I Met A Gish Galloper

I’ll spare you the details, which are simple yet labyrinthine, deeply boring, and inevitably leave you with an irritated disgust. By design. That is a mechanism of the Gish Galloper. It’s how you’d feel after a day battling bureaucracy but accomplishing nothing, combined with the thick feeling on your shoe when you walk out of a dog park long after it last rained.

The Gish Gallop, named after a creationist who used the technique in debates, is when someone throws out a stream of nonsense, perhaps insults, and outright lies in order to overwhelm their opponent, prevent useful conversation, and win by virtue of everyone losing. They take a few shards of truth then wildly distort and overwhelm them with a stream of garbage and offensive offense.

I had seen one on TV, but never expected to rent an apartment from another. In case you run into one too, I’d like to share the lesson I learned.

All customs and assumptions of honest communication between grown ups are abandoned by the Galloper with a speed that leaves you bewildered. As the trash heap grows, the original topic becomes less compelling than a new question: does the Galloper know what they’re doing? Is it on purpose, or are they really that, well, stupid? You are now dealing with someone who is either morally or intellectually incompetent and you want to know which one it is, even before the suspicion sets in that it’s both.

That’s the question that makes you want to win, to satisfy both curiosity and your sense of justice. It’s the hook that catches you and pulls you out of your otherwise reasonable life, and has you formulating emails in your head in the middle of the night. These thoughts can drain your joy, corrupt an otherwise great day, and hijack your attention. So what do you do?

Flush them. Engaging is cooperating, and you can’t fight nonsense, since refuting it takes so much longer than creating it. Your mind will come back to it, the way you keep wiping at the spot where a bird pooped on you even after it’s gone, and you’ll feel the urge to check for an update just like your eyes are drawn to the pile of used noodles on a Saturday morning sidewalk, but just don’t. Archive the emails and move on. Trust in karma. Try to feel compassion for the Galloper if you can, since they are not happy people, having lost their struggle to be decent people. Definitely feel compassion for anyone who has to deal with them, but that needn’t be you.

The bad news is the Gish Gallop works. My landlord was objectively wrong at every step, yet walked away with everything he wanted and my deposit. But he is a minor note in my human textbook, and I’m going back to the endless chapters of people being better. That’s the good news, con artists and liars are the tiny minority of humanity, ticks in an otherwise beautiful meadow.

The other good news is you can get a gift from the Galloper. Their ability to putrefy an environment can drive you to seek something better. I was content to rent crappy apartments, good enough places where the smell of poorly built pipes and previous occupants greeted me greasily when I opened the door. But the risk of another morally/intellectually incompetent landlord helped me make a decision, and I type this in the apartment I bought that is 1000 times nicer and really feels like Home.

Thank you Gish Galloper. May we never meet again.