House of Eratosthenes

Continuing with the theme of the post previous, about people being able to unilaterally change society in ways we’d never tolerate our elected leaders unilaterally changing it, simply by claiming they’re personally offended by things.

This is a process of sterility. Those in favor of it, as well as those opposed, would have to agree to this. It’s an endeavor of purification. Impotence is the goal, and is imposed uncompromisingly, relentlessly. To knock a foreign substance down from a hundred parts per million to ten parts per million, is just as desirous a task as knocking it from ten parts to one part. The paramount objective is zero — nobody should ever be offended by anything, anywhere. And yet, if/when that goal is realized, no further progress is possible. When your goal is a zero, rather than an infinite, your journey must be limited.

This is a direct contradiction to the nature of what is being done. Once an offensive thing has been removed, the search must begin immediately for another offensive thing. Whoever seeks to be offended, and fails to find something, by implication betrays all the others who seek to be offended. And so those who share this adventure, must continually find offensive things, decade after decade after decade. Some eighty or a hundred years ago, whoever sought to banish blackface Vaudeville skits from American culture for good, would have little comprehension as to how “Eeny meany miny moe” could possibly offend anybody; and yet, here we are.

It is a non-stop journey. One foot goes in front of the other, until all limits are transcended and infinity becomes possible. And yet, the nature of the goal, is zero rather than infinity. The crusaders toward the zero, desire the endless journey, the journey that expands into the uncharted; the journey of the frontiersmen of old. But the frontiersmen of old trudged toward infinity, not sterility.

And I think this is the real reason why offended people are offended. They’re doing it to themselves; their quest is a conundrum of intrinsic, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree self-contradiction. Once an environment becomes sanitary, movement must eventually cease as life is made impossible. That’s what a truly sanitary environment is. Dead. Silent. Still.

Impotent.

The nattering nabobs of political correctness want a “progressive” movement, which essentially means each generation undertakes a new wave of tasks unimaginable in size and scope to the generation that came before. You can’t have that when you trudge toward zero instead of toward infinity. So because the nabobs are dissatisfied with themselves, the rest of us must become embroiled in phony controversies about billboards and nursery rhymes.

The Truth has another example for us, you might say. I’ll let the blogmaster speak for himself.

We all know that FDR had polio during WW II, but the press kept this fact from the public and the world. He also spoke the following words in white and the rest is from a forwarded email:

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.” One elderly woman read the words aloud: “With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph.” But as she read, she suddenly turned angry. “Wait a minute,” she said, “they left out the end of the quote. They left out the most important part. Roosevelt ended the message with “so help us God.'” Her husband said, “You are probably right. We’re not supposed to say things like that now.”

What the press and the PC people are now trying to do is to put a veil back on words he and other national leaders spoke, especially their references to God. This “newspeak” that was introduced in the book 1984 is deception by omission, which is a lie. Walter Duranty was guilty of this type of deception which covered the killing of seven million Ukranians by Joseph Stalin.

I have been amazed at the cognitive dissonance maintained by true fans of President Roosevelt. Our current government is supposed to be completely transparent, we need Bill Keller to tell us all about everything the government is doing. Undersecretary of Defense tells Bill Keller, hey, don’t print that — it could jeopardize the safety of some of our agents. Keller says, okay, I weighed both sides, and decided the public has a right to know. Nobody is allowed to argue with Bill Keller…and yet, six decades plus change ago, we did not need to know the President needed a wheelchair. We were supposed to be imbibing deeply this new technology involving photographs, and we were supposed to believe we were being presented an accurate visual of our officials in power. And yet, whatever the powers-that-be decided we shouldn’t be looking at, we weren’t allowed to even know about.

Yeah, the President being in a wheelchair is a trifling matter, and the argument that it’s entirely irrelevent, is a convincing argument. My observation isn’t that something relevant was being cut out; my observation is that the people who manufactured the news, rather than the people who consumed it, were placed in the position of deciding what was relevant.

We wouldn’t tolerate that today. That’s what all the screaming is supposed to be about in the liberal circles: The Press is the administration’s “lapdog,” they don’t “speak truth to power” often enough, blah blah blah. Hey guys. Roosevelt’s men took cameras away from people. They gave orders that the lenses be covered until the hoist was down and the President was solidly on the ship, behind a desk. Our 43rd President chokes on a pretzel, and you think your civil rights are violated if you don’t know every detail.

And the God thing. That, right there, is what I’m talking about. Separation of Church and State, they say. An American value cherished and enshrined in our culture since the founding of the republic. And yet…who they kiddin’? Nobody was crusading for the continual sanitization of all mentions of The Almighty from public view, back in 1789. Nobody is trying to assert such a thing. But should this not be so asserted, if the argument is that religion-neutrality, as we define it today, is indeed a cherished American value?

It’s an inherent contradiction, from an inherently contradictory quest: A continually progressive inter-generational journey — toward zero.

In America, you have a perfect right to engage in things that are bound to frustrate you, and you’re even empowered to recruit others to help you and therefore to become so frustrated. You don’t have the right to inflict it on the rest of us.

And that is a cherished American value.

[…] The foregoing describes the human spirit in times past, and it would appear that chapter has now closed. Things are different today. We are in our bathos now. Dreams, where they exist at all, no longer concern exponential conquests; nowadays, they are fractional conquests. We start from some environment that has some filth to it, we devise ways of detecting impurities, and then we clean and purify. Where a new generation dreams of things undreamed-of by the previous generation, it has to do with trudging toward a zero. Taking a mathematical zero, and making reality reflect that zero-based ideal with greater precision. Our water has so many parts per million of arsenic, let’s see if we can cut that in half. There’s so much ozone in the air, let’s bring that down. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/12/2006 @ 12:39

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Tuesday, July 25th, 2006