The End of Imagination  

By Harry T. Cook 

3/22/13

Harry T. Cook

"I believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. It's what I believe. It's what my church teaches me. And I can't imagine that position would ever change."

-- The Hon. John Boehner, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

A rigid Catholic hierarchy could not -- or would not -- allow itself to imagine that Galileo could successfully invalidate the church's doctrine of "the perfectibility of the heavens" merely by observing sunspots. They could not imagine that Earth was not the center of the universe.

Finally, in 1992 Pope John Paul II issued a hedged and convoluted apology for the church's lack of imagination, which caused Galileo to live out the last nine years of his life under house arrest. His crime? Being right.

Tens of thousands of people still cannot imagine that Charles Darwin was anything but a heretic and a kook for suggesting that human beings had evolved and were evolving through the process of natural selection from lower forms of life.

Few people before the Wright Brothers undertook to make a fixed-wing airplane fly thought such a thing was possible. Henry David Thoreau, as he watched the first locomotive steam into Concord, grumped that is was only "meanness going faster."

The common knowledge in 1491 was that Christopher Columbus & Co. would take the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria right over the edge of the Earth and into eternal oblivion if they pressed on. It's hard to believe, but flat-Earthers are still among us. They cannot imagine that Earth, which seems so horizontal to them, could possibly be round.

Inoculation against smallpox was once dismissed by many as defying the will of God, despite the obvious fact that it prevented many deaths. If they had to invest belief in a deity, could they not have imagined a less vengeful one?

A young Henry Ford vowed in the 1890s that within 10 years there would not be a single horse on the streets of Detroit. His detractors asked if the horses would then be married. "Get a horse" was the epithet shouted at early motorists. Clergy denounced the automobile as a work of Satan. They could not imagine today's crowded streets and freeways.

The man third in line of succession to the presidency says he can't imagine ever countenancing the marriage of two men or two women. Funny thing, that. Plenty of men are already married to one another, plenty of women to women, too. So John Boenher can't imagine what is already manifest?

Travel in space was an idea once reserved to the deranged. The myth of Icarus was routinely cited as the argument against any such thing. People just couldn't imagine it. Then came Yuri Gagarin and later Alan Shepard. Later, yet, the first human beings to walk on the surface of Earth's moon. Those things happened because those who had imagined them as possibilities acted upon their imaginations.

Why can't Boehner and people like him do the same?

If human beings never indulged their imaginations, our houses and apartments, given global warming, would be well nigh uninhabitable in summer. If Samuel Morse had not imagined being able to communicate by dots and dashes over a copper wire, the telegram would never have become a major means of almost instantaneous communication.

Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi and the geniuses who figured out the Internet -- all entertained wild imaginings that many, if not most people in their times thought ludicrous -- if they thought of them at all.

John Boehner and his lot need to allow themselves to imagine a little more freely and creatively. Imagination may be the signal characteristic that makes us really human. In any event and for so many reasons, ours is no time for the end of imagination.

re essay of 3/15/13 States' Rights              

Mark Carlson, Athens, TX:

I am a Texan who actually agrees with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that taxes are the price of civilization! Yes, we really do exist! This was a great essay.

Janice Fuller, Wichita, KN:

Your characterization of my state will be seen as unfair here. But Thomas Franks spelled it all out in his book, What's The Matter With Kansas. But please don't send your Genesiseans here.

Rusty Hancock, Madison Heights, MI:

If everybody was a one-issue voter, you might have a plan there. But what if you wanted to take part in the programs (or lack thereof) of more than one state? How would you ever pick which paradise of paranoia and discrimination to move to? Goodness, the distress that might cause. And if Mr. Stewart (a commenter) would really feel safe leaving the "improvement" of Social Security and Medicare to the Republicans, I wish him luck. That would be the rough equivalent of leaving to Adolph Hitler the problem of how "regular" Europeans were supposed to live with the Jews. As Marco Rubio recently said at CPAC, and I paraphrase, there's nothing wrong with this country, it's doing fine, so why should we try to fix anything? I'm so glad to know that he and everyone he knows is doing fine. We all know that everyone has health care insurance, a job, enough money, a good education, wonderful prospects for the future, and a complete lack of discrimination in their lives.

Charles White, Plymouth, MI:

Your "bright" idea is flawed. Your own words point out the contradiction in your one-sided thinking. I certainly hope that your "bright" idea goes nowhere. States allowing working citizens to have the free choice to choose to pay union dues is enabling them, not forcing them to pay for unions they don't support.

Keep in mind that the worst-case scenario of late is our own federal government that decided to increase the tax rates on the rich, depriving them of making their own choices on how their money should be spent and invested. Other peoples' already-much-lower tax rates affected also? No. That is a clear example of "making laws these days favor depriving certain people of certain choices." Demonizing states rights is despicable. The ability of the states to pass laws is the only final check and balance against a federal government that is depriving certain people of certain choices.

Ralph McFarren, Cambridge, MA:

I grew up in Mississippi. My best friend was, as we said then, "queer." I learned to say "gay," but never said it out loud. Such a place is Mississippi.

Mark Bendure, Grosse Pointe Park, MI:

You ask where we would be if Abraham Lincoln had accepted the secessionists' desire to build their own nation. Judging from the electoral choices, policies and practices of those from Confederate States, we would be a damned sight better off in the remainder of the country without the Confederate States being part of the Union (though African Americans in those states might have a different view).

Fred Fenton, Concord, CA:

"States rights" has ever and always been the cry of those seeking to deny constitutional rights guaranteed to all citizens. One of the large consequences of the Civil War was to change the focus from independent states to a unified nation. Before 1861 the two words "United States" were generally considered a plural noun. Thus, "The United States are a republic." After the war "United States" had become a singular noun. We now say, "The united States is . . ." This has obvious import for the way we read the Tenth Amendment. We also need to move from national sates' rights to affirmation of the "One World" as seen by Wendell Willkie. The U.S. should stop defying the United Nations and the World Court when they find us in violation of international law and human rights.