Monday, November 2, 2020

In the business of Bullshit.


The other day a piece of copy came back to my desk, my virtual desk. 

I had errantly used the word "precision." It's a good wood. It connotes attention to detail. It imbues commitment. And a sense of demanding rigor. But an eagle-eyed account person flagged me down because in the context I was using it it was puffery. It could not be substantiated.

In other words, my word was Bullshit. 

Upon reflection it occurred to me, that I, and perhaps you, and perhaps many of us have been gainfully employed in the Bullshit Business. We try to sell, what somebody pays us to sell, stuff to people who either don't know about what we're selling, or don't know that they need, or want what we're selling.

In the process of doing so we have become masters in the art of bullshitting. 

We can smell an overpromise from 100 miles away. We can spot weasel words the way a barn owl can spot a yard rat with a gimp leg. We can catch a whiff of ovine feces while standing in the eye of an F5 hurricane.

That is why we are so triggered by this Lyle Lanley clone who has bullshitted his shabby way into the White House four years ago, destroyed this country and done everything but sell us a Monorail to escape our current woes.

"You don't need a Covid cure, 

you don't need a vaccine.

What you need is a monorail

to get you from Boston to Racine."


"Mon O Rail, Mon O Rail, Mon O Rail."


By the way, if you haven't seen this Simpsons episode, make it a point to do so. The first few seasons featuring the work of Conan O'Brien, the talented David X. Cohen and Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein (the savant genii who hired Rob Schwartz and I to write an episode of their show Mission Hill), were incredible and prescient.

The allegory -- I think its an allegory -- stands the test of time. 

Because while Lyle is peddling his unique brand of manure, the unwashed masses of Springfield are gleefully eating it up. Suspecting they are being sold a bad bill of goods but swept up in the populist euphoria that has done in, so many civilization in the past.

This is where we are at today, the day before the election. 

Tomorrow 100,000 million Americans will cast their vote, close to a 100 million are already have via early voting. 

And they will decide whether we listen to science, the counsel of experts across all fields, and return to the rule of law, or whether we let the spray tanned, wig wearing Lyle Lanley continue to gorge himself at the taxpayer revenue trough, sell our national security secrets to the highest bidder, and wave something shiny in our face to distract us from the atrocities he has committed and will continue to commit for the next four miserable, unbearable, fucking years.

Something shiny, like a Monorail.




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