Franklin's Laser

There is no blog today, and I’ll tell you why: the notion of making any sense to the sensible is ludicrous in this zeitgeist, and the wisdom of rousing the insensible from their blood-feast is questionable.

With the exception of the “NRA Approved”
all of this is from actual children’s cereal boxes.

But I do want to note a funny thing I read in the internets today:

Joe Gandelman / The Moderate Voice:
Quote of the Day: Mitt Romney Told Olympians They Didn’t Get There Alone

Our political Quote of the Day gives us one more strand in the heaping-plate-of-spaghetti-of-hyocrisy called American partisan politics, where the accuracy of an assertion is not what matters. What matters is that you pick up something that can be repeated, and exaggerated and cherry picked but try to forget or deny or not mention what you yourself said. Via First Read, here’s presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney talking to Olympians in 2002. Keep in mind that Romney has seized on an out-of-context part of one of President Barack Obama’s speeches to say Obama believes no businessmen got where they are soley on their own efforts.

“You Olympians, however, know you didn’t get here solely on your own power,” said Romney, who on Friday will attend the Opening Ceremonies of this year’s Summer Olympics. “For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions. All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them. We’ve already cheered the Olympians, let’s also cheer the parents, coaches, and communities. All right! [pumps fist].”

In full context, Romney, of course, also praised the Olympians’ efforts – right before he made his “you didn’t get here solely on your own” remark.

“Tonight we cheer the Olympians, who only yesterday were children themselves,” Romney said. “As we watch them over the next 16 days, we affirm that our aspirations, and those of our children and grandchildren, can become reality. We salute you Olympians – both because you dreamed and because you paid the price to make your dreams real. You guys pushed yourself, drove yourself, sacrificed, trained and competed time and again at winning and losing.” [...]

This relates to the Guns story and the Penn State punishment and contrition as well, and even a story in the Wall Street Urinal claiming that “the government” didn’t built the internets! Noes!!! Care to guess WHO then did? (Why t’was Amurric’n Free Interprize what done did! Surprise, right?)

There is a reason that Benjamin Franklin and George Washington did not defeat Admiral Howe in New York harbor with their flintlock-mounted laser cannons.

Go my death robot! Defeat Lord Cornwallis!

I’ll tell you what that reason is in a minute, but first, a short interlude from our sponsor, rational thought.

We do not adjudge events from the point of view of the participants, but, rather from our own, Olympian view, aided by knowledge and “analysis” not available to the objects of our scorn.

The reason is the same reason that citing “the Founders” in a constant drumbeat since Friday morning — literally available to me on any local rightie station carrying syndicated content from The Hate Jockeys of Hate Radio at any hour, as random checking proved to my satisfaction —  that citing “the Founders” and “Second Amendment Rights” is as absurd as criticizing Franklin and Washington for not driving off the Redcoats with their lasers.

After all, Franklin’s pioneering work in electricity is a factor in the development of the laser, just as private enterprise would OF COURSE be a factor in the creation of the internets, and both Mitt Romney and the Wall Street Urinal guest slimer argue against the notion of collective effort — e.g. “civilization — in favor of the Daniel Boone model of the lone individual standing and creating the incredible civilization that we all benefit from by arguing the collective thought OF that civilization, using the collective effort OF that effort to decry “collectivism.”

I’m not blogging today because who can stand against that kind of institutional (and institutionalizable) madness?

You see, we forget that there was ever a time when we couldn’t read. The new knowledge has overlain our old ignorance to full negation. Where there was  void, and the world was filled with mysterious runes that we fervently believed would unlock the mysteries of Earth and Life and what Mommy was doing when she read those REALLY GREAT stories to you —  the ones with all the cool pictures?

But we Judge Jefferson by contemporary standards. We judge that Lincoln “didn’t really free the slaves” and “didn’t really like black people,” that Grant was a “bungler” surrounded by crooks, that Harry S. Truman should have dropped the A-bomb on an uninhabited island to show the Japanese how mega-powerful and awesome we were, and they’d have rationally decided to surrender.

They used Shirley Temple to sell cereal, Ronald Reagan was
once a “free button”  in specially marked boxes, Babe Ruth
hawked cereal, and here’s Alan Ladd,  starring in
“The Blue Dahlia.” Really? The Black Dahlia? For breakfast? 

Hindsight is not merely 20/20, but comes equipped with tunnel vision.

The reality of the people in 1789 was a reality relating to a significantly different place (a place with huge herds of buffalo, and passenger pigeons, for instance) with flintlocks (as opposed to AR-15 assault rifles) and, probably, the reason that Franklin and Washington couldn’t get those laser cannons to work.

No one thinks of chiding them for NOT having laser cannons, but we think not a thing about peeping with DNA and then loudly snickering and sneering at Thomas Jefferson for not living up to our 21st century notions of “morality.”

Gee. In Robert E. Lee’s time, very few Southerners actually thought Blacks were human beings, at all, but, rather, a hairless and much cleverer version of an African ape. That was their “reality,” just a denialists are certain that it is sheer arrogance for wee, puny Mankind to believe that it could increase global warming, and regularly sneer, with all the gusto of a Southern White of the Civil War, and moralists rampage through Happy Valley looking for people to punish and institutional penalties for Penn State. Because, of course, everyone “knows” that they must have had OUR omniscience, and Sandusky couldn’t have done it alone.

So I’m not blogging about that, because I know what happens when mobs roam the institutional corridors, because I watched too many Frankenstein movies.

Franklin and Washington  did not have the opportunity to avail themselves of this timeless wisdom, I realize, but I blame them anyway.

The collective morality of our civilization and society can’t be talked about, either, because each and every one of us, in the WSJ/Mitt Romney formulation, arrived at our ethical, social and moral framework all by ourselves, which is why we’re all “Ethics Creators” and should get a retroactive tax cut from God. He could, say, lower the suggested tithing rate from 10% to 7.5% and that ought to be a great karmic rebate to the virtuous.

A long time ago, I told you the story of how I was stalked, at 16, by a sexual predator.

And I told you what I  decided to do — not knowing until that moment that men even HAD sex together, and knowing nothing about sexual molesters (as, alas, too many of my generational sisters found out all too much about) — after the “family friend” tried to trap me in his study.

I looked at all the destruction that would be caused, and the realization that I might not be believed, and  I decided to say nothing to anyone, ever. UNTIL that column.

All I know now is that, if I knew then what I know now, I would make EXACTLY the same decision.

We all created the internet; we were all created by our society, our parents, our schools, our roads; the founding fathers, confronted with our MODERN problems would undoubtedly look at the Second Amendment differently, and we know that their decision would be different than ours has been.

Because the Founding Fathers were smart and they were wise.

And that’s why I’m not blogging today.

But, Requiescat in Pace, Sally Ride.

Courage.

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