The truth about bull *** - new book

Your Call Is Important to Us
The Truth About Bull***
by Laura Penny

Publisher: Crown Publishers | Date published: 08/23/2005
ISBN: 0307238369


Description
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Every once in a while a truth-telling book appears out of nowhere, a
book that crystallizes our darkest suspicions and makes us mad as
hell-while we're laughing like fiends. A book like this one.

Your Call Is Important to Us is a manifesto for anyone who's sick and
tired of the twenty-first century's tidal wave of bull***. Taking
no prisoners, author Laura Penny dissects-no, disembowels-the
culture of globalized, super-sized, consumerized b.s.

Dating the renaissance of bull*** to wartime propaganda, Penny skewers
the "corporate bafflegab," scripted, question-proof political
events, toxic faux foodstuffs, and miracle pills that clutter our
lives. She spares no one and nothing: not Wal-Mart, where "every
rinky-dink chunk of mass-produced bric-a-brac is manufactured
expressly for you"; not Bush's White House, with its "wallpaper
of phony populist sloganeering"; and not the vast pharmaceutical
industry, with its "gateway prescription drugs."

Penny reveals that prisons are the hot new thing in call centers (the
federal prison industry bills itself as "the best-kept secret in
outsourcing") and that the Public Relations Society of America has a
Code of Ethics Pledge (who knew?). Finally, with devastating precision,
she demonstrates how our "all-you-can-eat buffet of
phoniness" not only alienates us from each other but degrades public
discourse, breeds apathy, and makes us just plain stupid.

Your Call Is Important to Us introduces a fearless and utterly
disarming new voice in social criticism. It's an island of clarity in
an ocean of ordure.

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Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
YOU'RE SOAKING IN IT
No matter how cynical you become, it is never enough to keep up.
-LILY TOMLIN
We live in an era of unprecedented bull*** production. The more polite
among you might call it poppy*** or balderdash or claptrap, but the
concept remains the same, and the same coursing stream of crapulence
washes over us all, filling our eyes and ears and thoughts with
clichés, euphemisms, evasions, and fabulations. Never in the history
of mankind have so many people uttered statements that they know to be
untrue. Presidents, priests, politicians, lawyers, reporters, corporate
executives, and countless others have taken to saying not what they
actually believe, but what they want others to believe-not what is,
but what works.

I am not so naive as to lay claim to some golden age when everybody
meant what they said, and said what they meant, and the world entire
was bright with the glare of truth. First, I came to consciousness in
the eighties, so people have been conducting themselves in a sleazy
manner the whole of my short life. Second, every historical era
conjures up its own lies, noble and banal. Since there have been snakes
for the squeezing, there has been someone to flog their precious oil.
We distinguish ourselves largely in terms of largeness. Our era is
unique by virtue of its sheer scale, its massive budget, its seemingly
unlimited capability to send bull*** hurtling rapidly over the globe.

There is so much bull*** that one hardly knows where to begin. The
platitudinous pabulum that passes for stirring political rhetoric is
bull***. The scripted, question-proof events that pretend to be
spontaneous exchanges are bull***. The committee-crafted persona and
the focus-grouped fad and the rule of the polls are straight-up
bull***. The disease hysteria du jour is bull***, and so is the
latest miracle pill. The new product that will change your life is
probably just more cheap, plastic bull***. We endure bull*** in the
course of our workaday lives, in the form of management-speak memos
about optimizing strategic objectives and result-based, value-added
service delivery. We tolerate bull*** in common life-maintenance
transactions, like banking and shopping. Most of what passes for news
is bull***, and even if you are so fortunate as to find things worth
watching or reading, the content you desire will be punctuated with
shills for things you don't need, like ginormous automobiles and toxic
faux foodstuffs.

Even a cursory study of bull*** yields an embarrassment of riches, an
all-you-can-eat buffet of phoniness, like when a Bush staffer eulogizes
departing press secretary Ari Fleischer with the words, "His message
discipline was extraordinary," a bull*** description of a peerless
bullshitter. Or check out the Web presence of a swank PR firm, like
Burson-Marsteller, mouthpieces for many a megacorp, and thrill to their
proficiency in change communications, issues management, reputation
management, and the coup de grâce, personal and social responsibility.


"Your call is important to us" has been chosen from a very deep
reservoir of bull*** phrases for the title of this book because it
best exemplifies the properties native to bull***. It tries to slather
some nice on the result of a simple ratio: your time versus some
company's dough. Like most bull***, the more times you hear it, the
bullshittier it gets. This is why bullshit is best served quickly, with
many visuals, in mass quantities, with no questions from the floor.

