THE GRAND IRONIES OF MODERN POLITICS

Rex W. Huppke lamented the death of Facts on April 18^th of this year in an obituary in The Chicago Tribune. He cited Florida Republican Representative Allen West's assertion, “without a scrap of evidence or reason”, that as many as 81 Democratic members of the House of Representatives were communists.

While West's assertion seems an egregious example of abandonment of the truth to make a point, it is by no means the most dangerous kind of lie. The kinds of people who would believe such an assertion are probably not capable of getting themselves into a voting booth with a proper ballot come election day, even if they manage to remember that it's the day they are supposed to take America back—whatever that means.

No, the truly dangerous non-facts are the ones that persuade otherwise intelligent citizens to embrace positions and policies that are in their own worst interests. Here are a few examples:

1. 

   Wall Street only needs Main Street
   until they have ALL the money.
    

   Working stiffs in the Tea Party who have been persuaded that more tax breaks for the rich and another round of gutting banking regulations will somehow make us all more financially secure. These poor schmucks still believe, after 30 years of contrary evidence, that the Laffer Curve works, and that supply side economic policies are good for the middle class. How they can still believe this after their wealth has been stripped and redistributed to a handful of Wall Street pirates is a mystery to me, but believe it they do...and with passion.
   
   

2. 

   So...if there weren't any guns
   we'd all be dead?

   Gun nuts in the NRA who get apoplectic the moment anyone suggests imposing some restrictions on access to combat assault weapons. These bozos think they are protecting the 2^nd amendment and ensuring that a well-armed citizenry is able to keep an over-reaching and ambitious government from enslaving us. Meanwhile, we've all been enslaved by a handful of banks without a shot being fired. Instead of protecting their right to own firearms, which has never actually been under attack as near as I can tell, the rank-and-file, touting the NRA's official line, have made it not just possible but easy for true nut cases to arm themselves to the teeth with lethal firepower. The only reason we need guns to protect ourselves is that we have willfully and without much forethought armed the people we need to protect ourselves from.
   
   

3. 

   Capitalism doesn't bankrupt nations.
   Capitalists do.

   Humanities majors who have been persuaded by the more strident voices of the Occupy movements that the same corporations that have brought us automobiles, computers, wireless communications, high definition TV, instant hair color, and Oreo cookies are in fact a monolithic cabal of evil that ought to be eradicated as soon as possible. Proving that ignorance and illogic are at home in both ends of the political spectrum, these lunatics want to scrap Capitalism wholesale because a few bad actors were greedy and unethical. That they don't have any viable system to replace the Capitalism that has served us so well on most fronts for so many years does not seem to damped their enthusiasm for its dismantling. There are many things in the various and nebulous Occupy manifestos that need to be addressed, but overthrowing Capitalism is not one of them.
   
   

4. 

   I don't know who could object
   to being prayed for, but this gives
   you a pretty good idea where
   these women are coming from.

   Choice advocates who believe that a pro-life stance is a stand against women in general and women's health issues in particular. They want to make the debate about women's health rather than what it is really about, which is when does life begin. That the issue is not women's health is, I think, adequately demonstrated by a Finnish study that shows that women who have an abortion are 4 times more likely to die in the year following their abortion than women who carry their child to term. The difference is so statistically significant that it can scarcely be denied, yet Planned Parenthood and other abortion-on-demand advocates have tried to suppress the information, maintaining, among other things, that the study does not prove causation. This reminds me of the tobacco lobby denying any causative link between smoking and lung disease or the coal lobby's claim that global warming isn't real. The sad thing is that it is women with real difficulties who will suffer most from framing the debate this way.
   
   

5. 

   Whoops! Sometimes scripture cuts both ways.

   Conservative Christians—usually also evangelical fundamentalists—who actually believe that they can make a cogent and persuasive argument with an agnostic or atheist by quoting Scripture. There is a logic and symmetry to all God's laws that exist separate from and independent of the Christian understanding. It is embedded in creation, whether or not you accept Creation, and is accessible even to science, although it often takes a metaphysical poet to understand the connection. This is where people of faith need to go to prove their points, because faith has to stand up to a certain amount of scrutiny to be valid. There are an awful lot of well-meaning Christians, I think, who need to read more than just the one Book.

Darwin in Gatorland

When I first moved to Tampa, Florida years ago, I bicycled to Lettuce Lake Park to get a first-hand look at the local flora and fauna. They had a nice swimming hole there with a stone seawall and a sandy little beach. The water was tea-stained, but clear and still. It looked like an excellent place to take a dip except for the signs posted all around that said 'No Swimming – Alligators'. The signs were pretty much superfluous as the swimming hole was occupied by a very visible and very large alligator. By large, I mean 12 to 14 feet in length and many hundreds of pounds, most of which were teeth.

