When rational argument fails

Back when I was in high school, my racist friend Phil announced to me that he was joining the KKK.

"Phil," I said to him, "I don't think you can get in if you're a Catholic."

Phil had an anger problem, which he barely controlled at this moment, and snarled, "The Klan doesn't hate everybody. Don't be so narrow-minded!"

That's an old trick of the bigoted, accusing the broad-minded of narrow-mindedness. Rush just paid the same compliment to Sonia Sotomayor.

When one's political opponent is a liar, how is one to answer?

Warning!

I'm posting this to warn all and sundry that some of you may not get Christmas presents in 2012. This will come about because some of your loved ones may believe that the world will end on December 21 of that year. Some nonsense about a Mayan calendar prophecy.

No sooner had I finished reading Ron Rosenbaum's Slate article on this subject (May 22), than I read the following in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly. Coincidence?? You decide.

"The next to be placed among the regiment of fools are such as make a trade of telling or inquiring after incredible stories of miracles and prodigies: never doubting that a lie will choke them, they will muster up a thousand several strange relations of spirits, ghosts, apparitions, raising of the devil, and such like bugbears of superstition, which the farther they are from being probably true, the more greedily they are swallowed, and the more devoutly believed. And these absurdities do not only bring an empty pleasure, and cheap divertisement, but they are a good trade, and procure a comfortable income to such priests and friars as by this craft get their gain."

Don't be fooled. If I'm lucky enough to be alive, I'll be having a party on December 22, 2012.

Why things are the way they are...

Erasmus, in The Praise of Folly, observes that, "[S]ince the Stoics define wisdom to be conducted by reason, and folly nothing else but the being hurried by passion, lest our life should otherwise have been too dull and inactive, that creator, who out of clay first tempered and made us up, put into the composition of our humanity more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason; and reason he confined within the narrow cells of the brain, whereas he left passions the whole body to range in."

There you have it. A pound of passions to an ounce of reason.

Double betrayal

When 9/11 happened, Americans were horrified and terrified. In the following days, we mourned our dead. Then came the day when Bush announced that, instead of just bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, we would fight a war on terror. That is, we would root out terrorists wherever they were. I don't consider myself politically brilliant, but I knew from that very moment that Bush meant Iraq. Using the American people's rage and grief to trick us into a war that the members of his administration planned in advance was a cynical betrayal of the people he was supposed to protect.

The second betrayal, using torture to get false information linking Iraq and al Qaeda, is a betrayal of everything America stands for. Years ago, I joined Amnesty International when I heard about the torture in Argentina of Jacobo Timerman. I was thankful that I lived in a country that would never use torture. It was a matter of pride.

Proud Americans, where is the rage?

Pie

A friend of mine subscribes to the Bigger Pie theory; that is, if everyone doesn't have pie, the solution is not to cut up the pie more equitably, but to let the haves keep their pie, and trust them to make a bigger pie. The theory goes that, with the bigger pie, everybody gets pie.

I say, Never underestimate the ability of the upper classes to eat more pie.