Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Dedication

  For Sarah and Nems in Zurich

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 The contempt of conflation

  2 The conflation of kings, despots and similar buggers

  3 Kings and the big boy

  4 The slither of expertise

  5 The god of post hoc bull

  6 Holy water

  7 It’s simple: vote for me

  8 May I blame Walt?

  9 The puppy that never grows up

  10 It’s natural, see

  11 Be afraid

  12 Keep being afraid

  13 Bad news isn’t bad news

  14 Good old Occam

  15 Just give them a tune

  16 O sing of His grace

  17 We won

  18 Parochial milking

  19 The uniqueness of Wayne

  20 Just like us

  21 Oi you

  22 Riding the seesaw of meaning

  23 Another word for it

  24 Dressing up

  25 Beat it down, in the name of the father

  26 All hands to the pump

  27 Happy together

  28 The tyranny of the image

  29 Branding

  30 My sort of pope

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, bullshit is a noun, a transitive verb and an intransitive verb. In other words you can talk bullshit, you can bullshit someone or you can just bullshit in general. In addition, though the OED doesn’t mention it, the word serves as an adjective. One regularly hears of bullshit arguments, though less regularly than one should. Most arguments are bullshit. I have yet to hear bullshit used as an adverb — he spoke bullshittily — but don’t write it off. The word is young and vigorous.

  Again according to the OED, the first recorded use of bullshit with its current meaning is from a poem written in 1928 by E.E. Cummings. Cummings liked to be known as e e cummings, which is a nice example of bullshit. The refusal to use punctuation added nothing to his poetry but it did make people notice him. In the words of the ad agencies, it was a unique selling point. As a result he is better known than most of his contemporaries, a recognition that has little to do with merit.

  In the poem one of Cummings’ characters referred to a war as being ‘a lotta bullsh*t’. I can’t tell you which war but I’ve no doubt he was right. Bullshit has been and continues to be a feature of most wars. The reason is simple: the people who do the fighting are likely to suffer and unlikely to gain. Their leaders are in the opposite position. So those leaders need to resort to bullshit in order to persuade the fighters to fight.

  The word bullshit grew up in America. I grew up in the South of England and was unfamiliar with the word until, I think, the late 1970s. The word took root because it filled a need. British English had nothing as potent. Such archaisms as poppycock and balderdash could only be used on stage or by ex-squadron leaders with vast moustaches, and otherwise there were only such innocent and gentle terms as rubbish and nonsense. The OED still gives these as the nearest synonyms to bullshit, but the difference is substantial.

  Bullshit is nonsense, but nonsense doesn’t have to be bullshit. Nonsense can be agreeable. Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, for example, is fondly thought of (though not very often by me).

  The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

  In a beautiful pea-green boat

  They took some honey

  And plenty of money

  Wrapped up in a five pound note.

  That’s nonsense. But it isn’t bullshit. Bullshit deceives.

  The antithesis of bullshit is reason. Reason exposes bullshit as bullshit. So bullshit is scared of reason. In consequence, and as I shall demonstrate throughout this text, bullshit constantly dresses itself up to look like reason. It’s a clear case of imitation being the sincerest flattery.

  It also illustrates the accuracy of the old myth about Truth and Falsehood, who went bathing together one warm ancient day. While Truth was frolicking in the cool water, her conscience as clear as a nun’s wimple, Falsehood nipped out of the pool, ran back to where they’d undressed and stole Truth’s clothes. When Truth emerged dripping and discovered what Falsehood had done, she decided that she would rather wear no clothes than don Falsehood’s. Hence the naked truth.

  Reason has done more than any other faculty to reveal the truth. But though we enjoy the many fruits of reason, from the plough to the internet, reason itself is not popular. Indeed reason has had its back to the wall throughout human history. And from time to time it’s had its back to the torturer’s rack while bullshitters dressed in power tried to convince it that the sun goes round the earth or that the devil had infested it or that the supreme leader was a good man or whatever species of bullshit served the current needs of the bullshitters. Reason generally prevails in the end because it can be shown to be right, but it does not do so easily. And every bit of ground it wins is constantly in danger of being repopulated by bullshit.

  Bullshit has always been with us. But as a result of the proliferation of media in the last century or so, there is now more of it than ever, and it is harder than ever to avoid. We are awash with bullshit, drowning in it. It assails us constantly, from walls and pages, from speakers and screens. It has become so accepted a part of the human landscape that bullshitters cannot merely make a living from bullshit, and achieve power and prestige and wealth from bullshit, they can even win prizes for it. Unironic prizes.

  The five standard journalistic interrogatives are who, what, why, where and how.

  Who bullshits? It is easier to list the people who don’t. One, of course, is my sainted mother. The other, obviously, is you, the reader. The rest of us, to varying degrees, are guilty.

  What is bullshit? It is the wilful use of at least partial dishonesty.

