Archive for December, 2011
A Day for Optimism
Back in 2008 while listening to the radio, I heard Casting Crowns’ version of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day“. I found the melody incredibly moving and when I examined the lyrics I saw a compelling message. I posted the video to my blog and then a year later one of my readers asked me to re-post it. And so it has become a sort of Rutherford Lawson Blog tradition.
I am not religious but the almost strident optimism in the song (based on a poem by Longfellow) cannot help but move the spirit. It reminds me, on a lighter note, of an old humorous story:
Two brothers were driving their father crazy. One brother was an eternal optimist and the other a pessimist. In the hope of showing his sons “the other side of the coin”, the father took the pessimist to a room piled high with toys. The boy began to cry. “Why are you crying,” asked the father, “look at all these toys!” The boy replied “yes so many toys that might break if I played with them.” Failing at that experiment, the father tried again with his optimistic son. He brought the boy to a barn piled high with horse manure. The boy joyfully jumped on top of the pile and started shoveling with his hands. “What in the world are you doing? Why are you so excited and happy?” asked the father. To which the gleeful boy replied:
With all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!
And so we have a choice between optimism and pessimism. In the old Christmas song, the singer evolves from:
In despair I bowed my head
There is no peace on earth I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on Earth, good will to men
to
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail.
With peace on Earth, good will to men.
The sound of the bells and their resemblance to the sound of children’s voices (children, being our future) inspired the singer. He trusted that God (or in my case perhaps hope) had not abandoned the world. I do believe that in the long run, the right prevails.
I wish happy holidays to my readers. In the spirit of self-fulfilling prophecy, let us all take this season to declare that tomorrow will be better than today.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Image: chrisroll / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Real Voter Fraud
My fellow liberals are understandably upset about various Republican state legislatures passing laws that will restrict voting access to typically disenfranchised people. These laws disproportionately limit votes that would probably be for Democrats. The premise behind the stricter laws is to stamp out that dreaded boogeyman VOTER FRAUD. Of course, we wouldn’t want to remind these legislators that the occurrence of voter fraud is miniscule.
If my Republican friends really want to worry about voter fraud, I’d like to turn their attention to a fraud that goes unnoticed every election. Very simply it is the phenomenon of very stupid people entering the voting booth.
My story actually begins with my own stupidity. The other day I was looking at a map of the proposed Keystone pipeline extension which had a solid line and a dotted line on it. I was having trouble understanding the difference. Like an idiot, I had neglected to notice the legend at the bottom of the map. My almost-eight year old 2nd grader explained the map to me when my wife prompted her to. I then updated my Facebook status to say “The verdict is in. I am not smarter than a 2nd grader.”
Things got worse however later in the day. The Lawson family gathered around the warm glow of the television to watch the game show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?. For the uninitiated, contestants on this show try to win money by answering questions in topics taught in the first through fifth grades. Each contestant gets the help of one actual fifth grader from a panel that appears in each episode. With that backdrop, the following transpired. Mind you, I am NOT making this up.
The question: Which President of the United States served immediately before Franklin Delano Roosevelt? (Answer: Herbert Hoover)
The contestant thought aloud, “Well, IF Roosevelt served more than one term, then maybe the President who served before Roosevelt was Roosevelt himself?” The host, Jeff Foxworthy was kind enough to tell the woman that there are no trick questions on the show. I could see at this point, things were not going to end well. IF? One of the most well-known facts about Roosevelt was that he was elected four times, the only President with that distinction. Clearly this fact had escaped our poor contestant.
After pushing her brain to its limit she called on her fifth grade partner for assistance. Sadly the young girl was not the best exemplar of our educational system. Her answer was “Abraham Lincoln”. At this point, I went into shock. Lincoln was long dead before Roosevelt was even born. Their terms were not even in the same century. But forgiving man that I am, I gave the poor fifth grader a pass and blamed her teachers for her utter ignorance.
