Palin isn't thinking
Blaming America's media and high taxes is ignorant when compared against what it's like in the rest of the world
Whenever anyone runs down the United States -- as younger, liberal sorts will do, from time to time, alas, usually pointing with outrage at some historical tragedy and using it as the basis for a blanket denunciation of the nation as a whole -- I immediately ask them, if this nation is so awful, then which country is better, which has a more humane history or a better present, with more freedom and an improved chance for happiness?
This invariably draws a blank look because they are not comparing America to actual countries in real world, but to some Wonderland of their own imagining. They are sincere, but haven't traveled anywhere, don't know anything, and are under the false impression that waving around one dismal fact wins an argument. It doesn't.
Similarly, when the right wing --such as its current pinup girl, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- takes a pickax to the pillars of our democracy, as she does when she attacks the media or denounces taxes, we need to pause and ask sensible questions.
Where on Earth is the media better? In Britain, with its loutish, cheesecake tabloids and state-run TV? China? What's she thinking of when she tells Americans that their media is skewed and mendacious? When she tells us to ignore the free press that we have been sending soldiers to fight and die to protect for the last 200 years?
Some ideal media in her head? A media consisting only of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal? What?
My guess is she hasn't thought it through.
Ditto for taxes. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes. Nobody wants to pay taxes at all. But which nation is she thinking of when she decries how it's done here? Individual taxes top out at 35 percent in this country. In Great Britain it's 40 percent. In Germany, it's 45 percent. In Sweden, 56 percent.
Telling people not to pay attention to the media and to resent the taxes that run our government is both anti-American and ignorant. But angry ignorance -- posing as patriotism, naturally -- is all the rage in certain quarters and perhaps is even in the majority. We'll find out next month.
"Is Google making us stupid?" Nicholas Carr asked in the Atlantic Magazine over the summer. And while he made a persuasive case that surfing the Net is creating a generation of distracted info nibblers unable to concentrate for minutes at a time, the benefits to the online world of information literally at our fingertips are so many that we have not yet, I believe, appreciated them fully.
For instance: Google has rescued mankind from one of its lesser yet still vexing mental agonies -- groping for a bit of information that will not come.
You remember -- don't you? -- the frustration of some name or word dancing just out of reach. At the tip of your tongue? When was the last time it happened? That ordeal had almost completely vanished from modern life, so much that I didn't realize it until one recent exhausting Saturday afternoon. I was sprawled in repose when my son tossed off one of his typical from-the-blue questions: What's the name of the Jack Nicholson character in the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?
I know that -- or I knew that. It had been a while since I've seen the film. The thing to do was to spring up and Google the picture, but I was beat, and so just lay there, pondering, trying to extract the name from my sagging brain. Nurse Ratched came easily enough. "Nurse Ratched, give me my cigarettes!"
But Jack Nicholson? He was so good in that part, too.
Don't you remember, pre-Google, how you'd grope and strain and struggle to retrieve some meaningless bit of data dancing just outside of the reach of your straining brain? James Thurber captured the unpleasantness perfectly in his classic memoir My Life and Hard Times:
"I had been trying all afternoon, in vain, to think of the name Perth Amboy. It seems now like a very simple name to recall, and yet on the day in question I thought of every other town in the country, as well as words and names and phrases as terra cotta, Walla-Walla, bill of lading, vice versa, hoity-toity, Pall Mall, Bodley Head, Schumann-Heink, etc., without even coming close to Perth Amboy."
Thurber turns in, but the subject still haunts him. "Long after I had gone to bed, I was struggling with the problem. I began to indulge in the wildest fancies as I lay there in the dark, such as that there was no such town, and even that there was no such state as New Jersey. I fell to repeating the word 'Jersey' over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless."
In despair, he bursts into his father's bedroom and wakes him with, "Name some towns in New Jersey quick!" and the episode ends in chaos, as it often did in Thurber's life.
Of course, when I thought to write this, I pulled down The Thurber Carnival, which contains My Life and Hard Times and was about to begin methodically searching for the particular passage I had in mind when it occurred to me, "Oh yeah, it's now the 21st century." I plugged "Thurber" and "towns in New Jersey" into Google Book. It told me to look on Page 204, and there it was.
Oh yeah: Nicholson played "McMurphy." I wasn't going to leave you hanging, but wanted to give you a reason to stick with this to the end.
This isn't the funniest joke I've ever printed, but I was searching for a good line about the economy, and noticed this, from lower-case poet e.e. cummings, of all people, and felt obligated to pass it along:
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.