The background, from FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center), “Meme Doctors Quote From Well-Known Satirist” by Angelo Fichera on 12/12/19:
[satirical columnist Andy] Borowitz … in a post to his verified Facebook page in 2016:
Stopping T**mp is a short-term solution. The long-term solution, and it will be more difficult, is fixing the educational system that has created so many people ignorant enough to vote for T**mp.
This was quoted (in a punctuational variant) on Facebook today, with ensuing commentary (edited some here):
— Hana Filip: I used to think along these lines, as well. But now I don’t. Vance (JD Yale U), Hegseth (Princeton, Harvard alum) and many others supporting Trump got educated at some of the best universities in the US. Germany had the most Nobel prize winners between the wars, and arguably a high level of education of its general population. So good education alone, or being exposed to high educational standards alone, does not suffice to make people immune to wrong, really stupid choices.
— Karen Chung > HF: It’s not enough. But it can give people tools for better critical thinking.
— HF > KC: Exactly, which is what I used to think. The stunning part is that even if you have those critical analytical tools, you may still not use them or put them to questionable use. So this is which must be addressed, fixed.
— AZ > HF: Or people put them to straightforwardly wicked ends. The tools can be used in many ways. I absolutely agree that school education is a social good, but without a humane moral education it’s just a really good hammer that can be used as a murder weapon.
I try to avoid sententious slogan-slinging, but this one came to me out of the air — which usually means I’m quoting someone without realizing it, dammit, but this one I can’t find — and it struck me as a vivid expression of an idea I’m deeply committed to, so I put it out on the net.
There’s an analogous experience in lecturing, which for me is a performance on a set outline (not a recitation of a memorized text), tailored to the audience and the setting and sensitive to the way the audience is responding: in the enthusiasm of the moment, I blurt out something so striking that I think (in the part of my mind devoted to evaluating what I’m doing at the surface), wow, cool stuff, I had no idea I thought that, and my whole body is happy. It feels akin to my experiences with alternative states of consciousness, some of which I have more or less control over, while others come on me unbidden, like lightning strikes.
So: lecturer’s lightning, writer’s lightning. I know, I know: epiphany ‘a moment of sudden revelation or insight’, but I tend to go for metaphors closer to the sensory ground.
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