GETTING BACK TO CIVILITY: 10 Easy Steps

There's no question that the world is a less civil place than it used to be. Rudeness and name calling are the new black. In the genteel South people used to preface compliments with 'Bless their hearts' to let the listener know that the niceties to follow were less than sincere. Those days are gone. Now it's okay to cut a bitch and leave the bloody entrails at the scene. When supposed society luminaries pepper their speech with profanity like drunken sailors, what are drunken sailors to do when they need to add some passion to their conversations?

9 mm punctuation. getting your point across without the need for any bothersome fact checking

I was discussing the idea for this blog entry with my wife this morning while she was trying to watch the Real Housewives of New York. One of the housewives was wearing a hideous low-cut knit top throughout the scene, and my wife remarked that when she saw the episode aired, the housewife was bound to regret her fashion choice. “She really needs a push-up bra to make that work,” my wife said. My reply: “Push up bra? She needs a floor jack.”

This is when I realized that my own civility could use a little tune-up, although I lay a lot of the blame for my failings in this regard squarely on the Real Housewives shows. They have so desensitized us to verbal sniping, insults, sarcasm, name-calling, character assassination, yelling, and even hair pulling that there is a danger that we will all begin to accept this stuff as normal behavior.

My neighbors are a case in point. They like to fight with one another in their driveway. They yell at the top of their lungs for interminable amounts of time, drawing fearful crowds. F-Bombs are just a stepping off point for them to truly horrific mutual vilification. My guess is that they somehow think this is normal behavior, and that they came by this notion from watching too much reality television.

I'm not about to dissuade them. Life is too short already. I've heard it said that you shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight, but I have to think that taking an assault rifle to an argument with either of these two would leave you hopelessly outmatched.

Real Housewives' behaviors have infected politics, news analysis, scientific dialog, public policy discussions, religion, and sports. When I think of all the places where bad behavior seems to be the new norm, it occurs to me that all this may have actually started with sports. The rioting of soccer fans in assorted foreign venues is legend, but I'm actually thinking of something closer to home.

I'm think specifically of Vince McMahon's WWE professional wrestling franchise, where poor sportsmanship coupled with blatant vulgarity was pyramided into a viable ratings generator long before anyone thought of turning multiple cameras onto regular, albeit mostly immature, people in their native environs. I confess that I myself used to think of pro wrestling as just entertainment, but, in retrospect, I may have been seduced by the up-front and ubiquitous presence of pneumatic young blonds in skimpy costumes.

Fisticuffs: now a required skill for the debate team.
Can the chess club be far behind?

It's long past time to change course. These are my proposals for a return to civility:

1. Eliminate reality TV and talk radio. These seem to be the source of almost every wrong-headed opinion that infects our national consciousness and consicience.
   
   
2. Eliminate the internet...or unvetted commentary...or require all comments to include the real name, address, and phone number of the commenter. The anonymity afforded by the Internet has undone any requirement to be correct and replaced it with a requirement to be loud and repetitive. Eventually this will spell the end of civilization as we know it.
   
   
3. Eliminate caffeinated energy drinks. These just exacerbate an already dangerous situation. When people leap to conclusions without benefit of any forethought, the last thing we need to do is speed up the process.
   
   
4. Eliminate mobile communications devices. Where caffeine accelerates the germination of bad ideas, modern wireless communications speed their dissemination.
   
   
5. Move the national speed limit back to 55mph. Haste breeds anxiety, and anxiety breeds intolerance.
   
   
6. Limit in-car stereo systems to 10 watts per channel. It's not possible to listen thoughtfully to the opinions of others when your ears are bleeding.
   
   
7. Criminalize the habit TV news commentators have developed of talking over one another during panel discussions and talking over their guests when they disagree with them. Some of us actually want to hear both sides of an issue.
   
   
8. Eliminate super PACs and their political attack ads. Somewhere along the line campaign managers as a group got the idea that you can't win an election by being a nice guy. Now everybody running for office has to sponsor drivel meant to demonize the opposition rather than explain to us why their own solutions have merit. Seems to me all that campaign money would be better spent lifting us all out of the mire instead of trying to hold the opposition's collective head under it.
   
   
9. Campaign finance reform...NOW! Too much money in politics has made it possible for a handful of really wealthy charlatans to subvert the democratic process. They have turned our electoral system into gladiatorial combat that has us all trooping down to the Colosseum for bread and circus while they help themselves to the spoils of the realm.
   
   
10. Resolve all major divisive issues with single unarmed combat. A little pugilistic blood-letting couldn't be any worse than what we have now. Two champions get in a ring, and the matter is settled in 12 rounds. The loser's supporters have to sit down and shut the hell up. Right or wrong, fact or fabrication, none of the intellectual arguments would carry any weight whatsoever. If you think about it, this is not significantly different from the situation we have right now. It would just be over a lot sooner, and we could all go back to blessing each other's hearts.

