The Departed

Famous people keep dropping like flies.  This seems to be the worst year for celebrity death in quite some time, perhaps since the year that John Denver and Sonny Bono died young and needlessly.  Of course, not all of the celebs who shuffle off this mortal coil are on the level of a Michael Jackson or a Patrick Swayze.  Some are known for other things than performing and are really only celebrities in the loosest definition of the word.  Two of those who have recently died are Larry Gelbart and Jody Powell.

Gelbart was a writer and more specifically a comedy writer and more specifically than that an immensely skilled comedy writer.  In death as in life, he is best remembered for creating, or, rather, adapting from the movie of the same name, the sitcom M*A*S*H.  there was more to him than that, though, and he wrote movies and plays and other TV shows.  Some of those are pretty damn good, too, such as the play Sly Fox and the TV movie Barbarians at the Gate.  He started out in radio at the age of 16 when his father, who was a Hollywood barber,  got him a job writing for Danny Thomas.  that led to a stint working on Duffy’s Tavern which led to writing for Bob Hope for a while.

In the ’50s, he worked for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour and some specials.  He is represented by the character called Kenny in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and I want to go further off to the side on that and say that the character of Lucas is not Neil Simon’s presentation of himself, but is, in fact, his take on the young Woody Allen.  It’s not about Your Show of Shows, which is what Neil worked on.  It is about Caesar’s Hour, which was where Woody came on board.  In fact, there is a legendary story about Woody being brought to the writer’s room by Milt Kamen, who you probably don’t remember, but should.  Kamen had found Allen when Woody was writing sketches at a resort in the Catskills and convinced Caesar to hire him.  On the appointed day, Kamen collected Allen and ushered him into the writer’s room with the introduction, “I have with me the young Larry Gelbart.”  To which Gelbart, who had been a top comedy writer for about ten years, responded, “The young Larry Gelbart is sitting right here.”

But that’s how young he was when he started.  He was maybe 26 or 27 at the time and seemed like an old pro.

Gelbart was best known as a writer of clever dialogue in the spare, unsentimental tradition of George S. Kaufman.  As the guy who wrote most of the best episodes of the first four seasons of M*A*S*H and who also had a hand in all the others from that period, his influence on me was enormous.  His characterization of Hawkeye showed that he could have been a good writer for Groucho, had Groucho still needed top-notch film writers in the later decades of his career.  for many years, my true ambition was to be the young Larry Gelbart.  For a while, it was to be the middle-aged Larry Gelbart.  A person could do worse.

The second person I wanted to bring up was Jody Powell.

Now, I can’t say that he was any particular influence on me, although I’m sure he would have been had I actually known him. ( At least that’s what I got from the tribute that Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about him on The New Yorker website.)  I just wanted to note that I saw him once when I lived in Washington.  He crossed K Street in the opposite direction that I was, and I recognized him.  He gave no indication of knowing me, as shocking as that might seem.  I didn’t stop him, didn’t follow him, didn’t pester him, just took note of him.  “That’s Jody Powell,” I thought.  “Cool.”  He certainly didn’t look like a guy who would die, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age 65.

You just never know.

What Closes on Saturday Night

People like to throw the word “satire” around a lot these days, but the term is rarely understood or applied properly.  I say this after reading a review of what sounds like a dog of a movie, Hamlet 2, in The New York Times.  At several points, the reviewer, Stephen Holden, refers to the satire in this film, only I don’t see anything satiric about it.  It’s merely a spoof, and Mr. Holden seems to think that sending up Dead Poets Society–however abysmal and worthy of derision that film may be–qualifies as satire.  However, it doesn’t, at least not to my mind.

Satire is a political and social weapon, and it has one target:  Those who have too much, control too much, and think that they have a right to dictate what sort of lives the great mass of humans get to live.  It is a cudgel that should be used in defense of the defenseless and against those in power.  You can make fun of a cripple, but a cripple can’t be satirized.  Neither can someone who is poor.

