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Truth Is No Stranger to Friction

By Dale Short

You can say all the bad stuff you want about politics, but at least it gets our

attentionnot to mention, gets under our skins.

At about this time in an election year, for instance, we're to the point where

we assume that anything anybody says to us is bound to have a hidden political

meaning. The Culture War in America is at a fever pitch we haven't seen since--

well, four years ago.

Even the giant convenience-store chain Seven/Eleven is inviting bleary-eyed

morning customers to choose either a red (Romney) or blue (Obama) cup for their

coffee, and the daily accounting is released in the form of a political poll.

In fact, a person can't even tell a simple story without some listener com-

plaining that it has a thinly veiled, devious partisan message.

Such as, the story about a place that once decided it was spending way too

much in tax money on public education and, instead, people should pay privately

for their own schooling. This proved to be a popular idea, especially among high-

ranking citizens (i.e., those who had money) and new private schools and universi-

ties flourished.

Without those pesky teaching credentials to worry about, anybody and

his/her brother/sister could start up a school and charge money to attend it. And so

they did. With the free market kicking in, teachers could set their prices basedstrictly on how popular they were. And so they did.

The superstar teacher at the time was a man named Gorgias (pronounced

"gorgeous")--not to be confused with Gorgeous George, who was a different type

of wrestler in a different country at a different time.

Gorgias would become famous for inventing a new style of rhetoric, known

today as Sophism, which is defined as a specious form of argument used for de-

ception.

(Wikipedia adds, Such an argument might be crafted to appear logical

while actually representing a falsehood, or it might use obscure words and compli-

cated sentence constructions in order to intimidate the opponent into agreement out

of fear of feeling foolish. Other techniques include manipulating the opponent's

prejudices and emotions to overcome their logical faculties.)

People paid big bucks to hear Gorgias's town-hall-style speeches, but the

main attraction was what followed a speech. People in the audience who consid-

ered themselves educated (i.e., in the old-fashioned public way, such as Socrates,

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