Truthiness Ascendant

All politics is local, so stay with me here. I'll roll around to the big picture soon enough.

I'm not going to say that those who tried to derail the city's general obligation bonds are wrong or downright stupid. We can all disagree on exactly what things in hard budgetary times fall into buckets such as "necessary investment" or "wasteful spending." Two people can look at the same line item -- say paving a parking lot or replacing a squad car -- and have completely different opinions about whether that purchase is really necessary. And that's okay. Democracy is good. We'll just have to vote on it.

But the problem is; if the electorate is incapable or unwilling to recognize objective fact and use that in their decision making then what you get is a public discourse that is incapable of reaching compromise or consensus because the two (or more sides) are speaking completely different languages. If two sides can't even agree on basic facts e.g. the Constitution prohibits the president from conducting warrantless searches of American citizens with no oversight by anyone, then the chances are pretty slim that one will ever see a useful compromise on the problem. If that's too abstract for you, let's look at a more local problem. If I raise say, $11 million in 15 year bonds but if I completely pay off my 2007 Dodge Charger Police Cruiser(And if they don't by the Dodge, why not? But I digress...) after 36 months -- by this I mean pay car's note in full -- have I financed the car for 36 months or 180?

I admit it sounds like a poser. Like one of those annoying story problems from ninth grade math. But you know what? That's why you had those problems in ninth grade! These are real-world questions, not just the teacher's sadistic way of passing time. Clarke's Third Law states, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps for the sake of many of our brothers and sisters here in Clinton we should amend that to read, Any math sufficiently advanced beyond ninth grade is indistinguishable from magic.

It seems our increasingly complex society is simply demanding too much of our simple simian brains. When faced with seemingly intractable issues such as "what happens when I turn my computer on?" or "I'm scared of Mexicans but if we kick them all out of the country, who will do my lawn?" the higher reasoning centers just shut down and we go with our gut, right or wrong. So insecure are we in what we understand about the world that we take that gut feeling and then insert it into the parts of our brain where actual, provable facts normally live and presto! Truthiness! Example:: Even though the law on petitions is very clear and available with a very simple Google search and states

If at any time before the date fixed ... for taking action on issuance of the bonds, a petition is filed with the county auditor (or any other governing body -- ed.) in the manner provided by section 331.306 asking that the question of issuing the bonds be submitted to the registered voters of the county, the board shall either by resolution declare the proposal abandoned or shall direct the county commissioner of elections to call a special election upon the question of issuing the bonds

Because I feelthat my petition to force an election should be valid even though it is late, you should still accept it and hold the elections anyway. Never mind that one would think that anyone who would go to the trouble of 240 signatures would take the five minutes to check when the filing deadline was. But again, I digress...

For how are we to govern ourselves if one part of the population uses empirical evidence, repeatable experiments and the evidence of our own eyes a.k.a. reality to view and analyze the world and its worries and another part cares not a whit for what the evidence says, because whatever they feel strongly about must be true? What we get is a citizenry that is encouraging of the basest demagogues, susceptible to rumor and just generally unfit to govern itself.

Which is a pity really, because like that conference on the mound scene in Bull Durham, we're dealing with a lot of shit here. And all of it requires people to be relatively clear-eyed and switched on. Those two attributes seem to be in pretty short supply in the body politic right now.

Postscript:People -- especially elected officials -- who bitch about 'bloggers' spreading rumors need to wake up and smell the coffee. The toothpaste is never going back in the tube. The Internet is the new town hall, the new speaker's corner. If you aren't out here and mixing it up then you are increasingly as the words of Bruce Sterling have it, "legacy people."