If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
Pope Francis just said the following to the children in Singapore:
“All religions are paths to reach God. They are—to make a comparison—like different languages, different dialects, to get there. But God is God for everyone. If you start to fight saying 'my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn't', where will this lead us? There is only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christians; they are different ways to God."
This is, straight up, the heresy of indifferentism. It is not plausible that the Pope does not understand this. The Pope is a heretic.
Of course one is Catholic because one is convinced that Catholicism has more of the truth than other religions. Otherwise what is the point of having a Church? What is the point of having a Pope? What is the point of Christianity? Why didn’t we all remain pagans or Jews? Were the martyrs just bigoted fools to die for the faith?
Yes, all religions are paths to God, and all major religions are largely true. Given a good God, it must be so. It must be possible to get there as a Hindu or a Jew, with sincerity and effort. That is the doctrine of invincible ignorance. But consider the different religions as paths up a mountain. Not all paths up a mountain are equally straight. Not all paths get you all the way, even if they go in the same general direction. Some paths will prove to be impasssible higher up.
The analogy of language, which Francis uses, suggests all paths are equally serviceable; for that is the general view among linguists about languages. Thery all do the job. No one dares say English is a better language than French.
Moreover, the teaching of the Church has always been, “no salvation outside (or without) the Church.” And Jesus said “no one comes to the father except through me.” Francis must reconcile his claims with these doctrines, and I do not believe he can. He cannot be indifferent to truth claims.
Donald Trump’s great talent as a politician and a leader is that he does. It is like magic. Pierre Poilievre does too.
Lots of people have criticized Trump for saying, during the recent debate, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs, and family pets. Kamala Harris laughed at him in split screen as he said it. The moderator stepped in to deny it was happening. Warren Kinsella and Ben Shapiro and many others saw this as a serious misstep by Trump. Kinsella said it made Trump look ridiculous.
I think we see, even just a couple of days later, how smart the reference was. It is all over the Internet, in song, meme, and dance.
The best way to make a point is with an image. The best image to make a point is a dramatic one; a shocking one or a ridiculous one. Trump knows this.
People who do not understand rhetoric, repelled by the shocking image, object to it instinctively. It makes them uncomfortable. Hence the blowback from the moderator, Shapiro, or Kinsella. “You can’t say that!”
It is not the rhetorician’s job to make anyone feel comfortable. Comfortable is boring and forgettable. It is to get his point across.
The image of foreign-looking people eating family pets is perfect because it makes people very uncomfortable. The more so because it has a strong emotional pull. People love their pets, usually more than other people. Good writers know that the perfect way to make a reader sympathize with their character forever is to show them being kind to a cat or dog in the opening pages. Or to make the reader hate a character, show them kicking a dog.
Trump may also have, at a blow, won back all the childless cat ladies.
And we have the video, in split screen, of Harris laughing at the claim. She’s laughing at cats and dogs being killed and eaten? She has identified herself in many minds as the villain.
And the name of the town is Springfield? The same as in The Simpsons—a name chosen because every state in the union has a town named Springfield. It is perfectly generic. And Ohio? It is everyone’s home town.
This could happen you, member of the audience, any day now. Your dear pet Mittens or Snoopy is not safe.
True or not, it is a perfect image to express the growing general alarm over high levels of immigration and lack of assimilation. It crystallizes it and fixes it in the mind.
Along with all the memes and TikTok videos, It has also set off a general investigation all over the internet to find out if the claim is true—making the issue of mass immigration the focus of discussion for days or weeks to come.
And pulling up lots of evidence that it is indeed true.
As the evidence piles up that it is true, the image of Harris laughing at it looks like callousness. She doesn’t care. She’s fine with people killing Fido. And the moderators too are shown to be the bad guys.
Trump is great at this. His image of a wall across the southern border was similar. Give people a concrete image: a wall. Build the wall.
So is the story of his showing the leader of the Taliban a photo of his own house. Make it concrete, make it visual, make it dramatic. Trump understand this. People think and especially people feel in images.
Trump also knows enough to repeat basic points, rather than getting bogged down in details. Political wonks object to this; to lack of details. But rhetoricians and ad men know the way to convince is to stress one point—the “unique selling proposition.” Too much detail, too many reasons, loses the sale.
We ought to use the wisdom of rhetoric the classroom as well. We deliberately reject it there, and in doing so we are missing completely the essence of educating, which is to make the lesson memorable. What you do not remember, you have not learned. Teachers and educational bureaucrats instead instictively reject anything that might make a lesson memorable. They keep everything as bland and forgettable as possible.
Back in the Seventies, the US government funded a massive survey to find which teaching techniques might improve results in the public schools. I think twenty different approaches were approved, and tested against each other and against a control group, in classrooms all over the US. All but one of the new techniques came from the Ed Schools, the educational experts. And all of them failed—all actually did worse than the control group. They were positively harmful. The one that turned out to be better, “ Direct Instruction,” was developed not by an Ed School, but by an advertising man.
