DENVER – It has begun.
That’s the subject line of an e-mail my sister received that calls for a boycott of the new dollar coins from which “In God We Trust” has been expunged.
I heard a similar phrase while listening to a Sunday talk show panelist blast the new breast cancer detection guidelines. The guidelines, according to this Sabbath Gas Bag (the phrase is Calvin Trillin’s), are exactly what opponents of healthcare reform have been warning us about: government bureaucrats making healthcare decisions for us. And so it begins.
There’s no making sense of nonsense, but let us at least try to establish that it IS nonsense.
I hadn’t heard about “In God We Trust” not being part of the new coin design, but as soon as my sister read the e-mail aloud, my internal urban legend detector began beeping furiously.
So we went to Snopes.com and Urbanlegends.about.com, two Web sites that document and debunk all the latest free-floating rumors and tales. Sure enough, we learned that “In God We Trust” has been moved, not purged: It’s now on the side of the coins rather than on the face.
And yes, the inscription was left off the first batch of the new coins as a result of a minting error, according to the Associated Press. But of course, conspiracy theorists don’t believe in minting errors, not when they KNOW that godless communists are plotting to take over America.
As for the fear-mongering around healthcare reform: I suppose I understand people’s wariness about a government “takeover” of healthcare. The thinking is that absent the competitive pressures of the marketplace, the public sector has no incentive to do all the things a business needs to do to succeed: provide quality, cost-efficient service.
I also understand how people who already have health insurance are uncomfortable with changing the status quo.
What mystifies me is the failure to recognize that the status quo includes entrusting our health to a handful of large insurance and pharmaceutical companies whose primary purpose is to maximize their profits. We hate the idea of government bureaucrats rationing healthcare but have a touching faith in corporate bean counters rationing healthcare.
Also baffling is the failure to recognize that those who have led the charge against healthcare reform are – you guessed it – the insurance and pharmaceutical industries along with members of Congress who have taken some very generous donations from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Fortunately, not everybody who opposes Obama thinks he is a godless communist. Here in the Denver area, for example, there’s a car dealer who has gotten a fair amount of attention lately for a billboard on his lot that displays a caricature of a turbaned President Obama and the words “President or Jihad? Wake up, America! Remember Fort Hood!”
In an interview with the Denver Post, the car dealer said Obama “should prove he’s American.”
The guy’s not a racist, of course. None of these Obama abominators are. They just don’t think he ought to be president of the United States. So if he isn’t a godless communist he must be a foreign-born Muslim terrorist. Or, draw a Hitlerian mustache on him and call him a Nazi.
There’s nothing new about name-calling or rumor-mongering in politics. But in the late and not necessarily lamented gatekeeper age of journalism, the newspapers and the network news programs wouldn’t waste their space or our time on baseless charges.
Now, though, someone can get half the story — that “In God We Trust” is no longer on the face of a dollar coin or that Barack Obama’s father was a Muslim and an African – and miss or conveniently ignore the other half – that the motto was shifted to the side of the coin or inadvertently left off of some of them, or that Obama himself was born in the United States and raised Christian.
And then that ill-informed person can blog about this supposed outrage and a thousand other bloggers – along with Fox News — will follow suit until even reasonable people can be forgiven for thinking that the rumor would not circulate so widely or for so long if there wasn’t something to it.
Point out that if there were really something to it we would probably be hearing about it from legitimate news sources and you’ll find that legitimate news sources have been delegitimized by an assortment of commentators to the point where some people believe that the so-called legitimate news sources are in on the conspiracy of silence: So it begins – the “it” being nothing less than the demise of Our Way of Life.
All of this would be vastly entertaining if it weren’t exerting such a distorting effect on policy-making at a time when we could really use some wise governance.
Russell Frank: Columnist or Communist? You decide. Write to rfrank@psu.edu.
