This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 18, 2010 - Asked to cite one quality that a person needed to develop to become an effective writer, Ernest Hemingway replied, "a built-in, shock-proof, bullshit detector."
I learned about bullshit from my father. He was an intelligent and kind man with a keen sense of humor. He'd enlisted in the Marine Corps the day after Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was all of 17. He spent the next four years touring the South Pacific with the First Marine Division. By the time he was honorably discharged at war's end, he'd turned 21 and was finally old enough to buy a bottle of beer legally.
He told me once that he considered every day after the war to be a bonus. Fate had sent him home where he would meet my mother and start a career, while so many of his buddies left this mortal coil on remote islands with exotic names like Guadalcanal and Bougainville.
Perhaps because he'd come of age while doing battle with the Japanese Imperial Army, he never took the routine trials of everyday living too seriously. He also had an extremely low tolerance for nonsense, and was quick to call bullshit when he noticed it.
Though he never considered himself to be a hero, he was buried at Jefferson Barracks with the full military honors due a combat veteran. Just one more Marine who'd done his job, reporting for the final roll call.
If Pop were still with us, I suspect that his bullshit detector would be working overtime. That's because BS is content-free language that's spoken to conceal rather than reveal. The hidden agenda may be some nefarious plot or it may be the simple fact that the speaker doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, but in either case, we're presently drowning in this inane verbiage. Consider the 2008 presidential campaign as an example.
Barack Obama ran for office on a platform of "hope" and "change." Given the intellectual rigor of those terms, he might as well have been selling pixie dust.
Hope is the irrational expectation that dreams will become reality. If you told my father that you hoped something would happen, he'd tell you to "wish in one hand and crap in the other, then see which one fills up faster."
And change, as Heraclites first noted, is a constant -- the world turns and things change. But what was Barack going to change? A 10-dollar bill? The national mood? His underwear? Candidate Obama wasn't big on specifics.
Under normal circumstances, I'd never consider voting for a guy spouting such vague BS, but the Republicans managed to up the ante by adding Sarah Palin to their ticket. Here was a vice-presidential aspirant with firm foreign policy convictions who'd never heard of the Korean War. The perfect modern candidate: a content-free person.
Of course, BS on the campaign trail is hardly a new development, but there was a time when politicians would lighten up after the election and set about the task of governing. Unfortunately, as our politics became increasingly ideological, the opportunities for practical compromise became correspondingly rare because ideology is to BS what Nebraska is to corn.
The appeal of ideology is that it relieves the true believer of the burden of critical thought. Conservatives, for instance, would cure any and all economic woes through tax cuts:
In 2001, when the economy was booming and we enjoyed a budget surplus, it was obviously time to cut taxes because the government was collecting too much money. Now that we're mired in recession and face stunning deficits, we need to cut taxes to stimulate the economy.
For the past 30 years, conservatives have promoted the counter-intuitive notion that decreasing tax rates increases tax revenue because of the economic stimulus the cuts provide. Although this supply-side BS has never worked when actually implemented, the slogan has been repeated so often that many people think it's a generally accepted principle of economics, which it is not.
Right-wingers have also managed to demonize the estate tax by labeling it a "death tax." Hint: If the dead were really paying the bill, no one would care. It's the heirs of the dead who pay the tax, and they care a lot.
Complaining that their windfall was already "taxed once" when it was earned originally, they find it unjust that they have to pay taxes on it as well. This argument conveniently overlooks the fact that all taxes are collected when money changes hands, and they weren't the people who paid the original levy.
Under the death tax theory, coal miners in West Virginia have to pay their fair share to support the government, but those who earn their living by lounging poolside while waiting for Mums to pass are exempt. Really? Which group benefits most by maintaining the status quo?
The lame-duck Congress has now convened to decide what to do about the inconvenient fact that the Bush tax cuts are about to expire. These cuts were heavily tilted in favor of the top 2 percent of earners and also gradually did away with the dreaded death tax.
But because the GAO projections of their long-term impact were so dire, they were passed with a sunset provision to make the math appear more reasonable. (If your bullshit detector just went off, move to the head of the class.) In January, all federal taxes -- including estate taxes -- will revert to pre-2001 levels. Bush, in effect, won a 10-year holiday for his wealthy supporters and then left it to his successor to figure out what to do next.
While there is general agreement that it's a bad idea to raise taxes on what's left of the middle class in the midst of a recession, Democrats have proposed allowing the cuts to expire for the top bracket. Republicans, who howl the loudest about the dangers of deficits, are adamantly opposed.
The late Lars-Erik Nelson once observed, "The enemy is not conservatism. The enemy is not liberalism. The enemy is bullshit." It would appear that the enemy is winning.
M.W.Guzy is a retired St. Louis cop who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.