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Cleaning out the notebook again…

Cable news can rot your brain and make you crazy. A place where I’ve been going a lot recently almost always has a TV on cable news. After being subjected to this garbage for awhile, I sort of understand why so many people favor going to war — or at least “intervening” — in countries with oppressive dictators. The simplistic, emotional and context-free reports from television leave the impression that the obvious right thing to do is to intervene.

It seems that most people have seen so many simplistic television shows and movies — and TV news mirrors that simplicity — that they believe fixing complex problems is simple and easy. It’s maddening, because the solutions aren’t as easy as implied by the narratives laid out on news channels.

Speaking of wars, I’m worry about what’s going on in Iran. I’m not making a prediction about what’s going to happen there, because there are too many possible scenarios. But I can see the very real possibility of it leading to a large war that most people don’t want — all because the small players there are aligned with bigger powers outside the region.

If Israel attacks Iran, there’s a possibility that Russia could try to intervene to defend Iran. The Russians have already been warning Israel not to attack. If Russia gets involved — which might not even happen, of course — there’s going to be a lot of internal pressure here for the United States to get involved on the other side. Wasn’t there some big war nearly a hundred years ago that was triggered by an assassination simply because big powers were aligned with the players in a smaller-scale conflict? The Iran-Israel conflict isn’t exactly the same, but it’s similar enough to bring World War I to mind for me.

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When I got into politics professionally more than 20 years ago, I learned one thing pretty quickly. The worst people in the business to trust were the ones who talked a lot about being Christians and talked about being on a mission from God to change the world by getting elected.

Those were the people most likely to try to cheat me. They were the ones most likely to cut corners and justify their “little” dishonesties with the justification that they were trying to do God’s will. As a Christian, that sickened me. I learned that I could trust most of the rest of the folks in the business. If they had been around for awhile — even if you knew they were liars and thieves — you knew there was an “honor among thieves” that you could mostly count on.

Politicians such as Rick Santorum scare me. It’s partly because of his cavalier willingness to use government force to impose his judgment on other people while spouting rhetoric about liberty. But even more than that, it scares me that he seems to believe he’s on a mission from God.

In a speech four years ago at a Catholic university in Florida, Santorum laid out his view of the world. In his version, the United States is on God’s side. The parts of the world that oppose this country are evil. He seems to have missed the point that when God sees a sinful and fallen world, that includes us, too. Instead, he sees a holy and righteous United States — led by the U.S. government, of course — on God’s side. He said:

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We used to laugh in this country at the crude propaganda the the government of the Soviet Union used to brainwash the people under their rule. In the United States, we don’t call it propaganda. We call it education, but the government has a very conscious mission to brainwash Americans to buy into the system.

A reader who’s going to remain anonymous shared with me this scan from his kindergarten child’s homework, presumably for Presidents’ Day. The students had to read the material and then answer a question. Some of it is just factual, such as the White House being in Washington. Others aren’t so factual, such as, “Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President, was an honest man.” Oh, really? And, “The president works hard every day to protect our country, the USA!” Do they know the difference between opinion and fact?

Do you believe Barack Obama works hard to keep us free? Do you believe that George W. Bush worked hard to keep us free? Or do you believe that each of them had his own political agenda — and that achieving that agenda was far more important than “keeping us free”? (Of course, the question ignores the little matter of what freedom is, too.)

If you grew up in government-run schools and haven’t given a lot of thought to what you were taught, you might look at these statements and find it bewildering that anyone would object to them. But these statements have nothing to do with educating children about how the world works. They have everything to do with getting children to accept and believe national fairy tales.

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