The dog that didn’t bark (what Huckabee, McCain, Romney and Thompson are really telling us about the war on science)
In any war, you can wage a campaign of direct assault, feint and manouver. In bureaucratic wars, like the one waged by the Bush adminstration and their supporters in the Republican Party, that means you could pack commissions with those inimical to their missions — see this one, as analyzed in this depressing article. Or you could simply lie. Administration critics have pointed to what they say is false information about all kinds of health and science related issues, like the deception about condoms discussed in this post below. For a proper treatment of all the different ways that science has been the punching bag of Bush-led Washington, Chris Mooney’s book, or Seth Schulman’s both offer useful, dispiriting entry points to this sorry history.
However, there are some signs that tactics, at least, are changing. Maybe the frontal assault is giving way to a war of attrition. For example, the budget deal of last December (in which the nominally Democrat-controlled Congress is complicit) starved at least certain areas of science of all but bare life-support funding.
And more, from the GOP presidential hopeful debate in South Carolina two nights ago. I took a look at the transcript, and what was striking was what was not said — the silence of the curs. (Unfair, uncivil, but, as Doonesbury’s Duke once said, “The pension fund was just sitting there.”)
Tracking through the entire record of that debate I tried to find a mention of the word “science.” I found it once, when Romney called for investment in science and technology R & D to help create American energy independence.
How about “research?” Once again — and this time from the mouth of Chris Wallace, complaining that ideas like education, research and development are long term approaches to problems, and asking McCain what he would do right now about the possibility of a recession. (Yup — your press corps in action).
And, grasping at straws now, how about that magic bullet for all that ails us, “technology?”
Six times! Maybe there’s hope, if not for basic science, at least for a little support for engineering and applied science. Maybe we won’t have to wait for all those folks lending us money to buy their stuff to invent the cool gadgets they’re going to keep on selling us long after we have any hope of paying for them.
Or not. Romney used the word twice, McCain three times, and Thompson, with a spin all his own, once. In addition to his plug for energy independence, he thought science and technology were probably good for the country. (I paraphrase, but that’s the basic idea.)
McCain acknowledged the existence of an info-tech revolution, and then shouted out twice in a paragraph to the “tremendous technology in the state of Michigan,” that could pull us up into energy independence.
(The complete vapidity of the Republican approach to the energy issue is the story for another day. I took a long swipe at Huckabee’s “thinking” on this in an earlier post. Both McCain and Romney offer slightly more slickly packaged versions of the same pabulum. We don’t actually need to do anything at the federal level, because Michigan’s tremendous tech will somehow miraculously sweep the internal combustion engine, our electrical grid, our industrial power needs and all the rest into some blissful state of oil-and-gas free heat, light, warmth and motion. Forgive me. I don’t think so. But that’s all for a different post(s)).
Meanwhile – I got distracted. There was one more mention of technology in Thursday’s debate. Fred Thompson offered this nugget:
“I believe with all my heart that if we enforce the border, if we crack down on employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants, and required them to use the modern technology that we have now so that they can, in effect, push a button on the front end and find out whether or not someone is legal….if we did those things, we would have enforcement by attrition.”
Yup, that’s it. We don’t need more tech. We don’t need to research anything. We don’t need to train scientists or engineers, or even pay attention to teaching science and math better in the schools. All that we need to ensure a strong, prosperous America prepared for the 21st century is computers set up to make sure no undocumented bus boy clears your table.
It doesn’t take a frontal assault to destroy something. Attrition — each child that never gets taught, each grad student that gives up, gets out, does something else — can do the job just as well.
It’s true that science can be inconvenient, as much for the habits of thought it breeds as for any specific result. So better, perhaps, just to ignore it, except when it becomes necessary to wave the magic wand of “science and technology” as the solution for problems that are, in fact, political at their root. That’s what the GOP seems to have decided: that the best approach to science in 2008 is to pretend it isn’t really there, and to hope that maybe it will go away.
As it could, to the ruin of us all.
Image: Francisco de Goya, “Boys with Mastiff,” 1786-1787. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
