Some of us know the type. Like Bernie Litgo in the movie adapted from David Mamet’s play, they spin wild tales for our amusement, but in academia and publishing, fact is supposed to be far more important than fiction, and processes are said to be in place to ensure only facts get published.
In the 1980s cult-classic, About Last Night, based on David Mamet’s play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Jim Belushi’s Bernie Litgo is a shameless bullshit artist. The film opens with him telling Rob Lowe’s Danny Martin about an obviously made up encounter with a woman, the sort of thing that would be laughed out in a Penthouse Forum story and yet he tells it anyway as though it were true. “I’m over at the Pancake House,” he claims, “and this chick walks over to the cash register. 19 or 20 years old. She wants to buy a pack of Viceroys. She gets the smokes and says she forgot her purse up in her room.” Perhaps needless to say, Bernie offers to pay for the smokes and the young woman invites him up to pay him back. Shortly after they arrive, she offers him some bourbon, says “I think I’ll take a shower” and “Then let’s fuck.” “So I say: ‘I’ll join you in the shower, if you have no objections.’ So in we go, and does she have a body? Are you kidding me? The tits. The legs. Are you fucking fooling me? The ass on this broad.” After the shower, Bernie claims to flick her with the towel, “I hit her on the ass, and we got this big red mark. I’m all sorry and so forth, but what does this broad do — but let out a squeal of pleasure that would fucking kill a horse. What the hell, I’m liberal, so I heave a chair at her.” While things do not get any more realistic from there, Danny listens attentively, asking questions like he believes every word, even as the woman supposedly “pulls out a suitcase from under the bed — with a World War Il flak suit” and “leaves the zipper open,” “we’re humping and pumping, and every once in a while, I go ‘boom.’ In the middle of everything, she turns on a little tape recorder. I don’t know what the shot is. All of a sudden I hear: I’m pumping away, the tape recorder is making airplane noises. Every once in a while, I go ‘boom,’ and the broad starts going crazy. She’s moaning and groaning — and screaming, ‘Red Dog One to Red Dog Squadron.’ Suddenly, she screams, ‘Wait!’ and pulls out a five-gallon jerry can. It’s full of gasoline. She splashes it over the walls – pulls out a zippo and ‘whoosh,’ the room goes up in flames.” Rather than calling complete bullshit, Danny asks Bernie if the woman in question was a prostitute, a professional. “You think she was a pro? – A pro, Dan?” to which Bernie responds cryptically, as though he was offering some real wisdom, “A pro is how you think of yourself Last Night. See my point?”
If you don’t know the type, the scene can be hard to understand. Bernie is obviously making the entire thing up. It’s not even clear there was a woman who didn’t have her purse at all, forget her almost burning the apartment down in a blaze of passion, but Danny plays along the entire time, interjecting and asking questions as if the story were completely true. Moreover, this isn’t the only fabricated escapade Bernie details throughout the film. In almost every scene, he has a story to tell that almost certainly never happened and yet, Danny never questions him on it, even the female characters play along at times. Why? While it’s not an easy question to answer, I worked with more than one character like this in the car business in high school and college learning important lessons in life and the art of fraud. Whether it was their exploits with women, their athletic glories when they were younger, how much money they made and the fine things they had before they were reduced to selling cars, some people always had an obviously suspect story to tell, but the vast majority of the time, the other salespeople would just sit around and listen, nodding their heads in amazement while thinking the person was completely full of shit the entire time. I forget the precise phrasing, but I remember one salesperson did remark to me in private that another salesperson was a total bullshit artist, saying something to the effect that he was the type of person who’d claim he could climb to the top of that flagpole in five seconds and dance a jig up there, indeed had done it already, and yet he liked listening to him anyway simply to pass the time. In fact, he liked him personally, even though he knew he was full of shit. Interestingly, people like this weren’t generally referred to as liars, though they were certainly lying. Instead, they were bullshit artists, spinning wild tales as almost an artform. I’m not sure why, but something about the statement struck me. Most of us simply like hearing stories and if someone can tell a good one, we’ll listen even though it’s fake – perhaps because it is fake – attentively and try not to break the suspension of disbelief.
At the same time, most of us don’t work in academia and academic publishing, where fact is supposed to be far more important than fiction, and processes are said to be in place to ensure only facts get published. Though both professions claim to be devoted to the truth, elevating the pursuit of truth above all other things, I was recently reminded of About Last Night’s Bernie and some of my former colleagues in the car business more so than anything else after learning about the saga of the embattled former, now deceased Cambridge University professor Jason Arday, who committed suicide last week after some of his problems with the truth were revealed. To date, most of the media’s attention has been devoted to cataloging his many, many fabrications and accusations of plagiarism, the role Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies may have played in elevating him to the youngest minority professorship in the university’s eight century history, and questioning whether those who uncovered these fabrications are racists for doing so, perhaps even being responsible for a suicide that has been called a “lynching” in some quarters, but precious little attention has been paid to what I consider the real story. How did both Cambridge University and Simon & Schuster, who recently published his memoir compete with an almost $1.4 million advance, become reduced to being the equivalent of a Rob Lowe character in an 80s film, even worse in many ways? How is it possible that those who were supposed to take a skeptical stance by nature exhibited no skepticism at all even when it came to truly outlandish claims, on par with anything Bernie said? If even The Atlantic, a generally sympathetic publication described the claims as “near-mythic (or perhaps purely mythic)” how could they have passed academic scrutiny and a supposedly respected publisher’s fact checker?
