Quotes

Everyone has a point to prove, and I wish they would just go ahead and try to prove it on their own rather than relying on dead people. You’ve heard it a million times: “Thomas Jefferson said this, this and this.”
And then they just leave the point hanging there, because they believe there is nothing more to say. That since Thomas Jefferson said it, there is no more need for debate, because it must be so.
I’ve often wondered how Thomas Jefferson would have felt about this. If he could have known that every brain-dead hick in a wifebeater and a Cat Diesel Power hat would end up using his words to prove, for example, that Ford is superior to Chevy.
And does anyone ever stop to think that Thomas Jefferson may have occasionally been wrong about something? Maybe Thomas Jefferson just had his head up his tuchas one day, or maybe he was hungover, or maybe he had taken a fact from the wrong press kit.
But none of that matters to anyone. He could have been staggering up the steps of Monticello one afternoon with a whiskey bottle on one hand and a couple of Vicodin in the other and hollered to ye olde scribe “All men are created equal, but the redheads are masters of them all! And you can quote me on that. Hahahaha.”
You know that contributers to the editorial pages of today’s newspapers would be writing, like they’re all intellectual and stuff, “…and in the words of Thomas Jefferson, redheads are our masters.”
Just because they’re dead doesn’t make them right. Look at Lincoln. He said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” Wrong. Every school kid can recite the Gettysburg address, whether they have any idea what it means or not.
The problem with ancient quotes is that they give us no sense of context. When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” for all we know he could have been speaking at an Antioch Pacifist Union women’s auxiliary breakfast. What else was he going to say? You know how those things go. The speaker always tells the audience what it wants to hear. He may hate dogs, but if he’s speaking to the Humane Society he’ll tell them he laps coffee out of a dish.
Have you ever noticed that nobody ever quotes Hitler? I’m sure that along the way he must have said something that made sense. Something like, “The first step in establishing a civilized community is an adequate public sewer system.” But you never see the head of the local Sanitary District stand up and say, “As we move forward on our $14 million, gravity feed collector system, I can only recall the words of Hitler when speaking about civilized communities…”
At least no one is trying to put words in his mouth, a status Jefferson could only wish for — which, in the words of Monty Python, “is a hell of a thing.

Social Security

So now they're having a go at our Social Security benefits. Fine. They can have them. I would gladly sacrifice the estimated $23 a month (adjusted for inflation and incompetence) I stand to be raking in each month, if everyone would just agree to shut up about it until I reach the age where my hearing gives out of natural causes.
Now a leaked White House memo says a Social Security benefit "recalculation" may be necessary to avoid insolvency. For those who do not deal much in public policy, "recalculation" is a government word meaning "screw the public." This particular recalculation would result in benefit reductions of as much as 50 percent, although I think we can all relax a bit, because they will probably only take the full 50 from the people who need it.
For the rest of us, who are counting on Social Security in our retirement about as much as we are counting on Paris Hilton to deliver a white paper on astrophysics, it is unlikely to have much effect at all. Besides, we'll have this hefty 2 percent we will be able to invest in our own, private account, which we will trust to the same Wall Street investment brokers who brought us derivatives, Global Crossing and just last week were speaking glowingly at the "buy opportunity" at Krispy Kreme. Better the government would let us take 2 percent of our payroll deduction tax and put it under a mattress. Sure, the mice might get it, but if that is what it takes to keep it out of the clutches of J.P. Morgan Chase, I consider that a small price to pay. At least it would support the ecology. Otherwise, we just might as well take the two percent and put it straight into the pool for the investment bankers' Christmas bonus.
Of course all this is not to say that I fall in with the "remain calm, all is well" crowd that doesn't want to do anything to Social Security whatsoever. The thing is, I just don't think it's as horribly complicated as everyone makes it out to be. We know that soon more money will be going out of the fund than is coming into it. So you basically have two options: Bring in more money (higher taxes) or pay our less money (lower benefits). What's so tough to noodle through about that? Sure, I don't like it, but I don't like low-fat diets either. And sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Big deal.
One thing I DON'T want to see, though, is upping the retirement age. I don't mind working to age 82 myself, but I definitely don't want to see OTHER people working to that age. I don't want to have to shout into the drive-through box at Wendy's because the geezer with the headset only has his hearing aid turned up to 3. I don't run into an attendant at Home Depot who's never heard of "air conditioning." If I go into the hospital for outpatient surgery, I don't want to see the doctor rooting around the ER for his Coke-bottle-sized glasses, which have been perched on his head, the whole while. I don't want an airline pilot whose midafternoon cross-country route to Los Angeles coincides with naptime.
You can reform Social Security all you want, but if it involves going to the strip club and having one of the dancers suggestively remove her teeth and hurl them into the audience, leave me out of it.