But this was ignored. The results of the massive study were buried. The ed schools and the ed establishment were too powerful. We went with the methods proven to fail.
I hear Direct Instruction is currently being introduced in the Philippines, however. I have had my own students in Qatar, who have experienced it, demand it. I suspect it is being used elsewhere in Asia.
Another example of the value of rhetoric in education: you may have heard of Khan Academy. Short videos online that explain concepts in the school curriculum. It started with math, but now includes a variety of subjects. Everyone now seems to be using it.
Salman Khan, who created it, is an advertising man. He knows how to present.
While the usual public school classroom just has students break into small groups and stare at one another.
Today is 9-11. Everyone remembers where they were on this day in 2001. It is one of the great inflection points in modern history, a day on which the world changed. Before 9-11, Muslim terrorism was not a thing. There was no Department of Homeland Security. Boarding a plane or crossing the US border was a relatively simple process. There were not metal detectors everywhere.
I have seen the argument recently that 9 – 11 inspired the new aggressive atheism. It gave many the ides that religion, or “extremism,” or believing in anything, was the root of all evil.
It also threw globalism in to reverse. Opening all doors to foreign influence and foreign cultures turned out to mean something more than a wider selection of restaurants and colourful ethnic dances in the multiculturalism festival.
And of course it led to a generation of war, in Afghainstan and Iraq.
I noticed that before 9-11, everyone was opposed to honouring soldiers and the military. After 9-11, soldiers were heroes.
What other such inflection points have there been in my own lifetime?
The first one has to be the Kennedy assassination. That seemed like the death of an era in which America was universally admired. Europe had messed up badly, but America was the great hope. The war was won, we had defeated the dragon. Sure, there was the Soviet Union, and the overhanging threat of nuclear war. But we at least had confidence in who the angels were, and who the devils were, and some evidence that angels win in the end.
The Kennedy assassination ended all that. Evil had won after all.
One almost immediate result was the death of the folk boom. Folk music was too innocent, optimistic, and socially engaged. In came the angrier and more self-centred electric music, the Beatles and the Stones and Blonde on Blonde. In came the drugs and the idea of turning on and dropping out: we gave up on “the system” and trusting authorities.
The other great inflection point was the fall of the Berlin Wall; 1989. Although this was mostly a symbol for the more drawn-out collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The bipolar world we had taken for granted was suddenly gone. People rather absurdly declared the “end of history.”
Lesser inflection points are perhaps the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1980, corresponding with the release of the Iran hostages; that is certainly an event burned into my memory. Perhaps by the same token the election of Trump in 2016. Perhaps the election of Pope Francis in 2013; perhaps that of John Paul II in 1978. Perhaps the War in the Falklands, which established Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady and signalled the returned vitality of Britain.
And perhaps too, although it was a couple of years instead of a day, the Covid pandemic. People any more tend to date things pre-Covid or post-Covid, the way they used to date things either pre-9/11 or post-9/11.
Everybody is expecting Donald Trump to win he big debate this evening. I think this is dangerous for Trump. Expectations for him ae too high. Harris will have to be really awful to be seen to have lost.
To begin with, this debate will naturally automatically be compared with the last one, against Biden. So if Harris can avoid actually drooling on stage, she will look good by comparison.
Harris has a reputation as a bad debater, because of her epic failure against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. This low expectation is automatically to her advantage: success in these debates is usually about exceeding expectations. And the low expectations may be unwarranted. Harris did well enough in a VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020; there is no reason to think ger skills have declined since then. And she is a lawyer and experienced prosecutor: the skills needed for that are debating skills.
Trump has a reputation for being deadly in debate. But he can’t use his best weapons against Harris: the sharp put-downs. Because Harris is a woman, and a minority woman at that, she gets special privilege. You can’t punch a woman hard, or you look like a bully. This is the reason I thought the Democrats should have gone with Tulsi Gabbard in 2020: Trump is weakest against a woman. Granted, he was able to debate Hillary Clinton effectively; but nobody really believes Hillary Clinton is a woman.
So I expect Harris to at least hold her own.
Trump’s hope must be that she chokes under the pressure. There are signs she has trouble handling pressure. But they can dope her up, can’t they?
Jagmeet Singh just pulled the plug on the NDP-Liberal pseudo-coalition.
This is as I predicted: he had to cancel it a decent interval before the next scheduled election, in order to give voters any reason to vote NDP instead of Liberal. He will now, to prove his bona fides, need to vote against the Liberals now in any plausible no-confidence motions.
This need not bring down the Liberal government. They could be kept in power by the BQ without the NDP.
But given the current polling, it probably will. The latest seat projections show the BQ becoming the official opposition, and both they and the NDP picking up 16 seats. So everyone but the Liberals has an incentive to force an election now.
Posts
