Eschew Binarity

Another ridiculous Sunday morning, beautiful clear sunshine -- it was cold last night, I actually got out my jacket and put it on. I slept in this morning. Last night the greatest movie was on TV, like at one in the morning. They don't tell you the name of the movie at that hour, they just show it, but it might have been called "Door-to-door Maniac," or "Five Minutes to Live," or "Last Blood." As I see it on the Internet, this movie has been released under all those names. Johnny Cash is a bad guy who has a plan to rob a bank by holding the bank president's wife hostage and ... well, it was a really surprisingly good movie. She's the president of the Women's Club, y'know, all in curlers and stuff. Johnny breaks into the house, he says, "Bank presidents might like their women looking like that but I don't." Blurry focus, low budget, Ron Howard is in it, he looks like he's about five -- pre Opie, I'd guess. So anyway, that was over at three or so, and I woke up with the sun burning my face through the window.

But I've been thinking about something.

Being that we live here in the bedroom of Washington, DC, a lot of our readers work for the government. And you guys know, the fiscal year starts tomorrow. Right now, you can't buy anything, you can't sign up for classes or training, you can't plan any travel, because you don't know what your budget's going to be.

Congress doesn't have to decide how many paper-clips you get this year. Their budgeting doesn't go that far. They'll decide though if the program you work for is going to have little things like ... salaries, say. I don't know how it actually looks on the inside, but it seems that they allocate money for particular agencies, and even within the agency they subdivide it down into programs, this one gets this and that one gets that. When you look at how big the federal government is, this is a huge job.

October first is the start of the fiscal year. Last week, nobody in the government had any money, because everything had to be accounted for, these last weeks, and once there's a budget nobody will still have any money because the agencies have to find out how much they're getting and then divvy it up internally. Both houses of Congress vote on it, and then the President signs it. It is never ready at the start of the year. Never. (How do you spell CR?)

This has got to be about a forty-hour-a-day job. Nobody could really do it right, you can't know what's going on in every little office out there, you have to have some kind of policy guidelines and a bunch of people working for you who gather information, and then you juggle the numbers blindly and see what you think ought to be done, who ought to get what.

Looming behind all that, you have a gazillion-dollar-a-month war going on, pointless, ineffective, winning us enemies around the planet, implemented both deceptively and ineptly, sucking money out of the country's bank account at a rate that is unknown but estimated in the cotillions (that's a one with a gazillion zeroes after it, in a floor-length dress). You've got the spectre of China calling in their loans, busting our bank overnight. The constitution is being ripped to shreds, the environment is boiling over, sick people can't see a doctor and poor people can't pay their mortgage.

So now I see Congress is ... censuring MoveOn.org.

Scuse me, I like to goof off at work as much as the next guy. I'm sympathetic, but ... isn't there a better time for this? MoveOn.org put an ad in the New York Times, with a little pun: Petraeus or Betray-Us. Everybody knew the general was sitting over at the White House getting instructions for his presentation at the Capitol. Everybody knew he was going to say the war is going wonderfully great, and everybody knows that's not true. It's a military guy giving a political presentation -- a very dangerous combination. We saw it before, when Colin Powell went out and cashed in all his respect to tell a string of lies at the UN, that was a hard one, because you really did think the guy was honorable, but they sucked it out of him, he betrayed us too. So a general lies to Congress, what's new about that? --Well, it might not be new, but we cannot let it become acceptable.

Certainly we can't make it a crime to say something when the emperor comes out in a transparent, weightless suit of big ol' nothing.

Why did Congress stop everything, in the middle of the busiest time of the year, with all this going on, to discuss MoveOn.org and vote on whether they were bad people or not? Do you understand that?

We get the Washington Post, there are full-page ads in there all the time. Israel, Syria, Russia, whole countries buy a page in the Post and put some stuff in there, with a bunch of names at the bottom of the page endorsing it -- hey, isn't the whole first section mostly bra ads? Does Congress want to vote on whether Playtex actually lifts and separates?

The real question is, how did they let this issue, the issue of some group buying an ad in the Times, rise to the top of their list of priorities? I guess anybody with money can buy an ad. So somebody bought an ad that took one side, as opposed to the other, so what?

Somehow the Democrats have let the Republicans define the situation. Again. It's just bizarre that this has happened to us. It seems to me they all -- both parties -- have such a low estimation of the American voter that they think all that matters is slogans. They may be right, that's the hard part, this might actually be what matters to people.

But no. Nobody really cares about MoveOn.org, this is bull-oney. Look at this SURVEY. Fifty-six percent of people have never even heard of MoveOn.org. Twenty-two percent have an unfavorable opinion of them. Look: nobody cares.

