Daily Archives: December 6, 2004

Wrongful Thinking Department 101

Quote from a currently running commercial for Cox Digital Telephone:
“If a million people are doing it, it must be a good thing, right?”

So, if a million people are jumping off of cliffs, to use a metaphor from my mother’s playbook when I was a kid, you should be doing it too?

Or to paint with a much broader brush … if a million people are racist, sexist, bigoted, uptight, boorish cads, then that’s the direction you want to head in? If a million people support a fascist dictator with an agenda that includes decimation of people not like him (or them), that makes it a worthy cause?

Wow. Marketing never ceases to amaze me.

To paraphrase Ibsen, since when has the majority ever managed to do anything but ostracize (and that’s the mild end of the reactive spectrum — the other end would include thumbscrews and quartering or crucifying) its innovators?

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Sometimes in Fits of Restless Pique

Sometimes in fits of restless pique
I lose the will to even speak;
and listening to voices lie
reduces me to tears. I cry

not for their souls in peril; no,
but for a world that makes it so
worthwhile to bend and shape the truth
this way and that, a mood to suit.

And weeping, once the phone is dead,
I sit and wonder, seeing red,
why those who have integrity
must bear the brunt of infamy

while tarred and feathered by those fools
who will not play by agreed rules,
but choose instead to twist and wreck
the facts. But then, in retrospect,

I pity anyone who must
rely on guile instead of trust
to count some coup against their foe
scoring them, one, everyone, zero.

06 DEC 2004

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