As a toddler, Professor Arday claimed the doctors described him as “no better than a vegetable” and that “there’s no one in there,” skeptical he would even be able to talk, so he “rocked and hummed and banged his head until he bled; he slammed cupboard doors and smeared his feces on the walls,” before almost miraculously beginning to speak despite having a speech therapist he says physically abused him. Deaf in one ear with “marked difficulties,” the beatings continued as an adolescent, causing him to become epileptic and supposedly he entered high school unable to read. In fact, he couldn’t even write out his college application, claiming his girlfriend at the time did so and even when he began his master’s degree program, he could only read at the same level of his three year old daughter. Learning disabilities and beatings were not the only challenges he faced, either, far from it. There were financial difficulties as well, that required him to work two jobs while he was in school, from 11 PM to 5 AM, then another shift from 5:30 AM to 7:30 AM at a different location. Things were so bad, “The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style.” Shortly before the deadline, he claimed to have a brain tumor and after the surgery to have it removed, suffered from a mini-stroke and lost his short term memory to the point where he forgot what the thesis was about entirely. “I’d worked on my thesis for over thirty months, and now I was reading it as if for the first time,” he wrote. Following a tough battle defending the thesis, where he likened himself to Rocky Balboa, the tumor came back, he got divorced, suffered autistic burn out, and couldn’t get out bed before deciding to commit suicide during the pandemic, only to be saved by the Eagle’s classic, “Take it to the Limit.”
Beyond the obvious bullshit, even The Atlantic noted that strange coincidences abound, meaning things that couldn’t possibly be true. “Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths.” “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he claimed, one asked to the godfather of his child. Even if you set how insane all of this is and decide to believe everything for some reason, Professor Arday’s public statements and original abstract submitted before he got the deal appears to have told different versions of these same ridiculous stories or in some cases, perhaps even more ridiculous stories that weren’t mentioned at all. Before the book, he claimed several times that he’d run 300 miles in three days for charity, or was it 600 miles in six days, or twelve days? He said he raised a million pounds for charity as a result of these efforts, then said it was part of a syndicate. He insisted he was a part of the BBC series Up, though it was filmed before he was born, only to have him concede he was merely making an “analogy” not talking literally. In the abstract, the brain tumor was testicular cancer, the suicide attempt occured years earlier, and that as a teenager he was hit by car only to spend several months in a coma. The doctors at the time said he would never recover and that removing him from life support would be an “act of mercy,” events he was able to describe while being in a coma in the first place because he had “locked-in syndrome” and was aware of everything happening around him. “As I will describe to readers in the book,” he wrote in the proposal, “these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.” The book, however, fails to mention any of this or his miraculous awakening or how he spent a year “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk” even though he was supposedly be in high school at the time, taking his exams and as his memoir claimed “I was relieved, beyond relieved” when they were done.
Ultimately, Professor Arday insisted he was prompted to greatness because of a prophecy told to him in Brazil in 2006, when a local aide worker “a woman in her thirties with dark hair and eyes and a gentle, steady way about her” decreed that he was destined to suffer in life on the way to achieving incredible things, “After the trip was over, I never saw the woman again, but her words stayed with me,” he wrote, “and, you might say, her prediction came true,” but that appears to be bullshit as well. The proposal has it occurring in 2005 instead of 2006, and rather than a local aide, it was “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures,” a “shaman woman.” “Do you know the story of Spartacus, the escaped slave who led a rebellion against the Romans?” she asked, before revealing his fate. “Every event she described,” Professor Arday wrote in the proposal, “has since come to pass” except that next to none of it did, even according to his own self-evidently false writings. To be clear, my intent is not to dunk on Professor Arday, especially after he committed suicide. Instead, I compile this to demonstrate how utterly ridiculous these claims are to anyone with the slightest hint of skepticism. The bullshit artists requires someone to bullshit, and that someone chooses whether to believe it or not, or play along or not. From what I can tell, Professor Arday was an obviously a troubled individual that in a better world would’ve received the help one needed to cope. In this one, however, credentialled charlatans indulged his insanity for their own gain and profit, taking his bullshit and using it for their own purposes even knowing it was bullshit, exploiting Professor Arday and defrauding the public. Suddenly, however, no one has anything to say or is willing to take any accountability. Simon & Schuster claimed to have assigned a fact checker to the work, but has flat out refused to comment even as they proceeded with the publication like it was all real. Somehow, those who are supposed to be the best and brightest among us, who tell us how great, noble, and true they are practically on a daily basis, are more credulous than Danny in About Last Night or me in the car business at barely 14 years old, and they don’t want to hear about it anymore or explain themselves in any way. We, at least, were in on the joke. They, however, using man for their own purposes and created a tragedy of their own making. Sadly, they will face no accountability for their actions. Instead, they will claim others are responsible and busy themselves setting another needless tragedy in motion.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 