-2002

Race or Ethnicity: White

Gender: Male

That is my last question for now: Can we get someone to take on the editing job?
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* Yoo would be John Yoo, who served as Bybee's Deputy at OLC and who was an active composer of justifications for torture.

Bullshit (Second in an Irregular Series): FOX News ~ Hot Air & Obsessed

It really is quite astounding. Media Matters has posted this brief report on the propaganda campaign FOX has been waging against ACORN. If, technically, bullshit consists in efforts at communication without concern for criteria of truth or falsity, the FOX folk seem to exemplify the genre. Lot's of blather no news.

" Fox News and the ACORN charade

By the end of this month, FNC will likely have mentioned the community organizing group nearly 1,500 times, according to TVeyes.com. (The tally currently hovers around 1,480, which is about 1,300 more than CNN). The cabler's over-the-top obsession with the group's urban-based voter registration initiative has become something of a running campaign joke.

Yet asked about it in Politico, retiring Fox News anchor Brit Hume took great pride, boasting, "We had a great run on ACORN."

Hume's self-satisfying view really does capture the FNC ethos. Because in truth, Fox News never advanced the ACORN story one inch. It never broke any news. It never contributing anything journalistically to the story. Meaning, news organizations never (I don't think) had to cite Fox News for anything regarding its ACORN coverage. And its reporting certainly had no impact on the overall campaign.

Fox News couldn't stop talking about ACORN, and yet FOX News never managed to uncovering anything newsworthy about ACORN. It just rehashed and speculated, rehashed and speculated.

Still, Hume boasts FNC had a "great run" on the story. Why, because it filled up endless hours of Fox News programming? Is that how Hume determines a Fox News success?"

Bill Kristol Points The Times in the Right Direction

I have posted before on the political opportunism, unseemly inbreeding, and intellectual impoverishment among the neo-con crowd. It turns out , though, that if you simply keep shovelling the bullshit, eventually someone beside your family and a few fellow-traveling friends might start to listen. Well, it appears that The New York Times has decided to pay for bullshit, having hired Bill Kristol to write a weekly column for their Op-Ed page. (Here too.) There are at least two problems with this. They have less to do with Kristol (who is a political hack well beyond rehabilitation) and more with The Times.

First, it simply cannot be that Kristol has been hired because of his great record of insightful comment. It is hard to disagree with Katha Pollitt who, in her lament about Kristol's hiring notes:

“A pundit, even a highly ideological one like Kristol, has to be (or seem) right at least some of the time. But what's striking about Kristol is that he's has been wrong about everything! or did I miss the sound of democratic dominoes falling neatly into place all over the Middle East? And it's not as if he's a great prose stylist, either. At least David Brooks can occasionally turn a phrase. Kristol just churns out whatever the argument of the moment happens to be, adds jeers, and knocks off for lunch.”

Pollitt offers a long ~ but surely not exhaustive ~ list of examples of the erroneous and offensive pronouncements Kristol has made. In the role of right-wing ideologue he is a repeat offender. (Let's be clear - there is no one on staff of columnists at The Times who stands nearly as far to the left as Kristol does to the right. He is, simply put, an extremist.) What the hell are the criteria for getting a columnist position at The Times? If we take Bill Kristol as an example, competence surely cannot be among them.

Second, perhaps the folks who hire at The Times are impressed by Bill's resumé. Here is where the inbreeding ought to be apparent. What has Bill Kristol ever done outside of the secure network of Mom and Dad's* well-heeled and well connected chums? Answer: nothing. His incompetence never gets noticed simply because he is swaddled in the warm blanket of nepotism. What matter if you're consistently wrong or offensive? Someone will come along and
pay for another glossy venue from which Bill can spout inanities. So, hiring Bill Kristol makes it clear that The Times mustn't be looking at merit any more than competence when they cast about for columnists.

What is the point here? Consider the defensive, self-serving rationalizations of Andy Rosenthal the Ed Page Chief at The Times, who accuses critics of the decision to hire Kristol of hypocrisy grounded in a "weird fear of opposing views." Rosenthal goes on:

"The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual and somehow that's a bad thing, how intolerant is that?"