However, it seems to me to have been a trend in this country over recent years to attack those without power while giving those with power a relatively free ride, the main exception being partisan caricatures.  The Daily Show is capable of rising to the level of satire, but not much else that I see.  In the main, we spoof the rich and powerful–the “how stupid is Bush” trope is more spoof than anything else– while attacking the poor and downtrodden.

Let me use a couple of examples to show what I mean.

The first is an example of how popular it is these days to kick the poor. It’s a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look concerning two homeless men, Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and his cohort, Ginger.  Now, I like Mitchell and Webb.  I’m not here to run them down.  I just found this sketch disappointing because it does nothing except reinforce stereotypes and take potshots at people who are already down.  This takes no courage, no wit, no incisiveness, nothing.  At best, it takes a bit of a mean streak.

Contrast this with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as Tom fun and Derek:

There is an element of understanding and sympathy here that makes it poignant in a completely unsentimental way.  The small stain of satire in the piece is inherent in its sympathy with the characters and addresses the narrowness of a society  that pushes some of its weakest members to homelessness for their eccentricity (in losing their lodgings for Derek’s “unconventional way of eating an arctic roll“–a kind of dessert) and to theft in search of a bit of fun.

Satire denies the supremacy of the powerful by invoking laughter, but it is a laughter tinged with outrage.  Satirists are injured idealists, disappointed lovers.  They are people who use wit in order to defend those who cannot defend themselves and to deflate pretension.  And of all the things that one might claim about the homeless, calling them pretentious isn’t one of them.

What If?

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates last week, I’m struck, yet again, by the pointlessness of our news coverage.  I’m not going to get into the particulars of the case.  That has already been done ad nauseum, and since I wasn’t a completely neutral party who was there, how can I say what went on?  I will say this:  Instead of drinking beers under a magnolia tree, it would have been better had the President joined them in the White House screening room for a viewing of Rashomon.

Last night, while I was skimming the umpteenth post on The Daily Dish about what’s being moronically called Gates Gate, I was struck by the thought of how ephemeral the whole thing is, how although it’s the big thing of the moment, in a few weeks it will be forgotten.  The news, as a concept, is a voracious consumer of outrage.  Based in melodrama, it searches endlessly for heroes and villains and works mostly by manipulating emotions by taking very real people and reducing their sufferings to a kind of marionette show.  You can’t sell papers, even digital ones, without stoking somebody’s discontent or their pity.

The news is grounded in sentimentality, which makes it harder to take any given story seriously for any particular length of time.  Since the story is sentimentalized, it is shallow.  Since it is shallow, it cannot be sustained.  To do otherwise would be like watching the same scene from a soap opera over-and-over again.  And it’s hard to imagine anything that could be duller than that.

Even longer-lasting stories, such as the War in Iraq, are presented in sentimental ways and are presented as a series of distinct sentimental stories rather than as one continuing narrative.  In the case of the Iraq War, it started out with a patriotic pageant called “Shock and Awe.”  This was followed by the desert melodrama “The Looting of Baghdad.”  “Abu Ghraib,” “al Qaeda in Iraq,” “Saddam Down the Spiderhole,” “Crisis in Fallujah,” “Improvised Explosive Device,” “The Hanging of Saddam Hussein,” and “The Surge,” among a plethora of titles, all had their moments in the sun.  And just to be clear, I am not trying to belittle the suffering incurred by the soldiers involved, their families, or the Iraqis themselves.  These are all people who experience these stories not as melodrama but as tragic farce.  Their suffering is real and should not, cannot, be diminished.

And that is part of the hell of it.  By sentimentalizing such a story, the news business does exactly that.  It diminishes the suffering of those directly involved.  It takes something profound and makes it passing fair just for the sake of making a few more dollars.

