Rush Limbaugh Has Survived For Years On Truthiness - In His Case, it's
Really "Falsieness"
Truthiness is our newest and most popular buzzword!
It's also a major social threat!
Truthiness is being discussed everywhere lately. Stephen Colbert used
the word on the debut of The Colbert Report
on the Comedy Central TV Network in October 2005, giving
the word it's current definition and cache`. Now, it is
being used and discussed on the major TV networks, in The New York Times,
Arianna Huffington's The Huffington Post blog, and many other
national media outlets. As of mid March 2006, a Google search for "truthiness"
lists 318,000 citations.
The first sentence from the
Wikipedia entry
on truthiness states, "Truthiness is the quality by which a person purports to
know something emotionally
or
instinctively, without regard to evidence
or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination."
Truthiness: 2005 Word of The Year!
The American Dialect Society,
a panel of linguists, has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is “truthiness,”
defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be
true, rather than the facts.
As Colbert explained in the satirical newspaper
The Onion, "It
used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own
facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all.
Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president
because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that
back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is
very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a
dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be
true, or what is true? "Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing]
anyone else says could possibly be true.' There's not only an emotional
quality, there's a selfish quality."
The Threat of Truthiness
Truthiness is truth lite - NOT the whole truth. It sounds like the
truth. You want it to be true. However, it always lacks many pertinent, inconvenient facts that don't support the
truthy conclusion.
What worries me most is that many people don't seem to know the
difference between truth and truthiness anymore — or
even to CARE about those critical differences. It's like people are so
tired of parsing the details of complex issues, they will embrace any
attitude that saves them from having to make personal decisions about
major issues during times of complexity.
In 1941, in his social classic, Escape From
Freedom, Erich Fromm showed that in times of crisis and uncertainty,
individual members of society tend to wish for and seek a "magic leader."
A charismatic leader who will relieve them of the anxiety they feel due to
social upheaval and personal powerlessness. Someone who is resolute.
Someone who will "make the trains run on time." So, they turn to public
figures like Bush, Cheney, and Rush. "Magic" leaders who are always right
no matter what, who never alter their positions or plans regardless how
out of step with reality they become. They are "confidence men" of the
highest degree. Men who are so completely confident of themselves and their
positions they just dismiss any critique or opposition out of hand. Not
our position, can't be right.
Falsieness: Rush Limbaugh's Version of Truthiness
Rush is always whining about reality because many years ago he set up his own parallel
universe, in which he's always right and the New York Times, The
Washington Post, or any other legitimate source of information, is always
wrong. He lives in this universe of his own definition and is immune to
criticism.
Rush is a preacher of sorts. He makes his statements and foists his
opinions on the world with such a psychotic level of certainty that many
in his audience respond to his certainty with belief.
To cite his most recent example of truthiness, we taped his radio show
of Wednesday, March 8th, 2006. You can find it on my Dittohead Plot page.
Why Do I Call Rush's Views Falseiness?
Are you old enough to remember "falsies"? Although women have
used various types of padding to enhance their figures since early times,
these pads were for show only. As soon as you touched a pad, you knew it
was a pad. However, once foam rubber became
available and cheap, foam rubber pads became the "in" thing!
These pads felt much more like real breasts than any fiber pad could,
and if you accidentally touched her bra, the foam felt soft and
flexible, like a breast. All sorts of women and girls started using them
to enhance their desirability, so, in those socially conservative days, a man might be attracted to a
woman for months before he realized she was flat chested. We often felt deceived,
so we called them "falsies."
Guys resented falsies then, and I think they still do today. Why then,
do they continue to flock to demagogues like Rush Limbaugh? Rush's rants sound and think like Mother's milk and beautiful breasts.
He tells you a fable you wish was true. You want to just stop thinking and
squeeze and nuzzle. You believe anything Mom tells you.
Dittoheads want Rush's falsies to be real in that same way, but there's
no breast under all the foam rubber, just more foam rubber. Despite this,
his listeners will search and search for a nipple, and make irrational
excuses for their failure to find the nipple in real life. Some remain
addicted for years, unwilling to admit there is no nipple, just a lovely
vision of one.
My video contains funny instance after
funny instance
of Rush fabricating Falsies!
