House of Eratosthenes

I haven’t sympathized with the “liberal” viewpoint very often, but once in a great while it does happen. I don’t believe in “starving the beast,” depriving the Government of tax receipts until the day comes that it stops spending money. It’s irresponsible, and I’ve come up a little starved myself in terms of reasons for believing this would ever happen. And it’s always been my opinion that if science can somehow prove that “life” has not yet begun, and a woman doesn’t know how she can support a child and has no plans to provide for a child’s welfare, abortion should be an option. If we can prove life has not begun. As in, prove it. I understand the conservative position is that life begins at conception, so I think my position is liberal.

We shouldn’t even be considering an anti-flag-burning amendment. The federal government has no jurisdiction for legislating against controlled substances, or for enforcing those laws; such an issue is purely a state matter. Ditto for the Defense Of Marriage Amendment (DOMA). I agree with Thomas Jefferson’s revulsion toward primogenture, although I stop short of recognizing the “death tax” as a valid remedy for aristocracy. And a good metric for determining the overal moral and ethical health of our society, is the ability of children to aspire to & achieve greatness, although they come from humble beginnings. If this becomes rare or excessively difficult, we should take that as a sign that something is busted and needs fixing.

Because I do come down on “both sides” at one time or another, like most people I have the opportunity to entertain “Amen, brother” arguments from both conservatives and liberals — arguments designed to encourage me, and keep me on whatever side of an argument I happen to be on.

The few times I get to hear an “Amen, brother” argument from the liberals, I’m almost always horrified, and left uncomfortable with the position I had that attracted this sense of fraternity. Invariably they seek to reassure me that things are the way I think they are — although their vision of things the way they are, has nearly nothing to do with my reason for arriving at a similar opinion. On abortion and parental-notification, they would like to make sure I remember the girls who can’t tell their fathers they are pregnant, because their father is the father. Silly conservatives with their notification laws, they don’t even understand that this is happening, every day.

Sometimes I’m in a forum where I’m allowed to interact, in which case I make the point that perhaps the conservatives are distracted by the situation with irresponable girls using abortion as a contraceptive device. How often does this happen, I’d like to know, versus how often men impregnate their own daughters? The response to this is often angry, and always revealing. Some say even if the abortion-as-contraceptive situation outnumbers the incest situation a thousand-to-one, it doesn’t matter because this is about principle. I suppose I could understand that argument, but it seems hypocritical to advance from that position, to rejecting any presence of principle on the part of conservatives. Some liberals insist that it never happens, that all abortion procedures are emergency by their very nature. Others insist that I have no right to have an opinion at all, being a man — weren’t they congratulating me only moments before, for being a man having the right opinion?

But let’s get back to the subject at hand, because I am a man, and somewhat removed in the practical world from the emotional topic of abortion.

There is perhaps no other place where my occasional agreement with liberals invites more rancor and dissention than the issue of “economic justice”. I have no sympathy at all with affirmative action, in fact, what our society has evolved to envision as the “moderate” set of resolutions on this, nauseates me. I am far to the right of just about any position I have ever seen advanced on this issue, ever, even though my own position comes from just reading the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause and taking it seriously. I have had this position ever since I got hauled to the principle’s office for beating up a bully, and given a stern lecture for doing to the bully exactly what the bully had been making a habit out of doing to me. The school authorities, I asserted in not-quite-articulate sixth-grade language, ought to be concerned with what is being done, not with who is doing it. How wrong is it to beat someone up? Why is it routine when Big Bad Bill does it to nerdy little Morgan, but such an outrageous demand for something to be done when nerdy little Morgan dishes out the same treatment?

Circumstances demanded that I start pondering this question at age ten or twelve. By age twenty-five, I still didn’t give a rip about “conservatives” or “liberals”. At nearly thirty-nine, I’m still a little uncertain as to which side is doing a better job embracing this common-sense principle. Once again, when liberals send an “Atta Boy” my way, they show they can’t quite get the job done without trying to exert some control over the way I see the world. One would think it’s a simple job to say “good for you, for insisting that poor people are punished no more harshly than rich people for committing the same crime” and go on your way. But no, more often than not, they must continue, congratulating me for seeing the light about how little work our rich people do and how much money they steal from poor people.

Excuse me?

I had worked in close proximity with more independently-wealthy people, by the time I was thirty, than most people with my economic background do their entire lives. How many rich people have treated me unfairly? Rich people have taken the initiative to make sure I was treated well. Don’t ask me to come up with an exception to it, because I can’t think of one.

Poor people, on the other hand, have been absolutely devastating. There is something about being poor. People often start to believe in a discrepancy between how much money people have versus how much money they should have. I suppose this is something that is easy to do. And once you do that, of course, since that word “should” is in there you’ve got to do something about it. It’s a funny thing about theft; so many people who engage in it, in their heart of hearts, they don’t think they’re guilty.