The notion that Bill Kristol is "a serious, respected" intellectual of any stripe simply is a howler. So, this is not about liberal intolerance and hypocrisy. After all, it is not like Kristol lacks for venues; and nobody is calling for The Weekly Standard and so forth to be closed down. It is about The Times hiring a writer who turns tricks for conservative politicians (whether they be in power or out) and who has compensated for consistent incompetence by drawing down on his reserves of good will and financial connections from conservative family and friends.

What scares me are not folks with "opposing views" but people like Bill Kristol who regularly are disastrously and dangerously wrong and who are unable or unwilling to reflect on that fact. By hiring Bill Kristol The New York Times is simply lending credibility to the crackpot right and, in the process, further diminishing its own.
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* Dad being neocon-in-chief Irving Kristol, mom being Gertrude Himmelfarb, conservative historian.

More of the Same - Republican Lies, Half Truths & Bullshit

A purportedly "grass roots" effort called 'Freedoms Watch' has emerged that aims to influence Congressional and Senate campaigns in relatively tight races. The FW folks are trying to put pressure on incumbants not to switch their votes on the Iraq debacle and are running a series of Television Ads for that purpose. Several things are important to note about this effort.

First it is coordinated and funded by Republican big-wigs. It hardly is a swelling of public outrage from the hinterlands. You can find information on those involved here - nearly all have prior ties to BushCo. These are the usual suspects and they are behhaving in the predictable ways.

Second, the ad campaign falls back on an old canard, namely that somehow, despite all reliable information to the contrary, there was a relationship between Saddam Husssein's Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. So, once again the minions of BushCo are simply lying. What does the still shown above - taken from the FW adverts - have to do with the Iraq debacle?

Third, the adverts exploit for partisan political purposes the 'sacrifices' made by veterans and their families. This is shameless. Yes, let's be very clear, the people shown in the ads have made sacrifices - literally life and limb. And I am sure they would like to think that their sacrifices have been meaningful. But the evidence is that BushCo lied up front to rationalize the Iraq war. These ads simply divert attention from the abuse of authority that the administration has engaged in. The folks in the adverts would be better served by directing their concern toward speaking out for the democracy and freedom that the Bush administration has been undermining.

Fourth, there is scant evidence that in any meaningful sense we are "making progress" in Iraq. The adverts assert that too, despite the newly released intelligence estimates that say, 'yes our military forces are making some progress in clearing the streets,' but 'no, there is not much political progress at all.' So, that would be lie number two (perhaps a half-truth).

Finally, the Press Release that FW put out read "August 22, 2007 – New Group, Freedom’s Watch, to launch Major Advertising Campaign in Support of Victory in Iraq." Conveniently, and again in step with the BushCo party line, there is no definition of "victory," no criteria for what might count as success. So, on top of the deception we get an extra big helping of bullshit too.

More Bullshit from Bush

"The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq, were
the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th,
and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to
the security here at home.” - W.

The fact is that insofar as there is an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, it is an artifact of BushCo's disastrous foreign policy. There is no evidence whatsoever establing a connection between anyone in Iraq and the 9/11 attacks or current risks of terrorist attack "here at home." Nor is there much evidence that the "new" BushCo surge strategy is working. The President is either stupid or a liar - and of course the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

__________

P.S.: Added later that same day - Just in case you think my assessment is simply more unpatriotic, pinko blather consider this view from the hardly liberal Fred Kaplan over at Slate:

“The White House report released today, on how far Iraq has progressed
toward 18 political and military benchmarks, is a sham.

According to the report, which was required by Congress, progress has
been"satisfactory" on eight of the benchmarks, "unsatisfactory" on
another eight,and mixed on two. At his press conference this
morning, President Bush,seeing the glass half full,
pronounced the report "a cause for optimism"
—and for staying on course.

Yet a close look at the 25-page report reveals a far more dismal picture
and a deliberately distorted assessment. The eight instances of
"satisfactory"progress are not at all satisfactory by any
reasonable measure—or, in some cases, they indicate a purely
procedural advance. Theeight "unsatisfactory" categories
concern the central issues ofIraqi politics—the disputes that
must be resolved if Iraq is to be aviable state
and if the U.S. mission is to have theslightest
chance of success.”

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the Bush performance yesterday is the tacit assumption that the public really is dense enough to buy the administration's bullshit.