Throughout this book, we will look at some of the world's muchness of
bull***. I have elected to proceed on a sector-by-sector basis, since
bull*** is not just a phenomenon but an industry-one of the growth
industries of the information age, in fact. But bull*** is not a
single industry unto itself, nor a sector proper. Instead, it rides
shotgun, running interference for all the major modern sectors. We
shall commence by looking at the two fields of human endeavor that have
distinguished themselves as the most prolific producers of bull***:
advertising and public relations, which get bonus points for
encouraging the industries that follow in their wake to tart themselves
up. Next, we will see how financial markets, corporate structures, and
lax laws allow for more merde, with entire companies-your Enrons,
your WorldComs-exposed as mortared with bull***. Then we'll have a
look at politics, which is a business as well, alas. Finally, we'll
look at a few examples of bull*** produced by some of the sectors that
affect your everyday life, like pharmaceuticals, insurance, the service
industry, and the media.

We are all, of course, implicated in the bull*** pandemic as minor,
small-scale producers of our own ordure. I would love to be hard-core
like my favorite Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and declare
that all lies are wrong, and that there are no circumstances whatsoever
that condone untruth. Kant thought that any lie, no matter how minor or
well-intentioned, corrodes the universality and trust that people need
to live freely, and I couldn't agree more. But I'd be lying if I said I
never lied, and I'm sure you could conjure a million retarded
Philosophy 101 variations on the theme of virtuous fibs. It is
therefore crucial to note that there are very different orders of
magnitude when it comes to bull***.

Those couple of daily white lies, about bad haircuts and spousal girth
and the like, are entirely harmless and preferable to the useless,
hurtful truth. Good manners sometimes call for omission, editing, and
the occasional fudge. However, if your secretary is shredding documents
by the light of the moon, or your testimony before the House interrupts
the soaps, or you have yet to visit the country where all your money
lives, you have probably concocted a whopper of inordinate size.

Nor am I unduly concerned with the gap between appearance and reality
with respect to the way the common man woos his wife, greets his
co-workers, or combs his hair. It takes millions and millions of
dollars, and a solid toehold in the public consciousness, to prick up
my ears. When something installs itself in popular culture, that is
when I begin to wonder about the gaps between what that thing does,
says, and says about what it does. If I fault the spectacularly wealthy
and powerful the more for embroidering the truth, it is not because
they bull*** more frequently than their lunchmeat-munching lessers,
but simply because they get a lot more out of it, thus setting a very
bad example that ensures continued bullshitting all the way down the
line. Dollars may not trickle down, but lessons and images certainly
do.

I am even tempted to make the case that lying is less dangerous than
bullshitting. In his essay "On Bullshit," professor Harry Frankfurt
draws a subtle and useful distinction between lying and bullshitting.
The liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter is unburdened by
such concerns. Bull***-related phrases like bull session or talking
*** also suggest a casual, careless attitude toward veracity-a sense
that the truth is totally beside the point. Bull*** distracts with
exaggeration, omission, obfuscation, stock phrases, pretentious jargon,
faux-folksiness, feigned ignorance, and sloganeering homilies. When
Dubya speaks of freedom and liberation, and claims to be praying for
peace as the army disgorges load after load of bombs, he is not lying.
He is bullshitting. A lie would be a simpler, more factual thing, like,
nope, we aren't dropping any bombs. A lie would be easier to disprove.
Bull*** is a committee-drafted simpleton's sermon about evildoers and
terra and freedom being God's gift to all men.

This is bull*** because it tricks out a terrible thing in floaty,
fulsome rhetoric. Bull*** is forever putting the rosiest of spins on
rotten political and economic decisions. This is because bull*** is
all about getting away with something, or getting someone to buy
something in the broadest possible sense, which means covering arses or
kissing them. Bull*** is always trying to be your buddy, getting all
chummy with you, making greasy nice. Nobody passes a bill because they
got a bale of cash from some industry concern; instead, they wax poetic
about the good people of Any District who will benefit immensely from
the new legislation. Nobody leaves office because they fucked up; no,
they want to spend more time with their families. No mogul says I do it
all for the money, suckers. They blah-dee-blah on about the company, or
some magnificent abstract idea the company embodies.

