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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.
Liar, liar, house on fire
In its never-ending quest for editorial balance and integrity, the venerable New York Times gave equal time to Israeli and Palestinian news channels in its reporting of the devastating fires sweeping through Israel.
Israeli news expressed the widely-held opinion that arson is behind the unprecedented rash of urban and forest conflagrations, the latest tactic of Palestinian terrorism.
Palestinian news reported that fires in Israel are started primarily by discarded cigarette butts and children playing with matches, with the remainder caused by electrical malfunction.
An Arab spokesman observed that Israel should take measures to ensure that these causes are addressed to prevent future fires. He failed to explain why fires anywhere near this scale have been unknown for the entire 68 year history of the State of Israel.
Thank you once again, New York Times, for honoring your famous motto:
All the news that fits, we print.
When Satan Calls
Few people set out wanting to do evil. So how does evil happen?
Most evil begins with the desire to do good. But when we don’t recognize where good ends and evil begins, then we’re bound to cross the line between them.
Something about a certain road paved with good intentions.
But the most insidious kind of evil is the kind that continues to masquerade as good long after we’ve crossed the line. This is the favorite device of Satan, one that we usually recognize too late, after we have everything we wanted… and we’re stuck with it.
We’ve embraced the information revolution, which has so efficiently opened the floodgates of knowledge that we’re now drowning in a sea of pseudo-facts and misinformation. We’ve embraced the communication revolution, which has so thoroughly created lines of connection that we are more deeply disconnected than ever from one another and from reality.
Now that correspondence is effortless, we often leave emails unopened and, even more often, unanswered. Now that recorded messages are a click away, we’re too distracted to check our voice mail. We think it’s rude to call without texting first, and we consider it rude to end a text with a period.
We click to the next page only halfway through the current page, and we escape exposure to ideas that make us uncomfortable because mysterious algorithms are filtering the information that reaches us. And when unpleasant news does make it through the gauntlet of ideological censorship, we sink into a morass of emotional angst and cry out against a world that defies our comprehension.
Satan is laughing all the way to the motherboard.
But not everyone is deceived. There’s a growing, grassroots movement to observe a technology Sabbath, to unplug in order to turn on and disconnect in order to reconnect. No phones, no computers, no videos, no texting.
Does that sound horrifying? Impossible? Cruel and unusual?
Convince your friends and family to try it. Pull a dusty book of the shelf and remember what it’s like to feel what you’re reading. Go to the park, play softball, plan a progressive meal with friends and neighbors, enjoy a family game night.
Feel the technology toxins flow out of your body. Once the shock wears off, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start it years ago. And when you start the new week, you’ll be more rested, more relaxed, more focused, and the envy of your coworkers.
And then you’ll wonder how you will make it all the way to your next Sabbath.
The Gift of Gratitude
If I were to say, ‘God, why me?’ about the bad things, then I should have said, ‘God, why me?’ about the good things that happened in my life.
— Arthur Ashe
There’s no arguing that tennis legend Arthur Ashe had good reason to complain. His mother died when he was four years old. His brilliant tennis career was cut short at age 36 by a heart attack, followed by two open-heart bypass operations and one brain surgery, only to discover that he had contracted AIDS via blood transfusion. He died at age 49.
It’s extraordinary that a person could suffer so much and not cry out against his fate with anger and bitterness. But the explanation used to be obvious, before it became increasingly rare:
Gratitude.
Donald Trump has finally gone too far
Perhaps we can forgive the president-elect for his crassness, his coarseness, his ultra-nationalist rhetoric, his mockingly superior tone, and for dragging the electoral process deeper into the mud than anytime in the last century.
But now he has officially gone too far.
Donald Trump has committed the unpardonable sin of not telling the press where he went for dinner last Tuesday evening.
By doing so, reports the Washington Post, Mr. Trump has “dispensed with generations-old traditions and formalities,” adopting a “combative approach to press relations” in a way that shows “he clearly doesn’t respect the media.”
Gee, is this the same media that rallied all its collective forces to discredit Donald Trump as a candidate and convince the country that a humiliating electoral defeat to Hillary Clinton awaited him come November 8? Might that have something to do with his perceived lack of respect?
But that’s not even the real issue.
More significant is the sense of entitlement the media feels to invade the private lives of every public figure, and the selective metric they apply when they do so. They grudgingly accord scant airtime and column space to stories that don’t fit their ideological agenda, then cry foul when they’re denied access to the not-yet-president’s family meal and frame the perceived offense as a threat to national security.
If the election results taught us anything, it’s that the media has become so skewed in its reporting that it can’t even trust itself. Maybe if reporters learn that lesson they’ll find themselves more welcome beside the presidential dinner table.
Yonason Goldson 