"We'll have to evolve . . ."

"With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain." --Friedrich von Schiller.

On television as I type today, Kitty Pilgrim of the Lou Dobbs Show is asking a guest why it is that our government “can’t protect us from shoddy and dangerous products from China.” It may be a rhetorical question – certainly for me, it is – but it is also indicative of how resolutely oblivious the nation is to the obvious, self-proclaimed, fact of corporate capitalism and its life view. Why, indeed – how is a better choice of question. How can anybody rational, having observed and heard those who call themselves “capitalists” describe themselves, their purpose, and their intent, pretend surprise that a government of corporate capitalists has no interest in controlling corporate capitalism?

If ever there were proof of my contention that capitalism has become our national religion, this will do nicely. What else but religion could explain this kind of stultified behavior? But the debate where there is nothing debatable has become peculiarly “made in the U.S.A.” (ironic, isn’t it, that little of our country IS actually made in the U.S.A., anymore?). That’s the subject today, and while I’ve spoken of it before, I confess that near panic moves me to do so again. An “America” as stupid as this one is not what I had in mind when I thought of living out my retirement years.

More, having lived as long as I have, having done all that I have, and having survived what I have, I claim the prerogatives I’ve earned.

“I am lapidary but not eristic when I use big words.” So wrote William F. Buckley (Jr.) when criticized for using “big” words. I couldn’t help recall that, having been repeatedly accused of sesquipedality since having showed up on the Internet five years ago. I couldn’t help recall, because it’s microcosmic of our incredibly stupid and benighted society.

Don’t bother to look up Buckley’s epigram, I’ll translate. “Lapidary” refers to the practice of carving the inscription on tombstones, and the assiduous – oops; that means “constant in working or giving attention’ – and meticulous – oops again; it means “paying scrupulous attention to detail” – to a duty.

In time past – and not so long ago – there would be those among us intelligent enough to squirm inwardly at that. No longer, of course.

“Eristic” means “provoking controversy, or given to sophistical argument and specious reasoning.” So, what Mr. Buckley said was “I am precise and meticulous where detail is concerned, but I do not intend to provoke anyone by sophist (oh, hell – look it up; is that too much to ask of people who think they know it all, anyway?) statement or argument. “

Nightly, I listen to a cadre of “experts,” “analysts,” and whatever vaingloriously argumentative balderdash the media can foist upon a public stultified and stupefied by propaganda, posturing blowhards who inveigh in language fit eighth graders on all manner of things political and of nationally critical import. Each morning, I read columnists who write in language likewise suited. Pitifully illogical and solecistic (look it the hell up – I don’t have a Hip-Hop, Ebonics, Pidgin English, street Hip-Hop, or aboriginal term because people who speak that kind of primitive argot seldom have use for language and terminology representing anything more complicated than the use of their genitals), the purveyors of Operation Mockingbird mind-control cover the pages of each newspaper with nitwit nonsense.

It’s infantile, “see Dick jump, see Jane run” journalistic pabulum, the kind once directed by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to the “stupidest of the audience” in Nazi Germany. Everywhere one looks these days, he is obliged to listen and watch as people of the most marginally possible intellect hornswoggle an audience of mentally compromised and staring morons.

The phenomenon is unique, however. It is unique in the fact that its victims have somehow been convinced of their own penetrating perspicacity (look it up – “google it,” to quote another supposed intellectual giant of the culture) and towering genius. One who does not understand, and has to look up, the meaning of the taxonomical appellation for the subject of discourse, feels nevertheless qualified and competent – entitled, even - to argue its esoteric points.

Strange? Not really – it’s state of the art propaganda. No one is as “deceived, confused, and incompetent” – as a CIA Operation Mockingbird wonk described its prospective U.S. public victims – as the individual who has been convinced of his surpassing mental acumen while remaining child-like and primitive in fact.

An idiot who somehow know he’s an idiot has a distinct advantage over one who thinks he knows everything.

Again and again and again – and again, I have in the last decade engaged in disputation with individuals who, questioned even generally and basically on the science having to do with the subject, prove to know almost nothing.