The chaff of this approach to news is the kind of person we call a celebrity.  These are people of no discernible talent who attain a sort of notoriety, quite often from a scandal, and they work quite hard to remain in the public eye.  I just saw a headline concerning Kim Kardashian this morning that described her as a star, and I’m still not sure why I should know her name at all.  Except that she was involved in some scandal at one time, which made her part of the news cycle.  For the person who gets addicted to the notoriety, life becomes a melodramatic story of various romances and break-ups and career moves.  It’s a very sad thing, this addiction to fame, and I can’t imagine the bottomless, existential dread that must envelope Ms Kardashian every time she looks in a mirror and notices an imperfection.  Michael Jackson was killed by his fame and by the sentimentalized parody of a person he became in its service.

And so the omnivorous news cycle continues, chewing up people and stories and spitting them out as parody humans, no longer noble or tragic but merely pitiable.  And there’s nothing to be done about it because most people prefer melodrama to tragedy and sentimental comedy to farce.  They like everything tied up at the end with ribbons made of avuncular smiles and homebaked pies.  It’s a reality of a kind, a shabby, sentimental one, but that’s what folks like.  For the advantage to sentimentality is this:  When the emotions produced are fake and trite, you don’t have to risk the power of true pain and joy.

The Dan Brown Conspiracy

With the release of the film Angels & Demons, the time has come again for op-ed pages all over the movie-going world to ask the burning question of the 21st century:  “Why does Dan Brown sell so many more books than I do?”  Many theories are posited, from Mr. Brown’s alleged proselytizing for some sort of suburban demi-Christianity to, I suppose, mass hypnosis.  The deeper sort of reader is puzzled by the enduring allure of drivel, and the more mercantile sort drips with envy over money being generated so easily and quickly by someone who is obviously no more talented, clever, or intelligent than they.  And yet, I think none of this explains the implausible popularity of  Angels & Demons or, more especially, The Da Vinci Code.

For many people, of course, it is simply a matter of–to use an old comedy nostrum–”buy the premise, buy the bit.”  It seems unlikely to me, though, that there’s 100 million copies-worth of the suspension of disbelief available in any one century.  If that is true, another explanation must apply.

Being a modern, frantic, beleaguered American, my mind leaps immediately to the conspiracy theory.  It’s not so much that I think that there is some hidden international conspiracy that is trying to sell Mr. Brown’s books–although that would explain a lot–it is that, I think, the appeal of The Da Vinci Code and its lesser brethren, all of which invent huge, unseen conspiracies, comes from a widespread need for the conspiracy theory as a way of understanding reality.  I would contend that, in a dizzyingly complicated and existentially fragmented world, a world in which most people feel themselves to be the victims of their lives rather than the heroes, the finding, keeping, and maintaining of conspiracy theories is a lifeline that people latch on to in an attempt to keep themselves functional, to keep themselves sane.

There’s a paradox in using something that is fundamentally paranoid and insane as a defense of one’s sanity, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  And the proof of the usefulness of conspiracy theories is in their very ubiquity:  Off the top of my head, I can come up with a great pile of popular conspiracy theories.  There is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the alleged conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination.  There’s the idea that someone besides William Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems.  There is a whole slew of them having to do with the Tri-Lateral Commission.  There are the ideas of the left-wing media, the mainstream media, and the vast conspiracy that uses right-wing radio as its mouthpiece.  There are conspiracy theories about 9/11, various recent elections, the Moon landing, Israel, Jews in general, the Queen of England, and a number of Popes.  There are conspiracy theories involving the Mormons, freemasons, Democrats, Republicans, Communists, and Fascists.  That’s the problem with conspiracy theories:  They’re everywhere if only you look hard enough.

We are taught to be rational.  In fact, one of the hallmarks of Western civilization has been its championing of the rational mind.  And rationality has led to many boons and wonders.  Unfortunately we live in an irrational universe, and when we are confronted with something that challenges the order that our rational minds have imprinted on the world–such as that a deluded loser can kill a President, that 3000 people can die in a lunatic’s idea of a publicity stunt, that a middle-class burgher in the Midlands of England can have the greatest ear for language and feel for character of any writer in English–we feel that we have to explain it in terms other than the obvious.  If the prejudices and biases we use to defend ourselves are wrong in this, how else are they wrong?  Without the shield of these biases, we are Lear on the heath and the world is a madness.

