Mindful Digressions

What could have been

I’m not what one would call an emotional guy, so it would be highly unusual for something I came across in a magazine or newspaper to cause me to shed a tear. However, when I read last week about someone whose comic book collection sold for $3.5 million, I cried like a baby. Why, you ask, would some other person’s good fortune elicit such a response in me? Good question.

It dates back to my childhood in the 1950s. Each week, my parents gave me a dollar allowance, which was a small fortune for a pre-teen back in the day. I would hop on my bike, ride to the local newsstand, and spend much of my dollar buying the latest edition of ten cent comic books. Whatever was left over was spent on packages of baseball cards. Each package included a flat, square piece of bubble gum and seven baseball cards with the players’ photos on the front and vital statistics on the back.

This weekly ritual continued from the mid-Fifties through the early Sixties, during which time I amassed a collection of thousands of baseball cards and hundreds of comic books. Most of the comic books were superhero comics from DC Comics and Marvel. Yes, I admit that I would occasionally buy an Archie comic book and, in my younger days, I would sometimes pick up a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck comic book.

By the time I got to high school, my collection of comic books and baseball cards, which I kept neatly organized in our finished basement, was unrivaled in my neighborhood. But when my mother opened up a knitting store just a few doors down from the very newsstand where I acquired my vast collections, she asked me to move my comics and baseball cards from the basement so she could store all of her extra yarns and knitting supplies down there.

Our house was a three bedroom split-level, but because we needed four bedrooms, my parents re-purposed what was originally intended to be a lower-level recreation room, which is what “family rooms” were called back then, into a fourth bedroom. My bedroom. When the closet for the recreation-room-turned-bedroom was constructed, a wide and deep storage shelf was built into the back. It was the perfect place for my collections and I carefully moved all of my cherished comics and beloved baseball cards from the basement to that shelf in the back of my closet.

Kid stuff

Then, when I went off to college, the unthinkable happened. I came home during one of my sophomore year breaks and went to hang up the clothes I brought with me. When I opened my closet door, I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing...or more precisely, not seeing. The huge shelf in the back of the closet was filled with skeins of yarn. I ran upstairs to the living room where my father was sitting in his easy chair reading the newspaper.

“Where are my comic books and baseball cards?” I screamed. My father calmly explained that he needed space in the basement for his tools, so he moved my mother’s yarns and knitting supplies to the back of my closet. “Okay,” I said, fearing the worst, “but where did you move my comic books and baseball cards?” I could sense from the expression on his face that what I was about to hear would, indeed, be the worst.

“That’s kid stuff,” he dismissively replied. “You’re in college now. You’re too old to be playing with comic books and baseball cards.” And then he dropped the bomb. “So I threw them all away in order to make room for your mother’s yarns.”

I’m not suggesting that my 50s-60s comic book and baseball card collections would have fetched $3.5 million, as did the 30s-40s collection of the guy in the article. But I had some classic baseball cards, including rookie cards of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Harmon Killebrew, along with a whole host of cards, all in pristine condition, of mid-century baseball legends. And my comic book collection was vast and most were in great shape, having been read only once or twice.

So let’s put it this way, I’m reasonably sure that my two collections, had they not been unceremoniously tossed out by my father, would have permitted me to have retired by now and to feel financially secure for the remainder of my life.

As I learned during my Werner Erhard est training in the early Seventies, what is, is, and, after all these years, I have forgiven my father, who, in his defense, was clueless as to the true worth of what he had so casually discarded.

Still, reading about the 3.5 million dollar take on fewer comic books than I owned, not even including my immense collection of baseball cards, did bring about a strong, visceral reaction as I pondered not what is, but what could have been.

Be fruitful and multiply

I have been biting my tongue, figuratively speaking, trying hard not to be drawn into this silliness that virtually every Republican politician and most members of the Catholic clergy are calling a “war on freedom of religion” and a violation of the First Amendment.

Well politics is politics and as Isaac Newton once noted in his third law of politics, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Okay, so this wasn’t Newton’s third law of politics, but his third law of motion. Politics, physics...what’s the difference?

I’ve been trying to understand the logic behind the Catholic Church’s intractable and contradictory positions on birth control and abortion. Of course, trying to apply logic to religious belief is a fool’s errand, as logic and religious belief are wholly (or holy?) incompatible.

