Call Me a Sewer Rat, Then

It is hard not to agree with the Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Becks of the world when they say things that amount to "Our country is going to hell in a handbasket."

We've known that for a long time. It might be the only sentence in American English about which there is a consensus. Kurt Vonnegut put his finger on this in an article about the 1972 Republican National Convention*.

During the Nixon and Johnson years, or the Nam years, tons of kids, youngsters of all walks of life, staged hundreds of protests against the war. Each of them came home learning the same bitter lesson: our government just isn't interested in our opinion anymore.

That was, I think, when we all should have thrown our hands up. Which reminds me, now, of the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama ran, and won, on the word "Hope". Hope sells. Sex, like hope, sells. Unlike hope, sex is something we can have.

Our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

It's not hard to agree with Beck and O'Reilly about that. It is hard to agree with them about why our country is headed there. They think we're headed there because our disenfranchised few are trying to stake out some part of the American Dream for themselves. They aren't so up front about that. They try and push the idea that "equal under the law" is a property of socialism or communism, which is true. It is true in the same way that "having a tail" is a property of sewer rats.

According to FOX logic, a horse is trying to be a sewer rat because a horse has a tail.

That's the logic. People buy it. And so, our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

*"In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself", in Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons

Inaugurating My Blog

I'm going to start out this blog by talking about the beloved Westboro Baptist Church people. Y'know the ones: "God Hates Fags", "Fags Doom Nations", "Thank God For Dead Soldiers" and the like.
Most recently, they made almost no noise at all by protesting the Obama Inauguration. They had flyers that said, predictably, "God Hates Obama."

So, that one doesn't make sense. On the one hand, they claim that God hates America and punished us with the World Trade Center attacks, etc., for our acceptance of homosexuality. On the other hand, God, they claim, hates Obama, but made him (presumably) the most powerful person on the planet.

Did His Omnipotence take a day off on election day? Or does he not care about political matters (which doesn't make sense in the first place, really, but let's entertain it for a moment), in which case, how could he hate a large political unit like, oh, let's say The United States of America?

One more point, a logical one, about these people. Over and over again in interviews, they claim they know they're on the right track with all of this hate speech because everyone hates them. The principle they appeal to? If you're doing the right thing, the world will hate you for it.

You're familiar, of course, with the conditional from classical logic? Sentences of the form: If it's a cat, then it's a mammal, or If A then B? If you have A, B follows. For example, if you have catness, mammalness follows, but it doesn't work the other way around. From mammalness, catness doesn't follow. If you have a mammal, it could be cat, but it could also be a dog, a whale, a bear, a human, etc. Which is structurally the direction they are applying their principle.

And, if the world hates you so much, why does it put you on so many talk shows? I think we secretly love these people. They're one of our favorite jokes.