Curtain hanger My psychologist is trying to get me to go easier on myself. I tend to judge myself harshly. An example might be this week at school. We had a couple days when most of our students were out for some testing, so we had to figure out what to do with a handful of kids. If you teach them something important, you only have to re-teach it to the others. If you don't teach them anything important, why are you in school? Whichever way you choose is unsatisfying. I like to feel I've accomplished something at the end of the week. So I chose, and then I felt bad about my choice, and had to remind myself that I didn't choose to mar my week by sending most of the kids away to testing, and I shouldn't blame myself.

When my shrink was first trying to get me to lighten up, he pointed at the curtain hanger in his office. It was slightly bent and it was exposed, when it should be tucked behind the curtain. He told me the curtain guys installed it wrong. He confessed that his normal tendency would be to look at it every day and feel frustrated, but he has learned not to beat himself up about little things like that. When he gets to it, he'll get to it. In the mean time, it isn't doing any harm.

It's been months now, and every time I go to therapy I notice he still hasn't fixed it.

It bothers me. Just a little. I'm only telling you because I can't tell him.  ¶ 8:13 PM 0 Comments

  On Bush and Bullshit Did our president lie his way into a disastrous war? Rather than facing the tedium of the factual record, I would like to approach this question by examining the philosophy of lies and their bastard cousin, bullshit. The key work in the area is On Bullshit, a book by Harry G. Frankfurt. Despite its title, the book is a completely serious work of analytical philosophy.

Frankfurt points out that every lie is actually two lies. One is the lie about what is the case in the world, for example, “I am entitled to a tax refund of X dollars.” This is a lie, of course, because we have exaggerated or fabricated some of our itemized deductions. In making this false claim about the world, we must also lie about our mental state. Our claim entails a second, implicit claim to be experiencing the mental state of believing our statement to be true. Such a mental state is incompatible with our actual ideation, which includes thoughts such as, “I’ll just tell them I lost the reciepts,” and “Nobody gets audited anyway.”

With this understanding of the dual nature of lies, Frankfurt turns to the question of bullshit. When we bullshit, as opposed to when we lie, we do not knowingly misstate the truth of what is or is not the case. The truth of the case is irrelevent to a bullshitter; he is not knowingly misstating the case, because he does not know or care what the case may be. A bullshitter tells no explicit lie. He only tells the implicit lie, the second kind of lie that liars tell. The bullshitter is only lying about his mental state: he wants us to believe he knows and cares what is or is not the case, when in fact he does not know or care.

Given his equananimity in the face of post-invasion revelations, it is obvious that President Bush did not know or care what was the case with Hussein’s WMDs and ties to al Qaida. But there is more.

In the run-up to war, President Bush authorized the creation of an organization that may be regarded as a kind of model institutional organ for the production and dessimination of bullshit. He called it the “Iraq Study Group.” This name itself is two-thirds bullshit, because while it was a group, he didn’t expect it to study Iraq. The stated purpose of the group was to provide access for the president and other select leaders to unfiltered intelligence about Saddam’s purported WMDs and links to al Qaida.

What does it mean to filter intelligence? Well, if someone offers a report in which someone claims he witnessed the processing WMDs in a certain building in Iraq on such and such a date, filtering this intelligence would mean considering the reports of other agents and agencies to consider whether, for example, such a building exists, where the man actually was on the date he named, whether he would have been given access to the building, or whether, say, he may instead have been a substance abuser with crushing debts who just made the whole thing up to get asylum for his family.

Or, if one were handed documents purporting to authorize shipments of uranium from an African country, filtering the intelligence might mean asking allied intelligence services in, say, Italy, whether they aren’t just a cheap forgery, or checking to see if anyone might ever have been sent to Africa to check out the story.

Unfiltered intelligence lacks the benefit of such attention. As we have seen, and as intelligence analysts will confirm, intelligence can only provide an accurate picture of what is in fact the case if it has been filtered.

For this reason, unfiltered intelligence is useless to a decision maker who wants to know or to tell the truth. It is no more useful to a decision maker who wants to lie. In order to lie, one must know the truth, so that one can distort or deny it in the lie.

Unfiltered intelligence is only useful for a decision maker if he wants to bullshit. For this it is unmatched. Unfiltered intelligence allows a leader to illustrate any position he chooses without ever shouldering the burden of knowing what is or is not in fact the case.

It is possible that President Bush told some lies on the road to war, but his favored approach was to bullshit.

