Dear Dr. Bones,In this episode, our common bluecquaintance, the Patroniser of Public Transport, spots an opportunity to dynamite himself some fish in a barrel. And promptly takes it:
| (R) for Rationalization charley-on-the-mta | Mon, Aug 20, 2012 11:29 PM EST This very thought occured to me. A tweet by Bill McKibben: @billmckibben And let’s remember that Rep. Akin is on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Gulp. So, here’s how these things go. Let’s keep a good deal of There But For The Grace Of God Go I about this … * Rep. Akin believes Life Begins At Conception — that every zygote, every embryo, every fetus is a full human being, possessing moral status, and any abortion is murder. * And then he’s made to answer a question about whether the case of rape might allow for abortion. * But a zygote as a product of rape is every bit as innocent as that created in the confines of marriage! So that can’t be allowed. *Akin understands on some level, however, that there must be consideration for a rape victim who did not wish to become a mother. (Internal conflict is brewing: Cognitive dissonance!) Through the magic of rationalization, Akin decides that such pregnancies can’t really exist! Conflict resolved! Whew! |
There’s a good deal more than that, to which we shall perhaps eventually get. Meanwhile, the Eyetalics and the blackface above are His Worship's own. These banausic things seem to Paddy and Eye to form part and parcel of the Worshipful notion of how the lower orders think. At very least, they convey potentially significant inflections of the Worshipful voice as it struggles to grok the mental Umwelt of the less expensively educated: ¡Yoo wouldn't wanna miss ’em either way!
Still at the low, mechanical level, the Worshipful header looks to Eye like an unhappy mating of "‘R’ is for 'Rationalization'" with "Rx for Rationalization." If the much-esteemed PPT privately ranks his students, and his peasants, and the service in spas and restaurants, on an A-to-Z scale, Eye supposes it could be that he assigns Representative Aking a letter grade of ‘R’ [1] in biology. Yet it is not likely that even a Day One Blue Blazer would tacitly assume general familiarity with so un-Homeland™ic a system. [2]
In theory, "(R)" could be a slightly ahoo stab taken at "(®)," marca registrada. But such a stab is pointless and meaningless, as well as harmless, in the absence of any antecedent.
Of the two serious contenders, "Rx for Rationalization" seems distinctly preferable, even though what follows affords no general prescription, really, only one alleged specific example. "R is for Rationalization" would be pretty much unintelligible, coming at one utterly Out of the Blue Void, as it were, no particular 'R' having been previously mentioned at BMG, nor, as far as we know, become generally associated with Party Neocomrade (ninth grade) W. T. Aking of the Missouri Second.
Happy days.
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[0] On the whole, ’twere better not to speak of the worst at all. Except on the witness stand under oath or possibly at gunpoint.
[1] I guess an ‘R’ would be about the same as a conventional D- . Or possibly that "jocose and sarcastic E+" that you no doubt remember from the well-thumbed pages of our H*rv*rd Book. Which, by the way, ¿Whatever became of it? ¡Alas, poor Bentinck-Smith!
[2] One the other hand, Paddy and Eye agree that the Patroniser of Public Transport probably knows the way from Alewife to Braintree and back better in kilometres and hectares and joules &c. &c. than in those far less accurate and wissenschaftlich units understanded of the vulgar.
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Obviously most of us don’t go as far as Akin. Most of us feel at some level that even though we were all zygotes and embryos once, a woman’s wishes ought to be given at least some weight, at least some of the time. Is a zygote a human being? Most of us would say, Not really. Is a viable fetus of 28 weeks a human being? Most of us would say Mostly or Definitely. But in much of this range stands It-Is-And-It-Isn’t.
But some of us do not see, do not want, do not believe in the legitimacy of ambiguity. And in order to keep that one thing constant (that a fertilized egg in whatever stage of development is fully vested with humanity, as it were), everything else must turn around it. Like light around a black hole, science itself must bend. Ethics must bend: Regard for women, their freedoms, and their bodies, must bend.
I keep thinking of Yeats, in the poem so tritely over-quoted: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” It is, I think, merely a normative description: That to be ethical and good means to consider consequences; to be full of doubt, fear and trembling. Rationalization such as Akin’s takes one horn of a dilemma and pretends the other doesn’t exist.
And sadly, our media’s attention span (140 character limit) allows for nothing else. The sound bite culture in fact wildly encourages such rationalization and elision — until someone like Akin rather ingenuously tries to talk it through publicly, and puts it in such naked and grotesque fashion.
Discuss: 2 [1 new]
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