More Reasons - If Any Were Needed - Dick & Liz Cheney Are a Joke

Dick Cheney (war criminal) and his daughter Liz (who has accomplished precisely nothing in her 'career' beyond accepting nepotism) are criticizing Obama? Are you kidding? The reason why Iraq is in its current state reflects the duplicity and criminality of Cheney and his cronies in BushCo. So, Obama (of whom I am no fan) is bad news because he has not cleaned up Cheney, et. al.'s mess to their liking! What a bunch of bullshit. By publishing this sort of tripe the WSJ Editorial Page perfects its mimicry of Pravda.

Unfortunately, the Cheney's reportedly  have launched a 'grass roots' outfit to counter Obama's policy. They not only seem oblivious to their own abject unsuitability as sources of foreign policy advice. They also seem to not get the definition of grass roots - describing any organization launched by a former US Vice President and his privileged offspring as 'grass roots' is a laughable category mistake. And, might I add that the link to the WaPo Editorial Page (basically a free advert for the Cheneys) suggests that they are not far from the WSJ as peddlers of propaganda.
_____________
P.S.: And, it turns out the Cheneys are not alone among architects of the BushCo fiasco who seem oblivious to the disaster they created.

I Should Have Sought Out a Good Therapist, Instead I Grabbed My Camera - Leigh Ledare

At The Guardian you can find this brief commentary on Leigh Ledare. He photographs his mother having sex. I think the work is adolescent bullshit. Here is his rationalization for thinking we ought to take him seriously:

"The obvious question is why did he – and she – do it? When asked, Ledare can retreat into a mixture of conceptual art speak, as in "the extremely open and intimate relationship I have with my mother ... was developed through the work. (It) comments on the confusion around these sexual boundaries … through imposing herself on me as a subject, she was asking me to be complicit in her sexualisation. I saw her sexuality as a means of antagonising her father and refuting expectations he had for how she should behave as a mother, daughter, and woman of her age."

[. . .]

His decision to chronicle his troubled relationship with his mother, he says, started when he returned home one Christmas. "I arrived home not having seen her for a year and a half," he recalls. "She knew I was coming and opened the door naked." When Leigh walked in past the bedroom, "a young man, almost exactly my age, was sprawled out naked. He rolled over to see me, saying hello, before rolling back over and returning to sleep." Ledare interpreted this welcome as "her way of announcing to me what she was up to, at this period in her life – almost as though to say, 'Take it or leave it.' I had a camera and began making photos of her then. She was the catalyst."

So, in the event Ledare ought to have turned and walked away and then found a therapist. Instead he reached for his camera, then learned art-speak and psycho-babble to justify his ongoing lapse in judgement. Let's say - in case you have not guessed - that I am unimpressed. Indeed, I don't think one can even say this is a case of wasted talent.

Where Is Jack Welch Now? Congressional Republicans Suppress CRS Report

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, currently a pompous right-wing wind bag, made headlines by calling into question the October jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Welch implied that the unexpectedly favorable numbers were a political plot in which BLS officials had connived to make the Obama administration look good. Even conservative commentators like David Brooks thought his accusations were ludicrous. Well the question today is this - "where is Jack now?"

The New York Times reports today that Congressional Republicans connived to suppress a report from the Congressional Research Service that deflates the central tenet of their economic views, namely that there is some well-established, robust relationship between tax rates on those at the very top of the income distribution and economic growth.  You can find a copy of the report and some commentary here at The Washington Post.

The Republicans might have avoided stepping in this particular pile of their own bullshit. As Susan pointed out to me and as this cogent analysis of the CRS report and its putative shortcomings at The New Republic points out: "CRS reports are never released to the public anyway." Oooooppps! Now not only are the Republicans wrong about economics, but they are compounding their mistake by censoring the findings. This surely should outrage so hardheaded a businessman as Welch. Right? Don't hold your breath waiting for him to tweet his criticism of the Republicans. It is more likely that he will join the editorial ideologues at Pravda the Wall Street Journal in impugning the author of the report.
__________
P.S.: (2 November 2012) To punctuate this post I add a link to this news report from The New York Times this morning.  The story is about how job growth - as reported by those dastardly partisans at BLS! - has basically stagnated this month. Unemployment is reported up on the Friday before the election. Hey Jack! We'd love to hear from you.

