A parable: A number of diners are chatting happily when a car backfires, sending one of them diving beneath his table. The onlookers react variously: some assume that he is on the verge of a breakdown; others that he is a veteran with "post- traumatic stress syndrome"; but all assume that there is a psychiatric explanation for the behavior. However, the person who dove under the table was a mobster who turned states evidence, and is currently in the witness protection program, and his behavior was a rational response to the possibility that his cover would be blown and he would become the victim of a hit....
A second parable: My wife used to be a college administrator, and had any number of student aides throughout the years. One of them asked her to explain the idea behind banking, and so she gave a very simple explanation of savings accounts forming the basis for the making of loans, and the paying of interest by the borrowers, which eventually would be used to pay the savers in order to attract them to bank their money. However, the girl, to whom all of this was a novelty, fixated on the idea that one had not merely to repay a loan, but pay interest for the privilege of borrowing the money, and exclaimed "How terrible!", as if it were an unkind act, instead of a normal economic transaction...
A third parable: Two people were set to take a mathematics test. One of them, quite brilliant, had been uninterested in mathematics and studied only enough to get by, and had also dropped it as soon as she had finished the requirements. The other, a bit of a plodder, had taken a shine to math, and studied it not only as a subject, but as a vocation, hoping one day to teach the subject. She had also taken as many math courses as had been permitted. Of course, the plodder did much better on the test than the brilliant one, but the brilliant one did not learn a lesson, but instead called into question the accuracy of the test, as if it were designed to measure intelligence rather than math skill....
These are the things I think of reading the posts against Reagan.... |
