0651 - Marzipan

Warning! This column has nothing to do with Marzipan, and never was scheduled to discuss this outdated confection of ground almonds, egg whites and sugar. The name was just a placeholder. What the OO wants to talk about is the concept of mathematical elegance, and the related low level of public discourse and argument in the United States, and indeed in Anguilla, as well as the rest of the world. Let us start with elegance. An elegant proof is one which is short, convincing and sparse to the point of beauty: "Scientific exactness and precision" says a dictionary. That is what is lacking in the recent U.S. Congressional so-called debates about any subject whatsoever, and also lacking in the e-mails sent to the OO by the faithful supporters of the Bush-Cheney foreign adventures and attacks on the Constitution. It is also, we regret to say, lacking in some communications from Faithful Readers who don't read what we say. May we continue?

As a simple example, let us take the Estate Tax, discussed last week, where we noted that the arguments for total abolition (to save family farms and small businesses, prevent double taxation of already taxed income) were total twaddle. We did not say an Estate tax starting at a very high percentage of estates over a small minimum was desirable or sensible. We just said the arguments for creating a hereditary plutocracy of billionaires were twaddle. So, we don't deserve belaborment by Faithful Readers who don't dispute the appellation of twaddle, but say they have saved small sums after heavy taxation, and want to pass them on to their loving families. Since you are not billionaires, your somewhat smaller estates would not suffer major harm if we were in Congress, which we aren't.

Now, since we said "Congress", that body has achieved discourse that is meaningless, meanwhile neglecting the important business of the nation, which is not building special give-away projects to bribe constituents. We note with pleasure that the intelligent U.S. electorate now realizes the silliness of their Congress and in polls awards it approval ratings below even the war in Iraq. Feeling a bit below the weather after a hard week, the OO spent several days reclining and watching the Congress pretend to debate. Not a word that was said had anything to do with the subject, whether it was Estate Tax abolition (failed), or Constitutional Amendments to forbid Gay Marriage (failed) or flag-burning (failed), or just getting out of Iraq. Now, granted that getting out of Iraq is important, while flag-burning doesn't happen much these days, when discussing an important topic proper argument is not to repeat slogans like "Cut and run". If we were in charge of the Democratic opposition (and alas, we are not), we would hammer away on the demonstrated incompetence of Rummy, Cheney, and the Prez, and on explicit sensible things to be done to get out of this mess. [Note to the Democratic National Committee: we have on our Staff here the fellow who invented the anti-Nixon slogan "Would you buy a used car from this man?". Feel free to adapt it to attack those who brought you Iraq.]

On the much-vexed subject of immigration, the Republicans are badly split. They seem to be destroying the hope of ever again getting a Latino vote, but meanwhile neither party is doing anything to stem the flood of illegals. [Anguilla has the same problem, incidentally.] The Democrats are enjoying the fracture, but have uncleverly decided to support the Bush solution as if it were a solution. So nothing at all happened. Shall we offer our own views for misunderstanding? We are in favor of mandatory use of English in the U.S., not for bad reasons, but because failure to learn English means people are condemned to low pay and stoop labor forever.

Next time: AXAUnit [OO #652]

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