One of the lies of the conspiracy theory is that conspiracies are cloaked in an impenetrable secrecy.  The Bush Administration, to use a recent example, has shown us that this is not true.  They operated mostly openly, behind only a thin veneer of secrecy.  As the recent release of the so-called torture memos makes clear, they colluded and conspired and–most importantly–rationalized their way around and past laws both national and international.  They hid their intentions and lied to our faces to start a war on terror and a war in Iraq that they thought would combat–wait for it–a vast international conspiracy.  Perhaps it was a case of “it takes one to know one,” but I think it was just another collective delusion.

And so Dan Brown sells books.  It’s comforting to think that a rational explanation is readily available for something–the divinity of Jesus, for example–that doesn’t seem rational, that challenges our prejudices, that tests our biases.  If only Mr. Brown’s books were rational.  Or readable.  But I guess the appearance of rationality is better than no rationality at all.

HIGNFY

It’s getting to the point where I should just rename this blog “I’m an American Who Has Been Watching a Lot of British Panel shows” because I’m about to unleash another on my imaginary public. This one is called Have I Got News for You, and, in it, two teams of panelists are prodded into identifying and mocking news stories by a guest presenter. The team captains are Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. Hislop is the editor of the satirical publication Private Eye, which was once partially owned by Peter Cook, and Paul Merton is a comedian and writer known in the US to viewers of the British, or original, version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?

I make this post, though, not just to introduce HIGNFY (as it’s known to friends and family) to those who have not sampled it, but to point out something I think I’ve figured out about British politics. Ever since the Iraq War started falling to pieces, I’ve wondered how Tony Blair (and now Gordon Brown) and the Labour Party have managed to retain power. As time has passed, they have seemed increasingly comical and inept. And then I started watching these British celebrity game shows.

In the following clip, the guest presenter on HIGNFY is one Boris Johnson, a rumpled man from a well-to-do family who is the current mayor of London, and the former editor of The Spectator, as well as  Tory MP for Henley.  And after seeing people like Boris Johnson and Ann Widdecombe in action, it’s no wonder Labour’s been able to hold on.

But don’t take my word for it.  Just listen to Boris (Ian and Paul are teamed with Stephen K. Amos and Clive Anderson, respectively):

And here’s another. Ian and Paul joined by Sue Perkins in destroying Boris.

FairTax

While I’m trying to wean myself from all things political, I’m finding that I have to rid my brain of a few things that have been hanging out in there, shooting endless games of pool and smoking cigars.  In any cleansing process, one must dispose of the impurities, so just think of my post here as me taking a trip to a virtual sweat lodge.

Okay.  There is a proposal out there in the world to replace income taxes with a national sales tax.  Mike Huckabee is a proponent, as is, I believe, Ron Paul.  (N.B. FairTax proponents:  You can get a great slogan out of that.  “Two out of three Republican Presidential candidates prefer FairTax!” That’s for free.  As you’re about to find out, I’m not in favor of the FairTax proposal, but you’ve got a right to sell it as effectively as you can.)  The FairTax proposal is, I think, an honest attempt by sincere people to fix a system that irks the hell out of them:  our income tax system.  As someone who has been getting mugged by the IRS every year in recent years, I am not without sympathy for this sentiment.  Warren Buffett has discovered that while he pays 17% of his income in taxes, his middle class staff members pay an average of 32% of theirs, which is not right.  (Mr. Buffett, by the way, is the first to admit that it’s not right.)  A system that leans so heavily on the middle while going easy on those at the top is in need of revision somewhere.  The question then becomes, is the so-called FairTax the way to achieve that?