Yesterday, while assembling a WorkMate work bench the better to manufacture hurricane protection against what might be necessary for Hurricane Dean, I listened to FoxNews’ utterly unprincipled Sean Hannity deliver yet another of his (astonishingly) cynical tirades against people like Al Gore and those concerned with carbon dioxide resulted from internal combustion and other industrial-resulted emissions. For more than ten days since six miners in Utah became trapped in a mine there, we have heard experts including the miners explain the peril having to do with air content facing the trapped men. Air containing less than twenty percent oxygen would mean unconsciousness, the “reporters” have repeated mantra-like again and again.

Now, Mr. Hannity (and those who still actually believe this guy believes what he is saying and isn’t a paid actor reading a script) raises a number of typically irrelevant issues. Basically, he seeks to prove that those who don’t agree with him are cheating, accusing those not on his side of the argument of politicking and buying – is there a difference these day? – opinion favoring their point of view.

Is it really necessary to make reply to anything so obviously, characteristically disingenuous? The response to something like this was once, “I won’t dignify that with a response.” Hannity’s role as a propagandist for the corporately owned and co-opted White House - and neo-conservative corporate capitalism itself - has never been so colossally apparent. You need only listen to this guy with an open mind knowledgeable concerning the subject upon which he is currently declaiming to know what has happened to journalism and the news media in the Land of the Fee.

Frequently, friends and those who access my website essays (why does all of today’s alternative usage sound so singularly non compos mentis?), ask what I would say were I a guest on Hannity’s television “show” (it IS that . . .). Actually, Mr. Hannity (on his “fair and balanced” show) is the archetype of the dictator despot he so admires. He seldom – all but never – asks a question that isn’t the highest form of loaded question ever developed by today’s propagandist rhetorician. Master of the “when did you stop beating your wife,” question, Hannity goes one further. He uses the “is it possible” form of the meretriciously famous rhetorical device like a swashbuckler of the old pirate movies used a stage-prop sword.

Alexander Pope couldn’t have known Sean Hannity personally, but he knew the latter’s character all too well. “A killing tongue,” wrote Pope, “but a quiet sword.” Like the Jack S. Phogbound demagogue, he uses the all-too-familiar - indeed, absolutely characteristic of the politician – obliquely evasive retort of his pimp-prostituted kind. Still, it’s fun to ask these questions rhetorically. Let’s see:

“Mr. Hannity, a question where all this argument is concerned comes to the mind of logicians and tacticians otherwise. Mr. Hannity, were you the captain of the Titanic, and your ship-to-shore radio were to advise that icebergs were believed to have come further south – and into the projected path of your vessel, why would you order full speed ahead? Why – even more like the matter of internal combustion emissions-generated global warming in question - would you scoff and vilify those suggesting caution? WHY?”

Or, “Walking as per custom across a field at night, and informed that rattlesnakes had recently been seen there, why would you advise those in your company to charge straight ahead without caution?”

“Make that land mines – several having been discovered the day before. Why?”

How about this? “Going down into a mine daily as the Utah miners were, and informed that seismic reading of late were indicating extreme danger (a mountain you’re under moving is pretty scary for any miner not as colossally courageous as you are), why would you insist that work in the mine continue? Hmmmmmm? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT, sir?”

Then, too, “Assuming that you ARE one of the miners at the bottom of that mine, and you know – as obviously you would – that when the air you have to breathe becomes eighty-one percent carbon dioxide (you’re by your breathing changing the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide, you know), you lose consciousness and die. Why do you recommend, even demand, that those with you at the bottom of the mine exercise violently, and do everything you can to hasten the time when you can’t breathe?”

“TELL us about that, sir – great seer and expert that you are. How ABOUT that?!

“And, while you’re at the ‘telling’ and pontificating you so love, tell us who stands to benefit most from continued intemperance concerning fossil fuel emissions? Tell us who would suffer most from a favorable and co-operative public response to the warnings of “global warming” exponents. Why NOT cut emissions, and stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Why not, sir?

“It would be BAD if everyone were to stop driving their SUVs at ninety miles per hour? It would be BAD to stop making the air over cities so filled with pollutants that you can’t see through it? Are you telling us that air so full of industrial waste, internal combustion, and the like emissions that you can’t see through it is as good for breathing as clean air?”

