Saturday, January 28, 2012

At the End of the Day

Or should it be, at the end of the week, month, season, year, or decade? 

“At the end of the day” is the most ubiquitous, trite expression in political discourse.  Listen to Barack Obama for more than 15 minutes and you will hear the phrase at least once.  Why?

To answer that question look to the context in which at the end of the day is embedded.   Invariably, you will find that the pontificating politician will have taken you through a complex issue that he is attempting to simplify and twist to his advantage.  All politicians understand the commonsense notion that one must at least superficially acknowledge counterarguments in order to give his own argument at least a superficial semblance of credibility.

As reported in the New York Times January 25, 2012 by Ronen Bergman, here is Barack Obama dismissing the importance of recommendations provided by American and Israeli military advisors regarding war with Iran:

As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

In other words, I, in my infinite wisdom, am above mere mortal discourse, more like Zeus on Mount Olympus than a mere, imperfect servant of the people.  So, “at the end of the day,” I have decided what is best for all of you, even to the point of risking a thermonuclear conflagration, since I already did all the “tedious” higher level cognitive processing required to solve humanity’s problems.

At the end of the day pretty well summarizes political manipulation.  After taking us through the self-selected points of his agenda, the politician asserts his self-serving answer as the inevitable one.  End of the day epitomizes short-term thinking that dominates political discourse.  The implicit message is that citizens need not think past today or beyond what their ‘leaders” have told them about any given issue. 

Too often, we have fallen for that malarkey; it is the kind of mindless acquiescence that causes us to accept myopic “solutions” that the President and Congress recommend, recommendations that enable them to avoid hard decisions that they fear might imperil their political futures.   We are left with their cowardly, simplistic, short-sighted governmental conclusions, whether the conclusions are financial (irrational Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage policies) or social (permit illegal aliens to live in America with impunity and to collect benefits while doing so), and we are expected to meekly concur.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Word Control as Political Tyranny


In his classic 1984, George Orwell writes that, “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 plus 2 make four.  If that is granted, all else follows.”   On the other hand, legal types frequently remind us that no one has the “freedom” to shout “fire” in a crowed movie theater.

As we all know, there is a clearly recognized continuing tension between free speech and restrained speech.  And where there is tension, there is opportunity for Machiavellian manipulation.  That manipulation has become more and more frequent in America; we even have coined the term “political correctness” to describe one form of language tyranny.

Because the language of political correctness has been discussed widely, I am less concerned about it than I am about a less well popularized mode of thought manipulation:  word warfare.

In Corner Canyon High School of Colorado, a brief word warfare skirmish occurred this month.  After the student body voted to call their teams “The Cougars,” the school board got bombarded by a few citizens offended by the term.  You guessed it:  the aggrieved ones regarded “cougar” as a sexualized word.

The January 20, 2012, the Huffington Post quoted school district spokeswoman Jennifer Toomer-Cook :

"The board said this is a brand new school and we want to unite the community. And if there's something out there that could divide it, let's not go there," Toomer-Cook told KSL-TV. "That's [the Board's] responsibility to look at all of the input and make a decision. [Media reports are] making it sound like it was already Cougars and we ripped it away from them.

Now, on the surface, the battle seems quite trivial.  One readily could argue that the district is within its rights to oppose the media’s supposedly making their naming decision for them.   I am not arguing about what is the “right” naming decision.   To my way of thinking, the real problem lies in accepting a few citizens’ interpretation of cougar as meaning “an older woman seeking a sexual or romantic relationship with a significantly younger man” as the article opines.  

Until a given word unambiguously denotes a meaning, its connotations reside in the minds of the listeners.  That, of course, means that the connotations are subject to all the idiosyncrasies and ideo-pathologies of those listeners.   Boisterous “oddballs” can ban together and resolve to scrub clean any and all words that for whatever reason strike them as offensive; they need not hold the majority belief, only the most stridently advocated one.

Let’s not let them.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Voter Registration, Voter Disenfranchisement, Barack Obama, and the Democrats

Lately we have been hearing political double speak about how the heartless Republicans want to “disenfranchise” poor, down-troddened, or minority populations.  How?  By requiring voter registration. Imagine, wanting to ensure that a voter is who he claims to be.  Nowhere else in America does anyone have to show an i.d. except at a polling booth.

Is it that the anti-voter registration forces believe that voting is not consequential enough to warrant scrutiny of the prospective voter?   Even Democrats regularly need to present i.d. cards to rent an automobile or to board an airplane, but they scoff at voter cards, apparently valuing car rental and air travel over the integrity of our election system.

