Introduction to logic

Fortunate I was as a child growing up in south Arkansas. I had a world-class philosopher as a father. No, he wasn’t highly educated. An eighth-grade education at a one-room school near Kedron, Arkansas sufficed for him. Oh, he believed strongly in continued education. Thus, he extended his knowledge-base each morning with a careful perusal of the Arkansas Gazette. Also, he was the only person I ever knew who read the center portion of Red Ryder and other action comics. This was the short, printed, two-page section that no one else, I am sure, ever bothered to read.

Yep, only a true seeker of knowledge would bother to read narrative in a comic book. But that was my daddy.

He would be a delight if he were around to comment on such ideas as the one posed by our national Energy Secretary when he approved the sale of our nuclear technology to the country that furnished all but one of the 9-11 bombers of the World Trade Center. Oh yes, it was the same country whose leader recently commanded the execution of an American journalist.

I imagine my father looking him straight in the eyes as did me when I would advance, at the supper table, one of my hair-brained plans to make money without working. Using a principle as old as Socrates, he would say, “That don’t make no sense.” I can still hear, through the musty corridors of history, Aristotle chortling.

His expertise floated into economics as well. I’ll never forget the time I suggested a way to increase profits in the store. “Simple,” I said. “Just start giving away free cokes.”

“Free what?’

“Cokolas.”

“Do what?”

“Give customers free soft drinks. You won’t get revenue from them, but more folks will spend more money and profits will go sky-high.”

“We’ll make more money by taking in less money?”

“It’s as simple as that. What do you think?”

“I think,” he said, again piercing me with his eyes, “that they have a special ward in the state hospital over in Little Rock for people who believe such things.”

Yes, that sound you just heard was Descartes giving Kant a “high-five.”

My most memorable moment came years later, when I had reached full height and gotten married. We were sitting in the backyard of the family homesite waiting on ribs to cook. He was talking about hard times back during The Depression, about how growing their own food kept his family from starving.

I saw the opportunity for a “learning moment.” I told him how some high-income urban dwellers were giving it all up and “returning to the land” to live with nature and grow their own food like his family had done.

“Back to farming like we did?”

“Pretty much so.” I said, thinking though, of the pitiful scene from Easy Rider, where a demented group of misfit hippies were planting seeds in the barest desert land you ever saw. “I don’t think some of them know a lot about farming.”

But they are going back to living like we had to when I was a kid?

“Yep.”

“And they are leaving good jobs for it?”

“Yep.”

That man, who had once dug fence post holes for, as he put it, “four bits a day,” who had sharecropped, chopping cotton alongside his new wife in the blistering Arkansas sun, and who had butchered hogs while his wife “watched the store” and ended the day with bloody hands and soiled clothes, turned his head. He looked at me with those pale blue eyes that had won the heart of a local beauty as used to hard work as he was, and shook his head in a manner that would have pleased Plato.

“Why?” was all he said.

Early economic training.