Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Trueing the True

In his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon speaks of a “clinical version of the truth.”

What a concept!

I’m having a vision, here: I see a clinical version of the truth in which truth is not really true but only the appearance of truth that meets certain criteria to qualify itself as truthful even though it isn’t, strictly speaking, exactly true, but is close enough because it fits preconceived notion of truth as defined by a Blue Ribbon Panel of Experts whose brief is narrowly enough defined that it is possible to arrive at a truth that meets all the clinical criteria for truth when truth isn’t exactly true but is made so by being properly defined with quantifiable metrics to accurately measure the degree to which it deflects from what is and should be the Truth but can’t be because it is clinically defined.

Do you smell victory in Afghanistan?

5 comments:

steven_m_s. said...

"A lie told often enough becomes truth" Vladimir Lenin.
Or was it Joseph Goebbels?

Case Wagenvoord said...

I think it was Goebbels

TAO Walker said...

Maybe the corporate success in getting "organically grown" defined to their entire satisfaction is a sort of test-run precursor to an officially authorized (and enforced) "clinical version of the truth."

Stranger things have certainly proved "true."

HokaHey!

Case Wagenvoord said...

That's almost as creative as "health care reform."

TAO Walker said...

Yet another case-in-point....

How 'bout "The recession is 'technically' over."?

Let's face it, we could go on-and-on here, ad nauseum....but even with the 'stomach' for it, who's got the time?