A brief personal note before
we get started: when I was seven or a little older, I first read Norton Juster’s
extraordinary children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth. I will eventually write a longer and more detailed article on why so
many fans consider it one of the great works of literature but in case you haven’t
heard or read it, track it down immediately on Amazon, even if you’re not a
parent.
The Phantom Tollbooth may
not be as well regarded as the works of Lewis Carroll or C.S. Lewis but it is
just as remarkable at creating a fictional world with iconic images and incredible
wordplay. Indeed, it is as close to the American version of Alice in
Wonderland as we are likely to get and that goes equally to the
illustrations which were done by the master cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer. (Pfeiffer
is slightly more famous than Juster as he wrote dozens of comic strips and cartoons
in his long career, including for The New Yorker.) Briefly the book involves the adventures of a
bored grade school student named Milo who ends up receiving in the mail a mysterious
package that helps him assemble the title object. Driving through he enters a
land as remarkable as Wonderland or Narnia but with a distinctly American
twist. The names of the characters have
the kind of remarkable wordplay that Carroll would tip his hat too: the first
character Milo meets is The Whether Man, he gets stuck in a section of the world
known as the Doldrums inhabited by the Lethargians, his major companions are a
watchdog named Tock (who goes tick) and a Humbug and the word play is clever
throughout the book. In trouble with the law, he runs into Officer Short Shrift, there is a character named Discord who sells
noise (his sidekick is the Awful Dynne), the car once gets lost in Conclusions
(they all jump there) and they encounter characters as diverse as the Spelling
Bee, the Dodecahedron and the Senses Taker.
I had reason to recall this
book when I thought of the central struggle that is covering this land: there
is chaos and unease ever since Princess Rhyme and Reason were exiled to the Castle
in the Air. You see long ago the two most powerful men in this land had an
argument. King Azaz, the ruler of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician the ruler
of Digitopolis began a bitter conflict over whether words or numbers were more
important. Finally they asked Rhyme and Reason to settle the dispute and they
told them that words and numbers were of equal value. Neither one wanted to
hear that, so they banished the two Princesses to the Castle in The Air. Both rulers
have since regretted their decision but neither wants to relent.
Milo and his companions
spend much of their journey on a mission to rescue them, and here is the key
point that inspired this article. One of the major conflicts between Azaz and
the Mathemagician that Milo has to resolve is to get them to both agree to let
the Princesses go. This seems impossible because they have made it very clear
that whatever one agrees with, the other will never do the same.
When Milo confronts the
Mathemagician on this, he makes the following argument:
“Whatever (Azaz) agrees
with, you disagree with.” Milo says.
“Correct.”
“And whatever he disagrees
with, you agree with?”
“Also correct.”
“Then each of you has agreed
to disagree with the other and if you’re always disagreeing with each other,
then aren’t you really in agreement?”
“I’VE BEEN TRICKED!” the
Mathemagician shouted, for no matter how hard he turned it around in his head,
it always came out that way.
I don’t think I’m stretching
a point (by the way that’s a line from another brilliant Juster work) to say
this is one of the fundamental paradoxes of our political system. The loudest
voices on the right and left agree at their core to disagree on everything.
Indeed in this form of
logic, they are in agreement on many points: they each fundamentally believe that the other side is
un-American and violating the rules of government, they believe the only belief
system that works is anyone one that they alone control, they will contort
logic in order to make it fit their narrative and they will do anything in
their power to shout down any voices of dissent. You don’t need Rhyme or Reason to tell you
that they actually agree on more than they want to admit.
Including, it’s worth noting,
another critical point. Each side thinks that the other is completely worthless
and that America would be better off if the other was gone. I’ve written
similar articles about this in this series before, but a recent one drove this
point home in a very cruel but not surprising way.
Perhaps I should have known
better than to check progressive emails by now but one article struck my
attention ‘Red state conservatives are dying for the people they vote for.” I think you can see both the
self-righteousness and the fallacy of this article in the headline alone, but I’ll
go into detail.
In an article for the Washington
Post, a writer compared Ashtabula County in Ohio with Erie County in
Pennsylvania and Chautauqua in New York. Over the last several decades, all three
counties experienced economic woes as industrial jobs disappeared and wages
fell. However, Ashtabula residents are far more likely to die young, especially
from smoking diabetes-related complications or motor vehicle accidents, than
people in (the other two counties) states that have adopted more stringent public
health measures. The Post sites a study from
a Harvard School of Public Health in which she looked at geographic disparities
in premature mortality over recent decades” due to long run changes in state
policies or health investments.”
