Next to a prolonged late-night session of incontinent nostalgia (you know: when after at least a few beers, the talk turns to the good old days), there is nothing more appealing to me than sharing a full pitcher of righteous indignation with a like-minded, right-thinking cohort. So, as one who can work up a full-blown hissy fit in the face of an impenetrable touch-tone decision tree, I came to Laura Penny’s book, Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit (Crown, 2005), with keen anticipation, and I was not disappointed.

Penny, 30, a Canadian college teacher who says that she is tired of being put on hold, proposes to flush out some of the great gobs of bullshit which clog our Augean-stable lives. A clean sweep would, of course, be impossible without Hercules.

I must hasten to point out that Penny’s concept of poppycock or balderdash or claptrap, as the more polite amongst us might call it, is not the bullshit of Harry G. Frankfurt, the distinguished professor of philosophy whose essay On Bullshit (Princeton, 2005) achieved bestseller status here of late. Frankfurt’s piece was first published in a collection of essays in 1988 and is now a Lilliputian 67-page “book” only as the result of the sort of marketing pizzazz which Penny might include in her sights. He spends some 8,000 words attempting to describe with full academic rigor a form of expression which is neither truth nor lie, but an insidious (in Frankfurt’s view) message emanating from someone who doesn’t care whether something is either truth or falsehood, but only whether it does a job. Selling something as it is practiced on Madison Avenue. Or getting someone elected as it is practiced by Karl Rove.

Nor is Penny interested in the B.S. delineated in G.A. Cohen’s “Deeper into Bullshit,” a 2002 essay in which he attacks that inscrutable left-bank twiddle-twaddle which has invaded American campuses since my time in the grooves of academe. Chen claims that if you can put a “not” in a given text without changing its meaning, you are in the presence of his form of bullshit. But that’s another story for another day.

I come, not to bloviate about Frankfurt’s hogwash or Cohen’s fiddle-faddle, but to praise Penny’s sendups of public relations and advertising; the financial markets; corporate power; politics (“The platitudinous pabulum that passes for stirring political rhetoric is bullshit.”); the pharmaceutical industry (“The disease hysteria du jour is bullshit, and so is the latest miracle pill.”); an economy based on hyper-consumption (“The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit.”); and the news media (“Sleaze Bites and Fluff Crawls, or Can We Dumb This Down for the Kids?”). As you can see, Penny’s targets range across the aggravations of our times.

Typical of Penny’s insights, and displaying the liveliness and cleverness of her prose, is a passage about when “a friend pointed out the limited upside of the election of a fresh batch of familiar Republicans: at least the music would get better. He rhymed off lists of great Reagan/ Thatcher-era singles, angry desperate rawk and melancholy pop fueled by the general sense of economic and social malaise, like old R.E.M. and the Clash, the kind of stuff you hear at a bar on Retro Night. And it started to make sense: Reagan begetting Bush begetting Bush, “Dynasty” sequins and Sid Vicious belts on the runways, the new sad punks, the same old shite. We are living in the undead ‘80s, all the more powerful for coming back from the dead, like Jesus and zombies. Culture wars, a new evil empire, that Jennifer Lopez video that is Flashdance - it’s the ‘80s all over again, even though they only just happened. Since Dubya was elected for four more years, one Retro Night track strikes me as especially apropos: a song by the marvelously mopey Smiths from their 1987 release, Strangeways, Here We Come, a bitter little ditty called “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.”

Penny is not all fun and games; she comes up with a number of articulations of ideas we’ve all had, but never so well expressed. I’ve often struggled to describe the echo chamber Oval Office, but now I know it’s simply another example of “incestuous affirmation,” which “sets in when one grows so powerful and wealthy that one is utterly isolated from anyone but the like-minded or toadying. Examples of the deleterious effects of incestuous affirmation include Donald Trump’s hair, Michael Jackson’s face and the Bush war cabinet.”

Without getting too serious, or serious at all, Penny does suggest in her last chapter, “Think of the Children! Or Life During Wartime,” that some counterweight to the load of bull which weighs us all down may lie in higher education. Not the ravings of Second Lady Lynne Cheney’s 2001 report called “Defending Civilization.” Nor David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights. Nor the likes of Ward Churchill. But rather in a Great Books approach: “They might notice that the last round of major Allah vs. Jesus-my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God smackdowns raged on for at least five centuries.”

Sit back and prepare for a lively ride with Penny as you marvel at the terminally credulous cretins somewhere out there, who are actually swallowing this bilge she calls bullshit. As Lily Tomlin said: “No matter how cynical you become, it is never enough to keep up.” But Penny is surely going to help you try.