Perhaps the anti-voter registration crusaders forget the widespread 2007-2008 Acorn-induced, pro-Obama voter registration scam that ultimately led to Acorn’s congressional investigation and conviction for fraud. Why should anyone want to bar illegitimate voters?  If we are willing to give convicted felons and illegal aliens free education and health care, why not let them vote as well?

Anti-registration people are quick to remind their registration-favoring opponents that one person, one vote has been the explicit law of the land since at least 1965, and they claim that requiring voter identification could prevent some people from having their vote count.

To that argument I ask:  What does it mean to have one’s vote “count”? 

If 100 people vote legally and I am one of them, then I and everyone else has an equal, one percent, say in the election outcome:  One person and one equal unit of voting power for each voter.  On the other hand, if 100 illegal voters are permitted to participate in the same election, the voting power of each legal voter is diminished by half.  The issue, then, is not merely voting per se, but the right to have one’s view represented with weight equivalent to his/her legitimacy in the community as a whole.   Some totalitarian or terrorist states occasionally permit sham or show elections—elections that fraudulently diminish the voting power of the legitimate populace by multiple nefarious means.

Even in the United States, politicians have been known to deny persons the right to vote by “legally” manipulating the electoral process.  Consider Barack Obama. The now-President first won political office in 1996.  How did he do it?  By challenging the primary election nominating petitions of his Illinois Senate Democrat rivals.  And in that election, Obama and his handlers managed to use election nominating challenges to eliminate not one, not two, not three, but four persons who wanted to run.  Those who sought the seat included his predecessor, Alice Palmer, who initially had graciously endorsed Barack before she lost her bid for the United States House of Representatives and then wanted to try for re-election to the seat she voluntarily had vacated.  

Through his nominating petition challenges, then, Barack had disenfranchised every single citizen in the district who had wanted at least to consider voting for anyone other than Obama.  
The now-President had made superfluous any vote other than a vote for him, cutting his political teeth on “legal” voter disenfranchisement.  Obama did not have the “audacity” to run opposed for fear that he might lose to someone.  For that election, the only hope and change that he advocated was his hope to change the customary electoral process to move himself from failed community organizer to ineffective freshman legislator.  I bet those whom Barack disenfranchised in 1996 would have preferred being able to show a voter identification card and having a choice between at least two Illinois Senate candidates.

If Barack Obama and the Democrats now truly fear that voter identification requirements could somehow disenfranchise legitimate voters, they can devote their energies to ensuring that each and every legitimate voter has an i.d. card.  Obama et al. had no trouble in “organizing” Barack into the Whitehouse by using Internet and grass roots means when it was to their advantage. 

The current Democrat resistance movement has nothing to do with voter identification cards and everything to do with winning re-election in any way possible.  Across the USA and the world, they are boisterously, righteously trumpeting about “unfair” voter identification requirements, but making nary a sound about the risk of enfranchising fraudulent voters, since those voters are most likely to pull the Democrat lever.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Racializing: A National and International Preoccupation

England is abuzz about a single “racist” comment.  

British papers report that on January 5, 2012, Dianne Abbott, England’s first black member of Parliament, allegedly tweeted to Bim Adewunmi, a black freelance journalist, that white people "love playing divide and rule." 

Now, on the face of it, one might call the remark racist.  But could it merely be the “honest” racially-biased opinion of one black woman at one moment in time, an opinion not unlike momentary racially-biased opinions that intrude into the consciousness of white people against blacks or Koreans against Chinese, or between any two racial groups?

I know virtually nothing about Abbott; she may or may not be racist.  What I do know is that the personality of anyone who claims never to have had a racially negative or racially stereotyped idea flit through his mind can be summarized with one word: liar. 

Belief in the righteousness of one’s one group—whether that is a racial, sexual, religious, family or other group—should not be condoned.  On the other hand, it is patently absurd to become incensed by every minute group preference expressed by every person anywhere.

During my childhood, I recall a different typical approach to someone expressing a negative view of an “out group.”  At that time, when the listener heard an unfairly biased remark, he would refer to the biased person as “ignorant” and move on to some more fruitful endeavor.  He did not make a “federal case” of it.

This is not to say that we always should merely shake our heads and walk on.  When verbal bias is repeated, intense, or prolonged, strong counterstatements are absolutely essential; all the more so when verbal bias is accompanied by actions taken against any group.  But let’s not react intensely to every minor comment made by every narrow-minded person.