What Do We Do With Witches
King Arthur explains to a mob how to tell if a woman is a witch – Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail
…There are ways of telling whether she is a witch. Are there? What are they? Tell us. Do they hurt? Tell me, what do you do with witches? Burn them! And what do you burn, apart from witches? More witches! – Wood!
So why do witches burn? Cause they’re made of wood? – Good! How do we tell if she is made of wood? – Build a bridge out of her. But can you not also make bridges out of stone? Oh, yeah. Does wood sink in water. No, it floats. Throw her into the pond!
What also floats in water? Bread. – Apples. Very small rocks. – Cider! Great gravy. Cherries. Mud. – Churches. Lead. A duck! Exactly. So, logically– If she weighs the same as a duck…she’s made of wood. And therefore? A witch! A duck! A duck! – Here’s a duck. We shaIl use my largest scales…
Logic
Americans are sitting on the edge of a lot of scary logical “rabbit holes”. Here’s some examples.
Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and sex trafficker. Donald Trump was Epstein’s friend, and has been accused of sex offenses and had/has a known interest in young women. Therefore, what is Donald Trump?
The Constitution states that Congress has the power to declare war. The President of the United States took the US to war in Iran, without the consent of Congress. Did Donald Trump violate the Constitution?
“All persons” are guaranteed civil rights. ICE and other “law enforcement” agencies are rounding up “persons” in the United States, holding them without trial, and deporting them from the country. Is ICE and the others, at the behest of President Trump, again violating the Constitution?
The Constitution forbids the President from taking bribes, and “emoluments” (payments) from foreign countries. Donald Trump accepted an aircraft from the Qataris. He’s also accepting millions of dollars from folks who want Presidential pardons. And he took millions of dollars from investors in his family’s crypto-currency scheme. Is Trump violating Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution?
And the final one: Donald Trump violates the Constitution often. The Supreme Court gave him a “free pass” from criminal liability. Congress won’t do anything about it. What should the American citizen do to protect the Constitution, and the Nation?
Apologies
Cole Tomas Allen launched a failed attack on the President and his Cabinet on Saturday night. We don’t know a whole lot about his life, yet. We know he’s an educated man: a Cal-Tech engineer with a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Cal State. And, we do know that he sent an “apology and explanation” to his family and friends for what he was about to do. (Just an aside: the government and media refer to this as his “manifesto”. But it’s hard to think of a “manifesto” as starting with the sentence, “Hello everybody! So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused…”).
Here’s the logical “rabbit hole” that consumed Allen. “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” He then went into a detailed explanation of his thought process as he hoped to assassinate the President and the highest members of his team.
And he made clear the objections he considered, and the “logic” that led him to make the attack. That includes number three: “You didn’t get them all”, followed by the response “You gotta start somewhere”.
Polarized
We are a Nation polarized. We are as divided as any time since the era prior to the Civil War in the 1850’s. At that time, America’s information sources, the newspapers, often were either pro-slavery or abolitionist. Some of the heroes we were taught about in school, men like William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass, published widely read gazettes to further their abolitionist views. That was in spite of the fact that those views were opposed to existing Federal law. The Fugitive Slave Act, required runaway slaves be returned to their owners, even from free states.
And the “final straw” of that era was John Brown’s attack on the United States Military Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s avowed intent was to get weapons to arm a “slave revolution” to end the “abomination” of enslavement. He was met with full military force, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant JEB Stuart, both familiar names from the Confederacy, but then US Army officers. Brown was convicted of treason and incitement of slaves to rebel, and was hanged.
Was Brown a hero, or a madman? At the time, it depended on your view about enslavement, often on what newspaper you read. And, how you look at John Brown today might determine your actions in our current political environment.
Into the Hole
Our information sources, mostly what we see on the tiny screen on the device in our pocket, are almost as divided. We can explore any “rabbit hole” we want, any time we want. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that some people, even those we think of as intelligent and smart and educated, fall down the “rabbit hole”. They follow a “logic chain”, not unlike the one King Arthur takes the witch mob through. Arthur “logic-ed” that a witch would weigh the same as a duck. Allen “logic-ed” that the only action he could take was violence.
This is not an apology for Cole Tomas Allen. As I’ve written before, violence is not the answer to our current crisis. In fact, I see violence as abetting those who want to push the Constitution aside, and make America an authoritarian regime. But it would be a mistake to ignore the “logic” that got him to this ultimate action.
It is the true peril of our time.
