Time to Abridge Bullshit

The people shall not be deprived of their right to speak, write or publish their sentiments.

— James Madison

Although the Senate rewrote Madison's draft of the First Amendment before its ratification, no one questioned that free speech is a natural right in 1789.

Six decades earlier, a young Philadelphia printer, Ben Franklin, had said as much. "When men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard," he wrote.

Franklin didn't worry that some opinions are wrong, because "when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."

Free speech is a bedrock principle, as American as apple pie. Or is it?

The Founding Fathers never watched reality TV, where falsehoods trump the truth. Had they, the First Amendment might read: 

Congress shall abridge the freedom to bullshit.

I hate to say it, but our reality TV-star president has forced America to abridge bullshit. As we've seen—like raw milk, angel dust, and flammable pajamas—bullshit is bad for you. It ought to be outlawed.

Liberals will flinch at this suggestion, I know; perhaps some conservatives, as well. Tough. We're neck deep in a national emergency, brought on Trump and his despotic stooges and abetted by the traditional and new media's addiction to fair play.

It's time Trump's league of bullshit artists were muzzled.

And not only muzzled. 

It's time—lest we forget—they were tarred for their chronic bullshit.

If they're not branded as liars and propagandists, they'll resort to "communicative silence" (kommunikatives Beschweigen)—the convenient path closet Nazis took after World War II, when these German "patriots" permitted Hitler's narrative to persist, albeit in the shadows.

To Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Navarro, McEnany, Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Graham, McConnell, Jordan, Cruz, Gaetz, Johnson, Hawley and the rest of your ruthless, insurrectionary gang: It's time to shut up, time to fade away. 

Before we're trampled by your herd of incels, we will repress you and tar you, because you pollute public discourse with your unrelenting bullshit.

Lost Lingo

If it works, it's obsolete.

— Marshall McLuhan

Books, newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets were the 18th century's social media platforms; and printers, the century's Zuckerbergs.

To operate a press, printers would first assemble blocks of type inside a wooden frame, known as a coffin. They'd then place the coffin on a stone bed, add a page of paper on top, and crank the lever beside the bed to slide it under the press. Lastly, they'd screw the press down onto the paper, imprinting an image on the page.

When not pressing pages, 18th-century printers set type, the labor-intensive process preparatory to printing. To save some of that labor, they borrowed the Ancient Roman practice of substituting a graphic for the word "and" in written documents. ("And" is the third most common word in the English language.) Printers called their graphic—&—the ampersand, a corruption of "per se and," which was teachers' name for the graphic. (Eighteenth-century teachers insisted students pronounce the one-letter words "a" and "I" as "per se a" and "per se I" and demanded all students pronounce "&" as "per se and." Per se, as it still does, meant "by itself.")

Used type in the 18th century was tossed into a wooden box called a hell, often by an apprentice called a devil. (The printer's art, three centuries earlier, was considered black magic, because the pages were uncannily uniform. Many demonic terms stuck.) 

Type was scarce and expensive at the time, so to return it to service quickly printers would cast metal plates of entire pages. They called the plates stereotypes. French printers, instead of preserving entire pages as plates, cast frequently used phrases. They called these money-saving casts clichés, from clicher, meaning "to click,” the sound the cast phrases made when they were assembled in the coffin.

Such thrift was common among 18th-century printers. So was piracy. The printer of James Granger's Biographical History of England included blank pages throughout, to encourage artists to "extra-illustrate" the 35-volume work. Artists would interleave original drawings and paintings alongside the parts of the text their patrons found intriguing, adding "extra illustrations" to otherwise plain books. Enterprising printers—smelling money to be made—soon began to swipe images from other books and add them to copies of Granger's Biographical History, a practice they named grangerizing.

74 Million Cop Killers

If you were blind, you wouldn't be guilty.

— Jesus Christ

If you're among the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump, you're not blind to what you've done.

You have aided and abetted the murder of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.

You claim you're for law and order, but you're really a bully, a lawbreaker, a cop killer.

You are a fascist.

You say you're a conservative, but you support a radical strongman. 

You're anti-establishment, anti-liberal, anti-socialist, exclusionary, and nationalistic. 

You think you've been victimized and, by dint of genes alone, that you're superior to everyone who's different from you.

You're a fascist.

In the 1940s, people like you threatened Western civilization. My parents and their families fought and suffered, to put an end to that threat.

Now it remains for the democracy-loving portion of my generation, and my children's, to put an end to the threat you represent.

Rest assured, we will.

NOTE: Fascism derives from the Italian fascio, meaning "bundle." In Ancient Rome, the fascio symbolized power. Mussolini borrowed the word to name the "Blackshirts," the militia he founded. The Blackshirts specialized in roaming the streets, beating and murdering political opponents.

Helpless

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed that fascism is the result of bad parenting.

Parental abuse, neglect and repression combine, Reich said, to produce fascists, deeply warped individuals who are "apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, and good and adjusted, in the authoritarian sense." 

Fascists are, in addition, incapable of finding love and sexual satisfaction. Today we call such frustrated people incels.

Donald Trump and his followers are proof of Reich's beliefs.

Sadly, there's little, if anything, we can do to change the minds of Trump's followers. Their parents shaped them years ago to fall into line behind authoritarians. They may deserve pity; but not tolerance. They're helpless, loveless, diabolical, and—for the most part—beyond our reach. Our best course it to cede them that bleak corner of the playground where the civilized rest of us never wish to tread. Alaska comes to mind.

"The more helpless the 'mass-individual' has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the Führer," Reich said. 

"The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the Führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the 'national heritage,' of the 'nation,' which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising 'the masses' and confronting them as an individual.

"The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant Führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance."

God help us, and grant us the serenity to accept what we cannot change.

Leg Up

We live in a world of unused knowledge and skill.

— H. G. Wells

I had surgery a week ago to repair my shattered leg. 

Moments before I was rolled into the operating room, the orthopedist pulled a purple Sharpie from his pocket and scribbled his initials—DMT—on my thigh.

The doctor's simple act gave him a leg up, by driving to zero the chance he'd operate on the wrong limb.

SharpieGate aside, we need more Sharpie-wielders in our lives. 

Simple signoffs like my surgeon's (which he would call a "wrong-site protocol") protect us from human error.

We especially need more Sharpie-wielders in government, where human error now runs rampant.

The past few weeks have proven—as if we needed proof—that conservative-run governments are derelict. A freshly minted example reveals how much so.

Boris Johnson's government this week issued a £2 coin to commemorate H.G. Wells, author of The War the Worlds.

 

Wells fans are in an uproar. 

They're demanding to know how the government could have added a leg to the writer's famous "monstrous tripods," depicted on the coin.

“Can I just note that the big walking machine on the coin has four legs?" one fan said. "Four legs. The man famous for creating the Martian tripod. How many people did this have to go through?”

“It’s nice to see Wells memorialized, but it would have been nicer for them to get things right,” another said. “A tripod with four legs is hard to comprehend."

To date, Johnson's government has failed to explain or apologize for the blunder. 

Clearly, it doesn't have a leg to stand on.