"The Bookful Block-head, Ignorantly Read . . .," and, for Instance, 9-11.

A recent discussion on TagWord with the personable members there stimulates this, my latest “rant” (strange, isn’t it, that in the land of free speech almost every example of such has pejorated to the point of becoming anathema; if there is anything we seem to hate more as a nation than free speech, I can only wonder what it is . . .). Having learned from and stimulated by Internet forums like Truthout, Alternet, Useless Knowledge, MySpace, and others, I recently elicited my latest sampling of the public discourse by commenting on a now well-festered subject, the World Trade Center and what has become part of the vernacular as “9-11.” I have revisited that particular matter a number of times, in order to “thicken” my study by way of stirring the pot again. It has, you know, become cult-ified – grown into a new religious doctrine.

In order relate the two microcosmic measures of national discourse, I also sallied – sortéed, might be a more apt term - into the discussion on several websites of national health care vis-à-vis capitalism. There were a couple more subjects, too, as members of the TW site would attest, and soon the Internet forensic wort had begun fermenting nicely. The WTC, 9-11 matter has reached a “spiritus frumenti” content of about 100 proof. Whew!

The Newspeak media helped mightily the metastasis of what might be called the public thought process with still more of the “nappy-headed hoes” (assuming that’s how you spell the neologism so beloved of worthies like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, and their pettifogging, Senator Jack S. Phogbound like), race-Pecksniffian and chip-on-the-shoulder, demagogues’ manna from heaven, words as booby-traps, like (my god, people, haven’t we had enough of this old-ladies-knitting-circle, fish-wives, panty-hose effeminate and metrosexual gay, Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, Kimberly Guilfoyle, tabloid news crap - how the hell far can you take this “hate speech” bullshit, without losing ALL credibility?).

Even more to the point of my parenthetical question, how stupid can your argument get before anyone of the modest intellect necessary to recognize it as such may legally ignore it? MUST I respect and defer to witchcraft, shamanism, Santeria, and voodoo? I am required – by law, as it now seems I am - to listen respectfully when someone tells me the Blessed Virgin has appeared in the scum on a shower curtain (no, I’m not joking – it happened a while ago here in South Texas) and it’s a “sign?” From god?

Today’s discourse has become so . . . metastasized, was the word I used, wasn’t it? - as to have become so cancer-ridden, so utterly useless, that we have come as a nation to the point of absurdities that can only be explained among otherwise healthy brains by schizoid psychosis. There may be a question concerning whether the kind of stupidity the public displays is due lack of education, education that is deliberately conducive to error and stupidity, behavioral conditioning directed toward stultification and thought process confusion, or the like, but there can be no doubt where what is happening and why are concerned.

As I type this, for instance, a news program announces that a governor has repudiated his oath of office, refusing to enforce the law having to do with illegal immigration. He stands in defiance of the law, yet remains in office. It is as though he says, “I refuse to do what you chose me to do, which is the will of the people, but since you chose me I will do as I damned please – everything I can against your interests.” How is such thing possible? More to the point (again) how can you still pretend that a nation where that can be is a democracy?

Still, my discussions – especially with the breed who call themselves “conservative” (my god, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and the like are “CONSERVATIVE?”) - result in my being told again and again, day after day, that we are a democracy. Today, we learn that while seventy-six percent of the public is emphatically opposed to illegal immigration, politicians and the government they constitute don’t care. Democracy. Rule by the people. Sure.

The people can do nothing, but the people rule? Tell, me, someone – at what point in all this are we NOT a democracy?

Oh, but I’ve been here before. In spades. For more than two decades, 1977 to 2001, I lived in the “Nation of Laws,” where the government literally – in print, electronically, and by public action - mocked the law. That’s publicly. While the public stood idly by, watching like well-fed sheep. To a very large degree, nothing has changed yet to this day.

But my story was one occurring years ago, no one cared (or cares – and obviously), and I am more interested now in how its implications then – the ones no one found worth effort so much as attention – have resulted now. As if to assist here, the television – the Glen Beck Show and a cuckoo bird Catholic apologist – reinforces my growing fear of my demented nation. The Catholic apologist, head of one Catholic Church laity organization or councils, pontificates by extension that all sex without church sanction is evil. His analogy comes in a claim that everyone evil – i.e., not subscribing to his view of the procreative act.- would “graft a condom on male children and say, ‘have at it.’” Sex not intended to procreate, in other words, is evil.

