Talks Shows, Logic, and Things (obviously) Unrelated

Remember the joke about the guy who comes home one day to find the neighbor guy cannonading his wife? The wife looks over her lover's heaving shoulder and says to her husband, "Well, are you going to believe me or your eyes?" On a trip to Oklahoma and back yesterday and the day before, I listened to the talk-show hosts rally round their hero, Dubya and his Bush League administration. In various forms, I heard the joke about the cuckold again and again. George and the Bush League isn't to blame. Natural disasters aren't his problem. Besides, things weren't FUBAR, not as bad as we think, anyway. The far left is just trying to "politicize" the screw-ups. The Democrats are really at fault. Time and again, one of the cuckoo-birds correspondents would play the inane raving of one or another "entertainer" (how's that for absurdity?) like Celine Dion or Terri Koyne, to insinuate illogically that they were representative of their hero's detractors.

One guy kept repeating (we were trying to count, couldn't keep up—traffic in San Antonio can be very distracting, you know) how we should "forget the blame game and get on with the recovery" (yeah, the guard who slept on duty can always be expected to approve that approach, all right). If Ruby Ridge, Waco, the World Trade Center, and the like are any indication, that's how it will turn out, too. The Senate will hold "hearings" (which have the same relation to the old-fashioned meaning of the word that "debate" has to the presidential candidates' duet charades every four years). The House will have hearings, and the government will investigate itself. Result? Nobody will get fired, or even chewed out, and we'll go right back to our feckless "normal" (in a nation that has become only virtually real, a lot of quotation marks are necessary, it seems; see, the quotation marks mean the word has a special meaning . . . oh, never mind). "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make insane." Or stupid.

Et cetera. Anyway, here comes another World Trade Center cover up. When it's all done, I wonder how far we'll be from claiming it was all in our imaginations (frankly, the only reason I listen and watch anymore is to see how far down the rabbit hole we've gone).

And I'm fascinated with what Steven Allen called "the dumbing down of America." During the trip and our radio talk show patronage, we were also trying to count logical fallacies. As fast as I would name them, Rita would make a note. We only got a rough tally—the poor woman couldn't write that fast. "Our president is a good guy because he's a Christian" (on reporting the Prez' declaration of a national day of prayer). That's begging question, by the way (petitio principii). "A national day of prayer is a good thing because it's good to pray" (begs the question again). "We shouldn't criticize our president at a time like this because he's our president (beg . . . oh, never mind). We even heard from one self-styled genius that we shouldn't let the Koreans (or was it the Iranians) have nuclear weapons because it isn't good to have nuclear weapons (pick one—there's a list). There were more—types of fallacy, I mean. Lots of them, from ad hominem, to ad misericordiam, to illicit major and minor and all forms of illicit syllogism. You name it, we heard it. A veritable barrage of brainless, bloviating B.S.

My companion, a high school English teacher, and I began to consider the crippling effect of a nation which no longer teaches logic during elementary and college preparatory education. It ought to be taught, we concluded, like basic mathematics. A kid should be able to recite the logical fallacies, recognize modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms like he does the multiplication tables. Stupidity both like that pouring from the radio and that obviously being exploited by the "talk show hosts" (just the fact alone that no one recognizes this for the propaganda that it is is worrisome and vexing enough).

Worst, perhaps, of all was the fact that I found myself agreeing with everything Bill O'Reilly said. Now, THAT is worrisome!

Oops—that reminds me. A whole lot of people assume that because I criticize a conservative, I'm a liberal. Now, without reminding you (again?) that that's illogical—which I just did, anyway, didn't I? (anybody able to identify the logical paradox that represents?)—the fact is that all my friends here in my little coffee shop tertulia had a good time with that one. Hal a liberal. "Hal," Ed, my engineer friend said, "if you're a liberal, so was Attila the Hun." Dear reader, the reason I never criticize anyone liberal is the fact that I never listen to them. Matter of fact, I consider liberalism a form of mental illness. Brain gone to mush, is one way to describe it. What I criticize is my side, because that's the side I want to succeed. It won't if it's stupid. Our team has the water boy starting at quarterback. The greediest, most power-mad eminence gris in history (rhymes with brainy) is the blocking back (whose selfless trustworthiness you've gotta be able to count on . . .). That's stupid.

In the same vein, I've heard no objection to my politics more than, "If you don't like it here, why don't you leave?" That's the kind of logic and reasoning we've relegated ourselves to, I guess. The answer is that this is my country. Another is that I've never run from a fight in my life. I know how my country was intended to be by its Founding Fathers, and I decided long ago that's how I wanted it to be. And if John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and the rest were reincarnated on the floor of Congress or in our courts today, they'd have no damned idea where they were. Sad.

Finally, not only do public figures like the talk radio hosts and their nitwit nostrums reflect on all of us and demonstrate to the world how stupid (spell that v-u-l-n-e-r-a-b-l-e) we are, so does a cluster---- like the New Orleans disaster operation. Bill O'Reilly made a point or two, like I said. One was that when you're poor in the U.S., you're gonna get hammered. That's obviously true, and there's a corollary: if you're stupid, you're going to get it worse. He was right about another thing, oil companies profiting from the nation's misery. He just didn't go far enough (I think his capitalist soul just couldn't do it). We are presented with another of those paradoxes of logic. "America" is just about the only place it could happen. The taxpayers big oil is ripping off so eagerly (and sanctimoniously—capitalist religious doctrine provides for that) have been investing in their tormentors business for decades, in the form of huge tax breaks and allowances totaling in the hundred of billions. Now, anywhere else, anyone contributing to a company without exchange of consideration (property or services) acquires a share of the company's ownership. But not if it's taxes. Cute little finesse, isn't it? You buy the sucker, but you don't acquire any kind of ownership or control. It's a handout. So how does the guy you handed out to show his gratitude? Why, the first and every time he gets a chance, he sticks it to you. And you play along. "Whom the gods would destroy . . ."