#75 Irrational Arguments in Irrational Times (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

For my first rant, post killing off my newsletter, I've decided to change my format.  I used to work at "doing a column," creating a consistent train of thoughts on a single topic.  Screw that.  I'm branching out into random thoughts on any damn thing that crosses my mind.  And here we go.

I recently wasted a few moments listening to Myles Brand, the President of the NCAA (The National Collegiate Athletics Association, for those of you who have more useful things on your mind.), excuse the self-serving aristocratic behavior of the folks who administrate college athletics to the folks who rationalize that behavior to the rest of us; the press.  One of the questions this esteemed educator fielded from the peanut gallery was "what do you think about athletes who go straight from high school directly into professional basketball?"

The Pres responded by using Labron James as an example.  James is a high school wunderkind basketball player who is entering this year's NBA draft and will be making more money than a hospital full of doctors before he's old enough to drink beer.  Mr. Brand advised the kid to go to the pros, make as much money as he can, and get a college degree on the side.  According to Mr. NCAA, a college degree is a necessity if James is going to "have a happy life." 

I've heard a bag of reasons for a college degree, but this might the first time I've heard happiness and a college education linked.  From my own experience, I can't imagine how Brand could hope to prove that college and happiness even have a passing acquaintance. 

In the last half-dozen  decades, universities have worked hard to link themselves to financial success.  As college education prices have leapt out of the reach of everyone but the ruling elites' offspring, the focus of that education has become financial with minimal intellectual associations.  The concept of "a liberal education" has fallen into disrepute and even conservatives would have a hard time keeping a straight face while tying the current "conservative education" to a happy life.  Since the overwhelming majority of working people dislike, or hate, their work lives, the connection between education, work, and happiness is as disassociated as the reasons middle class folks vote Republican. 

While I'm picking on conservatives and education, the ultimate conservative catbox liner, the UK's Economist, recently provided its readers with an article praising the ascendance of "conservative think tanks."  This is a concept that is tough to take seriously.  A "think tank" that focuses on unoriginal thoughts intended to preserve the status quo.  While that does sound incredibly English, it's not the kind of organization that inspires visions of ground-breaking intellectual accomplishment.  While no one can honestly argue that it is impossible to be conservative and intelligent, being intelligent is not the primary requirement for original thinking.  Being conservative is contradictory to creativity. 

In the first years of this new century, conservative think tanks are doing quite well.  Their big tasks are explaining to the rest of us how trickle-down economics are going to work "this time" and why the fight we've picked with Iraq is "not a war about oil."  Conservatives have a vested interest in trickle-down, since the theory is when the rich get richer the poor will get some of the spillage; not exactly an intellectual exercise in economic calculus.  I'd be astounded if the majority of think tankers are not trust fund babies.  Rich kids arguing that they should be allowed to stay rich in the interests of those who are struggling to survive.  That argument always reminds me of a Green Peace booth I saw years ago.  It was staffed by the fattest woman I've ever seen in my life and their banner read "save the whales."  And I wondered . . . which sort of whale are we referring to?

The not-about-oil war arguments have been considerably more entertaining in recent weeks.  One of my favorites is that the Bush crowd couldn't be waging a war for their oil interests because oil is only one faction of the economy.  This argument has several variations, but I've heard it so often that it appears to be taking on veneer of credibility.  The conservative think tanks' best friends are conservative media who don't question any argument that comes from old money.  So the rest of us are left to decipher some meaning from the Bush-babble.

The flaw in this irrational argument is the hilarious assumption that Bush was elected by, and represents all of, all citizens and American economic interests.  A tiny number of interests provided GeeWiz with his financing, mostly oil and other viciously corrupt special interests, and an embarrassing minority of citizens voted for him.  Bush and Co. do not have to represent the majority of economic, political, or social interests to do the job they were elected to do.  Therefore, it's entirely possibly that a war on Iraq is precisely about oil.  Or only about oil.