Now, I wouldn’t care what a cuckoo-bird like that thinks or does – he’s in my view as sick in his way as the people who confuse the function of their genitals otherwise – but the fact that he might very well impose upon me in the same way that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer flaunts the law having to do with illegal immigration and President of the United States George W. Bush flaunts the U.S. Constitution. When the law becomes whatever the powerful – whether it be the all-sex-of-which-we-don’t-approve-is-evil, “the-word-is-flat-factions” or the “born-again” individual in office – say it is, I’m scared. The prospect of living in a nation governed by the Word Trade Center conspiracy theorists is alone enough to increase the frequency and intensity of my shooting practice, in other words.

I just don’t want to be in this cuckoo’s nest any more, to put it even more simply.

Still, I keep trying. The grandkids will be here when I’m gone. I keep hoping to discover a sociological, even political algorithm by which to turn around this stampede into societal insanity. I want the few rational people among us – that’s white, Anglo-Saxon males, thinking like traditional white Anglo-Saxon males who built our country, then held it together through a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression – to take it back.

Oh, it’s incontrovertibly true that we are no longer the eighty-nine percent majority that we were as late as 1965. Neither is it arguable that it’s there that things began to go to hell in a hand-basket, and I find it damned suspicious that no one but me seems to connect those facts. But I can’t legally say that anymore, CAN I? “Racist!” “Sexist!” Politically incorrect!” Maybe even “hate speech.”

Not as bad, maybe, as referring to someone as a “nappy-headed hoe,” or a “queer,” or the dreaded N-word, but that depends on who hears, right? Just trying to compose any kind of statement these days is to walk in a minefield of verbal high explosives. And the “mines” are being invented as I write this – no way to know until I step on one.

Still, I have to do something, and there must be some part of normal societal and national thought processes remaining unaffected by the politically correct paralysis. Like Patrick Henry, I know of no way to deal with the future except study of the past, and having been all my life an ardent historian, I consider what it was that once made us the greatest nation in history. What do we need to do again?

First, I think, we must, by teaching and demanding study and observation of the age-old rules of epistemology, logic, reason, and mathematics, begin to restore the public's consciousness, its sensorium, its ability to deliberate and reason productively and for its own benefit. That would mean to stop the dissemination of not only utterly false and nonsensical information on the publicly electronic media – television, radio, Internet, and elsewhere – but to provide for public debate and discourse that is logically valid in its content.

It is, in that regard, high time that moderators in public political debate, for instance, be logicians capable of pointing out to the audience fallacious statements, claims, and reasoning.

Oh, yes, I know – “free speech.” Free speech the right; the right as a matter of law. I agree, as I always have. In fact, I believe that therapy for our mentally deranged society absolutely requires restoration of free speech and the right of expression, however hateful or unpopular. Of all the oxymoronically contradictory premises we labor under as a society today, none is moreso than that of controlled free speech and expression.

You’re damned right I think you should say what you think. But what of responsibility? Ever hear, anybody, of the rule that says the right of free speech does not extend to make yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater? What about the responsibility of truth? Is it not one thing to have an opinion, another to spread for reasons or self-interest shared or otherwise falsehood, gossip, and propaganda deliberately contrived to make others act against their own best interests?

Part of a group somehow become lost in the wilderness, does not one who proclaims knowledge of the right direction in which to proceed have an obligation to know that he is right? Doesn’t “right” mean “I’ve been this way before? I know?”

Is it not a kind of societal sin to use one’s freedom of speech to spread unfounded ideas that may be crucial to his fellow citizen’s life, to our democracy, to our children, and to our way of life as a nation? Has not freedom of speech, in other words, the same responsibilities attendant any right protected by a free society? Isn’t a false assertion made on the radio, on television, or the Internet, for instance, like giving false information to the police or government? Isn’t it even more wrong – immoral – when self-serving, made only in the interests of the individual or group?

And if there is a duty to be truthful and accurate attendant the right of free speech, is there not, in turn, a duty to have a way to know when one is right, and to learn what that is? Is it not one thing to argue something believing on the basis of hearsay and very little personal knowledge of the matter that you are correct, but quite another to argue knowing you do so on no basis of proven logic, science, and mathematics? Does a computer “mouse” trip by one who knows little or nothing of the subject or matter, to a website composed by someone totally unknown to the individual in question, with total unknown expertise, knowledge, and credentials, justify one’s saying he “knows?”