There were two pre-teen boys standing on the edge of the seawall. They were throwing marshmallows into the water to attract the gator over to where they were standing. When the gator glided over to snarf up a few of the floating candies, they poked him in the face with a stick. The gator didn't offer any protest, but I looked into his big reptilian eye, and it looked to me like he was considering his options and measuring distances.

I didn't know about the Darwin Awards at the time, but I have since decided that both those kids have probably made it onto the list by now. They may even have done it together. Stupidity loves company. They could have gotten a miraculous infusion of basic sense in the intervening years, but I doubt it. This is Florida after all.

It's a good thing to learn from your mistakes, but, if you put yourself into situations where even minor errors can prove fatal, learning from them is moot. As a consequence death can really get your attention, but once you've suffered the consequence you no longer need to know what it taught you.

I was reminded of all this by a story in the St. Lucie News Tribune last week. The headline, 'It's wise not to leave guns in your car', seemed so obvious that I passed over it at first. It didn't seem much like news. Then I began to think about why the editor thought it necessary to include this bit of wisdom in the paper. Surely this was something that gun owners already knew, something about which they shouldn't have to be reminded. I for one don't want to think that gun owners who don't know this are running around with...well, guns.

not in our courtrooms, thank you very much.

I searched for the on-line version of this story so I could post the link here. When I found it, I also found quite a few comments, which didn't surprise me, but most of them were in support of, or at least excused, people leaving their guns in their cars, which surprised me no end. I began to suspect that my two alligator pokers were indeed still living and had moved to St. Lucie County.

The gist of the story was that local police have reported that 48 guns have been stolen from 40 vehicles since 2009. They also reported that most of these thefts were from unlocked, unsecured vehicles. This last bit seems particularly alarming to me. People leave guns in their cars, and fail to lock them up. Sometimes they leave more than one gun in their car. Apparently, I thought, gun owners do need the occasional reminder about the rudimentary aspects of securing their property. Imagine how surprised I was then to discover, when I read the on-line comments, that this is not, in fact, a security lapse on the part of the gun owners. Oh no, it is rather a natural consequence of draconian gun laws.

Oh, yes. You see, even though getting a permit to carry a firearm in Florida is pretty easy, there are places where guns are not allowed. Courthouses and police stations are such places. There are more, but you can appreciate that the Florida legislators, in an attempt, however muddled, to keep the wheels from coming off the criminal justice system, thought it would be a good idea to prohibit firearms in places where officers of the court might otherwise be intimidated by gun toting whack jobs from meting out actual justice. Well you would be wrong in that appreciation because the wielding of weaponry by private citizens is, it seems, an essential component of the dispensing of justice here in the Sunshine State. Besides, you never know when an angry alligator might show up for an unscheduled sidebar, and need to be taught a lesson in proper courtroom procedure and decorum.

You see, the citizens commenting on the story thought, almost to a man, that gun owners were forced by these unreasonable and probably unconstitutional provisions of the law to leave their guns in their cars. They didn't do it because they were lazy or stupid. They did it because the government had given them no choice in the matter. It was the government's fault, and, by God, the government officials have no business making gun owners feel responsible for something that clearly they would not do if they had a choice.

If gun owners were able to strap on their pieces and walk wherever they chose, you know, a well armed militia being essential to the safeguarding of our freedom, then you would not have firearms being stolen out of unsecured cars by criminals who probably should have been shot before they had the wherewithal to shoot back.

Now I actually like guns. I'm a pretty fair shot with a rifle, and I'm fascinated with handguns. I don't own any guns for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is there are many more interesting things on which I'd prefer to spend what little money I have. But the fact is I understand the desire to own a gun, and I don't really have an argument against it. What I do take exception to, however, is the singular disdain for logic exhibited by the gun owners around here—at least the ones who've had their guns stolen and the yahoos who are defending them in response to a fairly sensible and straightforward newspaper article.

For years the NRA has been telling us 'Guns don't kill people; people kill people.” This has become a sort of mantra for gun owners everywhere. It is one of the fundamental underpinnings of gun lobby philosophy, notwithstanding that it seems a lot to me like saying “Teeth don't kill people; alligators kill people”. It may be true, but if an alligator didn't have teeth, he'd be hard pressed to get his pound of flesh for getting poked in the eye. And yet those who choose to own and bear arms, ostensibly at least for the protection of their person and property, apparently expect their guns, when left alone in unsecured cars, to be able to take care of themselves. It defies logic. Here's a new platitude I have come up with for them to chew on:

When law-abiding citizens leave their guns in unsecured vehicles, sooner or later only criminals will own guns. Well, them and your occasional fat, angry alligator.