Now neither the study nor
the Post directly say that this is because this is part of the red state-blue state
war. This blog is more willing to say that explicitly. When it argues about
those changes, it takes special pleasure in comparing that California and Ohio
had comparable health rates thirty years ago and now California has the nation’s
second-lowest mortality rate and Ohio is 41st. The difference, they
all but say out loud, is that one state has been almost exclusively run by
Democrats, the other by Republicans.
The blog also writes that
there are disparities between the states in the South and Midwest and the
Northeast and West. The Post just states this as fact. The progressive site
that quote it predicts that in several years those disparities will increase
with how states deal with Covid, states that ‘criminalize’ reproductive health
care’ and of course, gun safety legislation.
Now there is room for a
debate on the subject but as always the left doesn’t want to have it. The attitude
here is not that of gloom as a certain residents of the country they live are
living in increasingly shorter lives, but more or less that of ‘Nah-Nah-Nah-Nah!
In your face, red staters!”
The title of the article
gives it away right there as well as the hypocrisy of it. The left has no
problem scorching the idea of far right talking points of ‘self-help’ or ‘rugged
individualism’. They will say they are the party that is willing to help the
less fortunate. But articles like this give lie to it. It is just as divisive as anything you see on
right-wing media and just as intolerant.
The message could not be
clearer. These people have it coming. They
were stupid enough to get caught up in the culture war, to listen to Fox News, basically
to vote Republican, or maybe just live in that state to begin with. And now as a result of this party’s policies,
they’re dying younger and faster and it will likely keep happening. We tried to
help them, but they don’t want it. Let them rot.
Think I’m being too harsh? I
hear comments like this all the time in so many blogs from leftists as well as
columnists who should know better. Their tolerance for everybody apparently
stops when it comes to those who live in red states or vote Republican. They salivate at the idea of the ‘brain-drain’
when educators and major industry leaves red states and go to blue states. One site loved posted social media posts of
people who were denying Covid and who eventually died. For all the right’s raging about a ‘national
divorce’, the left’s attitude is no less intolerant. It’s bad enough when they
barely consider the Republicans anything other than a party they can defeat,
but when you’ve apparently decided that the people who vote for them are simply
reaping what they have sown…well, I hate to tell you this, but there’s a part
of humanity missing and I don’t know if you’ll ever get it back.
Last I checked, all of these
are not entirely made up of Republicans. There are, last I checked,
African-Americans, women, LatinX, LGBTQ+, children and even Democrats in these
states. Some of them to be clear are
suffering from the same circumstances as the people who voted for Republicans and
brought this down upon them. Many of them may not have the option of moving to
a nice safe blue state. Does that mean they have no choice but to suffer the
consequences?
And just for the record when
you argue that blue states have stricter gun safety laws than red states – what
exactly are you implying? That people who die in a mass shooting in Pennsylvania
or Rhode Island are somehow more deserving of sympathy than ones who do
in Utah or Idaho? If there’s a school shooting in Omaha, are the victim’s
parents less deserving of sympathy because they spent their lives voting
for Congressman who got A ratings from the NRA? I didn’t think I’d ever have to
ask such a ridiculous question – but an article that makes that point practically
begs it.
Statistics might paint the
picture this blogs want to make, but they’re just numbers. The left loves to
use statistics to make their argument because that gives them both the air of detachment
and superiority. “See?” they claim. “The numbers are on side.” And then they choose to ignore the numbers
that they don’t want to deal with, like the fact that there are millions of Americans
who do not think the way they do and that no matter how much they try to shift
them, they won’t disappear.
The left likes the ideas of
Rhyme and Reason. Here’s some of that. If you people that all people are equal,
regardless of race, gender or sexual preference, then you must by necessity
extend it to those who live in different states, don’t vote the way you do and
don’t think the way you do. We can
disagree on many things but we must fundamentally agree on that. If you’ve
decided at the end of the day that those same people, just based on any of
those things are unworthy of basic decency, then you have jumped to a
conclusion and the only way to leave is like you do in The Phantom Tollbooth.
You have to jump back.
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