Someone, columnist Sidney Harris, I think, once observed that while, "Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one." Put the lack of necessary effort in learning resulted from the computer with that “small one,” you’ve created an Alexander Pope’s “bookful block-head, ignorantly read, with loads of learned lumber in his head.” Lord, have I ever been through Internet lumber yard after lumber yard in the past few years!

Parenthetically, I urge the reader here to use the World Trade Center Controlled Demolition matter as an example. The exercise can be an entertaining one, for one thing, and one very informative in the light of my discussion here. Check each claim and argument for substance logically (consistent, for instance with all other information, data, and reasoning), mathematically, and scientifically. As, by all means, the obvious question – how could everything being claimed have been done without notice by the tens of thousands of people who worked in, lived and worked near, and frequented the World Trade Center? That will probably stop you, but continue anyway – in order to relate the matter to others much in the news these days.

It’s time you learned to recognize the smell of bullshit.

Continuing with my discussion of “rights,” do those even abysmally ignorant of the given subject have the right by way of their right of free speech to promulgate to others as fact their uninformed, ill-advised, and specious point of view?

Legally sure; but how about morally . . .?

My intensive study of the public discourse over the past forty years has revealed a precipitous – so sudden as to suggest cataclysmic occurrence – decline in individual and, perhaps axiomatically, societal ratiocination – the ability to reason (not merely think). Everywhere in the nation, educators report the same phenomenon. Whereas columnists like James J. Kilpatrick, Sydney Harris, and others began reporting the same thirty years ago, even comedians have of late begun using public stupidity as a shtick in their comic routines and programs. Overseas - Europe, Japan, and the Orient generally – “American” stupidity – especially when related to what has now become our celebrated arrogance - is the subject of head wagging amazement and, in some cases, glee (our bumbling, bungling president, if only in that regard, is a national catastrophe).

And, to digress somewhat, that “arrogance” comment strikes a familiar chord. You see, I have long since discerned what seems a new kind of arrogance, that of the extremist and extremism. As I wrote in my last essay, the extremist is by nature and behavior – de facto – religious; religious in his intractable self-assurance that he cannot be wrong. Availing himself of some right he somehow believes ancillary to that protected by the U.S. Constitution, he becomes a pope speaking ex cathedra – i.e., infallible. Things, however legally, scientifically, or logically absurd, become fact simply by his saying so. It’s his “right.”

Hmmmm….. If it’s illegal (I speak only of legality here, not morality) to have sex with a child younger than a certain age, why is it legal – in the face of the assertion’s utter impossibility - to assure him that the World Trade Center was destroyed with controlled demolition by the United States Government? How about my using my stature as a celebrity of one kind or the other to assure the ignorant and uninformed – the indigent and poor, for instance – that federal spending on Iraq (only for instance) has no bearing on his taxes, his chances of medical care for his children, or the like? Incapable of the simplest interest calculation, with no idea whatever how – the process both legally, and procedurally - a dollar comes to be, or why, and how its value is derived, what is the individual’s responsibility to others when discussing the economy?

Totally ignorant of anything having to do with warfare, military tactics, the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model, Vegetius, Saxe, Clausewitz, Frederick the Great, or even the history of numerous battles, what is the social responsibility of the individual when discussing the supposed reasons for our having invaded? For leaving or staying? For assessing the strategic, tactical, political, societal, national, and moral meanings of “victory” and “defeat?”

Inasmuch as no rational person can doubt that were Iran to attack and attempt to destroy Israel, we would totally destroy Iran, what is all the jingoist blabber by neo-conservatism, and the hand-wringing tut-tutting of the knee-jerk liberal really about? Having been told categorically that Iran’s security and continued existence is directly dependent upon that of Israel, why would – how would Iran dare – attack Israel?

Oh, yeah, I hear you. You really believe that Moslems who knew there would be no one left to practice their beloved religion or worship their beloved prophet and “Allah” would attack, anyway? You’re not “ratiocinating.” You’re not free, either.

So, in answer to Steve and several others, if there were one thing I could do in an effort to restore our country to its erstwhile greatness, it would be to restore a sense of responsibility in the individual. There’s a mental experiment most will still be able to handle. Create a truth serum equivalent, a responsibility serum, in the life of every citizen, see what happens.

And, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."