The Twelve Good Men and True of Democracy

 On this day:

1521
The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade.
1862
American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Second Manassas.
1955
Black teenager Emmett Till is murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.
1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech
1968
Riots in Chicago, Illinois, during the Democratic National Convention.
1979
An IRA bomb explodes on the Grand Place in Brussels.
1991
Collapse of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
1991
Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
1996
Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales divorce.

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"It is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion."--John Kenyon’s 1983 volume, The History Men

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Many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s English that is odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

***

Some kid named Lucas McGill flew a drone into the sky to measure CO2 levels and found, surprisingly, that ground-level CO2 in cities was lower than in rural areas. That's good because we should be able to shut down the farms more easily than cars.

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The Twelve Good Men and True of Democracy

Is it wise to assume that silly opinions will dissolve in the light of public scrutiny?

A few weeks ago, Karen Bass, the once-and-future mayor of LA, patiently explained the dynamics of homelessness to wide-eyed Americans. It seems that the drug-addled, criminal vagrants plaguing American streets have a cause we had overlooked and we can treat. The real problem is they have no teeth. 

We'll see the effect of militant Dental Activists that will surely follow.

A DSA spokesman gave an interview attacking rental property, claiming there is no constitutional provision for double-digit returns on investment.

Some successful recent campaigns promise the end of the Supreme Court and the Senate; some promise to end the Presidency. And, of course, no police, prisons, or borders.

Several senatorial candidates plan to establish 50% national ownership of the nation's largest companies.

A power company rerouted its lines to avoid the site of house-elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, which contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby.” 

Are the shallowness and scope of these opinions and promises self-disruptive? When you hear opinions like diverting a multi-zillion-dollar power line because it complicates the non-existent gravesite of a non-existent character representing a non-existent species in a children's fantasy book —your tendency is to turn off the critical-thinking part of your brain and rest. You do not join in the fray. You can not imagine any consequence of this non-storm in this non-existent teapot.

This may be an underestimating the foolishness of humanity.

Imagine children reporting being abused in mysterious tunnels under a daycare center or teachers killing rabbits and turtles to intimidate them. Or a baby being sacrificed in a church. Barnyard animals being sacrificed in schoolrooms. A student taken to a graveyard, where he helped unearth a coffin and saw a body that was then cut with knives. "Bad Clowns," "robots," ritualized abuse, "magic rooms," and "Satanic practices." Preschool teachers who flew in the air while dressed as witches.

This was not Salem three hundred years ago; this was California and New Jersey a generation and a half ago.

Margaret Kelly Michaels, a teacher at the Wee Care Nursery School, was indicted for 299 offenses in connection with the sexual assault of 33 children and eventually convicted and sentenced to 47 years in prison. Albert Algerin, employed at the Praca Day Care center, was sentenced to 50 years for rape and sexual abuse. Bernard Baran, working at Early Childhood Development Center in Pittsfield, was convicted on January 30, 1985, of three counts of rape of a child and five counts of indecent assault and battery. He was sentenced to three life terms, plus 8 to 20 years on each charge. At Fell Acres, Gerald Amirault was convicted of assaulting and raping nine children, and sentenced to 30 to 40 years in state prison. In a separate trial, his mother, Violet Amirault, and sister, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, were also convicted of similar charges, and sentenced to jail for 8 to 20 years. (Reporting on this case won Dorothy Rabinowitz the Pulitzer Prize.)

All of these cases were brought by educated American citizens, prosecuted by adult law graduates (including Janet Reno), and all the victims were convicted by 12 good men and true. All of those convicted went to prison; Margaret Kelly Michaels went to prison for five years before she was rescued by a bloodied and battered common sense.

In this context, perhaps it is unwise to be confident that political positions that are clearly nuts will be easily sterilized by the purifying air of our sacred democracy.

So, start handing out the toothbrushes.