Bullshit has become such a pervasive form of political speech in the Trump world, it deserves attention as a specific rhetorical style. Most of us use the word to mean something is incorrect: “That’s bullshit!” The first time I heard the term “bullshit artist” was in the 1971 film, Carnal Knowledge, where two college students, played by Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, used it as a semi-complimentary exclamation after some amazing thing the other one said, the rough equivalent of “No way, dude!” But since American philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a short book, On Bullshit, in 2005, the term has been used to refer to a specific form of speech.
The staid and proper Fareed Zakaria talked about Frankfurt’s book and about Trump as “bullshit artist” on CNN in August, 2016, during the heat of the presidential campaign and again a few days ago. They’re both reasonably short and worth a listen.
Zakaria quotes Frankfurt’s book to distinguish between lying and bullshitting. “Telling a lie,” Frankfurt writes, “is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point.” Bullshit, on the other hand, “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false . . . [It] has spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.” Frankfurt concludes that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
Trump is a legendary bullshit artist—he’s been indulging in it throughout his adult life — who piles heaping helpings of narcissism and pathology on top. Our own Doug Ducey is a lower level practitioner, but skilled nonetheless. We see him practice his art regularly when he adopts the mantle of “friend of education.” He never tires of complimenting himself for pushing Prop 123, without acknowledging that it resulted in schools getting a portion of what the state owed them by law, and mostly from the schools’ own money, the state land trust fund, not the state budget. That makes him less antagonistic to public education than many of his Republican colleagues, but a friend of public education? Hardly. And he’s in danger of doing himself injury as he pounds himself on the back for “supporting teachers” by adding a few hundred dollars to their yearly salaries. Both assertions are half true, half false and all bullshit.
Now Ducey is congratulating himself for throwing his support behind renewing Prop 301, which assured schools that they would receive the money that was stolen from them by the state and partially returned through Prop 123. Prop 301 expires in 2020.
“I’ve not worked as hard as I’ve worked on Prop 123 to get funding to K-12 education to let us fall off a cliff,” the governor said.
Good old Ducey, giving his all to keep us in 49th place in per student funding so we don’t slip to number 50. Hell of a guy.
And why is anti-tax Ducey supporting the renewal of a six-tenths of a cent sales tax? Because it’s not really a tax.
“This is a funding program,” he argued.
Using that logic, I can think of plenty of other “funding programs” I’d like to see the state undertake, especially if the “funding” comes from the people and corporations who can best afford to pay for them.
If Ducey was truly a friend of education, he’d support the education groups who are pushing to raise the Prop 301 renewal “funding” from six-tenths of a cent to a penny. Not gonna happen. But he claims he’s “negotiating” with the education community about ways to improve the proposition—which, apparently, is news to members of the education community who say they have yet to be consulted.
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2017.
This article is bullshit.
Amen sister!
I’m going out on a limb here but when a politician runs on a platform of reining in the excesses of Wall Street while taking in tens of millions in campaign contributions and speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and assorted hedge fund managers, Bullshitting has been raised to an art form. But I digress….
Yeah, but she lost the election last November. We are all better off.
You can keep your healthcare plan.
You can keep your doctor.
You’re premiums will go down $2500 per year.
He rarely shares his opinions regarding controversial topics, like the Muslum ban. I don’t understand how the governor of a border state was able to remain silent on the topic. Called just about everyday and everyday he had not come up with an opinion? Seems like he’s afraid of his shadow and is a definite yes man to Trump. Not impressed and disappointed with the people of Arizona for not demanding more.
Its amazing that Safier can so easily recognize a pile of steaming BS when it comes to our President and our Governor, but not our recently “resigned” Superintendent of TUSD schools, HT Sanchez. He is right that our Governor is no friend of education. Nonetheless, Sanchez called in a recent letter, for us all to congratulate Ducey on his desire to give all day kindergarten to ALL of our students–I guess despite Safier’s misplaced support, Sanchez doesn’t read his articles, like this one–http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archi… David makes it clear that ALL of our students are not represented in the governor’s plan. In addition to misplaced support for Sanchez, I fear Safier’s support for his so called “education community” is also misguided. His friends all supported and pushed through Proposition 123, promising that it would all be used for classrooms and teacher salaries (and then voted to put only a small percentage in that direction). Then they promised us that they’d be “watching those triggers” and making sure that there were steps 4,5 and 6. All I can say is that they must not have grandkids, not a one of them, because at the rate their support is taking us, there will BE no funding for public schools in the future, as the “principal” of the State Trust lands gets whittled away. With friends like these, as they say, who needs enemies?
Can anyone provide a logical reason for the Republican general practice of taking funding away from the very things that will make this country richer and more competitive down the road? Their duplicity boggles the mind. On the one hand, they generally support fat cats and corporations in avoiding taxation; evidently failing to realize that fat cats and burgeoning corporate coffers couldn’t exist in today’s competitive technical world without the creative energy of – who? – highly educated graduates that required years of top notch and expensive education to learn how to squeeze every available cent out of the American money machine and into their offshore accounts.
You can’t educate Republicans. The comments on this and several other websites confirms that they are uneducated and want their kids to live down to that same standard. Everyone wonders why there aren’t many Republicans in institutions of higher learning but I have always contended that their brains are functioning at full capacity most of the time and it isn’t sufficient to get them much beyond a high school education. Putting a Republican in a college or university teaching position would be like putting a 2 cylinder engine in a NASCAR vehicle to run the Daytona 500. It’s laughable!!
It is all well and good to attack Republicans as dumb, as Beneal Good would have it. That is a very good indicator of how and why the Democratic Party has lost the executive branch, the legislative branch, soon the judicial branch, a majority of state governorships and state legislatures. Boy, are they ever stupid! By extension, it could be argued looking at the electoral map following the last election, that virtually the entire country is inhabited by dullards of voting age. I’m neither a Republican or a Democrat but this is the sort of commentary that makes it clear we are in deep water politically and locked in a cycle of blindness and tone deaf reaction.
Everyone knows the working class pays the largest percentage of sales tax. Ergo, it’s the only tax Ducey can love, a mere annoyance to his demographic.
Since we are talking about bull manure, education and truth, let’s talk about some fundamentals. To define a school as a public school when it is closed to 99.6% of the public is an abuse of the language. It is not a public school at all, it is a district school and most districts are specifically designed to keep the poor and minorities out. So, ergo, districts are a racist institution. People who propagate racist institutions are logically ….
Since we began school choice in 1993 (I was the deciding vote on the education committee), most but not all schools in Arizona have become open to the public. The charter school movement made that possible. Yes, now we have the beginnings of a public school system.
The last piece of the equation is allowing students is to quit our bigotry and to allow students to not only receive their public education at district and charter schools but at religious schools. Then, every school in the state will be open to the public.
Hundreds of well paid Russian agents have infiltrated Comments sections across the country in publications both large and small.
That sounds crazy!