Chris Hedges - the Pope of Truthiness

If Stephen Colbert accomplishes nothing else in his life, he will be immortalized by adding the word "Truthiness" to our language.

By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005. Soon after, this word was chosen as the 16th annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

Followers of Colbert will know that "truthiness" has specific ways of "spinning" fact-like statements to make them sound "kinda" true. The idea has morphed into a huge and interested topic (see #truthy on Twitter).

Here are some tips on talking "truthy".

• Throw in loads and loads and loads of interesting and maybe even kinda true stuff, whether related to your point or not ...
• Avoid actually having a point. Talk quickly, change the subject with every breath. This prevents the audience from actually remembering about what you last said while attempting to understand what you are saying now.
• Toss in lots of real truthy sounding stuff like dates, names and statistics. Say, for example, that  75% of what Chris Hedges says is factually false. 75% is better than "most" or "lots", right? Perhaps it should be 75.3 % ...
• Be a mind reader, know everybody's secret motivations.

So what does Hedges want to be true? What facts known to be true, but apparently not to him?

He reads minds and knows the secret motives of the rich and powerful. In fact, people's motives are complex and Hedges is disillusion if he thinks he understands them. Example:

SCHEER: Okay. And so I think my concern is that people will be more intimidated than they are now when they’re observed, when they’re watched.HEDGES: You’re right.SCHEER: Okay.HEDGES: That’s why they built it.

Actually what "they" say they built "it" to defend America against a terrorist threat. This is well known very thoroughly documented.  Whatever you may think of the surveillance system, it's pretty obvious that Hedges has no private access to the mind of President Obama.

He loves to think nobody but him sees the terrible mess we are in, because, for example, we all spend our time addicted to the Internet and don't read enough. He understands the issues but we can't because we aren't even trying.

Hedges really would like all the troubles of the world to be a result of a world wide conspiracy of the "oligarchy". The fact is that the "oligarchy" is not a "thing". What it is and who is involved seems to be completely up to Hedges.

Hedges love to think big. Words like "worst in history" sound truthy. Here's a sample of the Chris Hedges insight on Canada:

I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday (giving him "truthy" credentials to critique a Nation he knows nothing about) and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state (sounds scary, no need to be specific, lets move on ...). Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so (Is this why? Harper actually tells him things?) it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people (sounds factual. References please?). It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters (how "stiff" are the sentences and are they for dissent or weapons offences?). 

And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush (or is he perhaps crazy in his own right?). He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist (I'm no fan of Harper but the "right wing" in Canada would be called socialists in the US and they are not "rabid". Perhaps just in need of persuasion. Hedges himself is a rabid fundamentalist of the worst kind, but that doesn't make him wrong, just annoying).

The voices of dissent sound like our own (nope. We have our own issues). And the forms of persecution are familiar (to him). This is not an accident (it's a conspiracy). We are fighting the same corporate leviathan. (What, exactly is the "corporate leviathan" and how is that connected to all those "stiff prison sentences"? It's a huge step to claim that the "leviathan" - whatever that means - is the same, but he implies that he has special knowledge of it, denied to the average person)

In this passage, you can see Hedges rapidly jumping from decrying one catastrophe with purple prose and then leaping on to the next, hoping that nobody will stop and ask what he means by any of this. At every step he claims special knowledge. Subtly, his outrage seems to hint that he knows more about the situations he mentions than the listener (you know, he reads a lot and doesn't waste time on the Internet).

Hedges sounds like he's talking about the "truth" but is actually talking about what he wants the truth to be. At every step he skips over what we all know the truth to be. That's the essence of truthiness and why he's the Pope of it.