Conflate, conflate

There are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Benjamin Disraeli said this. I was there, I heard him say it.

I was there too when Mark Twain said the same thing about lies, that there are three kinds of them.

We were mining gold in a little town between Reno and Elko. Twain and I were the principles; we had a small crew of three men, and two horses and a donkey. At night we'd sit around the camp fire and Twain would tell stories. I kept a reporters notebook in those days and would often write down things Twain said that I found memorable. I'm sure the notebook's somewhere among my belongings.

All this was said of course in the days before conflation.

Some people consider conflation the fourth kind of lie. I don't, I think three kinds of lies are more than enough. A conflation is often an honest mistake, or at worst a lie totally dependent on context. If a conflation were a lie, conflaters would have been assigned a circle in Dante's inferno. But I'm reading The Divine Comedy now and conflaters are conspicuously missing.

Once, out walking through a cow pasture in rural Wyoming, I had to really watch my step, if you get my drift, it you know what I mean. There were little minefields everywhere; one false step and I could've been blown to smithereens.

I soon learned it wasn't the cows I had to be wary of, it was what the cows left behind. I also realized that real bullshit isn't so bad, that it's the made-up bullshit that really brings you down.