Sure. Hell yes! Where did you get the idea you were talking to the Man
with the Hoe (no, stupid, it’s a tool for use in the garden – not racist political demagoguery; and the title has to do with a famous poem, one inspired by a famous painting).

People like Hannity and the “today’s global warming is natural because it’s happened before” people (check your reasoning powers with that one – think about it), no doubt, learn whether the gun in their hands is loaded by putting it to their heads and pulling the trigger.

But - to those rendered fixated and without circumspection by propagandist media “personalities” (the expression suggests to you nothing about what I’ve been speaking?) like Hannity – I digress. The question, my topic, has to do with the use of “big words.” Note that no one who complains of sesquipedalian (by now, you should have looked it up) language complains of its epistemological, logical, or scientific equivalent. The individual who doesn’t recognize the meaning of “eristic,” for instance, proceeds blithely to discuss and dispute economics, sociology, politics, and military science. He knows everything necessary about matters like the collapse of the World Trade Center, the science of intelligence gathering having to do with the existence or lack thereof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the military science having to do with the feasibility of invasion and occupation of Iraq, and much, much more.

The guy who doesn’t recognize the term “Coriolis Effect,” much less how to write the equation for calculating it at any particular point on the earth, who doesn’t so much as know that the seas and oceans lose carbon dioxide to the atmosphere - let alone how to calculate it, who has to run for a dictionary, then a physics book, then a biology book (the dictionary suggests it) in order to identify the word “photosynthesis” – has no idea, or chance, of every calculating how much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere by plants . . .

But he will run off at the mouth about carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global warming, nevertheless. He has read that not all scientists agree upon the supposed – he hasn’t the faintest idea how to know – subject.

This morning (I stopped work on this last night, and it’s a new day), I recall an illegal immigration cuckoo-bird on FoxNews demanding to know how the government can use “a broken law” to deport the woman who sought “sanctuary” in a church. Consider the logic of THAT one, folks. Apparently, once a Mexican breaks a law, it becomes unenforceable. This guy thinks like the people who think they want to oppose cleaning up the ecosystem and the atmosphere in order to keep driving their gas guzzler at ninety miles an hour.

It goes on and on, of course – nothing worse than the educational system that has spawned it all. Yesterday, my wife Rita came home to inform me that she had in effect been demoted – to training animals. I hasten to explain that teachers in Texas are now all required to learn horse-training. This morning, Rita dressed appropriately for the horse barn where she must go for the latest of Texas education system instruction.

I swear that I'm not making this up (I wish to god I were).

A man seldom nonplussed – for something to say or otherwise – I am so now repeatedly. Everything government in this societal and national loony-bin does is akin to this latest of cockamamie nonsense. Forty two years a masters-degreed, repeatedly award-winning teacher, and now this. My god!

Now, I am one who has long recognized the parallels, repetitions, and re-iterations (if you can’t understand the language, again, this isn’t meant for you) of nature and the universe of which it is a part. This latest example of government gone goofy relates to things like the equally, and similarly stupid invasion of the Iraq and the tactics that followed. In fact, let us recall, the man responsible for the war was in no small way responsible for the miserable state of education in Texas.

And, as I say here, it goes on and on. Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Branch Davidian Compound, New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, the World Trade Center and the federal guard dog who didn’t bark, the hapless 9-11 Commission, Iraq, and of late, the I-35W bridge in Minnesota. Incredible, incompetent, feckless, and spend-thrift government everywhere. On and on.

HORSES! We’re apparently going to educate children – or teachers – the way we educate a horse! Actually, of course, it explains a hell of a lot of what I’ve been speaking here. The horses won’t believe global warming has anything to do with engine emissions, either.

I search for a way to conclude this – that having lost all hope that a people like this one will ever have what it takes to restore to health the nation I love. Let’s try this: A week or so ago, a man with whom I was speaking casually at a coffee shop looked my in the eye when he said soberly that even if the world was being warmed by pollution, we could deal with it by “evolving.” No, I’m not kidding (I admit that I thought he was joking; but he wasn’t, and I swear that’s what he said). More, I mention it to illustrate why I am so concerned with the stupidity for which the people of the United States have become famous.

“We’ll need to evolve . . .”