EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 WORDS

A couple of things I’ve seen recently bother me. One happened yesterday when I clicked a YouTube video featuring a replay of a local TV news show reporting a rape. All was fine except that the word “rape” was blocked. Same-same the “F” word or the other six forbidden utterances. Something is wrong here and I struggle to imagine just what it is.

I’m not a fan of gory, but I do revere history. The old films of war and holocaust now suffer from having explicit scenes and photos of dead bodies blurred. Disclosures appear before ads and videos warning that the following may make someone uncomfortable.

Have we gotten too “woke?”

I fear it may be so. Will the word “Nazi” be blurred in future telecasts because millennials don’t “feel safe” when they hear it? How about "Manson, Bundy, Dahmer, and Gingrich?"

I tell you what makes me feel “not safe.” It’s the wimping and bastardization of human intercourse and the blurring of reality in the name of succor. I've been so "not feeling safe" in my life that I would have emptied a clip on my Sainted Mother had she come screaming out of the jungle at me. I think it served to make the rest of my life more joyous. Reality teaches and strengthens. An impenetrable wall to block fear is nothing more than a woke Plato's Cave. 

The unfortunate result of all this? I’m drifting farther from the left and toward the center. I’ll never reach the cruelty, selfishness, and irrationality of the right, but the extreme left may lose a tacit supporter. And just ask those who participated in the American revolution, women’s suffrage, or the civil rights struggle how important tacit support is.

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.

Morning Thoughts: October 12, 2017

“He always baited her hook for her when we all went fishing.” My aunt said that about my father and mother, inseparable for more than 45 years before Mother’s untimely death. Aunt Essie thought that really meant something, baiting your girl’s hook.

I guess there are many measurements of love. This started me thinking about un-love, and then about divorce rates. After a little researching, my hair began to itch. The so-called “facts” began to collide with one another and wrestle like men in a tag-team match gone bad.

If we have been listening to coffee shop talk, we know that the divorce rate in America is 50 percent and rising. That’s something we can be pretty sure about as a start.

Oops. Wait one. It seems that, like about any other thing you can imagine, the experts don’t agree. They don’t agree by a large margin. Some say the rate is soaring and is closing in on 60 percent.

Others say the rate is falling, soon to fall below 40 percent.

Why the spread? Oh, we can round up the usual suspects. It’s not as easy to define “divorce” as we might think. Sure, when one person obtains a restraining order, hires a “marriage dissolvement” attorney, and receives a legal document from a judge, we can be fairly sure about that one.

What about, though, couples who separate but never bother to go through the cost and aggravation of obtaining legal certification? Are two people who are married but living separate lives in New York City and San Francisco to be counted in the divorce column?

Also, like crime statistics, the divorce rate depends on who’s doing the counting. Some states, I understand, don’t even keep divorce statistics.

Another oddity. I heard about a couple recently that had just re-married for the third time. If my public education “ciphering” holds out, that accounts for three divorces in one marriage, or is it one, or none? Further, my guess is that they aren’t through yet. What then?

Oh, and here’s a bizarre one. A friend of mine years ago told me, with some anxiety, about finding a set of photographs in her mother’s dresser depicting two girls of varying ages. After much wrangling, her mother told her that her dad, when very young, had married another woman and produced two daughters, whereupon he and his wife discovered that they pretty much despised one another in direct proportion to the extent that they loved their daughters.

Don’t ask. I can’t explain it either.

Anyway, the couple agreed to live together, stay married, and raise their kids until the youngest daughter was 18. They then divorced. After World War Two, the man came back, and married a young woman, the result of which was my friend.

Into what column of the Excel Divorce Table did that marriage fall into for more than 20 years? Incidentally, going through life with an inquiring mind, I’ve found that this strange story is not as isolated as one might imagine.

Next, an over active libido and mass quantities of alcohol, have produce an untold amount of annulments to day-old marriages, as have irate fathers with baseball bats. How are they counted?

Then we have what they called, in Daddy’s day, “shacking up” but in our more gently euphemistic times “living together.” That’s when two people, or one of them, just say they don’t want to bother with legal recognition of their union. If they split up after a few years, is it a divorce or the “greener pasture syndrome?”

Well, there you have it. You might wonder what got me off on this. Is there some personal origin for the inquiry? You have to careful. We once knew an overly-inquisitive lady (read: “nosey bitch”) who attended a small church near our farm. She would have already been on the phone with: “Are ya’ll having trouble?”

No, nothing as salacious as that. Hell, we raised one another, my wife and I. It’s no time to abrogate that investment. Besides, the Galilean was quite clear about forbidding divorces.