  Why do people bullshit? In order to gain an advantage of some sort, in the form of money or power. And since money is essentially an expression of power, the nub of the matter is that a bullshitter seeks some sort of power over the bullshittee, most commonly commercial power, or political power, or religious power.

  Where do people bullshit? Everywhere they can. If we in the developed world were to strip all bullshit from our streets, our screens, our papers and our airwaves we would barely recognize the civilization we were left with.

  How do people bullshit? Answering that question is the aim of this book. I mean to unpack examples of bullshit from New Zealand and elsewhere in order to expose the techniques they employ. These techniques are surprisingly few and surprisingly simple.

  There are two possible outcomes of this process. One is that the bullshitters will realize that the game is up. They will emerge en masse from their offices and their mansions and their palaces to confess their sins. A huge weight will fall from their shoulders as the politicians, the ad agencies, the experts, the pope, the motivational speakers, the mullahs, the marketers and all the unholy rest of them come forward over the brow of the hill like the von Trapp children, holding hands and singing. Never more, they sing, shall we bullshit. It will be a fine moment.

  The other possibility, a remote one, but there nevertheless, is that this book will make no difference. The bullshitters will continue to bullshit the bullshittees, using the same tired old methods. And if so, well, I will have said my piece.

  1

  The contempt of conflation

  As I begin this book, the newspapers are dominated by Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi is coming to the end of forty years of dictatorship. He is still urging his few remaining supporters to fight, to ‘drive the rats back to the se
wers they came from’, but in the best traditions of cornered dictators, he is doing this urging via the radio from some unidentified bunker. Inevitably he has announced that he will never flee his beloved Libya, that he prefers to die like a martyr on his native soil. In other words he’s planning to flee.

  I could easily, therefore, begin a discussion of bullshit with Libya, but I choose to begin on Cheapside in London one morning last summer, because that’s when I decided to write this book.

  Cheapside is a short street that runs between St Paul’s Cathedral and the City of London, so in a discussion of bullshit I could have fun at either end. But I made the decision about halfway along, outside a bank near Tesco Metro.

  It was rush hour. Men and women scurried to work, talking into cell phones, drinking coffee from paper cups with lids on, the sort of lids that used to be given only to toddlers. No one paid any attention to the bank. Its window showed a life-size image of Lewis Hamilton, the racing driver. He was wearing his white racing-driver overalls with the quasimodic hump at the back to protect his priceless spinal cord in the event of a crash. The overalls were dotted with the names of companies that had paid to be there.

  He carried his racing helmet under his arm, so as to reveal his pleasant face. His racial provenance has given him full lips, good teeth and skin the colour of fresh engine oil, youth has given him health and cheerfulness, and his skill at driving fast cars has given him wealth and fame. In other words, the bugger’s got the lot.

  There were a few words on the poster, purporting to have issued from Mr Hamilton’s smiling lips. The words were: ‘Together we are Santander.’

  Santander is a port in the north of Spain but here the name denotes the Bank of Santander, the owners of the window. In recent years this bank has expanded far beyond the city of its birth, especially in the UK. It has acquired several businesses, including Abbey National, a building society, which had in turn had previously acquired Bradford & Bingley, another building society.

  It is worth digressing for a moment to consider Bradford & Bingley. Naturally enough they used to be what their name suggests, a building society based in Bradford and Bingley. Such a name would have reassured cagey Yorkshire folk that their building society was strictly local and had nothing to do with the flash Harrys down south. But Bradford & Bingley became ambitious. It started to consort with every Tom, Dick and flash Harry it could find and by doing so it became the biggest mortgage lender in the country. Though it continued to call itself Bradford & Bingley it now had branches all over the country. And in 2008 it went bust.

  The British Government stepped in and nationalized the mortgage side of the business. It sold the rest to Abbey National. Then Santander bought Abbey National.

  Thus the bank found itself doing business a long way from Santander and facing the problem of being almost unknown to the great British public. To overcome that problem it sponsored motor racing, and hired Lewis Hamilton to be the face of the bank.

  At first glance banking has nothing to do with motor racing. At second glance, it has even less. Where banking requires prudence, motor racing requires daring. Banking is dull and safe (or is supposed to be), motor racing thrilling and dangerous. Where bankers must make provision against disaster, conscious always that they are the trusted guardians of the money that people love, racing drivers operate on the screaming edge of traction. Banking eschews risk. Motor racing courts it. Motor racing is death or glory stuff, littered with crashes. The success of a bank is dependent on its never crashing. Banks prosper by steady accumulation, whereas in motor racing the commonest outcome is loss. But the victories, though rare, are moments of huge ephemeral glory, celebrated by priapic plumes of wasted champagne.

