Screeds
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Brain Spasms Or Pod People?
February 1, 2003
When intelligent people say foolish, counterfactual things, my first reaction is to wonder if I’ve heard them right. When they persist in those things, adding such grace notes as “I’m perfectly serious,” I begin to imagine scenes from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
I’m not talking about opinions, now. When divergence of opinion is made possible by an absence of conclusive evidence, the spectrum it spans can be quite broad. I’m talking about declarations contrary to observable, objective fact.
One such emission is the “tax cuts for the rich” mantra that’s raised by the Democrats every time the Bush Administration proposes a tax rollback—before and after. By the commonly accepted meaning of the words, a “tax cut” will affect only someone who pays taxes. Since 96% of all taxes are paid by the upper 50% of American wage-earners, the tax reduction will have its most direct and immediate effects on that upper 50%—“the rich” to the anti-tax-cut demagogues. To demand that money be sent to the lower 50% instead would not be a “tax cut” but a welfare program.
The numbers are hard, and are easily available. Yet intelligent people continue the “tax cuts for the rich” chant until Satan would bar Hell’s doors against them to preserve his peace and quiet. And your Curmudgeon isn’t quite harsh enough to take them for purely vicious, amoral seekers after political advantage. Not all of them, anyway.
Here’s another for you: the “It’s all about oil” fetish that anti-war groups on the Left have given so much play.
Iraq possesses about 5% of the world’s oil production. Part of the reason Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait in 1990 was its much larger oil industry. So: If the United States government’s policy toward the Iraqi dictator was entirely a camouflage for our desire to seize Iraq’s oil… why didn’t we depose him, take imperial dominion over Iraq, and add Kuwait to our goodie bag on any plausible grounds?
For that matter, if our objective is to acquire oil, why hasn’t America targeted nearer, richer, and more vulnerable oil producers—Mexico and Venezuela? Why do we have to reach halfway around the globe, heavily straining our military and its logistics, to stick our fingers into a nest of vipers in quest of a lesser prize?
The silence is deafening. Apparently the logical disconnect paralyzes the thought processes of the “It’s all about oil” crowd. They need time to forget they were asked the question.
Yet there are persons in that movement who are quite intelligent—about other things, mostly non-political things. Clearly, they withhold the exercise of their intellects from certain topics, whether by a failure to extend it or an act of willful self-restraint.
Here’s a third: the notion that “Islam is a religion of peace.”
There’s some excuse for passively accepting this, among persons who’ve never been exposed to Islam’s actual tenets, or its history in action. The concatenation of “Islam—religion—monotheism—old—lots of believers—know there are a few here in the States” is enough to numb the typical American mind to the details of Islamic beliefs and practices. It doesn’t help the cause of clarity that President Bush, for public relations and diplomatic reasons, keeps repeating the canard from a lectern embossed with the presidential seal.
But what of the intelligent, the well-informed, the historically aware? What’s their excuse? How can they assert, in private among other Americans, that Islam is a religion entitled to equal stature with Judaism and Christianity? How do they brush aside Islam’s racism, its totalitarianism, its subjugation and brutalization of women, its barbaric code of “justice,” its condonement of the practice of slavery, and its exhortations to make war upon “the infidel,” that he be forcibly converted or killed?
Some offer a feeble “equivalence” defense: that both Judaism and Christianity have blots on their records as well. This completely overlooks an essential distinction. Doctrinally, both Judaism and Christianity abjure those who have committed violence against others in the name of God. Islam’s savageries are integral to its theology, which is decreed to be the literal word of Allah, absolute and unchangeable. Moreover, no Jew or Christian in today’s world goes out killing for Moses or Christ, or teaching that it would be right and proper to do so. Muslims do both these things each and every day, with the support of an appreciable fraction of their fellows. Ask the million-plus Sudanese Christians they’ve slaughtered and enslaved.
The facts are not obscure, should one wish to acquire them. If Islam’s dogmas and commands to its followers were labeled anything other than “religion,” it would be condemned by every decent person on Earth. It would get no more respect than Mein Kampf. Alternately, imagine Hitler re-labeling Mein Kampf “as dictated directly to the author by God,” and ask yourself how much more respect it would deserve.
So what are we to make of the intelligent man, well-accomplished in some non-trivial field, who defends an indefensible counterfactual?
Some are willing to concede the limits of their knowledge, and will accept pointers to sources of information that contradict their suppositions. Others are simply closed to the possibility that so “inappropriate,” “incorrect,” or “intolerant” a position might be factually accurate. These latter ones call into question their willingness to confront unpleasant truths—and thus the net value of their intellectual gifts, however large.
Intelligence is not a goal but a tool. There is no value in a tool that’s left in the box unused. It must be brought forth and wielded upon its proper subjects: facts. Even pod people should know that.
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