Deficit Tales: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Let's talk about the federal deficit. Everybody seems to agree that it is a bugaboo, but no one is willing to give up anything to make it go away. Barack Obama said we need to do something about it back in 2006 while George W. Bush was spending us into oblivion. Now that Obama is president the deficit has soared to unprecedented heights...at least if you believe this graphic that has been circulating the Net:

My niece, who ought to know better, shard this on Facebook. The innocent are being led astray by blatant disregard for the truth.

The anti-Obama forces love this because it paints a picture of our president as not only a profligate spender but one who is unnaturally and, as the picture seems to evidence, smugly happy about it. Those more amenable to the President are not that happy with it because, among other things, it's not very accurate. The math doesn't work, and it leaves a lot of useful information on the editing room floor.

The amount of federal public debt handed over to the new administration at the end of George W. Bush's term was $10.7 Trillion. Of that, $6.3 Trillion was owed to the public and $4.4 Trillion was owed to other U.S. government agencies. The total public debt increased under the Bush administration from $5.7 Trillion in 2001 to $10.7 Trillion in December of 2008. As of February of this year (2012) the total public debt stood at $15.5 Trillion, an increase, so far, of $4.8 Trillion.

The Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) estimates that by the end of fiscal 2012 the gross federal debt will stand at $16.3 Trillion. This represents an increase of $5.6 Trillion, not the $6.5 Trillion depicted in the graphic.

The other problem, of course, is that if you're going to hold Obama responsible for running up the deficit with extravagant spending, then he better have bought something truly ridiculous. Here's a nice graph of where all that new deficit came from since Obama took office:

Makes you wonder where all Obama's 'Robin Hood Socialism' shows up. Listen carefully to the Republicans and you would have to believe that the Democrats gave the whole increased spending nut to lazy welfare cheats and old people who ought to stop draining the nation's resources and just die already.

So except for Tarp, the bailouts, and the stimulus spending, which together total about $1.5 Trillion, none of the deficit spending was initiated by Barack Obama. It all came from programs, policies, and two wars in place before he took office.

Here's another telling chart, this one from the July 23, 2011 edition of the New York Times Sunday Review, and based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It is 'intellectual' as opposed to 'partisan.' That is, it does not spin blame, but rather pins spending to the origin of the policies that drive it.

Wow...looks like Obama has actually SLOWED non-defense discretionary spending and entitlement increases. No mean feat in an economy that the Republicans seem determined to hammer until the election is over. After that they'll make it even worse.

To me this shows the utter dishonesty of Republicans who cry about the deficits while refusing to acknowledge that the single most influential driver of deficit spending that has occurred during Obama's presidency is the Bush tax cuts. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge this indisputable fact, they want to add to the problem with even deeper tax cuts.

It doesn't make any sense to me that Mitt Romney and the Republicans hope to make their narrative stick, but stick it does in spite of the fact that it is a BALD-FACED-LIE. They are no longer accountable to the facts. Apparently they don't have to be.

They know hardly anyone will bother to check on the truthfulness of their assertions. There are too many facts to check, and it's too hard to separate the truth from the fiction. All a politician need do is keep repeating the story he wants to tell. When he's said it often enough it becomes true enough for the faithful who, after all, only believe what they want to believe.

Does anybody besides me long for the days when you could call a guy a liar, lay out the facts, and he'd be embarrassed by the dishonesty? Now the facts are just words streaming in the ether without effect or import.

Five Things to Consider before You Click 'Like' on a Political Post

Hold a lamp to the truth
and
drive slowly.

1. If you get most of your political news and analysis from the Comedy Channel, you probably have a world view that is at least as skewed as it would be if you got most of your information from Fox News. Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher may be smart guys, but they are first and foremost comics with a higher vested interest in laughs and ratings than in the truth. This is not to say that they are not often correct...just that being correct is not their primary aim...not unlike Fox.
2. If you agree with or, even worse, spout things like 'Republicans are waging war on women' or 'Democrats are waging war on religion' then you are guilty of exactly the same kind of fractious logic of which you are accusing the other side.
3. If you believe that the deficit mess is the result of welfare entitlements and paying people not to work, you need to turn off Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and read a book about economics. I can recommend several that give a thoughtful and balanced account of what's really going on in the economy.
   1. 13 Bankers – Johnson and Kwak
   2. Freefall – Stiglitz
   3. End this Depression Now – Krugman
4. If you sincerely believe that Mitt Romney is a misogynistic white wonk who is hell-bent on asserting control over the nation's vaginae, or that Barack Obama is a Nigerian, Muslim, communist traitor determined to destroy America, then you are a narrow-minded dolt, incapable of appreciating either nuance or irony. These fellows hold opinions that differ from yours. That is all. They came by their opinions honestly and with consideration (and in Romney's case several times) which is more than I can say about you if you believe all the crap you hear from their opposition.
5. If you have more than 20 friends, and they all agree with you on everything you think is important, you are in danger of losing the kind of perspective that leads to compromise and progress. If you have more than 200 friends, you are already lost.