Politic Ill Logic

Many years ago I was accepted into law school, but I deferred entrance for a year because of travel plans. Fortunately I procrastinated and didn’t get around to buying a return ticket until nine years later, which gave me plenty of time to re-think my future. I would have made a terrible lawyer. I bloviate far too much to produce anything resembling a brief. When someone presents a viewpoint contrary to mine I often see the logic in their argument and am no longer convinced about what I thought were my convictions, a bad thing in a profession where convictions count. I would have been the judicial equivalent of the hockey player who shoots the puck into their team’s net.

Occasionally I do spot the flaw in an argument however. This happened the other day, when the Ontario Minister of something-or-other explained, following a Rick Mercer report on the Zenn car – which as far as I know is the only Canadian-made car, and an electric car to boot – that the reason the Zenn car can’t be sold in Ontario is that “it’s not safe to mix high- and low-speed vehicles on the road.” I started scratching my head when I heard this, and now I have a burgeoning bald spot. Never mind that the car can be sold in the U.S. The reason I find the Ontario Minister of something-or-other’s statement so illogical is that I am told I can’t ride my bike on the sidewalk; I have to ride it on the road and be part of normal traffic flow. I went to the Zenn website and checked the car’s specifications. Its top speed is 25 mph (which they don’t bother translating into kilometers because what’s the point? They can’t sell the car to kilometer-savvy Canadians). OK, it’s not fast. But neither am I on my bike, especially since I never oil the chain and the tires are seldom properly inflated. Here’s another bit of illogicality on the part of the Ontario government. You can’t drive a car until you’re 16, but you can buy one when you’re 14 (as long as it’s not a Zenn car). Do you save up your allowance, buy a car, and ask your mom to drive it home for you? That law does, however, harmonize with the federal government’s law regarding the age of sexual consent, which is also 14. So I guess maybe a car could come in handy, even if you can’t drive it. You can have legal sex in the back seat of your legally owned car when you’re 14, and what can your parents do about it?

To get into law, medical or graduate school you have to write an exam that has a logic component. When you apply for a government job you must have to write the same type of exam, but instead of going after the high scorers, the government must recruit the people who score the lowest on the logic section. Bonus points if, when asked why you want to work in the civil service, you reply that it has been a dream of yours ever since you read Nineteen Eighty-Four. More bonus points if you don’t see any contradiction in a signatory nation to the Geneva Conventions using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and still more bonus points if you can craft euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And you’re definitely hired if you can write passages like the following, which help prevent anyone from discerning the illogicalities in your government’s policies.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.*

* Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature, University of California 1997. This won first prize in the world’s worst writing contest.