Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship

Abstract

This article opens with an inventory of how popular culture passion plays are homo logous to the stampeding disenfranchisement everywhere of working classes and the emasculation of professional codes of ethics under siege by neoliberal initiatives and gambits. The article then examines a recent example of contemporary, "deconstructive" scholarly analysis and inventory of presidential "Orwellian doublespeak." The preocc upation among contemporary critical scholarship with "discourse analysis" and lan guage gambits is criticized for displacing interrogation of realevent anomalies, as with the porous account given by the 9/11 Commission for what happened that fateful day. The article concludes by explaining how critical scholarship consistently falls short of unmasking Master Signifiers.

“Who’s Been Fooling Who?” Reflections on Truth and Deception in Politics and Their Implications for Public Administration

“…It should be noted here that, in contrast to the idea of the “just lie,” referred to above, or allegedly “big lies” committed by government (see, for example, Witt, 2010), this article, for the most part, addresses the somewhat more mundane and banal everyday deceptions that regularly occur among human beings as they interact with one another in their ordinary lives and within politics. The reason for this particular focus is to help understand why it is that politics and deception so often appear to be so inextricably connected to one another.…”