PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE:  This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

The words in this blog headline – words often used by a friend of mine – came to mind as I read a recent column by Leonard Pitts who works for the Miami Herald and whose prose appears in the Washington Post.

A good wordsmith, Pitt got right to the point when he wrote this:

“My brother-in-law died of ‘hogwash.’

“Another brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law, two cousins and several grandchildren are all recovering from hogwash. My wife spent a week in the hospital with hogwash.  I tested positive for hogwash but had few symptoms.

“Hogwash,” Pitts continued, “was the word a grocery-store owner in Naples, Florida, used last month in dismissing the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic.  This, after a viral video showing his patrons and employees going about their business without facial coverings, as if they had time-traveled here from 2019.”

As we observe our first anniversary of life in a pandemic, Pitts said many of us are taking stock of the various ways we have been impacted.

“The most obvious, of course, is the human toll:  One American in every 11 has tested positive, one in every 628 has died.  But even those who’ve escaped that fate haven’t escaped the virus’ touch.  It has transformed virtually every field of endeavor:  Sports, education, entertainment, the environment, the economy, eldercare, worship, justice, journalism, protest and politics, to name a few.  Its effects have also been felt in an arena you may not have considered, though here it has not so much changed something as revealed it.”

“Meaning: it has shown us the high cost of living in a facts-optional — indeed, an anti-fact — society.”

Pitts pointed to two events, which, he said illustrated the anti-fact tendency.  One was the effort to downplay the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by a zealot army drunk on conspiracy theories as laughable as they were deadly.  The other was regarding the pandemic as “hogwash,” though it has killed more than 525,000 Americans.

Pitts argued that, when facts cease to matter, consequences do, too.

“When everybody has their own truth, and no two truths look alike, we will become -=- as we are becoming — a society unable to effectively mobilize itself, even to save its own life.  If we are to avoid that fate, journalists must disenthrall themselves from false equivalence and stop boosting entertaining liars, voters must extract a penalty at the ballot box from politicians who embrace the anti-fact ethos, social media must be more aggressive in denying platforms to anti-fact super spreaders, and educators must make a priority of teaching critical thinking, civics and media literacy.”

In response to the notions from Pitts, it is surprising, though perhaps it should not be, that a quarter of members of the U.S. House and Senate have not yet received a virus vaccine, some because they don’t believe in the efficacy of it.  Not to mention that Senator Rand Paul recently went after scientist and government official Anthony Fauci in a hearing when Fauci advocated continuing to adhere to virus protections, such as wearing masks.

To put it simply, I’ll side with Fauci, not Paul. It is not possible to correct stupid – and, in this case, that means Paul.