- NR On Our Tendency To BS

National Review Sucks lately - and not just because they fired my friend. Not enough to make WFB spin in his grave or anything (the graphic above notwithstanding). But the things that made it interesting reading seem to have all been diminished a bit in recent months.

Judging the political position of a person or publication is a relative thing so it's impossible to say anything absolute. And everyone seems to think their personal view is the one that holds a fixed position. With that said, to me it looks like National Review has been drifting steadily to the left, but it may be my political shift not theirs. I leave it to the third party observer to come to a definitive conclusion on it.

Either way though, I think it has sucked lately. But this is piece, quite noticeably does not. Read Mr. Daniel Foster:

Did you know that the only major-league catcher ever to have a 30/30 season — 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases — was Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, who did it in the early Aughts as a Detroit Tiger?

Did you know that Marilyn Monroe, perennial paragon of American pulchritude, tipped the scales at about a buck fifty and wore a size-16 dress?

Did you know that, during development, Lockheed test-mounted a 20mm cannon on the SR-71 Blackbird but had to scrap the idea after the Mach 3+ spy plane caught up to and was struck by its own rounds?

Bet you didn’t know any of those things. And neither, as it turns out, did I, because none of them is true.

More precisely, each of them is bulls**t: Pudge Rodriguez is the only catcher ever to have a 20/20 season, and he did it in his 1999 MVP campaign while still a Texas Ranger. Marilyn Monroe weighed anywhere from 118 to 140 pounds, and at her buxomest would have probably worn a size 10, had not nearly all of her clothes been custom-made. (A pause, here, of appreciation: Per the records of Marilyn’s dressmaker, she stood five-foot-five-and-a-half, and measured a Platonic 36-22-36, the kind of figure you could set your hourglass by.) The tall tale of the overtaken bullets is told not of the (unarmed) Blackbird, but of its experimental predecessor, the YF-12, which was developed as an interceptor. And because of various truths of physics having to do with parabolas, friction, and gravity, it is highly unlikely to have ever happened at all.

Because of the unique circumstance of my upbringing, I require a lot of external verification for my views - particularly those views about identifying "who I am". I don't trust my own conclusions very often, particularly those concerning me and how others see me. My youth taught me how easy it is to be completely wrong about who you are, both to the positive and negative. And I've identified that mistaken view as the source of many a sin.

So as any of my friends will tell you, to know me is to know every little concern rattling around in my head. I figure ... put it out there so people know what I'm thinking, and they are more likely to take my concerns into consideration when dealing with me than they would be otherwise. Most people are more 'private' than that, but I've found a way to make it work for me.

But being that way makes BS generation more dangerous for me and how I see myself than it might be for others. Mr. Foster can toss out these tidbits at a party without fretting over being proven wrong, but for me it would matter much more. I don't mean to imply that I'm more virtuous than other BS generators at all, in fact I'm probably just more stiff and boring. And if I am just as guilty of BS as the next guy, it's probably that my sources have just become more obscure. But as a central principle of how I see myself, I like to think the real world is interesting enough without having to make things up.

Anyway, it's an interesting piece - a new take on an old story, and one that has an impact on our culture and our political discourse. It's worthy of your time I think.