Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit

A noble endeavor by someone who deep down is sincere and concerned about the consequences of BS in public policy and advertising. Good for a cursory overview and might even get some people worked up enough to pay more attention. However, this book is written with very little in-depth information and a lot of BS. The tone of the book is a serious problem. The author complains about the dumbing down of information, but spends half the book trying to be cute/funny. Example: on the rise of mutual funds: "Throughout the nineties, people looked at their lazy-ass money, snoozing away in their savings accounts, and told that money to get off the couch, quit eating bonbons, and get to work." Another example of BS: a Latin error on pg. 78: "there is a lovely Latin term in corporate law, ultra vires, beyond men, that refers to actions beyond the power granted by the corporate charter." No. "ultra vires" means "beyond one's power/strength." This is a common first-year Latin error. It was unnecessary to translate "ultra vires" at all: she could have just said "ultra vires in corporate law refers to actions" etc., but the decision to include a very poorly researched translation (for what purpose? to appear smarter? Harry Frankfurt would call this BS) corrodes for me the reliability of the rest of this text.

With the Western world choking on its own bullshit, watching things fall apart because we've believed our own lines, Laura Penny rides to the rescue, shovel in hand, to help us dig ourselves out. Compared to that other book, "On Bullshit," Penny's book is a breath of fresh air. No intimidating philosophical trappings, no faux-analytical setup, no nonsense. Compared to this book, "On Bullshit" is full of, um, shit.

She trains her sights on big drug companies, big business, big government, and all the other peddlers of insincerity, mendacity and falseness. And she does it in a way that's approachable and fun.

More on that "fun": Lots of social critics have tried using a sort of streetwise swagger in their language (see John Dicker's "United States of Wal-Mart" for an example with mixed results). But Penny pulls it off. Why? Perhaps it's because she does it all with a knowing smile. Criticizing the president by starting a sentence, "Dude's ..." or using offhand slang to mix it up when discussing Big Pharma. It comes off as fun, not forced, plain-speaking, not pretension. It's harder to do than most think. I really liked the book a lot. (It doesn't hurt that she's youngish, cute and Canadian.)

A bit outdated (circa 2004) but still painfully accurate. Gives a nice breakdown of the major sources of bullshit and why they will essentially never go away (hint: MONEY). Somewhat depressing, but it's refreshing to hear someone actually speak about these things openly. Worth reading.

This is one of the greatest books I've ever read!

Not what I expected

Upon starting this book I thought, "wouldn't it be ironic if this book itself turned out to be bullshit"? Alas, despite my high hopes going in, that's exactly what it is.

To start with, there are the small issues, such as the fact that, having been written in 2005, most of the content and especially tone of this book is hopelessly dated by today's standards - anything bitching about the Bush administration is just hopelessly passe these days, and the fact that the author didn't like the bullshit-laden cynicism of that administration seems to be pretty much the entire point of this book, at a time when such sentiments were hardly unique. With the exception of a few mildly interesting "organization of knowledge" type ideas about the nature of bullshit in the first few pages, there isn't a single thought in this book that someone else hadn't already thought of by 2005. This would be fine if not for Penny's annoying habit of turning every. single. sentence. into a series of rhetorical flourishes in a tone that screams "look at how clever and edgy I am", but mostly just succeeds in conveying that she's trying too hard to be clever and edgy. This makes her writing not only difficult to scan but tiresome to actually read.

I would've been willing to forgive this transgression, though, if not for the much larger issue that Penny makes no effort whatsoever to be anything but derivative of all of the other anti-Bush screeds circulating at the time, or to actually show that she is capable of using her education in any way other than appealing to that laziest common denominator of Bush-era liberal discontent. Absolutely no attempt is made at any time to cite any actual facts or to make any original contribution beyond the first few pages. It should therefore come as no surprise that Penny's argument is riddled with factual errors. At first, it's just minor, annoying things such as referring to her disdain for commercials featuring a nonexistent SUV called the "Chevrolet Tacoma", but as the book goes on she starts misquoting history in ways that undermine her argument (e.g. misidentifying both Jamestown and New England as being essentially corporate constructions from the beginning, when New England was no such thing.) and assuming that the reader has never heard of and apparently will never hear of James Comey, who as of this writing is head of the FBI. [May 2017 update: No one will ever hear of James Comey? Never ever? Hoo boy...]If Penny had made errors like this once or twice it would be forgivable, but she does it so often that it undermines her credibility, since mostly these are errors that would require about a minute of Google time in order to fix. Dude, if Al Franken could cite his sources for the anti-Bush screeds he produced during this period, so can you.

That this sort of shoddy, mass-produced work should appear in a one-dimensional liberal screed about how shoddy and mass-produced our culture has become is as ironic as it is sad, because it doesn't challenge the premise that even our "intellectual" polemics in opposition to mass-produced bullshit have to be mass-produced bullshit in and of themselves. Despite its initial intentions, this book is ultimately a product of the very same corporate profiteering and societal attention span issues that Penny herself is railing against. It exists not because Penny is a brilliant, or even coherent author, but simply because there was a market for this sort of writing in 2005, so someone published it to cash in, seeing the potential market of 59,028,444 (John Kerry's share of the 2004 electorate) US citizens alone who were dissatisfied with the then-present administration.

Penny's failure to recognize this, as well as the unfortunately dated nature of many of these observations, is really what makes this book so insufferable. It also explains why, when I bought this book shortly after Obama took office, it was out of a stack of about two dozen remainders. It's a shame, because there are some good ideas recycled here, and even a handful of entertaining witticisms, but ultimately this is just not a book that will appeal to most people this far after the fact, at least if you want anything more than superficial affirmation that your dislike of George W. Bush ten years ago was probably justified for one reason or another. As if evidence of that fact wasn't painfully obvious today in too many other ways.

Penny's book is not as much as a non-fiction account your current society as much as a very well-researched rant. Her premise is that our society rests on a base of bright, shiny gossamer thin bullshit. She differentiates "bullshit" and "lies" by stating the liars still know the truth and care enough about it that they are trying to obfuscate around it. Bullshitters just don't care. Whatever works for them at the moment will do. Our economy and government are castles in the sky, created by the fuming puffs of meaningless hot-air emitted from politicians, PR firms, advertisers and CEOs. For all the words we hear, very few have any depth or real meaning.

Now, none of this is any news to me, nor I doubt to you. However, Penny's writing style is what makes this book so delightful. No calm and journalistic phraseology here, no sirree bob. She rips into our culture with a language born of Gen-X, television and a society of distrustful cynics.

"When I was rooting around for exemplary Republicans, and began looking at DeLay, I liked him for a number of reasons. He and all the lesser Tom Delays, who share his Christ-and-Mammon creed but lack his diabolical skills, are loving proof that I am not paranoid. My most tinfoil-hatted fantasies pale in comparison to the things right-wing radical like Delay and his ilk actually say and do."

And for you SNC grads, there's even a chapter entitled "painting the lawn green."

- hilarious and entertaining...and yet intelligent and well-reasoned...Penny is a University Professor with a refreshingly youthful edge as she uses the word "ginormous" and writes sentences like "Dude wasn't even trying."
- a bit like Rick Mercer's ('This Hour Has 22 Minutes') Rants, but in greater depth and casting a wider net
- fun quote: "The media is a critical line of defence against, and a great disseminator of, bullshit. They have the power to make shit up, let shit slide, or make sure that the shit hits the fan."
- regarding U.S./Canada relations: "Sometimes I think this bond is a sibling rivalry. Canada thinks America is loud and dumb, and America thinks that Canada is lame and boring, but they are still brothers..."