Well I Wanna Be One

I fabricated a quote once. Conservative blogger, Ben Datruth, quickly fell from prominence almost as quickly as he ascended to it for doing that- for that and revelations of plagiarism too. Considering I get almost 5 visitors a day... almost, I figured I should come clean about my past before the wave of humiliation heads my way. Check the link so you know what I'm talking about, otherwise I may make even less sense.

So like a said, I once fabricated a quote. Not in the same way Liar O'Liely did. And I haven't plagiarized. What I did do was offer my friend a quote on a paper she was writing. I don't remember exactly what I said. I just remember that she needed a perfectly phrased quote to put just the right touch on a paper she was writing so I gave her one. She cited it as an interview and me as an authority I wasn't. I made up a quote and she got away with it. Fibby Mc Redstate, made something up and he lost his job. But maybe not his credibility.

He said the president and Tim Russert said something they did not actually say. He was making something up to support what he believed. He made it up to support what others believed. He made it up to endorse what he thought should be true, could be true, and to reinforce what he already lived as true. So, as far as he was concerned, it was true. Not because it actually happened, but because, given the proper conditions it could have happened. As far as he was concerned, those conditions to make it possible were there, but the actual event not occurring was just an inconvenient matter of the sensible world. It wasn't that it couldn't happen, it's just that it didn't happen. He believed it to be a possibility and it seems pursuing that possibility made him quite ambitious.

Still, why the quote, though? Why make something up? Even if Mr. Pants-on-fire wanted it to be an actual event, he knew it wasn't- how does that benefit him? If you know something's not true, it's not convincing you, and if you offer it in response to someone else, they likely won't be convinced of your position just by a quote... But I guess in this case it was more an issue of proving the president said something he really hadn't to make others look wrong. He just hoped no one would check up on his sources. I guess that still speaks to the issue of him living according to what he wanted to be true rather than what actually was. What he wanted to have happened, could have happened, so he just said it did happen. But it didn't.

So if you haven't checked the link, here's the deal: Ben believed that the president, during the 2000 campaign, would have said he was committed to a balanced budget unless there was a war. The president didn't say that. He just said he would maintain a balanced budget. So, because he hadn't maintained a balanced budget and eliminated a surplus, some people have a reason to question the president's "straight-shooteriness" and fiscal responsibility. Now, we already know how much I must hate America. This isn't about that. I am not concerned with the political issues in this. I am interested in the questions about truth, belief, and I guess what quotes are worth.

Here are some things the president really did say:

"Now I understand some say, 'Well, maybe they're just isolated' -- you know, the kind of people that are angry and took out their anger with an attack. That's not how I view them. I view them as people that believe in something. They is have an ideological base. They've subverted a great religion to meet their needs. And they need places to hide."

"There's an interesting debate in the world, is whether or not freedom is universal, see, whether or not -- you know, there's old Bush imposing his values. See, I believe freedom is universal"

"The way I put it was, there is an almighty God. One of the greatest gifts of that almighty God is the desire for people to be free, is freedom."

"Iraq is a part of the global war on terror. In other words, it's a global war."

"I mean, Americans cannot understand the nature of how brutal these people are. It's shocking what they will do to try to achieve their objectives. But it really shouldn't shock us when you think about what they did on September the 11th. It's the same folks, the same attitude, same frame of mind."

"D'Tocqueville, who's a French guy, came in 1832 and recognized and wrote back -- wrote a treatise about what it means to go to a country where people have -- associate voluntarily to serve their communities."

"Anyway, you'll be confronted with some stuff. Hopefully, our job is to make sure you're confronted with less issues, like being hooked on oil. One of the issues that we're confronting with now that I hope you'll not have to confront with is jobs going elsewhere because we don't have the math and science skills and engineering skills and physics skills that are taught to our children here."

Here's an interesting one from the same event, though not from the president:

"I have a comment, first of all, and then a real quick question. I want to let you know that every service at our church, you are by name lifted up in prayer -- and you and your staff and all of our leaders. And we believe in you. We are behind you. And we cannot thank you enough for what you've done to shape our country."

What do we do with these? Do these mean anything? I mean, if I already have a sense that the president isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, these will support that, but other than that? I mean, just sitting here as disembodied quotes they don't mean much, do they? Do they refer to a meaning beyond the words in them? Many of them don't follow basic grammatical rules so it's hard to describe them even as simple statements... Holy crap! I just discovered something. We have a totally post modern president.

Watch- if I say:

the dog runs

You know what that means. There should be a fairly regular, agreed meaning to everyone that understands those words apart from context and what not. You have a sense of what that means that does come from you; whatever idea pops into your head is yours. I feel I have to say that; but you could make a strong case that the words represent something with an objective meaning. This sentence doesn't really serve post-modern theory to well. The article "the" limits the subject to something specific. A dog is... well a dog, and it runs.

Oh but if I say:

and the dog you know a dog its gonna do that okay running

Oh I'll be nice- how about some punctuation?

And the dog- you know, a dog, it's gonna do that... okay... running.

What can you say about that? I guess you could say that the foundational ideas are there enough to know what's going on. You have the concept of a dog, you have a concept of running and that's enough to know that a dog is running. But you'd be a liar.

You need to do something with those other words: the "you" and the "know," the conjunction. Then there is a definite and an indefinite article, what should we do with those? There's what appears to be a sentence right in the middle of it: "it's gonna do that." Oh sure you can make sense of it, that's what you do.

If you put those words into someone's mouth though, especially a not so articulate, prone to malapropisms, loose associating, someone, you can know what it means. You know what it means in a particular context- because of various relations. That I can even pretend to punctuate that sentence depends on agreed meaning in an imagined context rather than a single objective meaning of those words.

It's not as easy as that, but I can't believe Ted Haggard is as ga-ga over this president as he is. Or maybe that depends on what the definition of "is" is.

Maybe, I'll come back to the quotes thing. But this is probably further than anyone would've read so I'm going to stop.

It's Houston, Not Houston
Hummingbird- Wilco
She's An Angel- They Might Be Giants
Rambozo the Clown- Dead Kennedys
Sit Down Servant- The Staple Singers
Gouge Away- The Pixies
Where Is My Mind?- The Pixies
Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough- Michael Jackson
Baba O'Riley- The Who
Blue N' Boogie- Dizzy Gillespie
Wishlist- Pearl Jam
Hypnotize- The White Stripes
Message of Love- The Pretenders
Crazy- Patsy Cline
Country Death Song- Violent Femmes
Satisfaction (I Can't Get No)- Devo