Professor Joseph Olson: a man more sinned against than sinning
A response to the Cycle of Nations (click to view)
Oh dear. We all love the Internet don�t we? Those endless lists of jokes, those pearls of wisdom that seem to flow unceasingly into our already overflowing E-mail boxes and terminally cluttered minds. The Internet is many diverse things simultaneously: one is that it easily fulfils the promise of a fantasy world in which Clangers are animated and where I have an unimpeachable taste in music. At its best, it offers a goodly proportion of the planet an opportunity to share interests, discuss themes, develop ideas; at its worst, it is an almighty quagmire, an endless game of Chinese whispers which makes office discussion about the sex life of David Beckham seem sane, rational and worthwhile in comparison.
All of which leads me to my first point of substance: the views of Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St Paul, Minnesota. I read the following lines attributed to him with some interest:
"In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory encompassed those citizens living in the government-owned tenements and living off government welfare...."
There was something rather odd about the phrasing, I thought: it seemed to have a little of the rabble-rousing journalese about it, but I kind of put it down to the purple prose of a right-wing college professor in the Mid-West. Hell, that doesn�t seem to be such a leap of faith does it? I had similarly put down the fact that Professor Olson had provided us with a total of 48 states (States won by: Gore = 19 Bush = 29), when in US presidential elections there are effectively 51 states (including DC), down to a typo that had got passed down from computer to computer. The statistics provided for the area of land won by Bush and Gore would be rebutted easily enough, I thought�Bush won nearly all of the large (in area) Mountain states, as I recalled, and the hardly miniscule Alaska�not really so many people there, I knew. Well, I thought, lies, damned lies and the Internet.
The Internet indeed. I quickly found Professor Olson�s home page- click here to view it. Hmm, no horns, I thought on the esteemed professor, and he didn�t appear to look much like Pat Buchanan. I scrolled down the page, and there it was:
DISCLAIMER: There is an e-mail floating around the internet dealing with the 2000 Bush/Gore election, remarks of a Scotish [sic] philosopher named Alexander Tyler, etc. Part of it is attributed to me. It is entirely BOGUS as to my authorship. I've been trying to kill it for 3 years. For details see: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp.
You know, I really wish I had cottoned earlier. One way of looking at it is that the e-mail was the work of someone who might seize control of the printing presses of the Daily Mail, print headlines like BLAIR�S PLAN TO EXTERMINATE MIDDLE CLASSES IN DEATH CAMPS or ENGLAND TO BE MERGED WITH NORTH-WEST BELGIUM IN NEW EU SCHEME to provoke knowing glances and asides from the said organ�s readership along the lines of �you see�this new editor is really speaking my language��*
The whole thing is completely debunked on the webpage indicated above:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp
As the page makes clear, it�s a sloppy, malicious, E-mail, and even more unforgivably, the total area of the USA is 3,619,000 square miles and not the 23,070,000 indicated�.. ( feel free to call me a pedant, as I�ve been called far worse in my time).
As the debunking page demonstrates, the long quotation from Alexander Tyler doesn�t exist either, so we have ended up with a faked response to a non-existent citation, so we might as well stop here. Except, and there always is an except�any political idea, no matter how right (or left) field always demands a response from somebody, anybody�me even.
The concept that societies move from one phase to another (From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; for example) is not in and of itself an unusual or controversial idea- economists of all hues will have their own paths of progress mapped out over decades or centuries. Marx had a word or two to say about the eventual development of communism from capitalism; Nikita Khrushchev, in the late 1950s envisioned the Soviet Union achieving the early stages of communism by 1980. If only they hadn�t booted him out in 1964...**
The language of the e-mail is apocalyptic in that the writer (who may well be holed up in a survivalist commune somewhere in North Dakota for all we know) imagines that the American economy and its democracy needs to be saved from meltdown due to the excessive demands of welfare claimants, and cloaks his/her views with some completely bogus academic references. Either that, or it is an elaborate hoax by Michael Moore or Howard Stern, or someone of their ilk to make some conservative Republicans look (even more?) ridiculous by lapping up its nonsense with a straight face.
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