The Truth About Truthiness
by Matt Hanson

Recently, the fun-loving folks at Merriam-Webster, based on a reader poll, announced Stephen Colbert's pet word "Truthiness" as their 2006 Word Of The Year. It won out by a 5-to-1 margin. (The second place suggestion was the commonly used verb form "google.") What does it mean? Truthiness, according to the extremely truthy Wikipedia, is "a quality by which a person claims to know something intuitively; instinctively, or 'from the gut' without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts." Truthiness refers to the triumph of fantasy over fact.

Merriam Webster President John Morse had this to say: "We're at a point where what constitutes truth is a question on a lot of people's minds, and truth has become up for grabs. Truthiness is a playful way for us to think about a very important issue." There's no question that truth in the broadest, most objective sense is definitely twisting in the wind. Accusations of bias, treachery, misinformation and bold-faced lies are thrown around constantly, whether empirically verified or done on commission from Rupert Murdoch. Truthiness, then, illuminates the primacy and necessity of fact.

What the hell is going on here?

Maybe Truthiness isn't a word so much as a state of mind — ours. Imagine living in a constant state of disorganized belief, centered around a worldview shaped by random nuggets of data, intuition mixed with skepticism mixed with a sort of zen hiccup. Sound familiar? No wonder we need movies and television and religion to tell us how to live. Megachurches spring up throughout the land. Displaced preteens raise their siblings in wastelands still filled with Louisina floodwater. The President surges troops forward into chaos and vertigo. Given all this, the only wise recourse might very well be to get a few laughs in before the irony of our hyper-intelligent, technocratic, ultra air conditioned nightmare swallows us whole.

Czeslaw Milosz once remarked that "irony is the glory of slaves." It is, after all, the consolation of the crapped-upon. Why else grab literal reality and spin it on its head? Irony and dark humor, going hand in hand, stave off despair effectively enough to help the joke-teller endure his fate. This is probably why, as everyone knows, many of the greatest professional comedians are doomed souls not exactly laughing on the inside. Given the fact that a major presidential contender has a best-selling book emphasizing The Audacity Of Hope," Truthiness might be more than the word of the year. It might be the word of the decade.

Here we have a stand-up comedian, a natural ironist if there ever was one, playing an anchor who got his big break from being on the world's premier fake news show. He made his name cariacaturing pompous jackass pundits while sneaking full-throated howls of intelligent subversion in through customs. Not for nothing did Colbert and his peers win the Peabody award in journalism — the prestigious award which never quite found its way into the hot little hands of one Mr. Bill O'Reilly.

Speaking of which, Colbert and O'Reilly recently appeared on each other's shows to duke it out face to face. The effect of split screening the two garrulous anchors as they went at it was exhausting. The faces flickered back and forth, hyperreal, as a million bristling dots shifted on the screen. One was struck by the impious observation that it was almost impossible to tell who was the real person and who was the farce. A little postmodern moment took place, an "event." A stereotype was stereotyping himself for the benefit of his audience, and the other was hosting a popular fake news show. Can you guess which is which?

The impresario of the Colbert Report is cheerfully wont to admit that he is not a journalist. He's not really an actor (in the Stella Adler sense of the word) either. He's not your typical comic. He's a jester, dancing on the wires of America, tossing parody and irony exuberantly into the air like an expert juggler, grinning from ear to ear. Hell, he embodies truthiness, since his bearing and language on screen are the exact opposite of the person behind the mask. The viewers (and there are a million of them per night) understand his message intuitively. He doesn't tell the news to you, he delivers nightly on his promise to feel the news at you. As such, he exists as a figment of your imagination. You can't get the truth from him, except when he's lying.

A fictional character ought to have a trademark phrase, and this one is bitter acknowledgement to the core. Truthiness is his word by natural right. It's a word which doesn't sit still. It deconstructs itself. Everyone uses it, all the time, to get by with simple transfers of information. How many times have you found yourself, usually during a conversation with a friend, quoting statistics you're not quite sure of or remembering snippets of history that tell a part of a story that you just can't place, for the life of you? Explaining, say, the Iraq War's progression, inception, and aftermath to a Martian would necessitate at least some truthiness from a reasonably informed, articulate person from the Left or the Right. We can't all be Noam Chomsky.

Here we have a word that describes the tenuous hold we have on real information, bitch-slaps the complacency of lazy journalism, illustrates the frustration of the current political climate and is funny and unpretentious and childlike to boot. So much better for the new millenium! Truthiness, let's hope, is not the last gasp of human intellect and wit before the madness of the world covers everything in dust. If we're lucky, Stephen Colbert is the beginning of something rather than the end of it. Let's hope D.H. Lawrence had it right after all: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."

Email Matt Hanson at junglegroove at gmail dot com