After looking into it pretty carefully and trying to be as objective about the whole subject as I can, I think the answer is, unfortunately, “no.”  I’ll try to explain why not.

First, the FairTax’s proponents never seem to take into account that there is a huge industry that exists solely because we have a complicated and burdensome tax code, the accounting and tax preparation industry.  This is an industry that employs over 800,000 people, a large percentage of whom would be thrown out of work in one fell swoop if the FairTax was implemented.  The industry as a whole accounted in 2002 for $82 billion in income, $5 billion of which came directly from tax preparation.  Of the $48 billion that went to CPAs, a huge portion would have been charged for tax planning and preparation.  By shutting down this industry, the FairTax would take billions of dollars out of the economy and flood the job market with a tidal wave of the newly unemployed.  Perhaps some FairTax advocate has some method of dealing with this disaster, but I’ve yet to see it.

Second,  a goal of the FairTax proposal is to eliminate the IRS (another 45,000 or so employees thrown out of work).  However, although it might be possible–and I want to emphasize the word “might”–to reduce the size of the IRS, some agency like it would still be needed to ensure that the system proposed by the FairTax worked.  You see, one of the ways that they try to keep a national sales tax from being as regressive as it wants to be is to send “prebates,” either in the form of checks or debit cards, to individuals to individuals and families who live at or below poverty level or some percentage above it.  The prebates would seek to give them the money that they would have spent in sales taxes up front.  And this is where the IRS becomes necessary.  Because, although the claim is made that income information will not have to be collected, you still have to know who is poor by the definitions of the legislation and who isn’t.  Without some sort of income verification, cheating will be rife.  Since income verification is built into the current system, parts of that system will have to be retained simply as a matter living in the real world.

But the real problem with the Fair Tax proposal is this:  No matter how they try to game it, such a system will still be inherently regressive.  Middle class people will still end up paying a disproportionate percentage of their incomes as taxes than would the wealthy.   Some assumptions are made about middle class families avoiding taxes by saving their money rather than spending it, however, that’s not likely to happen in the USA I live in.  We actually have a negative savings rate, which means that most people spend more than they make.  The difference between what people make and what they spend is financed, of course, through borrowing, which means that not only will most people be taxed on 100% of their income, after paying for shelter, plus some.  And the sales tax that gets rolled into debt would accrue interest, and folks would be paying on that tax for the life of the loan or, in the case of credit cards, in perpetuity.

Meanwhile, rich people, who don’t come anywhere near spending 100% of their income, would actually only pay tax on a fraction of what they make  They, as investors and savers, would be spared in ways unimaginable to most middle class families.  Since they are less likely to finance–and I’ve known people who pay cash for expensive cars who owned homes with seven-figure values outright–they would even be hit for a smaller amount of money on major purchases.  Also, one of the advantages of being rich is that you can buy quality items, which last longer and therefore need to be replaced less often.

The FairTax proposal is an idea for people who want to believe that things can be simple, but that has never been my experience of this mortal world.  The reality I inhabit is subtle, difficult, and complicated.  And the society I live in is rich, diverse, and as simple as an algorithm.  It would be wonderful if something as fundamental as a national tax system could be simple, but I don’t see it happening.  Not to say that proposals such as FAirTax aren’t worth putting forward.  It’s all a conversation.

My News Addiction

The Internet made me a news addict.  It’s always up, always there, just lurking behind a tab or a bookmark or as a memory in the address bar.  There are newspaper websites, news-related blogs, and news magazines.  There are feeds and summaries and convenient links.  It’s everywhere, news as entertainment.

And none of it matters.  At least not to me.

Let me give you an example.  In recent days, we have seen the American financial markets implode, the stock market experience a nervous breakdown (it’s gone from depression to mania quicker than you can say “government bailout”), and a slapdash and inconsistent government response.  I’ve read reports, and I’ve read commentaries.  I’ve looked at charts and listened to experts.  And I have no more control over these events now than I did before Lehman Brothers failed.  And yet I worry over them.  How can that be healthy?

