Civil discourse cont....modern discussions....

A deeply flawed syllogism

Or maybe we can just say that here's a fab example of arguing towards a cherished conclusion, a cherished party-of-one conclusion, that is. Notice the chick being magnetized has the freaked-out expression small animals get just before the car hits. So onward.

A flawed syllogism is like saying Obama, being a black guy and all, should not be president (::duh:: how obvious is that?) so therefore he was born in Guam or Nairobi or Kenya or some hot place without 48 oz. Coke slushies and shouldn't be president atall since he's not An American Citizen, so there. And since it's 2009 and we live in the age of bountiful crap, there's a huge consumer range of awful conclusions to choose from. Obama is a Nazi? Nazis everywhere? Gotcha covered. Death panels/check lists/whatevs administered by shadowy bureaucrats? You bet. Forced abortions? Absolutely. Internment camps for white people? Honey, we're there.

But let's just invoke the law of parsimony and call all of it for what it is, this "discussion" that's making the rounds, this populist tidal wave of 2m or 1m or 750k or 40 gazillion-trillion souls, depending on your news source, who showed up in DC last weekend. It's racism and it always was racism. (A tip o' the hat to Jimmy Carter for spelling it out and I second the emotion.) The world is not what it was. It's doubtful we can go back to those dear departed days of Klan marches, poll-taxes, and colored-only everything. It's not only the negras who've gotten uppity, it's the ladies too (most of them currently supporting their hunky guys), plus those little brown health-service-grabbing immigrants taking all those great American jobs. The celebrated era of the white guy is over and, in case you live under a porch or a rock, it's been over since about 1964.

But one thing that confounds me about stupidity in general, is this tendency to roar to the polar opposite of any argument. This AM, I'm currently brooding over No Impact Man: the movie, the book, the talk show. And yes, idiocy also comes to the progressive left on little cat feet. Here's this fella and his wife, plus hapless child, with a cushy income-level, who decides to give up everything for a year. It's kind of Walden Pond without the pond, the good writing, the ideals, and the 19th century, but you get the idea. So they have a pan of worms in the kitchen to compost their garbage, they walk up 40 billion flights of stairs every day, they squint under candlelight at night, and play charades for funsy. What I wonder is why they fled to this inflated dystopian vision of non-consumer life.

When I was a shirt-tailed tad, we kept our compost outside and when we lived in an apartment complex, we didn't have a compost pile. We had electricity too, and even used it at night to no ill-effects. For giggles and grins, we went separate ways to our singular amusements. I read comic books, my little sis babbled into her toy telephone, and my parents played bridge. As Terry Allen says, It weren't art but it weren't bad.

We didn't get a book deal out of it though.

No Impact Man has remarked in interviews that his vision of things was informed by Zen Buddhism, to which I call bullshit. The hardest part about Buddhism is that middle-way thingie. Extremes are easy. Hate to diet? Jump on the Anorexia Express and starve instead. Been a consumer pig? Give it all up, put on scratchy loin cloth, and hunker in the dark. The nicest part about being a total contrarian, is that you can give your brain a rest. There's no uncomfortable doubting or deciding moment to moment.

But, thankfully, extremism of any kind is always a two wicked candle. It burns like a mother while it burns, but it burns out fast.

Don't even try to light my fire. I'm here for the long haul.

Civil discourse cont...The Howling Mob

Knock, knock, knockin' at your own back door

Not to put too fine a point on it, but our Founding Fathers weren't nuts about dumb-asses either. In fact, the stupidity problem was one they recognized early on in pre-Revolutionary times and wrote long quarreling letters about it in their gorgeous curly handwriting. Sam Adams, an uncomfortable precursor of Glen Becks everywhere, thought that the Howling Mob, as it was characterized, could be put to noble service by siccing the rabble onto Loyalists and redcoats. Cooler heads, like John Adams, however, saw a lot to be wary of, like, f'instance, some rabble might be mongoose crazy and get all scary and unpredictable, and it was just possible they could get out of control completely. Which, of course they did, several times and to no one's benefit.

Thomas Jefferson thought that, in the interests of democratic thinking, one should mix with the dumb-butts and even, as he said, Lie on their stinking cots. But Jefferson had his trippy moments and who knows how he truly felt. He didn't lie on any reeking beds, that's for sure. He was mostly home at Monticello slugging down part of a truly exceptional cellar. George Washington wrote a little etiquette book in his twenties that was like many of the time: obsessed with the presentation of the self and with self control, plus exhorting his readers not to blow their noses on their fingers in the drawing room and not to pick lice out of their hair in church. On the mob side of things, I think we can vote him a quiet shudder.

So it's curious to me that we even give these poor teabagging souls a glance. Another blogger, The Rude Pundit, said that the 9-12 demonstration was the Special Olympics of protests and I tend to agree. Except that I can't overlook the fact that the howling mob is a part of America, as is their unvarnished racism. I don't know if their anger can ever be quelled, I don't know if they can be made happy; this country, even during its most somber midnights, has never done much for them. They are often constricted and deformed by poverty, whether it's a poverty of the soul, poverty of education or, the least ruinous type of poverty, financial. And yet, every so often, some strange personage arises from them, like a fabled feathered creature. Like Andrew Jackson say. Or Sam Houston. Or, in many ways, LBJ.

I've never been a believer in abreactive therapy: that it does a body good to blow his cork. Anger just begets more anger and its expression doesn't release anything, it just intoxicates. So I see these groups egging one another on and, I believe, no good will come of it. I know I'm not particularly good with idiots and it's better for me not to get furious about them, with them. But I think somehow they need to be engaged, and recognized as the part of America they've always been. It's the expression of that recognition I'm searching for.

Maybe George Washington's etiquette book has a clue.

I'm not seeing anything else that does.