Political definitions

I know that my blog is supposed to be about writing and this one isn’t.  But it is about words.  And I did say in my first one that I might just want to rant.  So I am ranting. 

            One of the main principles of communication as I remember it is that in order to have a complete communication there must be a sender, a person speaking, and a receiver, a person listening.  Over this past week I have watched Republicans speak out and Democrats speak out but it is not clear to me if either of these communications had a receiver.  So, per the principle stated above, there has been no communication.   

            If President Obama were to give his most eloquent speech yet to a group of French citizens who do not speak English would the speech be a complete communication?  No it would not.  How then is it possible for him to speak to a group of Republicans who do not want to hear him?  On the other side of that coin if the Republican minority in the house and senate have a valid point to be presented to the congress and the Democratic majority do not want to hear them what is the chance that they will be heard.

            When people speak the same language the communication may be incomplete for a number of reasons.  For instance, A Catholic speaking to a Muslim, A man speaking to a woman, a republican speaking to a democrat. 

            Even when we speak to each other we do not communicate our point if the person who we are speaking to does not hear or want to hear what we have to say.  And to make things even more complicated what if we do have something to say but we use the wrong words.   Let us start with the definition of what a Democrat and a Republican is.  Webster says that a Democrat is a supporter of democracy:  somebody who believes in or supports democracy or the democratic system of government.  Does this definition fit a person of the Democratic Party?  No it does not.  The United States, often referred to as a democracy, is actually a representative republic.  So what are Democrats doing in congress?  Republicans on the other hand are by definition supporters of a republic as government:  somebody who believes that the best government is one in which supreme power is vested in an electorate. So shouldn’t we all be Republicans?  I know they are just the names that are given to the two major parties but isn’t it confusing when we think about it that way?  And what would we stand for if we still called them Whigs? 

            So on to the next confusing category, conservatives and liberals.  A conservative is a person reluctant to accept change: in favor of preserving the status quo and traditional values and customs, and against abrupt change.  Now if we follow this definition, and per our language we must because that is what it means, then when Clinton left office and Bush came into office were the conservatives not the Democrats?  And when our country is in dire straits as it is now isn’t conservatism a self destructive position to take? 

            The definition of a liberal is; broad-minded: tolerant of different views and standards of behavior in others.  Well now as a righteous Republican I can see why my party is so upset with President Obama.  Wait, isn’t that a good thing?  Oh there is a second part to that as it relates to politics and it says; progressive politically or socially: favoring gradual reform, especially political reforms that extend democracy, distribute wealth more evenly, and protect the personal freedom of the individual.  Oh boy now I am rally confused because I don’t think that part fits either one of them.  It does however seem to fit President Obama.  Wasn’t he accused of wanting to spread the wealth?  Well as a Democrat that is exactly what he is supposed to do. 

            OK so now I have decided that the thing to do to solve these political squabbles is to simply throw out the whole mess of them and get a new batch.  Well that has been tried before and only works on a limited basis so here is my plan.  We should pay them each one million dollars a year.  They will not need to pay their own staff.  The staff will be paid as permanent government employees.  Sort of like the post office.  That way they won’t be able to hire their unqualified brother in law and pay them a huge salary.  Now the cost is really not too significant if you think about it.  Four hundred thirty five congressmen and one hundred senators, total annual cost $535,000,000.  They spent that yesterday.  So how will that help you say?  Well at a million a year there are many midlevel managers in the private sector who are actually qualified to conduct the business of running the country who would now run for office.  So, by my estimate, in the next two elections cycles we would have replaced all of our petty, bickering, whiney representatives with qualified people who will behave themselves lest they lose their million dollars a year job.  Oh and they cannot earn any outside income from any source.  That should shut off the lobbyists influence on them.  

First Amendment Rights

 

            This has been a very hot and much used topic in the United States for many years.  It is also a topic that is used when comparing the freedom of speech in the US to countries like China.  And when you talk about extremes the less restrictive laws of the US are well above those of China.  Of course those of us in the US think that we are the least restrictive but Canada actually is even less so. 

            The reason that I have chosen to talk about this now is that it fits nicely behind my last blog about fibbing.  Now a storyteller who is writing fiction is allowed to stretch the truth.  They are, as a matter of fact, expected to.  But what of the press in the US today, are they allowed to stretch it?    It seems to me that with freedoms come responsibility.  A rule of law states that you have the right to scream your head off about pretty much anything that you want, but you are not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theatre.   Therein lays the responsibility.  But how is it that the press has come to a point that allows them to incite the public and to mislead them for the sake of garnering readership.  Is it not their job to report a story and not to create it? 

