Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Upon starting this book I thought, "wouldn't it be ironic if this book itself turned out to be bullshit"? Alas, despite my high hopes going in, that's exactly what it is. To start with, there are the small issues, such as the fact that, having been written in 2005, most of the content and especially tone of this book is hopelessly dated by today's standards - anything bitching about the Bush administration is just hopelessly passe these days, and the fact that the author didn't like the bullshit-laden cynicism of that administration seems to be pretty much the entire point of this book, at a time when such sentiments were hardly unique. With the exception of a few mildly interesting "organization of knowledge" type ideas about the nature of bullshit in the first few pages, there isn't a single thought in this book that someone else hadn't already thought of by 2005. This would be fine if not for Penny's annoying habit of turning every. single. sentence. into a series of rhetorical flourishes in a tone that screams "look at how clever and edgy I am", but mostly just succeeds in conveying that she's trying too hard to be clever and edgy. This makes her writing not only difficult to scan but tiresome to actually read. I would've been willing to forgive this transgression, though, if not for the much larger issue that Penny makes no effort whatsoever to be anything but derivative of all of the other anti-Bush screeds circulating at the time, or to actually show that she is capable of actually using her education in any way other than appealing to that laziest common denominator of Bush-era liberal discontent. Absolutely no attempt is made at any time to cite any actual facts or to make any original contribution beyond the first few pages. It should therefore come as no surprise that Penny's argument is riddled with factual errors. At first, it's just minor, annoying things such as referring to her disdain for commercials featuring a nonexistent SUV called the "Chevrolet Tacoma", but as the book goes on she starts misquoting history in ways that undermine her argument (e.g. misidentifying both Jamestown and New England as being essentially corporate constructions from the beginning, when New England was no such thing.) and assuming that the reader has never heard of and apparently will never hear of James Comey, who as of this writing is head of the FBI. If Penny had made errors like this once or twice it would be forgivable, but she does it so often that it undermines her credibility, since mostly these are errors that would require about a minute of Google time in order to fix. Dude, if Al Franken could cite his sources for the anti-Bush screeds he produced during this period, so can you. That this sort of shoddy, mass-produced work should appear in a one-dimensional liberal screed about how shoddy and mass-produced our culture has become is as ironic as it is sad, because it doesn't challenge the premise that even our "intellectual" polemics in opposition to mass-produced bullshit have to be mass-produced bullshit in and of themselves. Despite its initial intentions, this book is ultimately a product of the very same corporate profiteering and societal attention span issues that Penny herself is railing against. It exists not because Penny is a brilliant, or even coherent author, but simply because there was a market for this sort of writing in 2005, so someone published it to cash in, seeing the potential market of 59,028,444 (John Kerry's share of the 2004 electorate) US citizens alone who were dissatisfied with the then-present administration. Penny's failure to recognize this, as well as the unfortunately dated nature of many of these observations, is really what makes this book so insufferable. It also explains why, when I bought this book shortly after Obama took office, it was out of a stack of about two dozen remainders. It's a shame, because there are some good ideas recycled here, and even a handful of entertaining witticisms, but ultimately this is just not a book that will appeal to most people this far after the fact, at least if you want anything more than superficial affirmation that your dislike of George W. Bush ten years ago was probably justified for one reason or another. As if evidence of that fact wasn't painfully obvious today in too many other ways.
