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It’s about time
Are you feeling more rested this week? Do you notice your watch running a smidgen fast? Maybe it’s because of the leap-second added by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on New Year’s Eve.
A few of us may take comfort knowing that our clocks are back in sync with the earth’s relative positive to the sun, and find it reassuring that all the cosmic gears and cogs are once again in perfect alignment. The rest of us couldn’t care less.
Does it really matter?
Well, yes; it just might.
There are two ways to look at time. First, as a convenient touchstone for organizing our lives. Without some universal standard for tracking our days and our hours, imagine the trouble we would have arranging our affairs and interactions.
But you can also make the case that time really does mean something.
All the things that might have been
What happens to the road not taken? Does it wait for us to return, or does it blink out of existence? And if we do return, is it truly the same road, since we ourselves have changed?
What about us: do we divide into two at every fork, with one alternate version of ourselves taking one way and another the other? And if that is so, might we reconnect further down the path of life, or crisscross, or switch back onto the road we left untraveled?
What of the people we meet along the way? Are we destined to meet them no matter which road we follow, or do future friends and cohorts come into existence and disappear with every choice we make? Will we find our soul mates whichever path we choose, or do different choices make us different people with different souls and different soul mates?
If you’re expecting me to answer these questions, you might as well stop reading here. I have no more idea than you do, and maybe less. But I do have a story about crossing paths and hidden possibilities.
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.
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.
Open Season on Everyone
Let me be clear. I am no fan of Ann Coulter.
The right-wing firebrand disdains all forms of moderation in both tone and worldview, whether she is tweeting expletives about Jews or hailing Donald Trump’s immigration plan as a new Magna Carta. When it comes to discrediting the intellectual and moral integrity of conservatism, nobody does it better.
Even Ms. Coulter’s political mentor, arch-conservative David Horowitz, disavowed her for attempting to resurrect as a martyred crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose self-serving campaign against communists real and imagined represents one of American history’s ugliest eras.
For my part, I’ve never gotten out of my head Ms. Coulter’s inexcusably cruel and utterly gratuitous swipe at Margot Kidder in a 2004 column about the controversy that eventually ended the career of CBS anchor Dan Rather. With neither context nor pretext, Ms. Coulter’s savaging of an admired actress struggling with bipolar disorder was even more contemptible that Donald Trump’s mocking of disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski.
So it may be simple karma that Ms. Coulter received as good as she dishes out at last weekend’s Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe. Her mere presence on the dais apparently marked her as fair game, making her the target of more vicious barbs than the man-of-honor himself.
But karma does not excuse the cast of notables who turned what should have been good-natured (if adolescent) banter into a lynching party.
Yonason Goldson 