A couple of months ago, an old friend--an oceanographer from Italy who has studied here--together with his new wife were being feted at a dinner party featuring an ethnically, politically, and interestingly diverse crowd. During the dinner, I was seated between a husband and wife team who were prominent figures in the local left establishment. They had already been trounced in a serious duke-out  with a writer and literature professor, so they were licking their wounds as they surrounded me with pearls from their repertoire of left and far left insights.

We were all quite civil, in fact generally friendly, with no (well, almost no) raised voices all evening. After dinner, we went to the living room where the real fun began. I suppose much of what happened had to do with my position as a university professor of International Business Economics. The goal seemed to be to induce me to certify or underwrite their various opinions, which would make it possible for them to rely on my expert testimony and therefore feel more secure in future political discussions. They finished the evening quite disappointed.

I was amused by their tendency to ask questions at least in threes. For example, the husband opened the conversation with a lengthy monologue which was actually about 15 different questions rolled into one. I pointed this out, but was met with objections that they (it) were (was) really only one question. Hence, if there was only one question, there was only one answer:  The sinister corporate coterie, consisting of 15 to 20 large corporations and their fat cat capitalist bosses, had conspired against all the rest of us causing hardship for the many and riches for the few. I didn’t underwrite their opinion, so the conversation, although remaining civil, began making substantive contributions to anthropogenic global warming.

In fact, we did get to the subject of global warming. After a few minutes, the wife asked me, "Do you agree with George Bush that there is no such thing as global warming?" It occurred to me later, much too late, that I should have countered with the question, "Do you agree with Adolf Hitler that the people should not be allowed to own guns?" Instead, I spelled out the Fred Singer/Denis Avery argument concerning the 1500 year earth warming/cooling cycle. I pointed out the many advantages we had in our last global warming period in about 950 – 1450, including healthier individuals, better diets, a workable growing season on Greenland, vast numbers of European, Cambodian, and other castles, palaces, and cathedrals. The husband then considered all this, repeating somewhat doubtfully even the existence of earlier warming periods, and blurted out the question, "Well, who caused that?" I guess I should have answered "God," an explanation that would have made little headway, but instead muttered a bit about nature. It would take too much space to consider the question, but really, if you believe humans, dominated by a nasty conspiracy, are causing today’s global warming, there must have been some similar nasty groups back then. I figure it was a bunch of priests, crusaders, and self-indulgent royal or aristocratic anti-heroes from various Shakespearian dramas. Some dominant exploiter had to be riding astride and yoking the poor folk, otherwise there wouldn’t have been a class struggle.

About this time I concluded that these two people actually were from another planet, perhaps one that is made out of anti-matter. A physicist might differ with my interpretation here, but it seems to me that the existence of anti-matter planets implies that what is true here is false there and vice-versa. What is isn’t and what isn’t is. Rude of me, I suppose, but I couldn’t help but drift mentally to some far away galaxy. And I couldn’t help but wonder what the cultural relativists might think of all this. After all, even if I consider the other planet’s matter to be anti-matter, they consider it just matter and that ours is anti. So how can I say theirs is anti and ours just matter. Isn’t that some form of bigoted galactocentric thinking? Point well taken. I guess it all depends on what your definition of isn’t isn’t.

-GIR-

GRIH Member Jim Marsh is a Professor of International Business Economics at the University of Hawaii.