Blog: The Ethical Echo Chamber
Beyond the Stars — A tribute to John Glenn
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
~Sir Isaac Newton
There are two kinds of visionaries.
The first type sees farther, like Sir Isaac Newton. They possess a special gift of brilliance, genius, or perception. They see what others cannot, recognize mysteries that hide in plain sight, uncover beauty and order where the rest of us see only chaos. For the most part, they are born, not made.
Then there are those who are blessed not so much with the ability to see, but with the ability to bestow vision, to illuminate the world not with new insights but by giving the gift of insight to others. It is not their acumen, but rather their irrepressible pursuit of transcendence that inspires us to do as much with our lives as they have done with theirs.
Thirty-six years after becoming the first man in orbit, John Glenn became the oldest man in space, not as an ego trip or publicity stunt but to observe the effects of weightlessness on his 77-year-old body. As with his first trip, he showed that the limits upon human beings are mostly self-imposed.
Most of all, he showed us not only what a person can do, but what a person should be.
President Evil
On 10 December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial suggesting that Donald Trump was largely responsible for the gunman who attacked a Washington pizza parlor and the deranged woman who made death threats against the mother of a Sandy Hook massacre victim.
I submitted the following letter to the editor in response. Inexplicably, the paper chose not to print it.
Dear Editor,
Your editorial was absolutely correct. Donald Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric definitely has contributed to the corrosion of our culture and our safety. But please explain why you limit your indictment to Mr. Trump alone.
Why don’t you lay equal blame in the lap of Hillary Clinton for her amoral campaign of distortion, deception, and corruption? The former next-president-of-the-United-States racked up 24 pinocchios last year from the Washington Post, and has lied about everything from her emails to her foundation, from her fictitious ducking under Bosnian sniper fire to the origins of her own name.
Why don’t you assign equal guilt to Barack Obama, who denied calling ISIS “the JV team,” who misrepresented Republican filibustering by a factor of ten, and whose misinformation about Obamacare could fill a government website?
And why don’t you admit your own complicity as part of the injudicious media that perpetuated the big lie of “Hands up, don’t shoot,” continues to indulge the wicked moral equivalence that excuses and enables radical terrorism, and — oh, the irony — provided Donald Trump with millions of dollars in free column space and air time, helping catapult him to primary and ultimately national election victory.
By all means, blame Donald Trump for all of society’s ills. But first show the moral fortitude of placing the blame everywhere it belongs, including on your own shoulders.
The real story about fake news
Responding to headlines about “fake news,” silver-screen icon Denzel Washington offered up this classic quote from Mark Twain:
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed, if you do read it, you’re misinformed.
He’s right, of course. The irony is that Mark Twain probably didn’t say it.
Which doesn’t make it fake news. To be fair, Mr. Washington himself didn’t cite Twain as author of the quote, which seems to derive from similar remarks by Thomas Fuller and Thomas Jefferson.
When I first saw the Fake News stories populating my newsfeed, I thought they must be referring to those absurd and provocative headlines that infest so many internet news pages. It seemed sad but not surprising that people give credence to this kind of salacious click-bait, but hardly worthy of national discussion.
I soon realized that the subject was more serious and, indeed, more substantive. Nevertheless, there may be a closer connection between the fraudulent and the whimsical than one might imagine.
Let’s start with the serious.
First of all, it’s not news that there is fake news or how harmful it can be.
Scorched-earth redux
If you’ve never heard of the Daily Banter, good for you. Here’s one of its latest headlines:
Trump Is Officially An Illegitimate President-Elect And The Democrats Have To Destroy Him
In a nutshell — or a nutcase — the hyper-hormonal screed asserts that Democrats need to take Republican scorched-earth policies to the next level to save our democratic republic.
Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, the manner of his election, or his adolescent tweeting, he has blunted the onslaught from many of his critics with the measured judgment of his cabinet picks and administrative appointments.
Aside from that, after eight years of partisan sniping, bullying, and obstructionism — from both sides of the aisle — what the country needs and wants is a spirit of cooperation from its lawmakers, not more posturing, bickering, and gridlock.
But here’s the question that really needs answering:
Why is a scandal sheet like the Daily Banter showing up at the top of my Google News feed?
Swearing makes you smarter. REALLY?
Experts have revealed [that] the use of profanity can in fact be a sign of a smart person.
This provocative assertion opened a recent article in the Daily Mail. The problem is, it’s not true.
Of course, that’s not the only problem. There’s also the problem of sloppy reporting, which comes from sloppy thinking, which comes from sloppy language. Which is what this story is really all about.
The alleged correlation between profanity and intelligence was inferred from a study concluding that people who know more curse words also know more words in general. Ipso facto, people who curse are smarter than people who don’t.
How much swearing do you suppose goes on at the Daily Mail?
Or you could ask a different question: Why should anyone take the Daily Mail seriously?
That’s a fair point. But the story also appeared in the Washington Post which, although avoiding the spurious equation between foul mouths and intelligence, still could not resist the lure of this equally misleading headline:
Why it’s a good sign if you curse. It isn’t. Which is clear from the Post article itself.
Of Doors and Windows
When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.
No, I didn’t make that up. Julie Andrews says it in The Sound of Music. Half a century later, it may sound trite, but with the drama and trauma of this American election cycle finally behind us, it sure feels appropriate.
With uncharacteristic unity, liberals and conservatives alike long ago attained consensus that the ideological pendulum was never going to swing back again. The polling data had us all convinced that Hillary Clinton would continue the policies of our Visionary-In-Chief, opening up America’s borders, tearing down real and figurative walls, and redistributing wealth while running up debt toward the 15-figure mark.
Some welcomed this as advancement down the highway to Utopia. Some lamented it as racing headlong toward the abyss. But all that’s behind us now. The door to the past is closed. Where the window to the future will lead, only time will tell.
Be that as it may, a few thousand years before Julie Andrews, King Solomon offered his own observations about open doors. With respect to wisdom, he said:
Fortunate is the one who listens for me, attentively waiting by my doors day by day, keeping watch by my doorposts and entryways. For whoever finds me finds life…
From Solomon’s perspective, when a door closes, it likely means we have to work harder to find a way in.
After all, what is a door?
Click here to read the whole essay, from this month’s issue of The Wagon Magazine.
Peace in our Mind
Two decades ago, Thomas Friedman suggested that someone should write a book called The Dictator Diet. Surely there must be some secret to the longevity of strongmen like Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro. Like horror-movie mutations of the Eveready bunny, they just kept going and going and going.
Well, the last of them is gone at last. Adios, Mr. Castro. We wish we never knew ye.
But imagine if it had been different. What if Fidel had been a friend instead of a nuisance, if Cuba had been an ally instead of a thorn in America’s side?
It’s not such a wild notion.
Yonason Goldson 