Solnit on Greed, Language, and Politics

 Regular readers will know that I consider Rebecca Solnit an incisive, articulate analyst of politics and the arts. So, when I came across this essay of hers at TomDispatch.com I suspected it would be worth reading. It turns out that, as I sit in the cold, wet, grey backwash of Hurricane Sandy, anticipating days of bad weather, her focus on climate change and why it has made less than a cameo appearance in the ongoing election campaign is especially well taken. Her focus on the pervasive greed - and its converse, poverty and hardship - are especially relevant given that the University where I work is in the midst of more than one labor dispute. And her broader theme - the ways our political language is increasingly infested with euphemism, bullshit and deception - is one that I myself have taken up repeatedly here over the years. In any case, here, reprinted without permission, is her essay in its entirely.

 **********

 Our Words Are Our Weapons ~
Against the Destruction of the World by Greed
By Rebecca Solnit

In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.

This was part of what made Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our language and called many if not all things by their true names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected, Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled, parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything in our world -- a phenomenon which went supernova in this year of “legitimate rape,” “the apology tour,” and “job creators.”  Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a rectification of numbers, too.) 

Let’s rectify some names ourselves. We often speak as though the source of so many of our problems is complex and even mysterious. I'm not sure it is. You can blame it all on greed: the refusal to do anything about climate change, the attempts by the .01% to destroy our democracy, the constant robbing of the poor, the resultant starving children, the war against most of what is beautiful on this Earth.

Calling lies "lies" and theft "theft" and violence "violence," loudly, clearly, and consistently, until truth becomes more than a bump in the road, is a powerful aspect of political activism. Much of the work around human rights begins with accurately and aggressively reframing the status quo as an outrage, whether it’s misogyny or racism or poisoning the environment. What protects an outrage are disguises, circumlocutions, and euphemisms -- “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, “collateral damage” for killing civilians, “the war on terror” for the war against you and me and our Bill of Rights.

Change the language and you’ve begun to change the reality or at least to open the status quo to question. Here is Confucius on the rectification of names:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

So let’s start calling manifestations of greed by their true name. By greed, I mean the attempt of those who have plenty to get more, not the attempts of the rest of us to survive or lead a decent life. Look at the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame: the four main heirs are among the dozen richest people on the planet, each holding about $24 billion. Their wealth is equivalent to that of the bottom 40% of Americans. The corporation Sam Walton founded now employs 2.2 million workers, two-thirds of them in the U.S., and the great majority are poorly paid, intimidated, often underemployed people who routinely depend on government benefits to survive. You could call that Walton Family welfare -- a taxpayers' subsidy to their system. Strikes launched against Wal-Mart this summer and fall protested working conditions of astonishing barbarity -- warehouses that reach 120 degrees, a woman eight months pregnant forced to work at a brutal pace, commonplace exposure to pollutants, and the intimidation of those who attempted to organize or unionize.

You would think that $24,000,000,000 apiece would be enough, but the Walton family sits atop a machine intent upon brutalizing tens of millions of people -- the suppliers of Wal-Mart notorious for their abysmal working conditions, as well as the employees of the stores -- only to add to piles of wealth already obscenely vast. Of course, what we call corporations are, in fact, perpetual motion machines, set up to endlessly extract wealth (and leave slagheaps of poverty behind) no matter what.

They are generally organized in such a way that the brutality that leads to wealth extraction is committed by subcontractors at a distance or described in euphemisms, so that the stockholders, board members, and senior executives never really have to know what’s being done in their names. And yet it is their job to know -- just as it is each of our jobs to know what systems feed us and exploit or defend us, and the job of writers, historians, and journalists to rectify the names for all these things.   

Groton to Moloch 

The most terrifying passage in whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s gripping book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is not about his time in Vietnam, or his life as a fugitive after he released the Pentagon Papers. It’s about a 1969 dinnertime conversation with a co-worker in a swanky house in Pacific Palisades, California.  It took place right after Ellsberg and five of his colleagues had written a letter to the New York Times arguing for immediate withdrawal from the unwinnable, brutal war in Vietnam, and Ellsberg’s host said, “If I were willing to give up all this... if I were willing to renege on... my commitment to send my son to Groton... I would have signed the letter.”

