House of Eratosthenes

On Sunday, the most powerful man in American print media went to New Paltz, NY, and apologized to SUNY graduates. In so doing, he gave them a good education about the world into which they have just entered, namely, that if you have the right pedigree you can sail through life without accumulating the mental skills necessary to solve a problem, large or small.

Ha ha! No, that isn’t what he said. That message would only be received only by those among the 900 who can read between the lines a little. To those who think what they’re told to think, and nothing more than that, the message delivered by Arthur Ochs “Pinch” Sulzberger, scion of the Sulzberger dynasty and publisher of the New York Times, was this: A simple lamentation about how little the world has changed since his own college graduation, and how this lack of change is all his fault.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Sulzberger said. “You weren’t supposed to be graduating in an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life, the right of gays to marry or the rights of women to choose.”

Sulzberger added the graduates weren’t supposed to be let into a world “where oil still drives policy and environmentalists have to relentlessly fight for every gain.

“You weren’t. But you are and I am sorry for that,” Sulzberger said.

Referring to his newspaper, Sulzberger said that it has made big decisions lately.

“It’s important that those of us at the New York Times have the courage of our own convictions and defend the rights of our journalists to protect their sources or, after much debate and discussion, publish news that our government is bypassing its own legal systems to tap into phone calls made to and from the United States,” Sulzberger said.
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“None of you wants to be standing where I am 30 years from now, apologizing to the next generation of bright and shiny college graduates,” Sulzberger said.

Simply amazing, isn’t it? Sulzberger sits at the helm of not only the New York Times, but arguably the entire newspaper industry in the United States. Terrorists attacked us, leaving an empty hole that remains to this day right in his own back yard. They’d piss rusty nickels for the chance to do it again. And in his mind, the problem that remains unaddressed, is that gays can’t marry, women can’t kill babies and illegal aliens can’t hop the fence.

Er wait it’s a little worse than that. What Sulzberger appears to have left unmentioned, is that illegal aliens can hop the fence just fine, and mothers can slaughter their babies as quick as they want thank you very much. Pinchy was bellyaching that there is some resistance involved in keeping those rights around. Not that the rights have been rolled back, just there are some among us who have reservations about them. That’s the most generous interpretation you could apply today to “graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights”: You’re fighting, Pinchy, because there is some debate going on about whether the human rights you mention, really are fundamental.

Women’s right to choose? Don’t apologize; take a bow. It has been unconstitutional to pass laws restricting this “right” since 1973, a year before you graduated from Tufts. The right of women to end their preganancies is intact, and unmolested throughout your sojourn in the real world — can’t say the same for the sovereign right of state residents to vote on their own abortion laws. Is that a “fundamental right”? No? Who says?

What any of this has to do with the problem at hand, though, is what I’d really like to know. There’s an enemy willing to crash a plane into a building, taking out themselves and thousands of innocent civilians, to make some boneheaded political statement. They’ve done it before; they’ll do it again. What, exactly, does homosexual marriage do to address that issue?

Oil drives our policy and environmentalists are fighting for yet more gains. Class of 2006, this is the biggest problem with the world into which you’ve just stepped. Envronmentalists artificially drive up the cost of commodities we must have in order to function in our daily lives, and whenever they impose a new hindrance on the rest of us, it’s never enough — they always want more. They make it hard to draw from domestic oil reserves, they make it hard to import the stuff, they make it super-hard to refine it, and they make it hard to ship gasoline between states. In my lifetime, it would be fair to say, no substantial victory, political or industrial, has been denied them. And the most powerful men in the communications business, piss and moan about how tough things are for the environmentalists.

Sulzberger’s great-grandfather bought the New York Times with borrowed money, and saved it from certain failure by identifying problems and coming up with solutions to those problems. His grandfather expanded the circulation yet more by adapting it to a changing world with newer technology — remote-control typesetting machines, facsimile transmission of photographs, again, identifying problems and then solving them. The quote “I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out” is attributed to him.

Pinch’s brains are falling out. His idea of solving a problem, would appear to be this: Terrorists want to kill us, so we should make sure illegal aliens can come streaming in wherever and whenever they want, and when someone in our country wants to talk to Al Qaeda, nobody should ever find out about it.

He’s to be congratulated for inheriting such a high position that his cognitive skills can atrophy this badly — and still he survives. One must marvel at the figures of history who enjoyed no such luxury. Like, for example, Adolph Ochs when he bought the New York Times 110 years ago.

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Unable To Solve A Problem
Wednesday, May 24th, 2006