At the end of his book, Professor Frankfurt notes that liars are condemned more readily and with greater vehemence than mere bullshitters. He argues that liars value the truth more than do bullshitters, because liars must know the truth to construct their lie, while bullshitters have no use for it at all. Those who value truth, he says, should fear bullshit at least as much as they do lies.

I think we should join Professor Frankfurt in asking, as he does at the end of his book, why we should bother to condemn lies if we are perfectly willing to tolerate bullshit.

Labels: Iraq

  ¶ 4:55 PM 0 Comments

  Mr. Smarty-pants shops for socks Shopping for socks I become frustrated trying to find my type and color. All I know is it's a Gold Toe wool sock named after a city in England, but almost all the Gold Toes seem to be named after cities in England. "Canterbury." "Windsor.""Cambridge." It's such an obvious ploy. A salesperson offers assistance, and I tell her I need a wool Gold Toe named after some city in England, but my problem is I can't remember which city in England is the home of my sock.

As soon as I make my little joke I feel like a dork, because I've told it to the wrong person. A department store salesperson isn't likely to share my urbane cynicism about the shallow pretensions of dress-sock marketing. It probably hasn't even occurred to her that the socks' names come from cities in England.

"Are these the ones you want?" she asks, holding up the "Edinburgh."

"Yes, those are the ones," I reply.

"Edinburgh is in Scotland," she corrects me drily. "What color do you want?"  ¶ 8:45 PM 0 Comments

  Traffic Needing to explain situational irony to my students yesterday, I told the following story:

I once had a student who almost always came tardy to first period. I raised the issue with her, and she complained that the traffic on her way to school is very bad. I suggested that since she knows that traffic is bad, she should leave home earlier. She responded that she cannot leave earlier because she can't get ready that fast. I suggested that she set her alarm earlier. "I already wake up as early as possible," she exclaimed.

I couldn't figure out what that could mean, so I stopped trying to reason with her and called her mom. I told her that her daughter was often late to first period.

"Well," she said, "The traffic is very bad..."

The happy thing about this is that the students laughed when I told it. One occupational hazard high school teachers face is being susceptible to the belief that teenagers are exceptional creatures of pure unreason. Both this story and my students' response to it remind me that teenagers are just people, and more like other people than not.  ¶ 8:20 AM 0 Comments

  Headline news at Marshall High The latest news from the school where I teach:

Student IDs teacher: "You look like that white guy on that TV show!"

Buy back begins with index cards, 3 things we don't know about you

Special test prep bell schedule interrupted by earthquake awareness drill schedule

Student model of Globe Theatre discovered in cabinet predates actual Globe Theatre

This week's 'Nooner' lunchtime activity: Bumfights!  ¶ 10:43 AM 0 Comments

  So much water so close to home Last night I complained because my wife bought potato chips. I have complained about this before. In the interests of the kind of titilating confession a web blog is supposed to offer, below I shall I rank my complaints about potato chips in descending order. The descent will be from my ostensibly wholesome complaints to the atavistic ones they hide.

1) They might give our son poor eating habits.
2) While I would never go out of my way to eat them, if they are around I will eat them.
3) I fear my wife will eat them by the handfuls and get fat.
4) They are white trash food.

While I hewed faithfully to numbers 1 and 2 in the subsquent argument, I felt sure my wife suspected the loathsome presence of numbers 3 and 4, the latter of which she probably read in the context of prior aspersions I may have intimated about her extended family.

She is sometimes physically demonstrative in arguments, so she picked up the bag, crushed all the potato chips inside it, and threw it away. My son's face doubled up as the injustice of the situation overcame him, my wife left the room, and I was left to soothe him while we ate the burritos that my wife had prepared for us. She had bought the meat and tortillas on the same trip to the store in which she had also procured the disputed chips.

She didn't talk to me for an hour and a half.

That night, she came to bed with one of my Raymond Carver books. She never reads Carver. She likes to curl up in bed with a flashlight to read long, accomplished novels of fantasy, imagination or suspense. But here she was kneeling in the middle of our bed, the book opened to somewhere in the middle, just kneeling there reading it.

"Why are you reading that?" I asked, surprised.

"No reason," she replied.

"What do you mean, no reason?" I asked.

We always tell each other our reasons for everything. I thought about the Carver stories, with their couples who talk past each other while the silences between their words hold the truth of their relationships.

I watched my wife's eyes scan the page, and I decided I should speak before it was too late.

"You're going to divorce me, aren't you?"

She looked up from the page and smiled.  ¶ 5:21 PM 0 Comments