Some might argue that because I’m not Catholic...in fact, not a member of any organized religion...I have no standing on this matter or any right to question the dogma of the Catholic Church. But given that this has become a political hot potato that could effect the outcome of the presidential election in November, as an American citizen, I believe I do have standing.

Back to the subject at hand, I’m having trouble comprehending why the Church considers both artificial birth control and abortion to be sins. Does the Church really equate the “sin” of preventing a pregnancy through the use of contraceptives with the “sin” of terminating a pregnancy through abortion? Apparently it does.

I did some research and I learned a few interesting things that I hadn’t previously known. For example, I didn’t realize that prior to 1965, contraception, even for married couples, was illegal in many states. But in 1965, in the case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found that a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptions violated the “right to marital privacy.” Seriously? 1965!

I also learned, according to religiousconsultation.org, that the contemporary “Catholic position” on contraception only dates back to a 1930 encyclical of Pope Pius XI. The Pope decided to tidy up what was described as a “mixed and jumbled” tradition by declaring that “contraception and sterilization were sins against nature and abortion was a sin against life.”

And how about this gem? Until the 19^th Century, the Church believed that sperm were “little homunculi, miniature people,” and for this reason male masturbation was sometimes called homicide. Honestly, I swear I am not making that up.

Perhaps that’s why God, so the bible says, took the life of Onan when he “wasted his seed on the ground” in order not to give offspring to his brother. Apparently that really pissed God off, and he smote the fifthy seed-waster. Hey, even for God, imposing the death penalty for masturbation seems a bit harsh.

But I still hadn’t figured out why the Catholic Church is so adamant about the seemingly incongruent positions banning both birth control and abortion. It seems to me that birth control would likely reduce the demand for abortions by preventing unplanned pregnancies in the first place.

I finally broke the code, though. It’s all about populating the planet with as many Catholics as possible. According to catholicsource.net, God said, “Behold, children are a gift of the Lord; the fruit of the womb is a reward.” In Genesis the bible states, “And God blessed them [Adam and Eve]; and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

So there it is. Fruitfulness in marriage is a commandment from God that is repeated numerous times in the bible. The use of contraceptives violates this commandment because it attempts to prevent couples from being fruitful and multiplying. In other words, the Catholic Church wants its members to be breeders for the Church. Perhaps that why they refer to their parishoners as “the flock.”

There is no argument from me that every religion has the right to its own set of beliefs, no matter how preposterous. But are the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church today as applicable and relevant as they may have been when the bible, upon which those beliefs are based, was written centuries ago? And should the beliefs and convictions of one religion be imposed, in this case as restrictions to personal freedoms, on those who have a different set of beliefs?

Whether or not you support or oppose a woman’s right to choose, when it comes to birth control, there is simply no legitimate reason to oppose the use of contraceptives. The Catholic Church’s position on birth control is backward, regressive, and is clearly out of touch with the contemporary American needs of its followers. After all, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 98% of all sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the Church.

I have a tough time comprehending how Republicans politicians object to government involvement when it comes to the economy and how they fight against imposing regulations over big buisness. Or how member of the clergy fight tooth and nail against any kind of government involvement in their religious practices. Yet when it comes to getting involved in and regulating the personal and private reproductive decisions of women, both Republicans and the clergy welcome government intervension.

It’s a true paradox, unless you happen to be a member of the Catholic clergy, a Republican politician, or an ultra-conservative pundit, in which case you embrace it.

This is totally absurd.

Manscaping

My wife asked me the other day if I’d ever heard the term “manscaping.”

Uh oh, I thought. This is surely a set up question. You know what I mean, right? It’s a wife-asks-her-husband-a-question-for-which no-answer-he-can-give-is-safe question. It’s a “Honey, do you think I look fat in these jeans?” kind of question. If he says “no,” she’ll accuse him of being dishonest and of patronizing her. If he says “yes,”...well, I don’t even want to think about that. It’s one of those loaded questions and he’s gonna find himself in the dog house no matter how he responds.

But I digress. I thought for a moment about the word in question and figured it had something to do with lawn care. You know, the manly art of landscaping. Then I thought perhaps this was a lead in to being taken to task for paying a landscaping company to do that sort of stuff instead of saving us money and doing it myself.

But because I still wasn’t sure what it meant, I asked her to ’splain it to me. “You know how women often trim their pubic hair, get a ‘bikini’ cut, or a ‘Brazilian’ trim,” she explained. “Well, manscaping is when men shave or trim their body hair.”

“You mean down there”? I asked, pointing toward my groin while moving my legs tightly together in a crotch-protecting stance. “Why would a guy do that to himself?” The word “ouch” came to mind. This is something that simply never occurred to me.

My wife patiently explained that men might engage in manscaping for the same reason that women shave their arm pits, their legs, and shave or trim their pubic hairs. It’s cleaner, it’s smoother, it’s sexier.

Too much information

Fair warning: what you’re about to read might be considered TMI, so proceed with caution. I’m a hairy guy. I have thick, flowing hair covering much of my body. Except, of course, on the top of my head, which is the only place I would actually want to have thick, flowing hair. Nothing but puny little fuzzies can be found growing up there anymore.

But I digress yet again. When I was going through late adolescence and early adulthood, I couldn’t wait for my chest hair to grow. Back then, a hairy chest was considered manly, masculine, and a sure sign of virility. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had acquired a thick, fur-like covering of chest hair. In fact, my back and upper arms were nearly has hairy as my chest. And I was blessed (or some might think cursed) with a thick patch of the short-curlies “down there.”

I hadn’t given much thought to my abundant body hair until my wife asked me about manscaping. In fact, I was content with, and maybe even a little proud of, my man-fur. It simply never crossed my mind that some might think it gross or perhaps a bit too Neanderthal.

I Googled “manscaping” to see what it’s all about and was surprised to find more than 600,000 hits. I came across an article in The Daily Beast with the dubious title, Why ‘Manscaping’ Isn’t Just for Porn Stars Anymore.

It seems that male deforestation, while not yet the norm, is gaining in popularity and is starting to move into the mainstream of men’s grooming habits. There’s even a term for the male equivalent of the Brazilian female trim, the article noted. It’s called the “Boyzilian.” Cute, eh?

Not so cute, though, was when the same article mentioned that some guys regularly get their butt cracks waxed. Hey, I warned you...TMI.

Manscaping seems to have become a big business. Who knew? One site, About.com, goes into depth about the whys, the dos, and the don’ts of manscaping. I learned, for example, that “keeping a neatly trimmed chest, back, shoulders...and more...will make you appear cleaner and send the message that you care about grooming.” I did not know that.

And I was shocked when I read in that same article that “nobody likes a hairy back and shoulders.” Omigod, nobody likes me!

Okay, it’s not as if I needed yet another reason to shun being seen in public in a bathing suit. Isn’t it bad enough that I have spindly chicken legs? Now I’ve got to be concerned about causing people to puke when they see my disgustingly hairy back and gross hairy shoulders that nobody likes!

Well, it is what it is. I am not going to succumb to this ludicrous manscaping trend. I’m announcing here and now that there is no way any hair removal wax, razor, or shaver is going to get anywhere near my body below my neck. I may be hairier than the average bear, but it’s who I am.

Besides, my wife is secretly into braiding the hair on my back.

Seriously, Virginia?

When did Virginia become part of the Deep South?

I was raised in the Maryland suburbs of DC, and back then, Virginia was THE place for young adults to live and play. In an effort to further promote the state and boost tourism, Virginia launched its catchy and highly successful slogan, “Virginia is for Lovers.”

My home state countered with its own slogan, “Maryland is for Crabs,” which, while catchy, in hindsight might not have been the best way of promoting what one can catch when visiting that state.

But that was then. Today, a mere 40 years later, Virginia is anything but the place for lovers. In fact, the Republican-led Virginia House of Delegates is in the midst of enacting two legislative initiatives that are basically telling lovers, particularly fertile lovers, to keep out.

First, Virginia is poised to become the first state in the nation to grant personhood rights to fertilized eggs. This “personhood” law would criminalize the birth control pill, stem cell research, and perhaps even In Vitro Fertility (IVF) assistance for childless couples. And, of course, since the proposed legislation defines “personhood” as beginning at the moment of conception and gives legal rights to a human fertilized egg, it essentially equates abortion with murder, even in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment.

During the debate, Republican delegate Todd Gilbert said, about a woman’s decision to have an abortion, “in the vast majority of these cases, these [abortions] are matters of lifestyle convenience.” Yeah, just like being gay is a lifestyle choice, right?

As if that’s not enough, the Virginia House also passed a rather Draconian piece of legislation that would require a woman who might seek a legal abortion in the state to submit to a “transvaginal ultrasound,” essentially a forced vaginal invasion. I’m told that this procedure is not only medically unnecessary, it is painful and humiliating. It is essentially being imposed on a woman against her will, like rape with a foreign object.

Further, according to an article in Slate, doctors in the Commonwealth will be required to certify whether or not the patient “availed herself of the opportunity” to view the ultrasound or listen to the fetal heartbeat. That certification would go into the woman’s medical records...whether she wants it there or not. So much for the legal definition of physician-patient privilege and the concept of confidentiality of patient personal health information.

Yet both of these Constitutionally questionable and personally invasive measures are likely to become law in a state where Republicans control both the House and Senate and where the governor, Bob McDonnell, is a socially conservative Catholic.

Interestingly, an amendment that would have required any man seeking Viagra to get a rectal exam did not make it into the law. Coming from a predominantly white male state legislature, that certainly is a shocker!

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. I think you just elected him into your House of Delegates.

Hallmark holiday

Valentine’s Day is almost upon us and aren’t our little, romantic hearts all aflutter?

Not mine. Call me an unromantic, jaded cynic, but to me, Valentine’s Day, as celebrated in this country, is a totally bogus “holiday.” That’s why a column that recently appeared in the local newspaper caught my eye. The column in question was written by syndicated columnist Tom Purcell.

Purcell wrote, “To men, Valentine’s Day is a contrived undertaking that makes mandatory the things...flowers, dining out, expensive jewelry...that should be reserved for the times when we do something really stupid and are desperate to make up.” Hear, hear, Mr. Purcell!

I started to wonder what really was behind this so called holiday, so I Googled “Valentine’s Day.” It turns out that Saint Valentine’s Day was originally observed to honor early Christian martyrs. The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine, all of whom were martyred. Interestingly, no romantic elements are present in the original early medieval records of these martyrs.

According to the site history.com, some historians believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Saint Valentine’s death. Hmm. Were all three saints named Valentine martyred around the same time? Did it happen in Chicago and was Al Capone invovled?

But others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place Saint Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia, which was celebrated around the middle of February.

Lupercalia was a festival in honor of Lupa, the she-wolf who suckled the infant orphans, Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Lupercalia translates to "Wolf Festival." During the festival, Roman priests would sacrifice a goat for fertility and a dog for purification. They would then cut the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood, and take to the streets where they would gently slap both women and crop fields with the goat hide strips.

Oh wow, it doesn’t get any more romantic than that, does it?

Having educated myself on what Valentine’s Day is really about, I am more convinced than ever that it is the epitome of the expression “Hallmark holiday,” a somewhat disparaging, albeit completely accurate, term to describe a holiday that exists primarily for commercial purposes. I know this to be true because I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Valentine’s Day as a romantic holiday was probably concocted during an intense, closed-door brainstorming session at the Kansas City headquarters of Hallmark Cards, Inc. The Hallmark executives were no doubt trying to figure out how to sell more cards during the lull between the Christmas and Easter holidays.

And that, my friends, is the true story about how Valentine’s Day in America was born. Of course, as Mark Twain once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”  Hear hear, Mr. Twain!

Of course, when my wife reads this blog post, there is no doubt that, as Tom Purcell warned, I will have done something really stupid by posting this and will be desperate to make up.

Damn you Hallmark Cards, Inc. and your stupid Hallmark holiday.

Super Bust

At the risk of sounding like every other bummed out, whiny, frustrated New England Patriots fan, sure, I was disappointed by the outcome of the Super Bowl. I would liked to have seen the Patriots win and bring the Lombardi Trophy back to New England. And I hate the New York Giants almost as much as I hate the New York Yankees.