In other words, his unnamed co-worker had weighed trying to prevent the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against the upper-middle-class perk of having his kid in a fancy prep school, and chosen the latter. The man who opted for Groton was, at least, someone who worked for what he had and who could imagine having painfully less. This is not true of the ultra-rich shaping the future of our planet.

They could send tens of thousands to Groton, buy more Renoirs and ranches, and still not exploit the poor or destroy the environment, but they’re as insatiable as they are ruthless. They are often celebrated in their aesthetic side effects: imposing mansions, cultural patronage, jewels, yachts.  But in many, maybe most, cases they got rich through something a lot uglier, and that ugliness is still ongoing. Rectifying the names would mean revealing the ugliness of the sources of their fortunes and the grotesque scale on which they contrive to amass them, rather than the gaudiness of the trinkets they buy with them. It would mean seeing and naming the destruction that is the corollary of most of this wealth creation.

A Storm Surge of Selfishness 

Where this matters most is climate change. Why have we done almost nothing over the past 25 years about what was then a terrifying threat and is now a present catastrophe? Because it was bad for quarterly returns and fossil-fuel portfolios. When posterity indicts our era, this will be the feeble answer for why we did so little -- that the rich and powerful with ties to the carbon-emitting industries have done everything in their power to prevent action on, or even recognition of, the problem. In this country in particular, they spent a fortune sowing doubt about the science of climate change and punishing politicians who brought the subject up. In this way have we gone through four “debates” and nearly a full election cycle with climate change unmentioned and unmentionable.

These three decades of refusing to respond have wasted crucial time. It’s as though you were prevented from putting out a fire until it was raging: now the tundra is thawing and Greenland’s ice shield is melting and nearly every natural system is disrupted, from the acidifying oceans to the erratic seasons to droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, and the failure of crops. We can still respond, but the climate is changed; the damage we all spoke of, only a few years ago, as being in the future is here, now.

You can look at the chief executive officers of the oil corporations -- Chevron’s John Watson, for example, who received almost $25 million ($1.57 million in salary and the rest in “compensation”) in 2011 -- or their major shareholders. They can want for nothing. They’re so rich they could quit the game at any moment. When it comes to climate change, some of the wealthiest people in the world have weighed the fate of the Earth and every living thing on it for untold generations to come, the seasons and the harvests, this whole exquisite planet we evolved on, and they have come down on the side of more profit for themselves, the least needy people the world has ever seen.

Take those billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David Koch, who are all over American politics these days. They are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat Obama, partly because he offends their conservative sensibilities, but also because he is less likely to be a completely devoted servant of their profit margins. He might, if we shout loud enough, rectify a few names.  Under pressure, he might even listen to the public or environmental groups, while Romney poses no such problem (and under a Romney administration they will probably make more back in tax cuts than they are gambling on his election).

Two years ago, the Koch brothers spent $1 million on California’s Proposition 23, an initiative written and put on the ballot by out-of-state oil companies to overturn our 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. It lost by a landslide, but the Koch brothers have also invested a small fortune in spreading climate-change denial and sponsoring the Tea Party (which they can count on to oppose climate change regulation as big government or interference with free enterprise). This year they’re backing a California initiative to silence unions. They want nothing to stand in the way of corporate power and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Think of it as another kind of war, and consider the early casualties.  

As the Irish Times put it in an editorial this summer:

“Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions are struggling to adapt to their changing climate. In the last three years, we have seen 10 million people displaced by floods in Pakistan, 13 million face hunger in east Africa, and over 10 million in the Sahel region of Africa face starvation. Even those figures only scrape the surface. According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed up by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, climate change is responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and affects 300 million people annually. By 2030, the annual death toll related to climate change is expected to rise to 500,000 and the economic cost to rocket to $600 billion.”

This coming year may see a dramatic increase in hunger due to rising food prices from crop failures, including this summer’s in the U.S. Midwest after a scorching drought in which the Mississippi River nearly ran dry and crops withered.

We need to talk about climate change as a war against nature, against the poor (especially the poor of Africa), and against the rest of us. There are casualties, there are deaths, and there is destruction, and it’s all mounting. Rectify the name, call it war. While we’re at it, take back the term “pro-life” to talk about those who are trying to save the lives of all the creatures suffering from the collapse of the complex systems on which plant and animal as well as human lives depend. The other side: “pro-death.”