Bull*** aggrandizes and amplifies. Sometimes this is a sign of the
bullshitter's luxuriant self-regard, like when athletes or actresses
praise the original G for their achievements. This is supposed to make
the star in question seem humble as well as Christian, which is a very
popular bull*** pose, particularly among the obscenely wealthy.
Instead of striking a modest note, though, such statements imply that
the supreme being has the time, inclination, and interest to fix the
Oscars or the Super Bowl. Though the famous contribute plenty of
name-brand bull*** to the culture, bull*** is more often produced
anonymously. It tends to be cranked out by hacks and flacks, in the
interest of aggrandizing and amplifying the object it is slathered all
over, whether that's a celebrity, a product, a candidate, a disease, a
war, a service, or an event.

Bull*** is not just happy talk. There are also bull*** scares and
threats that hold the public in a thrall of fear, all the while
eclipsing many genuinely problematic international developments.
Prime-time newsmagazines like Dateline and 20/20 excel at uncovering
the latest lurid crime or horror at home, airing gross buckets of
alarmist bull*** about satanic nannies and con-artist plumbers. Cable
networks shine when it comes to puffing up minor hobgoblins into major
panics, like shark attacks or the Summer of SARS, and making
made-for-TV miniseries like the one on the Laci Peterson case, and
Saving Private Jessica, the book, the movie, and the centcom agitprop.

Bull*** also minimizes, making sure the proverbial buck never, ever
stops. Such bull*** includes the fetid apologies of irresponsible
corporations and unaccountable politicians, the excuse-making and
name-changing that follow any mistake or massacre. Examples of this
include Phillip Morris christening itself Altria, Enron restructuring
itself into the utterly generic InternationalCo, and Dow's
self-flagellating Bhopal website, which, amid the mea culpas,
underlines the fact that they assume no legal liability for the
misadventures of their offending subsidiary, Union Carbide.

One of the really fascinating things about bull*** is how utterly
obvious a lot of it is. When one of the Enron dudes takes the stand and
pleads the fifth or uses weasel phrases like "I cannot recall," he is
not lying. He is bullshitting. He is bullshitting because the whole
routine is so flagrantly false that it sails gaily past traditional
notions of deception. It's not like he expects us to believe that early
onset Alzheimer's has rendered that whole making-millions-of-dollars
thing, like, a total blur. It is not a lame excuse or limp
self-justification. Dude is not even trying. He is merely repeating the
legally appropriate, self-protecting thing one says on such occasions,
giving voice to the typical script.

Most people believe that they can recognize the typical script as such,
and consider themselves excellent bull*** detectors. Bull***
detection is the stuff of which modern social bonds are made. We huddle
in little clusters, or gather on the Web, rolling our eyes in unison,
bitching and moaning about the bull***. We praise the superior
interpretative skills of our respective social sets and marvel at the
terminally credulous cretins, somewhere out there, who are actually
swallowing this bilge. And we talk this way whether we are discussing
politics or pop culture. The fact that most of us feel like we can see
through the prevailing pretenses but expect and accept them is part and
parcel of the way bull*** works. Bull*** thrives on the soft bigotry
of low expectations.

Cynicism, irony, and apathy-the ostensible markers of Gen Xers like
me-are often dismissed by elder virtuecrats as a lack of good
old-fashioned values. This virtuecratic stance may be more commonly
associated with conservative politicians, but Democrats like Al Gore
and Joe Lieberman have also been quick to pick on the usual pop-culture
objects of blame, like video games, TV, movies, and rap music. When the
banner of godliness is held aloft by hypocrites like William Bennett,
who blew millions in Vegas even as he cranked out book after book of
virtues, or Newt Gingrich, who talked family values but divorced his
own wife in the midst of her terminal illness, it casts doubt on the
very idea of a moral high ground.

Cynicism and apathy are, in fact, reasonable responses to the refulgent
tide of bull*** in which we have bobbed all our lives. We have seen
too many hopeful Reaganisms like "It's morning in America" give way to
scandals like Iran-Contra. One of the reasons why people-particularly
the young-are opting out of old-school civic duties like voting and
reading the newspaper is that they are weary of bull***.

It would be overstating the case, though, to claim that this apathy is
a form of conscientious objection. Apathy is also a consequence of
being, like, sooo totally distracted. There is a lot of other bull***
that is way more entertaining than the yawny old newspaper. North
Americans live at the intersection of too much and too little
information-a great location for bull*** production, since bull***
often begins with some little smidge of truth, like the hearsay
headline or the overheard opinion. The bullshitter knows a little
something, or thinks that he does, and rather than admit ignorance,
soldiers bravely on. All of us, save for the most scrupulous, have
doubtless blithered our way through a conversation regarding matters we
do not know much about, like talking about "unrest"-a classic
bull*** euphemism-in a place we couldn't point to on a map.

Copyright © 2005 by Laura Penny

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