Our adult contestant now had the option to use the fifth grader’s answer or come up with her own. She wisely chose to reject “Abraham Lincoln”. The furrows in her forehead deepened. She descended into intense meditation. And then it came to her. She had arrived at her answer. Her answer was …
JAMES MADISON
Gasping for air, I asked my wife to call the paramedics. Just when I thought the lady recognized the utter impossibility of Lincoln, she picked a President even earlier than Lincoln. In fact, she picked the fourth President of the United States. Could the fourth POTUS possibly have served in the 1930′s? So three possibilities come to mind. She either knew nothing about Madison, or nothing about Roosevelt, or nothing about either. She was a grown-ass woman! She was incapable of making a guess that contained even the slightest hint of deductive reasoning. Had she said Calvin Coolidge, I could have said ok … early 20th century President. Had she said Harry Truman, I could’ve said ok, she’s got a good time frame there and just got the men in the wrong order. But no, her answer was the answer of a blindingly stupid person.
And now the real tragedy … this woman can vote. It makes you wonder just how many of the folks who enter the voting booth cannot discern their anus from a hole in the ground. And if it is true that much of America is dumb-as-a-post stupid, what does that say about the leaders we choose? Is it any wonder we have a Congress that repeatedly makes a spectacle of itself in incompetence? And while I still support our President, is it any wonder that we demanded virtually no relevant experience from him before electing him to the Presidency? Is it any wonder that the current slate of Republican Presidential wanna-be’s appear to be answering a casting call for Saturday Night Live?
The real voter fraud going on in America is that folks who can’t tell the difference between a SALT treaty and a salt shaker are choosing the man or woman who gives the “go” on a nuclear strike. Sadly, while we can legally ask you to produce all sorts of identification to prove you are who you say you are at the ballot box, we can’t legally ensure you won’t put James Madison as a write in candidate on the ballot.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Pro-choice Argument Gone Awry and Farewell to Hitch
Pro-choice Argument Gone Awry
Recently the department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the stewardship of Kathleen Sebelius overruled a finding by the FDA that the “morning after” pill could be sold over the counter to anyone who wanted it. The morning after pill (also called Plan B) is used to hedge against pregnancy after sexual intercourse. The FDA based its finding on safety evaluations. HHS apparently overruled the finding based on skepticism of these same evaluations as it applies to younger consumers. To the chagrin of the pro-choice contingent, Barack Obama weighed in by saying that the overrule was just common sense and he used his young daughters to justify his own caution about the drug’s availability.
I support the HHS overrule and I am particularly troubled by one bit of rhetoric surrounding the controversy. I’ve heard many opponents of the HHS ruling refer to its impact on “young women”. Look folks, we’re talking girls aged 11 to 16. They are not young women. They are children. The President’s remarks were called by one pundit “paternalistic”. Well damn straight it should be paternalistic. Just how far have we lost our way in this country that we think an 11 year old girl should be able to walk into a pharmacy and grab a drug to prevent a pregnancy when she shouldn’t be engaging in sexual intercourse in the first place. I’m not one of those who advocates abstinence only education regarding pregnancy prevention but have we really gotten to the point where we readily accept our 11 and 12 year old daughters having intercourse? Have we really flipped so far off course that we believe parents should not be aware of their children’s contraceptive choices?
Sorry, pro-choice lobbyists and feminists in general, you can sling arrows at me all day long. My child becomes a “young woman” when she can put a roof over her own head and pay her own rent. Until then you’re damn right I’m going to be paternalistic and I’m going to be involved in her purchase of contraception.
Farewell to Hitch
This week at the age of 62, author and raconteur Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer. Whenever I tuned into a TV show and learned that Hitchens was going to be a guest my heart quickened a little and my mind buzzed with anticipation. To say Hitchens had a way with words would be like saying Julia Child could throw together a pretty good meal. Just reading his last contribution to Vanity Fair, I had to look two words up in the dictionary and I consider my vocabulary better than average (the words were inanition and etiolates).
