Some bad advice for achieving Peace In Our Time
A while back I was reading a column in the Kansas City Star and the lady who wrote it suggested we stop insulting each other and listen to reason and then once we do that we’ll all sit around a campfire, toast marshmallows, sing Kumbaya or If I Had a Hammer or Michael Row the Boat Ashore and get along just fine.
But to reach that state of collective bliss we’d all have to accept some objective facts and here those facts are:
Trump lost fair and square.
There was no wide-spread election fraud.
No reporter would ignore a genuine fraud story.
Well…good luck selling that.
Telling unreasonable people that the first step in getting along is for them to stop being unreasonable is like that old Steve Martin bit about how you can be a millionaire and never pay taxes and the first step is: “Get a million dollars.”
If you’re telling people who believe there are Jewish space lasers starting California wildfires and Donald Trump was sending them secret messages by wearing a pink tie and planes didn’t actually hit the Twin Towers that it’s time for them to start being reasonable and accept facts, you just might need a Plan B.
Having tried it and failed on numerous occasions, I can tell you with some authority you can’t reason with unreasonable people.
If someone decides they want to believe that cannibalistic pedophiles are keeping children in cages in the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn’t actually have a basement, you can’t stop them.
If someone decides they want to believe that Antifa was actually behind the Capitol riots that seemed to have a shortage of Black faces and an oversupply of White dudes carrying Confederate flags (and just one of those qualifies as an “oversupply”) once again, you can’t stop them.
If someone decides they want to believe the Earth is flat, a photo from the space station showing a decidedly round planet will not persuade them because if they really, really, really want to believe you can fall the edge of our planet—which nobody in history has ever done – you can’t stop them.
You might want to write this down:
Reasonable people look at the evidence and reach conclusions; unreasonable people reach a conclusion and then look for the evidence.
They’ll ignore any evidence that doesn’t support the conclusion they’ve already reached and grab on to any evidence that does, even if the “evidence” is an unsubstantiated rumor spread by someone on Facebook who’s posted photos revealing she lives with 142 cats, weighs 400 pounds and hasn’t been outside her house since the Carter Administration.
People believe what they want to believe and if the first two steps in your three-step plan for Peace In Our Time starts with people being reasonable, you’re off to a bad start.
Ignoring scandals
And allow me to play devil’s advocate and differ with the position that no reporter would ignore a genuine fraud story.
After WW2 thousands of Nazis – some of them war criminals – were welcomed into the U.S. because American intelligence officials thought they would make good spies and informants against our new enemy, the Soviet Union. (Look up “Operation Paperclip.”)
Wernher von Braun helped develop the V-2 rocket that killed people in Britain and elsewhere and when we needed a real smart guy to help us get to the moon, Mr. Nazi-Rockets was welcomed here and featured on a Disney TV special without too many questions being asked.
In 1976 the United States House of Representative Select Committee on Assassinations was established and concluded that John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were probably assassinated as a result of conspiracies and previous investigations had done a crappy job and that conclusion was treated like someone passed gas in an elevator; let’s just pretend it didn’t happen and get off at the next available floor.
More recently…
In 2008 Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution, served almost 13 months and after he got out, hung around with the rich and famous including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, flew around in a jet nicknamed the “Lolita Express” and by and large the press didn’t show much interest.
And despite promises to get to the bottom of things, how much investigative reporting have you read about Jeffrey Epstein’s highly-convenient suicide?
Off the top of my head I’d say there are thousands and thousands of scandals we’ve ignored or downplayed because of who was involved and what publisher they played golf with or it was just too difficult to challenge the official version of things.
If you’re saying: “But some of those stories eventually got out” you’re right and I have two comments to make:
A. Quit interrupting with your reasonable remarks, and…
B. The journalists who broke those stories had to swim upstream and challenge the status quo to do it and it sometimes took years or decades to get to the truth.
The idea that we don’t occasionally ignore scandals is bullshit and if we were lied to about how many people were dying in Vietnam or Weapons of Mass Destruction, what else has the establishment been willing to lie about? And once you start down that rabbit-hole, get ready to meet the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen and Grace Slick singing White Rabbit.
Once you know the government doesn’t mind lying its ass off and way too often the media is willing to go along and we now have social media so anybody a few lights short of a Christmas tree can throw out alternative theories to explain viruses and wildfires, you get into some very weird territory, generously populated by lunatics and right now the Republican party is willing to get into bed with some of those lunatics or at the very least doesn’t want to kick them out of bed for being crackers.
(I’ll wait while you figure that joke out, but I won’t wait too long because it’s really not that good a joke.)
All of which led to the “Big Tent” party cartoon idea because a big tent party is supposed to be one that allows a lot of different views among its members and you gotta give the Republicans credit: right now their tent’s so damn big it could hold a 3-ring circus.
Bottom line:
If the formula for getting along is for everyone to start being reasonable I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but in the meantime, enjoy the clowns.