            The story that has my ire up is one written on one of the internet news pages that came from a television story.  The headline read; “Funeral director revives man.”  Now when I read that I got a picture in my mind of an undertaker discovering that a man in his parlor was not dead and that the funeral director revived him.  The truth is that a man who happened to be a funeral director was the first on the scene of an automobile pedestrian accident.  The pedestrian appeared to have been killed.  The man saw a passing ambulance and flagged it down and the ambulance crew, using a defibrillator, revived the pedestrian.  The only thing that the funeral director did was to flag down the ambulance.  He did not by any stretch of the imagination revive the man and the fact that he happened to be a funeral director was absolutely immaterial.  So someone needs to explain to me how the story submitted by this irresponsible reporter is any different than any fiction writer who uses an actual event to structure his story around.  The answer is NONE. 

            I for one think that there needs to be some movement on the part of the press to reign in these over zealous reporters before the government decides that it too needs to be regulated in much the same way as the irresponsible CEO’s of the banks are about to be.  When we ask the government in China to relax their laws regarding freedom of speech the request would carry a lot more weight if we could show that our freedoms are not disruptive.  After all they are a country of over a billion people and we only have a little over three hundred million.  Too many people with too much freedom can become chaotic without the element of responsibility. 

            I welcome comments on this as I know that there may be many who will have opposing viewpoints.   

Fibbing for fun and profit

        We have all had experiences that we have told others about and most of us (probably all of us but I wanted to leave you an out) have embellished it to some extent on the retelling.  Every once in a while a person finds that they have a talent for telling stories.  I don’t know where mine came from but it was probably a defense mechanism that I developed for dealing with my father.  Well you know when you get a D on the report card you have to have something to say or you are stuck at home for the next semester.  I must also tell you that my father was a stickler for the truth so I also developed a sense for how far I could stretch a truth.  It doesn’t stretch very far.   So at some point in my life I learned that telling a story just for the fun of it was not only entertaining for me but others seemed to like it as well. But that truthful person that my father pounded into me caused me to develop a caveat.  When I find that I have convincingly told a tale to someone I have to find a cool way of letting them know that they have been had.  You usually know that this has occurred when I ask you if you would now like to buy a bridge.  Oh and the sneaky smile that comes across my face is a clue also. 

            Once when a friend of mine, Jim Bowman, and I were sitting in the seaman’s club at the Indian Head Propellant plants Explosive Ordnance Disposal School two young seamen came to our table to ask if we were in EOD.  Bowman being the story teller that he was admitted that we were.  The tale was that we were in the school and not yet graduated.  They wanted to hear about it so we invited them to sit and of course there was the obligatory beer that they provided while we spun the tale.  Bowman started it by telling the lads that we had just returned from an inspection of the South Vietnamese Army and had learned of a new weapon that the Viet Cong were using against our aircraft.  He then turned to me and asked me to describe it to them.  I quickly related to them how this was a new development on an old system and it was effective because it was not radar guided and so not detectable and that it was silent because it had no propulsion system.  Bowman then came back in and described an over sized arrow.  Due to its size of course it took much more than a man to launch it so they had trained elephants to do that.  It was at that point that one of the young men decided that we had conned them out of the beer. But we did still have his friend.  It took a few well placed looks and words for him to get the point across to his friend and they left.  This story is true although the story that we told the young men was obviously concocted.  But you see how the mind of a true fibber works and that one must be skilled in the art of fibbing if one is to write fiction.  Oh I did mention that my book is fiction didn’t I, wink, wink. 

            Now that I have retired and have taken up the pursuit of writing as a third career I am telling stories and putting them on paper.  I find that this part of the task is pretty simple for me but the profit portion so far has eluded me.  I thought that you wrote the great American novel and then just waited for a publisher to come frothing at the bit to negotiate with me for the rights to publish it and that I would have a movie producer waiting in the wings to make it into a movie.  I have not found it too difficult to distribute my books but I have found that the getting paid part is not that easy.  Well when I say distribute I did not mean to imply that my book is in distribution at book stores and libraries even though it is on Amazon and in a few public libraries.  Of course I had to list it on Amazon myself and donate them to the libraries.  Now let me explain that profit is defined as monies being made in excess of expenses. I know that you already knew that but it is important for the purpose of this article to re-state it because I think that many of us who publish our own material lose site of that definition.   That being said I must disclaim anything that I might have said to imply that I have yet made a profit. 

            But I have a solution to the profit part.  I am going to write another book and spend a lot of money getting it edited, printed, published and distributed.  And I am going to keep doing it until the publishers and movie guys get it through their heads that I am serious. 

 

Until next time.