Purple Polka Dotted Elephants
When I was in third grade, my teacher, Miss Wasley, invited students to stand up and tell a joke to the class the next day. I went home, and at dinner that night I asked my parents if they knew of a joke I could tell, and they happily complied. The joke they told me went something like this: A little girl stood up in front of her class and declared, “There are no purple polka dotted elephants in this room!” When the teacher asked the little girl to prove it, she looked at the teacher and said, “Look around and tell me if you see one.” The teacher and students surveyed the classroom and agreed that not one person could see an elephant of any sort - much less a purple polka dotted one. The little girl gleefully said, “See, I told you so.”
I thought the joke was hilarious and told it with great bravado to my class. Nobody laughed. I was 8 years old, but I knew that if you have to explain a joke, you’re toast as a comedian. And although I understood why the joke was funny, I lacked the resources to explain it.
But bravo for Miss Wasley; she had had the presence of mind to ask me to prove my assertion. She was voicing the famous statement that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”. But looking back, Wasley only got so far in our debate because she failed to counter my response. She failed at cracking the logical fallacy that won the day: the challenge of proving a negative and objecting to my shifting of the burden of proof.
And to the consternation of half of America, it appears that we’re right back in Miss Wasley’s 3rd grade classroom. We have a Vice President who speaks with such moral authority that he must know something that we don’t know. Apparently, God speaks directly to him and tells him what to think and what to do. And with God’s complete endorsement comes Pence’s contention that he’s merely a vessel with an unlimited line of celestial credit. Now that’s a whopper, no matter how you look at it. Fatuous piety. But he knows a winning tactic when he sees one, and he’s in danger of getting tired of winning with this millennia-old shtick.
In fact this tactic is such a winner in the US that these God Whisperers are cropping up in elections throughout the country. In addition to the inimitable Roy Moore, Republican candidates like him are winning GOP nominations everywhere.
We’re in the midst of another intellectual herpes outbreak from a virus that lies dormant in all Western cultures. It spreads like wildfire when our shared ideal of religious tolerance becomes so inane, so sloppy, that having an open mind results in our collective brains falling out. If we don’t call out these frauds and confront this plague of religious zealotry now, they’ll be disemboweling heretics by 2020.
