I’m Not Dead Yet!

I know it seems like I’ve dropped off the face of the Earth, but I assure you I am alive and well. In fact, tonight, I’ll be going out to catch Patton Oswalt’s show at the State Theatre, which would be particularly difficult had I shuffled off this mortal coil.

It just seems like I’ve been positively swamped. Between bizarrely scheduled focus groups, to early-morning taping sessions, to NTSC-to-PAL DVD transcoding, to cutting together a trailer for Bystander, to working on the updated video for the Tohubohu site, to trying to finish up some long-overdue writing projects, it just seems like I haven’t been able to get a free moment.

I did read an especially interesting book last week — On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt. I had seen the book profiled on The Daily Show (and since I caught the 11:00 p.m. show, they actually read the title aloud), and was curious about it. It’s actually a pretty good read — though Pam’s thought was that writing a book about bullshit is pretty much an exercise in bullshit in the first place.

I suppose my big takeaway was that the main difference between a bullshitter and a liar is that a liar actually does care about the truth, as he is deliberately trying to obscure it. A bullshitter really doesn’t care about the truth — the truth or falsehood of his statement is entirely incidental. A bullshitter is interested solely in creating a particular perception about himself rather than actually conveying (or not conveying) the state of reality.

An intersting observation. I couldn’t help but draw the obvious comparisons with the Tsar’s regime. People (myself included) have often said that they don’t know what’s scarier — the notion that Bush is lying, or the possibility that he actually believes the inanity he spouts. And to a degree, that may be oversimplifying things. Whereas someone like Dick Cheney is clearly a liar, going out of his way to deny a truth of which he is completely cognizant, Bush is really a lot more like the kid who didn’t study for his essay test and is just filling pages with material, hoping that it’ll baffle people just enough that they don’t realize he has no idea what he’s talking about.