Thursday, May 25, 2006

Help me

There is a nuance to the best lies. They have a texture and a rhythm that draws you in. A good lie is complex, a tapestery of solid indisputable truths woven together with unproveable vaguries that presents something that looks like the truth, so much so that you seem like an asshole if you question its veracity.

Now in this vein a lot of people will pick on advertisements. And those are a fine example. I mean the core message of every Bud Lite ad is that it will get you laid. This is a blatant lie. Barring the lapses of judgement that go along with being wasted, no one has ever gotten pussy because of an Anheiser Bush product. We all know this in an academic sense of the word, but when you see the ad, and you see that hot girl with big tits making a sassy remark that comments on the zeitgeist of this particular cultural moment, you think about fucking. That makes you feel something for Bud Lite. And maybe it makes you feel some loathing for Bud Lite because you're a sophisticated guy and you understand what they're trying to do to you. So you sit there with your sour puss on your face and your bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale every time you go out to play pool. But for every one of you dudes in Williamsburg and Oakland there's about two hundred guys having a blast in Ohio chugging Bud Lite.

But the most commendable lies in this vein are self-help books. For example:

http://jobs.aol.com/article/_a/does-daddy-affect-your-job/20060517161909990002

The underlying statement of this self help book is that the type of dad you have dictates what kind of worker you will be. Well who can argue with that? The lie comes in when we accept the authors premise that he has some real wisdom to share with us. He presents the Trojan horse of faux-freudian the-sky-is-blue type of observations and then follows up with observations like this, "Children of the "time-bomb" father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes."

Now how does he know this? How does he even categorize "time bomb" fathers? Isn't every father a time bomb? It's just a matter of time until you use his favorite driver to whack rocks into the lake, and boom! The "time" bomb goes off right about the moment he sees the nicks in the head of the club.

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