A self-styled rant about the frustrations of modern society11 October 2013tThere is not all that much that sets this book apart from all of the other anti-corporate books that have been released, except that at the end the writer says that this is not so much a book to help us look for a way forward and a way to get out of this mess that we have found ourselves in, but rather as a means to vent her frustration over the ever encroaching corporate and technocratic domination of our lives. The thing is that Penny doesn't actually say anything new in this book, and does not really point out anything that we don't already know, and there are much better books out there that do just that (such as Naomi Klein's No Logo).tThe thing about the corporation is that there are two sides to every issue. Corporations are able to raise huge amounts of capital to be able to produce things that normal people like us are not able. They are also able to make life easier and to provide avenues for us to be able to get things that we like and need. Without the corporation we would not have supermarkets, or multiplex cinemas, or even the vehicle to get you to these places.tOn the flip side, they have what is effectively unfettered power of control. Corporations control what we see and what we do. With the amount of money they are able to raise they are able to influence governments and elections. We have seen this recently in Australia where one media company pretty much dictated the election result by printing newspaper articles with views that they wanted people to see. For instance, opposition leader was pictured as the saviour that Australia needed while every move that the government made was plastered everywhere, and was given a negative twist (while this has been the case for a long time with elections, it has never been to this extent previously in Australia). Now, what we have is a government that is effectively secret and media shy, and bowing to corporate interests for what they believe is in the best interests of the country.tThere is one thing that I have noticed that is coming out of this recent election and that is a law banning boycotts. This law is clearly aimed at promoting and protecting corporate interests and denying the citizens of Australia the right to freedom of speech. The question is how is this law going to be implemented. Am I going to be forced to eat at McDonalds, and am I going to be forced to do all of my shopping at one of the major supermarkets because if I don't it will be considered a boycott. Or is this law going to fall flat on its face because there is no way to actually determine whether a consumer's buying behaviour is a boycott or simply choice.tAnother thing this book raises is the idea of the phone maze. I work in a glorified call center (meaning that we need to have decent training to be able to work where we are working) and the idea of the phone maze is to try and direct us to where we want to go. With the number of calls I make out, I encounter either the switchboard, or the phone maze. Having navigated lots of phone mazes, one becomes proficient in getting to where you want to go, or at least working out how to speak to a person because a computer simply has no intelligence and only responds to commands. Otherwise you hit the switchboard which, unless you are ultra-specific, they end up sending you to the wrong department anyway.tOne thing that I notice in my workplace is how people are being forced to specialise. The work duties are slowly being narrowed down in the same way that the manufacturing sector has narrowed down the tasks that the workers perform. Before the industrial revolution, blacksmiths used to be multi-skilled, however now all you do is the same repetitive task day in and day out. The same is the case with office work, and with file management, as the specific tasks on each file are farmed out to specialists. Being somebody who likes variety in my work, and to be able to be challenged from multiple different sectors, this is something that I do not particularly like.
What do You think about Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit (2006)?
This book pretty much summed up how I feel on my cynical days. An interesting overview that collects examples of bullshit from the insurance, PR, big pharma, government, advertising etc. sectors. I recommend it if you like to gripe about that sort of thing. It doesn't really offer any suggestions (and doesn't pretend to) but awareness is the first step to making things better right? Also, the book is about 5 years old so occasionally comes off a bit dated (talking about "the current Bush administration" and "Prime Minister Paul Martin" for example) but is still relevant for the most part. Plus, the writer is Nova Scotian and works at a local university so that's an added bonus!
—Jennifer
Bone up on how bullshit works, and begin to inoculate yourself. A small, hilarious, and easy to read book. Not only is Laura Penny extremely funny, clever, and topical but every one of her chosen subjects have direct and genuine relevance for all of us living in a culture which is profoundly saturated with state of the art commercial propaganda and playground to entire industries devoted to the subtle manipulation of the public mind (that's you, cowboy and cowgirl American - your so-called Rugged Individualist mentality was, paradoxically for you, formed within your culture -- and besides, this mentality is largely based on misunderstandings since we are hardly Self-Interest Maximizing Agents but rather social animals evolved to help each other). Excellent all around.
—Dan
A noble endeavor by someone who deep down is sincere and concerned about the consequences of BS in public policy and advertising. Good for a cursory overview and might even get some people worked up enough to pay more attention. However, this book is written with very little in-depth information and a lot of BS. The tone of the book is a serious problem. The author complains about the dumbing down of information, but spends half the book trying to be cute/funny. Example: on the rise of mutual funds: "Throughout the nineties, people looked at their lazy-ass money, snoozing away in their savings accounts, and told that money to get off the couch, quit eating bonbons, and get to work." Another example of BS: a Latin error on pg. 78: "there is a lovely Latin term in corporate law, ultra vires, beyond men, that refers to actions beyond the power granted by the corporate charter." No. "ultra vires" means "beyond one's power/strength." This is a common first-year Latin error. It was unnecessary to translate "ultra vires" at all: she could have just said "ultra vires in corporate law refers to actions" etc., but the decision to include a very poorly researched translation (for what purpose? to appear smarter? Harry Frankfurt would call this BS) corrodes for me the reliability of the rest of this text.
—H