The complex array of effects from climate change and their global distribution, as well as their scale and the science behind them makes it harder to talk about than almost anything else on Earth, but we should talk about it all the more because of that. And yes, the rest of us should do more, but what is the great obstacle those who have already tried to do so much invariably come up against? The oil corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, its staggering financial clout, its swarms of lobbyists, and the politicians in its clutches. Those who benefit most from the status quo, I learned in studying disasters, are always the least willing to change.

The Doublespeak on Taxes 

I’m a Californian so I faced the current version of American greed early. Proposition 13, the initiative that froze property taxes and made it nearly impossible to raise taxes in our state, went into effect in 1978, two years before California’s former governor Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in part by catering to greed. Prop 13, as it came to be known, went into effect when California was still an affluent state with the best educational system in the world, including some of the top universities around, nearly free to in-staters all the way through graduate school. Tax cuts have trashed the state and that education system, and they are now doing the same to our country. The public sphere is to society what the biosphere is to life on earth: the space we live in together, and the attacks on them have parallels.

What are taxes? They are that portion of your income that you contribute to the common good. Most of us are unhappy with how they’re allocated -- though few outside the left talk about the fact that more than half of federal discretionary expenditures go to our gargantuan military, more money than is spent on the next 14 militaries combined. Ever since Reagan, the right has complained unceasingly about fantasy expenditures -- from that president’s “welfare queens” to Mitt Romney’s attack on Big Bird and PBS (which consumes .001% of federal expenditures).

As part of its religion of greed, the right invented a series of myths about where those taxes went, how paying them was the ultimate form of oppression, and what boons tax cuts were to bring us.  They then delivered the biggest tax cuts of all to those who already had a superfluity of money and weren’t going to pump the extra they got back into the economy. What they really were saying was that they wanted to hang onto every nickel, no matter how the public sphere was devastated, and that they really served the ultra-rich, over and over again, not the suckers who voted them into office.

Despite decades of cutting to the bone, they continue to promote tax cuts as if they had yet to happen. Their constant refrain is that we are too poor to feed the poor or educate the young or heal the sick, but the poverty isn’t monetary: it’s moral and emotional. Let’s rectify some more language: even at this moment, the United States remains the richest nation the world has ever seen, and California -- with the richest agricultural regions on the planet and a colossal high-tech boom still ongoing in Silicon Valley -- is loaded, too. Whatever its problems, the U.S. is still swimming in abundance, even if that abundance is divided up ever more unequally.

Really, there’s more than enough to feed every child well, to treat every sick person, to educate everyone well without saddling them with hideous debt, to support the arts, to protect the environment -- to produce, in short, a glorious society. The obstacle is greed. We could still make the sorts of changes climate change requires of us and become a very different nation without overwhelming pain. We would then lead somewhat different lives -- richer, not poorer, for most of us (in meaning, community, power, and hope). Because this culture of greed impoverishes all of us, it is, to call it by its true name, destruction.

Occupy the Names  

One of the great accomplishments of Occupy Wall Street was this rectification of names. Those who came together under that rubric named the greed, inequality, and injustice in our system; they made the brutality of debt and the subjugation of the debtors visible; they called out Wall Street’s crimes; they labeled the wealthiest among us the “1%,” those who have made a profession out of pumping great sums of our wealth upwards (quite a different kind of tax).  It was a label that made instant sense across much of the political spectrum. It was a good beginning. But there’s so much more to do.

Naming is only part of the work, but it’s a crucial first step. A doctor initially diagnoses, then treats; an activist or citizen must begin by describing what is wrong before acting. To do that well is to call things by their true names. Merely calling out these names is a beam of light powerful enough to send the destroyers it shines upon scurrying for cover like roaches. After that, you still need to name your vision, your plan, your hope, your dream of something better.

Names matter; language matters; truth matters. In this era when the mainstream media serve obfuscation and evasion more than anything else (except distraction), alternative media, social media, demonstrations in the streets, and conversations between friends are the refuges of truth, the places where we can begin to rectify the names. So start talking.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books, a TomDispatch regular, and from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the California public education system in its heyday. She would like the Republican Party to be called the Pro-Rape Party until further notice.

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit