Sunday, May 23, 1999
What's the big idea?
BY PETER BRONSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
There are 88,413 words written in federal gun laws, according to Alan Korwin, author of Gun Laws of America. Yes, he counts them. And last year, he says, they grew 6 percent — not counting state laws.
So what will President Clinton and Congress do about school shootings? Pass another heaping plateful of gun laws.
Networks, news magazines and most newspapers are in favor of using the First Amendment to repeal the Second.
Voters hear “gun control” and get a warm, spreading sensation that something is actually being done.
So don't mention that pipe bombs are just as effective as guns, without any waiting period. Don't point out that anyone who spends a whole year building bombs probably can figure out a trigger lock. And never mind that the two boys who killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School broke 40 gun laws — that didn't slow them down long enough to reload.
It's blaming time. Senseless violence calls for senseless politics. And now that Joe Camel has been burned at the stake, guns are liberals' favorite target. If Republicans don't join the gun-control mob, they will be blamed next time.
But this is not about guns, school shootings or a federal mandate requiring a five-day “cooling off” period for stupid laws. This is about big ideas. I only mention all that other stuff because answering school shootings with more gun laws is such a good example of a tiny idea from miniature minds.
It is like a grain of sand with the gravitational pull of a dying star: It sucks everything — logic, reason, facts, experience — into a black hole. Nothing comes out of it.
Big ideas, on the other hand, are not even in the same universe. They loom out of the darkness like a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea — hard to find, massive, bending our perceptions, mixing the excitement of discovery with an intuition of familiarity, as if we knew it was there all along.
Here's a Titanic idea: “The End of Truth.”
It comes from Alvin Toffler, the author of Third Wave and Future Shock, who predicted the Internet back in the 1970s. He spins off extra-large ideas the way Al Gore hatches sad little fibs about being the “father of the Internet.”
“Special effects are so fantastic they can make you believe anything is true,” Mr. Toffler explained in a recent visit to Cincinnati. “Seeing is no longer believing.”
Any image can be altered. An entire Star Wars universe is created and some people think it's more real than life. Dead presidents show up in movies. John Wayne rises from the grave for a Coors beer.
“It creates enormous skepticism,” Mr. Toffler said. “There is no truth.”
Aha, I thought. In a world without truth, we are all card-carrying cynics and the most skillful liar is king — or president.
So we wink and nod and elbow each other — proudly spotting lies like the first kid in class who finds the hidden squirrel in a drawing of leaves.
In a world where truth has died, a wise man is someone who knows he's being deceived and shrugs it off. A fool is anyone who seeks truth or believes it exists.
And we don't have to wait 20 years to see what that kind of world looks like.
It's a world where we pretend 88,413 words of gun laws can stop bullets.
It's a world where we wage a “humanitarian war,” bombing refugees to protect their “diversity,” while the president who started the war lectures us about solving problems without resorting to violence.
A tiny headline in The New York Times last Wednesday said: “Clinton Keeps Option For Ground Troops.”
Amazing. For nearly two months of bombing, Gen. Bubba scrunched his chin, wagged his finger, bit his lip and stubbornly refused to consider sending ground troops to Yugoslavia.
And when he makes a sudden U-turn, the Times makes it sound like he was going that way all along: “Clinton keeps” an “option” he denied he ever had.
The image is altered. The face of failure is removed from photographs of the parade.
The end of truth.
Mr. Toffler has another big idea: “The countervailing force is going to be religion,” he said. He fears a backlash from people who want more from life than a strong economy. Christians vs. Rome, the rematch.
We don't have to wait for that, either.
In the library at Columbine High School, one of the killers asked Cassie Bernal, 17, if she believed in God.
“Yes, I believe,” she said.
The killer asked “Why?” — then shot her to death before she could answer.
Another 88,413 words of gun laws can't answer that question or stop the lost kid who asked it. He was looking for the big idea Cassie had:
Truth.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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