And yet the rich people are different. There is always somebody who is richer, and in the world of the rich, when somebody is richer it is by an overwhelming factor. For example, the rich people I knew possessed maybe one ten-thousandth of the net worth of Bill Gates. Were they jealous of Bill Gates? Were they enthusiastic about some scheme to get money away from Bill Gates, into their own purses? Again, I worked closely with these people; if they harbored such passions, you’ll have to take my word for it that I would have known.

How many people did I meet who made something around minimum wage, who wanted to take tax money away from families that made $40,000 or $50,000? They were everywhere. Now that I’m too cynical to socialize with people like that, I still have to contend with them because they vote. They drive most of our political climate. They’re out there.

This all gets in the way when a liberal congratulates me for “seeing” that rich people steal and poor people don’t. I don’t see any such thing. What I see, when I insist that justice should be blind to economic condition, is the American dream. I read what the Founding Fathers wrote, when they were united and also when they argued among themselves. When they squabbled, they accused each other of going BACK to England. What was so bad about England?

It wasn’t the dental care or the sandwiches, nor were they upset about the execution of William Wallace. England, to them, was a place where dynastic heritage determined far too much in life. If the son of a Duke spit on the sidewalk, he was fined six pence, and if the son of an Earl did the same thing he would pay a shilling. And if the son of a pauper did it, he’d go to jail. That is what they wanted to fix. That is the real American Dream.

And now we have these people called “liberals” who want to change this dream, to go back to the days when where you were born, who you were born to, what color your skin is, chooses certain things in your life. What motivates them? Commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter seem to want to sidestep the question, concentrating mostly on how the liberals behave once they have decided to be liberal. But what makes a liberal liberal?

To try to legalize abortion unreservedly, declaring the whole issue moot as to when life begins, doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with trying to ban capital punishment. One position respects life when life is guilty, the other regards life as disposable when it is at its most innocent. Forcing union “workers” to entrust the dubious judgment of union leadership with a portion of their hard-earned paychecks, doesn’t seem philosophically parallel with challenging every little thing President Bush says about Iraq, especially when some of the things the President tells us are already proven beyond doubt. One of those positions places unlimited trust in authority, to a fault, the other position disrespects authority when there is little cause to do so. So in terms of values, what unites these people?

Bernard Goldberg, in Bias, ISBN 0-89526-190-1 has a few interesting theories. He says, essentially, the media ends up being liberal in an effort to be invited to more cocktail parties by other people in the media. Central to his thesis is the problem that even very influential people in the media, do not get out very much. They don’t personally know too many different types or classes of people. They pretty much live, work, eat, sleep and play in Manhattan.

I can buy this, but it doesn’t answer the question of what makes them liberal? If they exist in some closed ecosystem, why don’t they get stagnated into an ideological model of, let’s say, conservatism, or Naziism, or nihilism or objectivism? Why liberal? Goldberg’s book, to the frustration of myself and several others, is silent on this point.

I’m probably far enough into Tom Fenton’s Bad News, ISBN 0-06-079746-0 to comment on how this book answers the question. Fenton, it turns out, is part of the problem and he doesn’t appear to be conscious of it. He is what Goldberg is writing about. He sees the press in America as failing in its vital mission, and on that point I’m going to have to agree. Things get complicated in a hurry, though. The mission of the press, in Fenton’s eyes, bless his soul, is to let us know about what is going on in the nation & the world, especially with regard to subjects that may impact our lives later. According to that, then, the press let us down when the September 11 attacks happened. Bad News is peppered with examples of how our media might have warned us about what was going to happen, and passed up the opportunity.

Here is the problem, then. If it is the media’s job to make sure we know things, and you work in the media, you have only two options: Accept the mandate or reject it. If you accept it, you must meet it, and if you think you are meeting it you have to make sure. This is unavoidable, for it is simply the way the human mind works. For example, teachers are charged with making sure students know things, and instead of simply telling the students things & letting them go home, they administer tests.

So if you accept a mission you have to show diligence in meeting it. You cannot show diligence in meeting it, unless you devise some kind of criteria by which you can determine the goal has been met. Fenton, then, speaks for all flawed journalists on page 85, when he says…

…many thinking Americans don’t understand why we’re not being asked to endure any sacrifices at home, with the economy awash in debt. Regardless of what it thought of John Kerry, though, as of this writing the public still finds President Bush credible as a war leader in the polls. Between September and mid-October 2004, a Rasmussen Report poll found that between 42 and 44 percent of people continued to support his leadership in Iraq. This, in the face of continuous bad news from Iraq and criticism in the press. How is that possible? [emphasis mine]

This is the problem. If it’s your job to inform someone and you take this job seriously, you have to see if they have learned what you have told them. Science defines learning as “a non-instinctive behavioral change.” We support our President’s leadership in Iraq, this shows we haven’t learned something, therefore, our media has failed and it must try harder. The notion that we have absorbed the information given to us, and simply found something else we think weighs more in the decision we have to make, is something that can’t be considered.

So our media is liberal because it doesn’t trust us to make the decisions that belong to us.

Why is the Supreme Court liberal? I’ll get to that another time, this has gotten plenty long enough.

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Wednesday, July 6th, 2005