The Center has Collapsed

If there are two things that I don’t like, they are these: 

Hypocrisy and mendacity – two nefariously complementary characteristics which have been on full display in the Senate hearings of Brett Cavanaugh for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.


I’m not going into preferences here, but I will go into the behavior of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its overly sycophantic supporters of whatever persuasion.



There is a principle of balance in statistics, one which we applied daily in my last position with AT&T.  Our tight, three-person working team relied heavily upon that concept in the modeling of business competitors’ prices in comparison to those of AT&T.
  

Pricing data which appeared in our models to be to  the extreme left or to the extreme right of the statistical data curves were not considered in the final analysis, because they were too far removed from the center, thereby providing no reliable credibility.


This analytic concept is generally well-respected, whether the data curves are bell-shaped or skewed.


OK! What does this have to do with the Cavanaugh/Ford nightmare raging in our nation’s Capital?


Plenty!


The political center has collapsed.
  

There remains nothing but a totality of extremes to the left and to the right, and the rest of us are the losers.  Hypocrisy and mendacity have seeped into the heart of the public square and have established residency there.


This weekend, as the battle in the halls of the Senate chambers rages toward what may very well be its conclusion, perhaps we should take a close look in our morning mirrors and pause to think of how we may have contributed, however slightly, to the destruction of civil polity in America.


Or, if you prefer, consider this musing by William Shakespeare in The Tempest:


 “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”