But . . . you should have heard me with the insurance adjuster. Euclid, Archimedes, and Pythagoras put together weren’t a patch on me. (Even less so since they’d be talking to the insurance adjuster in ancient Greek.) By the time I got done the insurance company had not only paid for a new barn roof, it paid for a new barn to go under it and a new chain saw and a new pine tree and six cows to replace the cows that would have been killed when the barn roof collapsed if I’d had any cows.
I’m ignorant—but I’m good at it.
And the world should be thankful for all the liberal arts graduates who are just as good as I am at B.S. Think of all the things that we owe to B.S. Think of all the things that would be impossible without B.S.
Art
Literature
Rap music
Dating
Marriage
Having a talk with your son about the birds and bees
Advertising
Marketing
Sales
Tech company IPOs
And don’t start making this list because it expands at a speed faster than Star Trek’s USS Enterprise at warp 9, which is 729 times the speed of light, which is B.S. I pulled off a website on the Internet, which wouldn’t have any websites if it weren’t for B.S.
* * *
Let us examine just two examples. First, politics.
I’ll draw a box.
Look into the box. That’s politics without B.S.
How would we be governed? Who could be elected? Imagine a candidate giving a B.S.-free stump speech: “No, I can’t fix public education. The problem isn’t funding or teachers’ unions or vouchers or lack of computer equipment in the classroom. The problem is your damn kids.”
Our executive, legislative, and judicial branches would cease to function. Our political institutions would be “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds [full of B.S.] sang.”
The America that the world knows would disappear. ISIS would pop back to life and hold sway from Baghdad to Berlin. What the Islamic State didn’t pillage the Islamic Republic of Iran would plunder. Vladimir Putin would leave off mere meddling and install himself, midst bathroom fixtures of gold, in New York’s hastily renamed Putin Tower. Xi Jinping would be general secretary of the Communist Party of China, chief executive of Hong Kong, president of Taiwan, and mayor of Cupertino, California.
But perhaps politics isn’t the best example. There’s too much of it that would be good riddance. Let’s take the example of all the hard subjects I so assiduously avoided in college, the dreaded STEMs—where one was tested with real questions and was expected to give real answers.
I’d argue that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are also dependant on B.S.
Not that there’s any B.S. in these fields. (Well, there is—but there shouldn’t be.) Rather, the problem is who funds science, technology, engineering, and mathematics?
Usually, it’s fools. Like me. We who are full of B.S. are the people who rise to be corporate chief executives, presidents of universities, and high plenipotentiaries holding the public purse strings.
Poor Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, has to go before a congressional budget committee and say, “We need $10 billion for the James Webb Space Telescope so that we can peer deep into the universe and investigate across the fields of astronomy and cosmology to observe some of the most distant events and objects in the universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies.”
Congressman: “Why? Are there voters out there?”
Jim: “Um . . .”
And this is where Jim needs B.S. He needs somebody like me to rush to his side.
Jim: “Perhaps I should let my staff member Junior Space Cadet O’Rourke explain the further benefits of the James Webb Space Telescope.”
Congressman: “Let the witness be sworn in.”
Me: “The Honorable Representative will be pleased to know that, besides its telescopic properties, the James Webb Space Telescope also employs an eight-foot array of mirrors which, if the situation requires, can be reversed to collect solar rays and focus them in an intense beam directed at Fox News causing the network to pop like a kernel of Orville Redenbacher’s in a twelve hundred watt microwave.”
Congressman: “Ten billion dollars? Okay.”
What We Can Learn from the Sixties Drug Culture
Maybe the answer to America’s current state of angry perplexity is “Everybody must get stoned.” It’s certainly an idea that’s trending. But I was around the last time we tried that. And perhaps this is an historical period that we should reexamine.
“If you can remember the sixties you weren’t there” is a quote variously attributed to Grace Slick, Dennis Hopper, Robin Williams, and a bunch of other people because . . . nobody from back then can remember anything.
I’m a veteran of the 1960s “drug culture.” At least I suppose so. I was there, a nineteen-year-old college kid during the Summer of Love. And I wasn’t some student senate, frat boy, ROTC, squaresville college kid. I was fully onboard the Magical Mystery Tour. It’s just that I don’t recall much about it. Where were we going in the “bong bus”? What did we do when we got there? Who else was along for the ride? And why, when I try to think of their names, do they all seem to have been called “Groovy” and “Sunshine”? Oh my gosh, I hope I wasn’t driving.
Fifty-three years later everything is a purple haze—so to speak. Today there’s another “drug culture” in progress. And in an attempt to learn from the past, we should be thinking about this new drug culture. Although maybe not the way I was, half a century ago, when I was thinking, “Wow! This is great f***ing s**t!” (Notice that my thoughts