All three of these irrational concepts are intended to make the rich richer and keep the rest of us in our place.  It's only logical that the rich want to hang on to their power and money, but it's not rational for the working class to want to help them.  When the have-nots want to protect the haves, conservative thinking has overwhelmed logic and self-interest.  The next step is to rejoin the United Kingdom and  sing "God Save the Queen." 

One of the favorite conservative catch-phrases, when they find themselves accused of pandering to the rich and powerful, is "class warfare."  In their minds, class warfare is supposed to be waged in only one direction; the rich putting it to the poor.  Somehow, they have managed to equate the poor fighting back with communism or socialism or liberalism or anti-Disney-ism.  Some damn thing that we're all supposed to hate as Americans.  The fact is, America was founded on class warfare.  The revolutionary war was nothing if not violent class warfare, taking up arms to defeat England's entrenched class system that had no business existing let alone migrating to the "new world."  Following that, by 100 years, we fought among ourselves to defeat the ultimate class system, slavery.  It's not hard to see how WWIIl, the great war fought by the self-proclaimed "greatest generation," as yet another class war.  The master race vs the rest of the world.  The master race got its master butt kicked and Americans returned to segregation, impoverished inner cities, and growing corporate power and influence.  Still, a good class war is always a big part of the American way.  I can always hope and I always do.

CornFairy.com "a leader in the search for innovative executives."  That's who the announcer on my Public Radio station said had sponsored the evening news.  Finally, truth in advertising.  I'm not an expert in mythology, but I'd assume a corn fairy is something like a tooth fairy.  So, this is a company that gets paid for hunting an imaginary creature.  Sort of like hunting snipes, but getting money to do it. 

I wonder what sort of company would hire a corn fairy hunting consultant?  General Motors seems like a likely customer.  GM isn't even a real company, having turned in profit losing tax returns for the last ten zillion years while finding the cash to over pay it's own corn fairies in salaries, stock options, and outright handouts.  Executive pensions at GM cost the company nearly $100,000,000 per year and that's an expense that isn't likely to shrink in the next decade or two.  I'm sure the corn fairy can help them find even more ways to squander GM's stockholder investments.  A room full of retards could do as well as the existing GM executive selection process.  What's that old statistical proverb?  Something about an infinite number of monkeys, typing at an infinite number of typewriters, will in an infinite amount of time, eventually, crank out a Shakespearian sonnet.  That's about the kind of still GM has shown in selecting CEOs.  Does anyone believe GM will exist long enough to find an intelligent exec with this system?

I'm tired, you're tired, the economy is smashed, and we're all going broke "saving the world" for international oil corporations.  Amerika, what a country.

June, 2003

#35 NYPD Pink (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

Act like you're surprised. The four white, plain-clothes cops, who fired 41 shots at and into an unarmed man in New York who endangered their lives by attempting to show them his identification (or give them his billfold), were acquitted in a New York court.

Score: Cops "we can shoot 'em whenever we want," Citizens 0.

The press pretended to be amazed that the court's judge (Judge Judy?) spent the weekend after the decision, celebrating, with the defense lawyers in an upscale politicos' hangout. I guess that tells us more than we wanted to know about the intelligence of the press. This decision has been written so many times that no one needed to consider new text for the story. Change one name and it's a wrap. The surprise is that anyone imagined the verdict would be any different.

Never happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

There has been a lot of half-hearted hand wringing about how "the system" needs to be changed and how the police ought to do a few weeks of community service PR to "regain the public's trust." Yeah, that would do it for me. Plaster a couple of Deputy Dog posters on the phone poles and we're all friends, just like before a pack of freaked-out cops shot the hell out of a man coming home from work.

Even the jurors got into the act. Juror Tom Knowles said that Amadou Diallo "looked at the police officers, they identified themselves, and as they moved toward him, he turned and backed away. . . Why? Why? We won't know those answers."

I can't imagine, either. Four badly dressed freaks, waving guns, come charging up, shouting gibberish (none of the witnesses said the four coherently identified themselves), and I'm gonna assume the wackos are cops. Every time.

