Binder
Do you think you can bullshit everyone?
There is the truth, and there is bullshit. We have to call out the bullshit whenever and wherever someone tries to sling it.
Red-faced Senator gets even redder. It woudn’t have happened if he weren’t a bullshitter.
Binder
The hearing room was packed before the gavel struck. Red camera lights blinked in every corner. Aides crowded the back rows, holding up their phones like a line of mirrors. The lamps hissed with a white glare, bleaching the room in hard white.
The senator sat at the center. His tie was redder than his face, which was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. He drummed a pen against the binder in front of him. Its sharp tabs stuck out, jagged like broken teeth. He tapped more loudly, making sure everyone knew he was impatient as a greyhound at the starting gate. Then he flipped the binder open to the one page he wanted.
Across the room the scientist was waiting. His reading glasses sat low on his nose, his shoulders were bent, and his hands rested near a sweating tumbler that he did not touch. He took off his glasses, rubbed his closed eyes. An aide approached and whispered in his ear. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Here we go again.”
The senator burst from the starting gate with explosive contempt. “We’ve had plenty of so-called experts before us. Always warning disaster. Professor, is the sky falling today?”
Staffers snorted.
“The sky will always be there, Senator, even when it’s filled with noxious fumes,” the scientist said. “But the atmosphere—”
“No more jargon!” The senator opened his binder and started jabbing at a pre-marked page. “Here it is, in your own words: ‘uncertain.’ Your models are uncertain. Yet you demand billions. Isn’t that hypocrisy?”
The aides’ smirks widened. The senator raised the binder high, as if he were about to thump it like a histrionic preacher at a tent revival.
The scientist’s fingers curled into fists against the table. He swallowed the reply he wanted to give. Instead he responded calmly, “Only a fool won’t admit that he might be mistaken. Here the uncertainty is less than two percent. It’s not ignorance, its humility.”
The senator leaned forward, sweat brightening his hairline. “So you admit you don’t know. That’s what people at home hear.”
Murmurs stirred in the gallery.
The scientist said, can I borrow your binder, Senator?” The senator nodded and gave it to an aide, who handed it to the scientist. He flattened out the binder and rapped on the marked page. The mic amplified the sharp raps of his finger. “Let me read the full line,” the scientist said. “Here it is: ‘The models are uncertain, but all converge on the same conclusion: warming is rapid, human-caused, and probably irreversible.’ You cut two thirds of the sentence, Senator.”
A ripple ran through the room. One aide’s eyes dropped to the floor.
The senator’s face deepened to a blotchy crimson. “That’s your spin. Americans see bias.”
“Americans can read,” the scientist said. “So they deserve the whole text.”
The cameras lingered: the senator demanded his binder back. He clutched at it like a drowning man clutches at a lifesaver. But he was flailing. “You professors live in ivory towers. People are tired of lectures.”
“If I were lecturing, you wouldn’t get in a word edgewise,” the scientist said. “I’m not lecturing. Are you?”
The Senator started harrumphing.
The people in the gallery started thumping their palms on the bench backs. Then someone called out, “Answer the question!” Another followed. “Answer the question!” The chant caught and spread, pounding against the chamber walls.
The senator’s grin collapsed. He sat in his chair for a few minutes barking, “Bias! Witch hunt! Persecution!” The crowd drowned him out. He stood up and left the room, leaving the binder behind as a train of assistants rushed out behind him.
The scientist folded his hands once more. He just stared at the binder, the Senator’s prop, abandoned on the table.
By nightfall, the clip had spread just as the Senator had dreamed it would—only not as he had hoped. The chyron read: SENATOR FUDGES DATA. Above it, a still picture caught him as he was rising from the table with wild eyes, twisted lips, and a bead of sweat falling from his face as he lurched away. On the table, the binder lay inert.
If you clicked on the still, the loop of his retreat played endlessly.