A Dramatic Announcement

As yet another academic year begins, I am making this dramatic announcement of an entirely new discipline: Bullshit Studies.  This will not only join the many Studies now extant but also critique them, yet in a more robust manner than the former reigning champions, deconstruction and postmodern semiotics, which incidentally were bullshit.

Bullshit Studies has vast potential.  Bullshit fertilizes every field, in and beyond academia.  Some fields, such as politics and television, produce very little other than bullshit.  Calling bullshit is our chief mode of analysis.  But we are developing tools to measure it.  We will start with the Bullshit Detector, and a scale of from 1 to 5 units of bullshit.  These units are called Hemingways, or "hems."

For example, calling this a "dramatic announcement" gets 1 hem, as it is simple p.r. bullshit.  Referring to "we" gets 2 hems, as it is actual quantifiable deception.

Some people more or less embody bullshit, which will require a different tool to measure.  We're working on that.  We must develop a way to distinguish bullshit by membership ( Republicans are basically bullshit) and then bullshit beyond that (Cowboy Rick, Newt Romney, etc.)  Of course, individuals can belong to a not entirely bullshit political party or view, and still be bullshit.  Ariana Huffington, for example, is bullshit.

As an academic discipline, we look forward to taking over as many academic departments as possible.  It's a long road.  We'll probably start small, perhaps at the Fringe Festival of the Modern Language Association convention.  But it can be done, as deconstruction proved.  When we are able to deny tenure to anybody not swearing fealty to Bullshit Studies, then we know we have conquered.

But professing Bullshit Studies does not require advanced degrees.  We uphold the highest standards of scholarship and analysis, but as everyone knows, advanced degrees are bullshit.

Today we start by calling bullshit on those big mouths-- Republican, Democrat, and Mr. & Ms. InBetween--who are complaining that Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene was overhyped.  Defining "overhyped" in non-tautological terms in reference to cable television will require years of systematic analysis (and perhaps a particle collider), so absent that, let's look at the substance of the charge in terms of impact and of actions--evacuations, precautions, money spent.

The impact of Irene is still being felt, long after the cable TV reporters have put away their rubber boots.  It's true that the media capitals of Manhattan and Washington did not suffer the impacts forecast in television animations.  The cameras, starved for shots of the Washington Monument toppled by the wind, or the Statue of Liberty swamped by the seas, had to be content to focus on reporters too dumb to get in out of the rain.  But since the cameras were switched off, the death toll has more than doubled.  Entire towns are flooded, in Vermont, New York state and New Jersey.  Roads are split and useless in North Carolina.  A million or more people are still without power.  Damages are likely to amount to from $6 billion to $12 billion--which ranks Irene in the top twenty most expensive hurricanes, and possibly the most expensive category one storm ever.

As for the precautions, pointing to the very statistic that suggests their success as evidence of their failure--the relatively low casuality figures--is bullshit.  It's 3 hem bullshit, which is characterized by repetition and is shared by a number of people who should know better, but that group of people is not totally bullshit--there are a fair number of idiots (including hopeless and temporary idiots) there as well.  Here's some suggested reading on the subject.

It's worth noting that an additional problem with forecasting storms these days is that we're in terra incognita thanks to the Climate Crisis, and its multiple effects over time.  That Irene may turn out to wreak most of its devastation with inland flooding is a prime example.

It's not clear at this point whether House maj leader Eric Cant is going to force FEMA to shut down without a deal on cuts to offset its budget appropriations, or whether he's just making those noises.  Cant is a challenge to Bullshit Studies.  He is himself bullshit.  But then there are his various actions, which require careful and nuanced application of Bullshit Detector categorization.  Fortunately, unlike FEMA and weather forecasting, this does not require GOPer-approved government funding. Which by the way has been cut for improving the very forecasting that bullshitters are complaining was inadequate.  That's a lot of bullshit.

Meanwhile there are huge ongoing wildfires in the heat of Texas and Oklahoma, and another tropical storm (Katia) in the Atlantic.  Storms, by the way, are not bullshit.

Footnote: (see, it is an academic thing.)  Our unit of measurement, the hem, is named after Ernest Hemingway because of his famous quotation (which is not so famous perhaps since I'm about to explain it): "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector."  Unlike many famous quotations attributed to people who never said or wrote them, this one is not bullshit--that is, Hemingway actually "said" it: in his Paris Review interview (republished in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series, p.239.)