Given the same circumstances, I'd assume (especially in that slime pit we Americans loving call "New York City") that they're muggers (even if they're wearing uniforms and badges) and I'd try to throw them my billfold in hopes that, while they pounced on the money like a pack of starving hyenas, I could sneak out of sight and shooting range. Since this group of New York's elite managed to hit their target 19 out 41 shots at 15 feet and closer, I think Diallo made the only safe move available. It was obviously his bad luck that these fruitballs managed to hit him at all.

In case you haven't read about this story, the four gunmen were part of the NYPD's "elite" Street Crimes Unit. "Elite" means they are so skilled that they can hit a well lit, mostly stationary target at fifteen feet, 19 times out of 41. The coroner said the cops managed to hit Diallo several times after he was dead. It is reasonable to assume that their accuracy improved once he quit "resisting arrest." When the victim tried to go for his billfold, one of the timidly elite NYPD'ers shouted "Gun!" and, as he and his partner tried to run away from the vestibule where their victim was trapped, they blasted away like their guns were stuck in Lethal Weapon mode.

It gets worse. One of NYPD's finest tripped over his own flat feet, which convinced the other nutballs that their little buddy had been shot. That really scared 'em . Nothing irritates NYPD cops more than when one of their victims scares them into falling down. The other three totally panicked and emptied their guns into the dying, but still exceptionally terrifying, citizen who was threatening them by creating a very large and hazardous pool of blood. The ricochet from the next round of wild shots scared the cops, even more, and convinced them that the dead guy was shooting back with his James Bond billfold. When the cops ran out of bullets and quit peeing in their pants, they discovered Diallo was long dead. After they gave him time to be really dead, they went looking for a weapon and discovered he didn't have one. That pissed them off so much that one of them actually screamed "where's the f__ gun?" Like Diallo owed them some sort of justification for all that misspent adrenaline.

All that evidence and a New York jury still couldn't find a reason to bring a murder, manslaughter, assault, or double-parking conviction against the cops. In fact, so far, the cops haven't even been suspended without pay.

One of the other jurors said the cops' testimony was "quite believable." A few of us might think the jurors were quite gullible, if we could grant them enough credibility to believe that they're being sincere in these statements. And I can. Since we have stumbled into a system of justice that's administered by housewives and other folks who can't or won't find useful employment, any sort of idiocy done by our court system is credible. Although this decision pushes those loose limits pretty hard.

Which brings me to the point of this Rat Rant.

The problem with New York's cops is no different than cops in any other city, except for New York being New York and there's no help for that. Cops, like the military, have convinced themselves that their primary job is to protect themselves from danger. They have a union, so they can't be reprimanded for doing their jobs incompetently. They have their fraternal "brotherhood" cover-up factory, so they can't be prosecuted for crimes they commit against the rest of us. They "protect and serve" themselves; first, second, and always.

New York City's head hopeless moron, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, admitted "we probably don't always do the best of training everyone." Duh. Depends on what you're training them for, Rudy.

Cops are trained to make sure that nothing bad ever happens to a cop. What they ought to be trained to do is to protect law abiding citizens from criminals. The job is supposed to be dangerous. If it weren't, the folks doing it wouldn't be needed. Until we decide that the job of police officer is the same as (and more important than) the task of the United States Secret Service, we're all in danger of becoming their victims. (Although, your chances of being a police victim are a lot greater if you're a person of color. Almost infinitely greater.) Until the citizens of this country take away the party money for all of the non-productive games police play in their never-ending effort to stay out of harm's way, we're putting guns in the hands of people who shouldn't be allowed to play with rubber bands.

Any cop who isn't willing to throw themselves between harm's way and a law abiding citizen is nothing more than an average citizen. There's no hazard pay for that. No 20 year retirement with a pension. No lifetime disability for damaging your back carrying an oversized box of donuts. No guts, no glory; or perks. Cops, like the ones who slaughtered Amadou Diallo, add to the bad bad rep of a group with an already bad reputation. It's time to redefine the job.

