A recent guest editorial in my hometown newspaper led me to do some research about the writer and a political group called “Citizens Against Common Core.” The editorial writer, apparently a “whistleblower-teacher” bent on attacking the Obama Administration through one of the new Common Core curriculum standards, has disseminated a rash of falsehood throughout the internet about a story entitled “A Mother of Monsters,” by Guy de Maupassant. Her contention that the use of this story in a Common Core teaching module is “designed to corrupt essential human decency” defies the internal logic of the story itself, and her accusation of a Marxist conspiracy to sully the minds of fourteen-year-olds is particularly galling…and revealing at the same time.
After my reply on the editorial page two weeks later, several individuals asked whom I meant specifically by the “con men” and their victims. In this case I mean modern media pundits with their devious political agendas; the victims include all those unwashed by the power of critical reading, including factual research, and critical thinking, especially what is called “formal logic.” How are they victimized? They sometimes vote, for one thing–often according to their fears and weaknesses and prejudices, and often against their own best interests, or the interests of their loved ones. They also pass on their oblivious victimization to the vulnerable around them who listen.
Can I be more specific? It would be impossible for me to chronicle the evolution of “shysterism” in our society, how we’ve accepted and even institutionalized deceit in almost every sector, but I guess I’d start with the indentured servants of the 16 and 1700s who were told they could, after a few years of servitude, make a fresh start in America, absolved of their former crimes or financial debts, if only they would do the grueling physical labor of colonizing a wilderness. A dozen-plus generations later, today, their descendants, raised on an American Dream they don’t really understand, suffer from an even greater disparity in economic and political power than their forebears. One only has to go to the Internet to find an income-distribution pyramid elongated so sharply at the top that it is evident real wealth is steadily flowing up, not trickling down. When the con men are rebutted with this fact, they tell us this is the nature of laissez-faire (unfettered) capitalism, that those of the poor and middle class who fall deeper into poverty deserve to in some way. It’s a matter of poor choices, not the circumstances of their lives; no one is taking advantage of them, the con men argue. Often their logic is unfettered as well, but when one calls them on that, they resort to theories sometimes summed up as “Social Darwinism”–a kind of economic “survival of the fittest”, while ignoring the words of Jesus in Matthew, Chapter 19 or Mark, Chapter 10 , or James, Chapter 2 and 5, or the words of Paul in I Timothy, Chapter 6. There are simply too many examples to mention here.
Near the end of my mother’s life, I found her agitated one evening as I visited her in her small apartment in one of the several government housing projects in our town. After some coaxing she told me about her concern that her neighbors–mostly poor, rural people like herself–weren’t paying their bills because they were pledging a substantial amount of their social security income to televangelists they had heard on their radios or seen on their TVs. She said that she had found this sort of thing her entire life: decent people wanting to invest in something meaningful and lasting and good, but deceived and manipulated by spiritual hucksters who have no real concern for their well-being. Later I applied this critical thinking myself, to the political hucksters who have usurped our airwaves–broadcast band and shortwave radio, and now news channels on TV–to sell their dubious political wares.
On other occasions I found my mother listening to the radio and chuckling at some remarks by Rush Limbaugh, then in his early years, saying something like, “Mr. Limbaugh, it’s possible that….” I remember smiling to myself, grateful that she had an intuitive understanding of the either/or fallacy, a ruse commonly used by pundits like Limbaugh to reduce a political argument to only two alternatives. Nevertheless, I also knew that, without formal training, she might not have the armor to resist all the hidden and often false premises, the non-sequiturs, and the post-hoc fallacies that Rush could throw at her.
I’m happy to say that my mother, gone now over 20 years, never seemed to buy into the diatribe she sometimes listened to with avid interest. I know though that she was concerned about its effects on the people she knew around her. Since then I’ve encountered the revisionist American history of Glenn Beck, the “children’s literature” of Limbaugh’s *Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims*, and the Newsmax columns on foxnews.com. After all, somebody has to keep an eye on these people, my mother once said.
She would have been most appalled, I think, by the proliferation of get-rich schemes that sponsor these pundits. Currently, I’d point to ads on Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s radio programs that involve a Bible code which shows one how to grow wealthy (Moneycode411.com or Moneycode12.com). Here one can watch a video and buy a one-year membership to learn or find the code. That is the bait. The hook is a claimed value of $149 with a promise that Newsmax is going to double the initial fee of $50 soon. I know that many will defend this as “laissez-faire capitalism” and I know that the Madmen admen have developed artiface into an art form, but I’d have to call this a soiled American Dream in a cultural context, and a call to Mammon in a spiritual one.