Still, I can’t deny that the Giants deserve kudos. They won, fair and square. Quite simply, Eli Manning and his guys outplayed Tom Brady and his. The Giants’ receivers made some remarkable clutch catches, while the Pats’ receivers seemed to suffer, particularly during those crucial, late-game drives, from a serious case of the dropsies.

So we need to cut Giselle Bundchen some slack. Brady’s supermodel girlfriend was just standing by her man when she reacted to “Manning rules” taunts by a Giants fan after Sunday’s game. “You have to catch the ball when you’re supposed to catch the ball,” she snapped back at the fan. Adding fuel to the flame, she continued, “My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time. I can’t believe they dropped the ball so many times.”

And while that is so true, Giselle, perhaps next year, when Brady and the Patriots return to the Super Bowl and do win it all, you should try to keep in mind that old adage about how kids...and supermodels...should be seen and not heard, right?

But I digress. Getting back to the game, which was distressful for those of us who are Patriots fans, the real disappointment for me was the mediocrity of this year’s highly anticipated crop of Super Bowl commercials.

Make no mistake. I do enjoy the Super Bowl games, even when one of “my” teams is not playing and I am, therefore, relatively indifferent about the final outcome. As long as it’s not a lopsided blow-out, that is. A close, exciting, well-played football game is great to watch, even when you don’t really care all that much about the teams on the field.

But let’s be honest. When you aren’t really invested in the success of either team, the real attraction is the ads. As the New York Post recently reported, a Nielsen survey found that 51% of those who watch the Super Bowl do so more for the advertisements than for the actual game.

After all, when companies pay an average of $3.5 million for a 30-second spot and are competing for the hearts, minds, and, most important, wallets of more than 110 million viewers, you expect a lot.

So yes, I look forward to the creative, innovative, and entertaining Super Bowl ads. And no, I didn’t go to the internet to take a sneak peek at the Super Bowl ads released on the web days before the big game. I wanted to be surprised and delighted in “real-time” during the game.

Sadly, this year there were considerably more misses than hits. When you get right down to it, it was pretty much the same old thing. Dogs, polar bears, babies, mostly second-tier celebrities, beer, soda, cars, and, of course, sex. Honestly, I didn’t see much that was genuinely new and exciting...or even very entertaining.

I was really looking forward to this much anticipated rematch between the Patriots and Giants, the grudge game in which the Pats were going to achieve redemption and would show the world that what happened at the Super Bowl four years ago was a fluke. And I was eager to see all of the clever, creative, funny Super Bowl ads.

In the end, both turned out to be a super bust.

Facts versus truth

When I first read Faulkner’s quote, I was perplexed. I had always considered “facts” and “truth” to be synonyms. Even the definition of each word cross references the other:

Fact: something that actually exists; reality; truth. Truth: conformity with fact or reality; a verified or indisputable fact.

Certainly facts are used as proof of what is undeniably the truth, but are they truly interchangeable words or do they actually have different meanings and usage?

At this point I was curious enough about the similarities and differences between these two words to conduct some Google searches. 

I learned that not everyone believes that the two words in question are synonymous. Some folks actually differentiate between the two words using diametrically opposed logic. One site argued that facts can be fleeting, enduring for but a moment. For example, the fact of someone’s location on a fast-moving train changes every instant. Truth, on the other hand is a more enduring type of fact, this source claimed.

Another site argued that if it’s a fact now, it will be a fact in the future, whereas truth is more temporal. Facts indicate a universal truth, while truth depends upon temporal circumstances. For example, that the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west is a fact. It will never change.

I found an interesting site, differencebetween.net, that provided four facts about facts and truths:

• Facts are more objective when compared to the more subjective truths.
• Facts are more permanent when compared to the more temporary truths.
• Facts exist in reality, whereas truths are usually the things that one believes to be true, or the things that are true in the current situation.
• Facts can also answer the ‘where,’ ‘when,’ and ‘how’ questions, whereas truths answer the ‘why’ question.

So what?

Why this quest for the facts to help acquire the truth about facts and truth? Well, I personally experienced exactly what Faulkner was referring to in his quote at the top of this posting.

Here is one fact. This past Thursday, in the early afternoon, I posted a blog, Bad history, which was critical of the Tennessee Tea Party’s initiative to change American history textbooks to be more Founding Fathers-friendly.