Here's the deal, it seems to me. When Aristotle systematized the rules of logic, he included something called the Law of the Excluded Middle. It seemed obvious at the time. Everything is either A or not-A, it can't be both. A sentence is either true or false. The sky is either blue or it's not. Given that, the rest of the principles of logic follow pretty easily.

Problem is, it's wrong, for two reasons I can think of. First of all, there are degrees. If you held up a paint sample labeled "Blue" and compared it to the sky, you'd find that the sky isn't actually blue. It's bluish, but blue doesn't really look like that, it's darker, and you gotta get rid of the greenish tint. This is the basis for fuzzy logic, which allows degrees of truth and is extremely useful as far as engineering applications go, because that's the way the world actually works, your motor doesn't suddenly overheat at whatever number of degrees it says in the manual, it gets hotter a little bit at a time. In between, the statement "the engine is overheating" is partly true.

Second of all, the negation of a statement can be two things: it can be the absence of a quality, or it can be the opposite of it. If I say I'm "not angry" at somebody, for instance, it can mean I actually like them, or it could mean I've never given them a thought. And this is the trap.

MoveOn put an ad in the paper. Seems to me the correct response, if you think they went too far, is to not notice. The general is working for the administration, OK, we've seen this before, there're worse things going on over there. You might think the MoveOn wording was a little harsh, or extreme, or poorly timed (I don't happen to think any of the above), but really -- why does this call for a vote in Congress?

Because if you're dumb enough to stay in the chambers when they call for a vote, you have to say if you're for it or against it. The smart thing is to go get a drink of water, or go out in the hall and talk on your cell phone, or practice your wide stance, something. Abstain, don't vote. Don't encourage them.

Here's the bad thing that's going on, and I don't know if this is new or if America has always been this way. It comes down to the idea that "If you ain't fer us yer aginst us." It's the reduction of the world to a single binary dimension, where you're either at the zero end or the one end, with no middle. In this case, Congresscritters thought they either had to support MoveOn or oppose them. Even Democrats. So they filed into the hallowed halls and sat in their places and voted on whether MoveOn.org was being nice when they made a pun on General Betraeus' name.

This need to bifurcate is at the heart of our controversy here in Montgomery County, with the sex-ed curriculum. Here's an example: the curriculum says "Some transgender individuals want to live their life as the opposite gender or have surgery to become the opposite gender. Many others do not want to do so," and somewhere else it says, "While cross-dressers change their clothes, transsexuals sometimes change their body by means of hormone therapy or sexual reassignment therapy to match how they feel." OK, those are facts. You go out into the world, you go out in public, you're going to see somebody like that. It seems sensible to me to take a few minutes out of a kid's long life to tell them what this is about, just so they know. Never mind the ones that are sitting there confused and disoriented about living in a world that requires them to live a lie.

But look how the CRC paraphrases that on their shadow web site. They say the curriculum "directs students to chop off body parts and change their gender." That is it, really, a direct quote from their down-low web site, their paraphrase of the sentences in the curriculum I just quoted to you.

How does that happen? It happens because they are defining the world in extreme binary terms. They are confusing the two kinds of negation. To their minds, you have to either approve of something or oppose it. There's no option to live and let live, you're either with em er yer aginst em. You can't just learn a fact, you have to take sides. And telling a kid a fact is the same as directing them to behave in that way.

Reading through their whining complaint to the state court, I was struck by how much of their case depends on the excluded middle. The fact is, some people are gay, some are transgender, some people speak a different language from us -- you don't have to choose if you're for it or against it, it's just how things are. When I go to Portugal, they eat blood. I don't know how they do it, they bake it or something, and there's just this big blood clot on your plate. They love it. I don't eat it. I have found that people are pretty good if you say, sorry, but in my country we don't eat that sort of thing. They usually laugh -- though three times I have had Chinese people trick me into eating some kind of guts or bugs -- but they don't feel offended, because it's not a binary world. Normal, intelligent people understand that. If you don't like to eat the blood, so what? It just means more for them, right?

No, the CRC would want to go to court to stop Portuguese people from eating stuff like that. Because yer either fer em er aginst em. If you're one of those blood-lovers, you're a liberal and a sissy. And by blood-lover, I mean somebody who doesn't actively oppose the Portuguese diet.

Don't fall for the dichotomy. There is always something higher that reconciles the two sides, you need to look for that. Don't react with ones and zeroes, find the continuum in between, we need to take a breath and think some of these things through, you can't live in a constant state of panic. We need to start using our brains again.