  In short, were there a list of activities most dissimilar to retail banking, motor racing would be near the top. Which is, of course, precisely why Santander hired Lewis Hamilton. They hoped to make their sexless business seem sexy. They hoped that when the public saw or heard the name Santander, the image that rose to mind would not be of a dull bank, indistinguishable from every other dull bank, apart from its additional disadvantage of being foreign, but rather of the glamour and thrills of motor racing and a sexy young English hero.

  The bullshit involved is the technique of conflation. It is simple to the point of crudeness. If you have a product or a service, or an idea or a belief, that you wish to foist upon the world, you conflate it with something the world already knows and likes. The two things do not have to be in any way related. Indeed the more distinct they are, the more striking and memorable the effect. The idea is that if you conflate the two things with persistence, the positive emotions aroused by the known thing transfer by a sort of osmosis onto the previously unknown thing, the thing you have to foist.

  Conflation is a fundamental of bullshit. It comes in numerous forms and I shall return to it repeatedly. But for the moment I wish merely to point out that it is also fundamental to dog training.

  I am not much good at dog training. All my dogs turn into the same dog, one who is good-natured, affable and part-time obedient. The part of the time when the dog is obedient is when it doesn’t need to be. When I do need it to be, I might as well whistle Jesus.

  Nevertheless I have read several books about training dogs. The nub of the matter is behavioural conditioning. And the nub of behavioural conditioning is conflation. You conflate the things you want the dog to do with good consequences. So, for example, if the dog sits when asked to sit, it gets a biscuit. The dog rapidly understands the pattern ‘If x, then y’, which is about as far as dog reasoning goes. Sitting and biscuits become yoked together in his simple mind. Just as the bank of Santander and Lewis Hamilton become yoked in ours.

  There is, however, one vital distinction. If the dog sits, it does get a biscuit. If you open an account with Santander, you don’t get Lewis Hamilton.

  2

  The conflation of kings, despots and similar buggers

  Gaddafi didn’t manage to flee his beloved country. It seems that his beloved countrymen hauled him out of a sewage pipe and shot him. Gaddafi’s forty years of absolute rule and his refusal to step down illustrate the old truth that despots like being despots, just as kings like being kings. Very few ever abdicate. Almost everywhere throughout human history, the only way to get rid of a despot or monarch has been to wait for him to die or to kill him. Though in either case he was likely to be succeeded by his son. Breaking that dynastic pattern has been the great triumph of democracy.

  The reason kings like to be kings is not far to seek. They get to eat and drink well at the expense of their subjects. Those subjects also have sons and daughters whom kings get to enjoy, according to taste. And kings can make the rules, fun rules like taxation, to which they are not themselves subject but from which they profit. Gaddafi is said to have stashed away billions.

  The bullet or bullets that did for Gaddafi demonstrate, if demonstration were needed, that he was a frail mortal organism like every one of his subjects. That same fact was even more vividly illustrated by the capture of Saddam Hussein a few years back. When they hauled him from his literal hole in the ground, he looked like a park bench wino. The film of him undergoing a check-up from an army doctor with latex gloves and a tongue depressor was close to pitiful. It was hard to square this wild-eyed bearded wretch with the bloody tyrant.

  That rulers are little different from their subjects is, for the rulers, an awkward truth. It is easier to rule if your subjects revere you, but they need a reason to do so. The qualities that often distinguish despots, such as brutality, selfishness and a pathological lust for power, are not endearing ones. So the despots need to suggest better things about themselves. And to this end they have always engaged in various forms of bullshit, one of which is conflation.

  But they have to be careful. By definition, a king is the apex of his society. So if he were to set about conflating himself with, say, the Lewis Hamilton of his day, in the hope that some of Mr Hamilton’s handsome heroism would
rub off on him, he’d run the risk of implying the superiority of Mr Hamilton. In which case it would make more sense to crown King Lewis the First.

  The conflationary figure a king requires is someone or something held in esteem by his subjects but not itself eligible for the crown. Wild animals sometimes serve. Gaddafi — what a cornily traditional dictator he proved to be, but then again they nearly all do — liked to be known as the Lion of Africa (or of the Desert, depending on his mood). He was, of course, no more noticeably leonine than jolly old Richard the Lionheart, who periodically set off on crusades to smite the heathen in the name of a loving god, just as lions do. (The heathen, understandably, was just as eager to smite back in the name of his own loving god.)

  But although the animal kingdom can supply ferocity and athleticism, it struggles to furnish examples of wisdom, or caring leadership. For these the conflationary leader reaches into the grave, where he has a choice of millions of dead people, none of whom is a threat. They can’t take the throne, and they have established reputations which they are too dead to ruin by putting a hand in the till or up a chorister’s cassock.

  If you were asked to scour the legions of dead for a corpse with whom to compare George W. Bush, it might not occur to you to finger Thomas Jefferson. It did occur to George, or at least to his speechwriter.

  Here’s the wrap-up of George’s rousing inaugural address of 2001.