It's increasingly apparent that what could once have been said about the privilege of place generally afforded by speech over writing being inverted in the normal mode of cultural production in the United States has at this late date completely collapsed. We are now living in a post-scribal politics where the authenticity of the word has been replaced by the authenticity of the sign, and that has itself been subsumed by the authenticity of the sensation. This is what lies in the middle of Stephen Colbert's celebrated "truthiness," which is an illusory ascription of truth values to bodily sensations which are neither public nor propositional and therefore paradoxically denied any kind of involvement in the semiosis of sentences. If what is true is what cannot be expressed, and also if what cannot be expressed is located temporally post-hoc to the dialog of democratic politics, then the assignation of truth values to sentential reasoning no longer exists and we have finally found ourselves living in a post-rational environment in every sense of the word. At root this forms a paradox because this analysis is unavoidable and nevertheless renders true such counterfactual sentences as "I very much enjoyed receiving oral sex from Amber Tamblyn and Emma Stone in a cheap motel in Needles, California during the Fourth of July Celebration in 2003 while the three of us were tripping balls on some of the best Psilocybe Cubensis I have ever eaten." Unpacking the counterfactual 1.) oral sex on mushrooms is difficult to enjoy under the best of circumstances, let alone while watching fireworks 2.) I have never met Amber Tamblyn or Emma Stone, let alone had a menage a trois with them 3.) no one has ever very much enjoyed themselves in Needles, California in the desert heat of July 4.) If I recall correctly on the 4th of July 2003 I was sober as a judge and miserably lonely and celibate, shacked up in a cabin in Forks, Washington working on the final set of revisions just prior to the publication of the second edition of The Poetics of Aggravated Sexual Assault: Ritualized Rape/Murder as the Last Art of the 20th Century. And yet, I repeat to myself the counterfactual and I know with a great degree of certainty that it is true, and not just in some Lewisian modal realist multiverse in which there are an infinite number of worlds where my engorged manhood is perpetually massaging the tonsils of any number of hollywood starlets, but in the sense that it is an authentic production of an expression that is absolutely true in the here and now of the universal indexical present.
Which is all to say that one really must be careful to use protection, because ultimately we've all already fucked eachother and are clearly therefore riddled with sexually transmitted disease.