Another fact is, as anyone who knows me knows, I am a huge fan of Stephen Colbert’s nightly Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, which is broadcast at 11:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday nights. On his Tuesday night show this past week, in his “The Word” segment, Colbert did a satirical piece critical of the Tennessee Tea Party’s desire to re-write history.

A third fact is that I typically go to bed at around 10 p.m. each weeknight. In order to watch The Colbert Report, I set my DVR to record it, along with The Daily Show. I usually watch both of the recorded shows the next evening.

Based upon these three accurate facts, one might conclude that I, shall we say, “appropriated” this particular topic for my last post; that I watched the Tuesday night recording of The Colbert Report on Wednesday evening, saw his segment about the Tennessee Tea Party’s wish to re-write history, and unabashedly stole the idea for my blog, which was not posted until Thursday.

But that is NOT the truth.

Here is another fact. On Wednesday night, which is when I would normally have watched Tuesday night’s The Colbert Report episode, my wife and I went out to dinner in Boston. By the time we got home to Worcester, it was after 9:30...almost bedtime. We decided to forgo our usual routine of watching the recordings of the prior night’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Instead,we headed up to our bedroom, where we watched reruns of House Hunters and House Hunters International on HGTV.

Thus, it was not until Thursday night, hours after I had posted my blog, when my wife and I watched the recordings of The Colbert Report from the previous two nights. When Colbert’s “The Word” segment began, I said to my wife, “Hey, that’s what I just blogged about earlier today.” She wasn’t particularly impressed.

The fact is that I didn’t know, when I posted about the Tennessee Tea Party on my blog, that Colbert had done a segment on it two nights earlier. In this case, the facts would lead one to believe that I based my blog posting on something I saw on The Colbert Report. But the truth is that I posted my blog about the Tennessee Tea Party before I saw or even knew that Colbert had aired such a segment.

That is how I came to understand what William Faulkner was talking about when he said “Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.”

 And that’s the truth.

Bad history

If you don’t like what actually happened in the past, the solution is simple. Rewrite history.

On this very site in May 2010 I posted something I titled The Texas Textbook Massacre. That posting was about how the very conservative Texas State Board of Education decided to alter the state’s social studies and history textbooks so that they would more appropriately promote the notion of the United States a Christian nation governed by Christian principles.

The changes imposed by the school board reconsidered certain historical events and personalities in order to better jibe with the views and values of the far right and Christian conservatives on the board.

For example, the somewhat revised version of history to be published in newly approved U.S. history textbooks suitable for Texas school children removed all but cursory mention of Thomas Jefferson. In the view of the Texas school board, Jefferson, that unholy, slave-screwing deist, was deemed to be an unfit example of an influential political philosopher.

Most egregious, though, was how the conservative majority on the school board proposed that the revised textbooks refer to the slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade.”

Fast forward to January 2012 and look at what is happening in Tennessee. The Tennessee Tea Party is proposing to eliminate references to slave ownership and other “mean and nasty habits” of our Founding Fathers from American history textbooks.

As Hal Rounds, the Tennessee Tea Party’s spokesman, said at a news conference, “an awful lot of made-up criticism about the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another” needs to be corrected.

Never mind that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with one of his slaves, or that John Adams had at least one slave working for him at the White House. Apparently, according to the Tennessee Tea Party, that is simply “made-up criticism.”

Yes, school children across our glorious, Christian nation should be taught that these virtuous and flawless men, our Founding Fathers, the framers of our Constitution, must only be remembered as paragons of infallibility.

Just look at how these wise men, a number of whom were, themselves, slave owners, avoided the contentious issue of slavery in the new country they were forming. They simply agreed to adopt a provision in the Constitution known as the Three-Fifths Compromise.

This provision counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives and for distribution of tax dollars. Well, all things considered, that was relatively good news for slaves. After all, Native Americans were not considered persons at all.

Let us not, my friends, allow actual historical facts to adversely affect the sensibilities of those fine young minds in Tennessee. After all, the purpose of modifying history textbooks in Tennessee is to ensure that “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

Hey, I get it. Just because something actually occurred doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually happened. Or, as far as Tennessee Tea Partiers are concerned, that it actually mattered.