The same goes for the Presidential campaign.  I know who I’m voting for based what I’ve gleaned from the policy papers published on their websites and with no thanks to the news cycle whatsoever.  In fact, all I ever see in the news are distractions.  Stuff and nonsense.  Meaningless gloop.  It’s all been reduced to the level of a reality game show, one that could be called Survivor:  White House.  It’s an odd way to choose our leaders and ought to be beneath us.

But nothing is beneath the news game.  Although we like to think of the news as something that is presented in the public interest, it is actually just the honey that attracts the flies to the trap of advertising.  And there’s no way of getting around this.  If the government owns the news organization, you end up, most likely, with mere propaganda.  If you leave it to the whims of the market, you end up with pabulum and pap.

Of course, as is the case with so much, The Firesign Theatre summed it up beautifully, this time on their album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.  They have a newsreader say the following:  “Those are the headlines, and now for the rumors behind the news.”

I don’t know what the answer is, and I’m not trying to prescribe a cure for everyone.  I just know that I have to wean myself off.  The news eats up my attention, makes me crabby, and gives precious little in return.  It is the enemy of enlightenment and peace, and has a tendency to narrow the mind rather than to expand it.  We’ll see how it goes.  If I write a post on Monday about the Federal bailout of a Presidential campaign, you’ll know that my plan will still need work.

I’d Like to Know

Ever since last Friday, the new Republican nominee for Vice President has been described consistently as being “hot.”  (“Hot” is a term that I hate because it doesn’t actually mean anything.  Like it’s cousin, “awesome,” it is a vague artifact of a post-literary culture.)  The problem I have is that she really isn’t.  Is anybody else looking at her?  What’s so damn hot about her?  Anything?  Somebody help me out here.

What I’ve seen is a lady with a rather plain face that is hidden behind hip glasses and a mound of make-up.  Where’s the hotness?  Does “hot” really only mean “not fat”?  I mean if she were just walking down the street, would heads turn?  Other than away, I mean.  I don’t think so.

Now, I’ll admit that she’s more attractive than Sen. McCain, but so is a ‘47 DeSoto.

I really only bring this up because it speaks to The Selling of Sarah Palin, a PR campaign the likes of which have not been seen since the deception that the Allies pulled on the Germans before D-Day called Operation Bodyguard.  And that speaks to the Republican belief that the great mass of Americans are witless nits who can be controlled through a continuing campaign of lying and obfuscation.

This Republican convention was a sad thing, hypcritical, mendatious, and libelous.  It was a whole great convention center’s worth of people who can, should, and probably will go to hell.

Faith

As I have been thinking recently about reason and logic, I have found myself bumping up against the concept of faith and have deepened my appreciation for the role that faith plays in the lives of humans. Now, I’m not talking only about religious faith, although I think that the religious impulse informs–in a twisted form–these other expressions of faith. I’m talking about faith in political agendas and personalities and faith in ideas of conspiracies. I’m thinking about the many ways in which people believe passionately and fiercely in propositions and images and concepts that are not supportable by the facts as they stand or knowledge as it can be known.

People routinely confuse believing with knowing. We’re all prone to it and indulge in it constantly. Perhaps you don’t like somebody else’s looks and draw a series of conclusion about that person based on only that flimsiest of evidence. Perhaps you believe that Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington were the same person because you’ve decided that Napoleon was such an outstanding general that only he could have beaten himself. Perhaps you read a book that postulated that UFO aliens from outer space are floating among us disguised as dandelion fronds, and the notion just tickled your fancy and became an obsession. It doesn’t matter. We have all indulged in this gambit in either small or great ways. And belief, in and of itself, is not a terrible thing. However, whenever belief in something becomes an obsession, then things begin to go awry. Perspective is lost and reason’s tenuous grasp is loosened.