But Hitchen’s final article for Vanity Fair also illustrates his penchant for killing sacred cows. He takes on the notion of “what does not kill me makes me stronger” and notes quite matter of fact that the treatment to kill his cancer had left him much weaker, not at all stronger. An avowed atheist, Hitchens had no problem attacking the sacred and leaving controversy in his wake. In The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice he portrays the much revered nun as guilty of terrible optics (photo ops with the wife of Haiti’s Baby Doc Duvalier) at best and a cunning religious propagandist at worst. One phrase from the excerpts I read jumps out at me, that Hitchens wished to judge “Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.” Hitchens takes on God Himself in the book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Based on these works, one could simply label Christopher Hitchens a flame thrower enjoying controversy for its own sake. But there was a gravity to Hitchens’ analyses. He wasn’t flippant. He could in one breath recognize the stupidity of a man (George W. Bush) and in the next breath castigate those who might judge Bush who were not worthy to do so. Watch the following two exchanges, one from 2000 and the other from 2006.:
(You can watch a fuller version of the second video here.)
It might appear at first that the two videos contradict each other. However they are completely consistent. In the first, Hitchens criticizes Bush’s lack of curiosity, his mental laziness. In the second, he criticizes the mental laziness of Bill Maher’s audience who rejoice in the “easy shot” at Bush’s IQ. He calls them “frivolous” and points out that calling Bush dumb doesn’t make you smart.
Whether or not you agreed with everything Christopher Hitchens said, there was no denying that the man did not have a lazy mind. When he spoke or wrote he invested a finely tuned intellect and he challenged you to invest the mental energy to understand him, and if need be, challenge him. In a world of stupid soundbites and knee jerk partisan rhetoric, Mr. Hitchens will be sorely missed.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Photo credit: Andrew Rusk from Toronto, Canada via Wikipedia
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Foreclosure of the Fourth Estate
Earlier this week I was watching an interview of GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. Ms. Bachmann told the hosts and other assembled guests that she thought everyone should pay some sort of tax, even ten dollars, as she put it, so everyone has a stake in America. I fully expected Joe, or Mika or even Willie to ask the congresswoman from Minnesota how she could say this when she told an audience at a debate not too long ago that the ideal tax rate for everyone should be 0%. As I often do while watching TV, I asked the question aloud to Ms. Bachmann and waited for my trusted journalists to echo my words.
Crickets.
Anyone paying the barest of attention to the GOP presidential nomination race would have spotted this inconsistency yet the hosts of “Morning Joe” just let it slip right on by. Before anyone accuses me of being a partisan attack dog, look at the following three stories and tell me how much the main stream media has covered them:
- Solyndra — when we are supposedly fed up with crony capitalism this story of an ill-advised loan to a poorly run energy company with evidence pointing to undue pressure from the White House, has received relatively little attention.
- Fast and Furious — guns end up in the hands of Mexican criminals with the involvement of the US Justice department. Attorney General Eric Holder and other Justice staff give incorrect information to Congress. Depending on your politics, the deception was either deliberate or not.
- $7.2 trillion in tax payer money doled out by the Fed without congressional knowledge much less approval.
Now it’s not that you can’t find these stories if you search for them but they are hardly leading news broadcasts.
When I was a kid, television news came from the big three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. News anchors were assumed to be objective. This is why when, for example, Walter Cronkite came out against the Vietnam War it was a major shock to the system. Now there are cable networks entirely devoted to news and two of them have an obvious bias, MSNBC on the left and Fox on the right. It is now possible to sit down to a night of “news” coverage devoted to portraying an opposing political viewpoint as either dumb, dangerous or at worst treasonous. This kind of reporting leaves out facts that interfere with the politics of the reporters.
The most important purpose of a free press is to accurately inform the average citizen. It is supposed to even the playing field and enable us to better participate in our democracy. It seems what we have now are sloppy journalists who don’t do their homework before interviews and let politicians get away with inconsistencies and contradictions or news professionals who flaunt their political bias.
One thing we didn’t have when I was a kid was the Internet. Now with Google and a little patience, we can weigh the differing sides of a story and come to our own conclusions. Each of us must become our own news aggregator. Either we do that or we wait until comedian Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” covers a news item better than the so-called professionals will.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Your Big Event for 2011 and My Life in a Cartoon
As the year comes to a close, it’s your turn to sound off on what you think the biggest event was in 2011. Use whatever criteria you want: impact on our nation or the world, personal importance to you, etc. I’ve offered some possibilities in the poll below. Elaborate on them in the comments section or offer one of your own.
My Life in a Cartoon
Happy New Year!
Respectfully,
Rutherford
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December 31, 2011 at 6:20 pm Rutherford 561 comments