March 2000

Interpreting News

The more media we have, the more sources that appear on the web, the more cable "news" channels we have, the more dense the new digital on-air world becomes, the harder it is to figure out what's going on. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Ever since crazy Ronny Wrinkles abolished the "Fairness Doctrine," the media has steadily gone downhill. Of course, that was the intent behind eliminating the one thing that held the American media accountable so Reagan could have claimed "mission accomplished" if he had been able to put together two such obscure words into a single sentence.

With the advent of all of these news "sources," American citizens are all the way back to those days when being more than 10 miles from the event is the equivalent to being across the ocean from useful information about the event. If you didn't see it, you can't know what happened. Even pictures lie, words are valueless. This is a serious problem for democracy. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." - Thomas Jefferson

Clearly, today we are not to be trusted with our "own government." Our government, our world, belongs to corporations and their representatives in governments all over the world and they don't trust us, themselves, each other, or humanity at large. All my life, I've realized that two things float to the top of the toilet bowl: cream and turds. In the corporate world, cream isn't often produced. Which means that the people who are running the world are the lazy, inbred, retarded children of the people who have been running the world for decades. George W. Bush, for example. (No, by the way, I don't miss him.)

Until a solution like the one the Fairness Doctrine represented is found, the integrity of our democracy, the quality of discourse, the value of our actions, the usefulness of "information" will be minimal. If that seems unimportant to you, you are not alone. Reagan's FCC henchman, Mark Fowler, argued that abolition of the Fairness Doctrine was a First Amendment "matter of principle." The principle was the "right" of corporations and the elite to have their position strongly made over all objections. You have to give Republicans credit for consistency.

Obviously, the authors of the First Amendment would have gone to war to defeat that sort of argument, but Republicans have freely interpreted the Constitution for their own purposes since Teddy Roosevelt fooled the party into being responsible to all citizens for 8 short, incredibly productive and progressive years. Of course, TR had to invent his own party (Bull Moose) to try and hold together the people who were honestly "conservative" and ethical after Taft returned Republicanism to it's rightful, corrupt, inbred roots. The Taft administration was intellectually lazy, administratively incompetent and corrupt, and personally gluttonous (sound familiar?) and set the nation and the world up for the first World War and 1929. The Republican Party has been repeating that formula ever since. The intention and end result is redistributing wealth from the many to the few: socialism and wealth for the elites, capitalism and disaster for the rest of us.

But this kind of discussion is blasted out of the MSM with the irrational "class warfare" argument and as far as Faux News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Murdock and Sun Myung Moon's media conglomerates, and the rest of corporate wingnut America's "news sources" are concerned that is the end of the discussion. Of course, the American Revolution was the ultimate class warfare and our Constitution was supposed to be the platform from which that battle could continue throughout the life of the Union of States. The classes will battle, regardless of the illusions and fantasies of propaganda, and the only real issue is "are both sides equally armed?" Today, the rich and powerful have all the weapons.

Reagan and his cynical and corrupt henchmen and heirs fired a fatal shot to the heart of democracy in 1985 and there has been no sign of democratic life from the corporate media since. Despite the fairyland wingnut whining about "left wing media," the media is overwhelmingly far right. Apparently, any sign of responsibility, integrity, fairness, or curiosity displayed by reporters is taken as evidence of political apocalypse by the wingnuttery. While it is true that the majority of intellectuals are liberal, it is equally true that most corporations are owned and mismanaged by the inbred children of inbred children of robber barons and ancient royalty. Those true "elites" hold the purse strings and money is what makes our world spiral down the toilet.

Without the protection and balance provided by the Fairness Doctrine, fairness is the furthest thing from the mind of corporate America. Without honest, balanced news, corporations like Murdock's and Moon's are free to distort and pervert "information" until it is as credible and useful as the babbling of priests or miracle cure peddlers. Once that task is complete, democracy has a half-life measured in minutes. The cynically misnamed "Patriot Act" was an example of that sudden death as were G.W.'s grotesque overuse of the State Secrets Privilege and Cheney's secret "National Energy Policy Task Force" meetings. From where I stand, it looks like the ride is all downhill from here.