The thought occurred to me yesterday that belief in a conspiracy theory is not unlike religious belief. Both beliefs are predicated on the existence of something vast, ubiquitous, and invisible. Now, I’m not here to run down religion. I think there are many kinds of spiritual search, and since we are then talking about the search for something that transcends space and time, it becomes difficult to apply the same standards as can be applied to the idea that man never landed on the moon. The first can be neither proved nor disproved, although it can be discussed right into the ground. The second can be disproved by looking at the moon through a sufficiently powered telescope in order to view the junk we left behind after landing.

I think that one of the most glaring examples of this will to believe in recent history was the childlike belief that the Bush Administration had in Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. It would be almost touching if they hadn’t used that belief to unleash an extraordinary amount of suffering and privation. It’s easy, I think, to look at these clowns cynically and to conclude that they sat down in a rational fashion and said, “Let’s just cherrypick the information that helps us, no matter how tenuous, and ignore everything that doesn’t.” However, I would posit that they were just being true believers.

They indulged in every tactic of the conspiracy theorist. They claimed to have a knowledge greater than orthodox sources, and denigrated those orthodox sources at every turn. Rather than producing proof of their claims, they demanded refutation and refutation of every detail of their claims. As refutations accumulated, they constructed a series of rationalizations rather than offering reasoned responses. They sifted through the evidence available only for those bits that they could use to bolster their own case and never considered anything that challenged their assumptions. Opposing ideas were attributed to vested interests rather than being accepted as thoughtful contributions from experts in the field in question. They twisted facts so that they would better fit their conclusions. And they did all this in absolute certainty of the rightness of their conclusions and never once allowed doubt to enter their minds.

I’ll bet there is still the occasional NeoCon who expects Saddam’s secret cache of horrible weapons to be discovered soon, such as Douglas Feith or Dick Cheney.

Faith is a powerful thing that can sweep through us like a storm, which is why it is important that belief be tempered with rationality. Faith and rationality are not in opposition. They are two tools of the same set. Faith can set inquiry in action, and rationality tells us when to apply the brakes, when to alter our beliefs, and when to set a new course when the old one proves fruitless.

Gums Flapping in West Virginny

Well, Bill Clinton has been on the stump in West Virginia complaining about calls for Hillary Clinton to pack it in since it is almost impossible for her to win the nomination at this point. According to His Former Highness, it is a good thing for both candidates to press on so that every primary will have two candidates to fight over. According to him, if this doesn’t happen, citizens will be disenfranchised. Of course, he’s wrong. He’s either wrong or lying, and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, just like his wife and loved ones.

The former President clearly doesn’t understand that having a primary extends the franchise to no one. Not having one disenfranchises a population of zero. You see, extending the franchise means allowing someone to help choose who will fill a given office, not who will be the candidate for that office. Ex-cons are often denied the franchise, and if Bill Clinton is so worked up about who is disenfranchised and who isn’t, he can try speaking out on that or the new requirements for ID cards being pushed by the Republican Party.

Neither party is required in any way shape or form to hold primaries at all. Our current method of selecting presidential candidates only really goes back to 1972, a run during which the Democrats have won precisely 3 out of 9 contests. As a way to choose the best possible candidate, it frankly sucks. We could have done as well by sticking the prospective candidates in one of those money machines they have at failing car dealerships. Whoever comes out of the machine with the most dollar bills gets to run for President.

He also claims that Democrats should “just saddle up and have an argument.” The problem with that, of course, is that just standing around calling each other names isn’t having an argument in any intellectual sense. It is simple idiocy. And there is no argument to be had because they agree on almost every matter of substance. The only question that is left to be decided is this: Which one has the better chance of winning the election in November? And when one of the candidates has a negative approval rating of 48% while the other has negatives of 32%, I think that the answer is a no-brainer.

It’s time for Bill to shut his trap, but I have no hope that he will. That would take judgment and finesse, two qualities that he possesses not at all.