In last night’s Albuquerque Tribune, the horoscope reading for Aries – that’s me - read:
"Nothing is written in stone right now. Even your opinions are subject to radical swings, as new information comes in…"
A horoscope defining intellectual honesty? That’s odd.
It’s a subject I return to often these days, because of the political right’s bitter, cruel, immoral tactics. The more they cheat and deceive, the less desire I have to stay open, adjust to new realities, concede my own fallibility and play fair. Instead, I want to fire back, which makes me feel better but risks bringing me down to their level.
Speaking of the sub-basement brings me to Linda Chavez, who almost became President Bush’s Secretary of Labor. Her latest syndicated column also appeared in yesterday’s Tribune. Her theme = clobbering organized labor for its support of the Democratic Party.
Chavez opened by reciting the most recent declines in union membership, making the point that the labor movement is shrinking. That’s true, but if so why call it "Big Labor" in the very next paragraph?
Her next argument is that today’s unions, unlike your father’s or grandfather’s unions, are more interested "in politics than collective bargaining." Is that ignorance or does she mean to distort history? I don’t know. I do know it's historically flawed. How does Chavez think labor got the right to organize, no less bargain collectively, if not through electoral politics?
She next offers a long list of big sums of money organized labor has given to Democrats. Fine. She never mentioning corporate contributions to the GOP. Space limitations, no doubt. .
She notes, further, that labor has helped "union friendly Republicans" like Senator Arlen Spector "who…beat back a primary challenge from a conservative. That’s a doozy. First, because Spector is a conservative and his challenger was from the extreme right. Second, because – I’m sure it was an oversight - she doesn’t mention that her hero, George W. Bush, also helped Spector. That might complicate her simple world, I guess.
But Chavez gets better. She charges the Democrats’ "willingness to block Social Security reform…" …is a "direct payoff to the unions…" This is an impressive sentence; I love the subtle suggestion that Social Security reform is on the table. It isn’t. President Bush is proposing to divert Social Security taxes to Wall Street, thereby undermining Social Security. It takes skill to cloak subversion in the word "reform."
As for the "payoff" to the unions idea, that’s imaginative.
You get the idea. Chavez is an apparatchik in the service of her political superiors. She would have prospered in the old Soviet Union. (And, come to think of it, in the present Russian government.)
I have strong biases. It’s tempting to organize the world accordingly. So easy. The example of Linda Chavez’s intellectual dishonesty should, however, help me stay on the straight-and-narrow. The way we Aries folks should.
I do wonder what her sign is.