The Death of Logic

Burt Prelutsky
Friday, November 28, 2008

The problem with being a logical human being is that every day, sometimes every hour, you get blind-sided like a quarterback cursed with an underachieving offensive line.

It’s bad enough when a movie or a mystery novel scores a big fat zero on the logic meter, but when it happens in real life, if you’re anything like me, you find yourself wondering if you have somehow followed Alice down the rabbit hole.

For instance, one day not too long ago, a headline in the sports section of my local daily, the Los Angeles Times, insisted that black players were underrepresented in major league baseball. On the face of it, that is one of the silliest examples of race-baiting that one could possibly come up with. That was the same day they ran 17 photos in the section, and all but four were of black athletes, and one of the four was a race horse. (I was moved to write a letter to the editor, asking if perhaps black athletes were over-represented in the paper.)

The fact is, professional baseball is one of the only true meritocracies left in America. If you can hit, catch or throw a baseball better than 99.9999999% of the human race, the team owners want to make you an instant millionaire, and the folks signing your paycheck don’t care what color your skin is or whether your name is Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Ishiro Suzuki or Hideki Matsui.

Still, one can’t help but ponder how the Times would go about making things right. Would they begin by getting rid of all the Latino players from Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic?

But as asinine as that article was, the Times sports section managed to out-do itself more recently. They ran a piece suggesting that racism was the reason that there were only four blacks coaching football at the major colleges. That particular story ran on November 5th, the day after a black man was elected president of the United States, garnering 66 million votes. But I guess the Times missed the news because they were so busy fretting about football coaches.

This kind of focusing on presumed racism is enough to give a person pause. While everyone, well perhaps not everyone, was celebrating the election of Barack Obama, I found myself wondering what happens in 2012 if Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal defeats Obama in his bid for re-election? Will that mean that we are back to being a racist society? I’m dead certain that will be the conclusion of the Times, and one shared by Chris Matthews, Alan Colmes and Michelle Obama.

Still, as absurd and illogical as my newspaper is, that’s nothing compared to the lunacy taking place in our courts. To take a recent example, 100 Somali Muslims sued Gold’n Plump, a meat processing outfit with plants in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the Work Connection, an employment agency, for $350,000…and, quite naturally, won. It seems the Muslims took five prayer breaks a day, which resulted in the non-Muslim workers complaining that it was unfair to them, while the employment agency had asked the Muslims to sign a form acknowledging that they might be required to handle pork.

The lawsuits, by the way, were filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Your tax dollars at work. It occurs to me that the motto at the EEOC, like that in Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” is that all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Why anyone in his right mind would hire people who feel entitled to five prayer breaks a day is beyond me, but clearly the folks at the EEOC have way too much time on their hands. Come to think of it, perhaps that would be a good place for the Somalis to go looking for new jobs. But I suppose Washington is not the place to settle if you can’t risk coming in contact with pork.

In conclusion, as most of you are aware, homosexuals have been rioting pretty much non-stop ever since California’s electorate once again put the kibosh on same-sex marriages. They have picketed and vandalized Catholic and Mormon churches to display their displeasure, which suggests to me that, instead of “gays” being their euphemism of choice, perhaps “cranks,” “louts” or “bigots” might be more appropriate.

The one group of churches they haven’t gone after are the black ones, even though 70% of blacks voted in favor of marriage being limited to one man and one woman. What’s more, blacks were very vocal about objecting to homosexual marriages being touted as a civil right. The fact that, in spite of all this, homosexuals have given black churches a wide berth suggests that while gays may not always practice safe sex, they certainly practice safe demonstrations.