Rather, I was just thinking how complicated things are and how badly we want to simplify them into sound-bites. That’s an innate desire among so many of us and it certainly creates some situations. Heck, it even got a twice-divorced man elected president. Thinking is hard.

What about divorces? If we can’t even count them, how could we ever assess a rate, or scientifically predict the probability of the success of an individual marriage?

I think maybe we should just stick with the “He always baited her hook for her” test.

Worth a little extra attention?
Yeah, I think so.

Morning Thoughts: October 11, 2017

Sometimes, if I think about simple things too long they don't stay simple. Maybe that’s why we enact such dreadful laws. Thinking is hard.

This latest thing came to me this week. I decided to base my monthly urban planning column  on what I thought was a simple and accepted concept. This is, that planning represents an area of endeavor about which reasonable people can and do differ.

More thoroughly stated, the concept posits that two unbiased and sincere people can view the same set of facts concerning a planning issue, receive the same amount of time for analysis, use comparable levels of experience and education, and come to diametrically opposed conclusions. Thereupon, they simply agree to disagree, in theory at least.

It’s simple and alluring proposition. Why do we need it? Well, I believe all propositions are stated in order to serve some sociological purpose. To wit:

Despites the vast body of literature surrounding the Old Testament Book of Job, the real reason it was written was to assure an iron-age society that stuff was just going to happen and they might as well shut up about it and quit pestering the Rabbis. A person, or a society, just can’t be good enough to create a perfect world.

Move to the New Testament and one can easily imagine that the parable of the prodigal son was written to allay resentment that backsliders were being welcomed back into a Christian community that badly needed numbers.

So, the concept of logical and benign disagreement about planning decisions perhaps grew from efforts to maintain societal harmony, promote order, or perhaps save jobs. Consider the Depression-era schoolteacher in west Texas faced with a schoolboard equally divided on whether the earth was flat or round. As Lyndon Johnson once observed, the teacher’s eloquent solution was, “I can teach it both ways.”

Sometimes the disagreements, though, aren’t based on comparable levels of logic. People aren’t ever going to agree, and reason fails. Currently, for example, we Americans are engaged in a bitter, friendship-ending, politician-exploiting, emotion-venting, ratings enhancing, career-ending disagreement over whether the First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to how certain folks react to the song chosen as the country’s national anthem.

Sadly, veterans of military service find themselves being used to strengthen the argument from either side of the issue. We do, after all, love our veterans.

Think so?

Let them propose building a treatment center for those vets in your neighborhood and see what happens.

Sailing To Oblivium: September 2, 2017

Did some informal research last evening while watching a little television. Discovered that I know very little about modern business, nor care to. That’s what happens when one strays from PBS into The Wasteland. I formed some amazing conclusions, to wit:

- In over 35.6 percent of the TV commercials displayed, I had no idea what product or service was being advertised.

- Unlike in my youth, when movie trailers (we called them “previews of coming attractions” in those days) made you, by design, want to see the movie being featured, today’s trailers are warnings that a normal person should not allow themselves to be dragged to see the film by a team of horses.

- The chances of a modern drug (A) curing you, or (B) killing you, are 1 in 25.

- In this modern world, a patient seeing a physician must be warned, for some reason, not to forget to tell their physician if they are pregnant or have had an organ transplant. Has the concept of “top of mind awareness” fled our modern psyche as did the ability to utilize cognitive logic?

- Every cell phone service is the cheapest with the broadest service area and the most doodads. A few even still offer the ability to call someone up and talk by voice, although this feature is considered arcane and increasingly unnecessary.

- The female models in TV commercials are all beginning to resemble, to a marked degree, the president’s wife or daughter.

- The primary purchasing factor in a new automobile is its ability to transport the driver via public streets at speeds far beyond the legal limit or within safety regulations.

- Americans have grown weak. Unlike my wife or me, or millions within our age group, they cannot quit smoking by simply ceasing to smoke, they must have some medication to help them. Sad. I simply can’t imagine another physical benefit that would require pharmaceutical input to produce happiness.

- Self-mutilation, or worse, resulting from a poor credit rating may be the next crisis in America.

- To earn the title “feel-good hit of the summer,” future films will probably be forced to include multiple gunfights and at least one car chase exceeding 45 minutes in length.

- The future of America will largely be guided by a long-standing academic relic that academicians refer to as “Miles Law,” originated by a high-ranking bureaucrat during the Truman era. It states that “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” There is a slight variation to its modern definition: the phrase “where you sit” has been expanded to include “what TV news channel you watch.”

I think I’ll go read some Charles Dickens.

Nobody asked me, but …