The first phone call came at 7:05 a.m. I picked up the phone. “Dear Customer,” a recorded message began. “This call is to advise you that we have deducted $399.99 from your account to cover the renewal of your service policy. To approve this transaction, press one. To speak to a service representative, press two…”
I hung up instead.
But then the same call came every hour, for the next six hours. After seven calls, I had their telephone number memorized: 1-469-856-8871. Google tells me that’s a Dallas exchange.
Imagination off leash
I’m always tempted to talk back to recorded messages, the way I talk back to contestants on Jeopardy who know nothing about Canada. I’m even tempted to “press two” to see if I can tie the service representative’s mind into knots.
“Sir…”
“No.”
“No what?”
“My name isn’t ‘Sir’.”
“But sir…”
“If you don’t know my name, how do you know I’m your customer?”
Or perhaps I could play word games with them:
“Sir, we need to confirm your bank account to complete the transaction…”
“The woman’s message said you had already deducted the money --”
“The transaction is in process…”
“Seven times! That would be $2799.93 deducted from my bank account. There have been no deductions from my account today.”
“Electronic transactions normally take two working days.”
“Ha! I don’t have working days anymore. I’m retired.”
Or perhaps I could pretend to be cooperative.
“We need your account information to confirm your identity.”
“You called me. So you must already have that information. You tell me my account number, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”
“That’s confidential.”
“You’re lying. You don’t know my name and you don’t know my account number.”
Yes, I know, that’s pure fantasy. Wishful thinking. One of us would hang up long before the conversation got that far. But it’s fun, isn’t it, creating opponents we know we can conquer?
Inventing “straw men”
In philosophical circles, this practice is called the “straw man argument.” The Online Etymology Dictionarydefines “straw man” as “an easily refuted imaginary opponent.”
I had wrongly assumed that “straw man” referred to the hay-bale figures used to train British soldiers, in World War I days, in the proper use of bayonets. A straw man could be safely gored and gutted without fear of retaliation. But apparently the term goes back to 1620 or so, when it described false witnesses who could be bribed to say whatever was wanted.
Wikipedia defines the straw man as “giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent.”
Similarly, the Grammarist website suggests that it’s a political tactic that typically highlights the most extreme position of the opposing side before demolishing it.
So a conservative might characterize support for women’s reproductive rights as the wholesale slaughter of unborn babies.
A liberal might define anyone who opposes the teaching of evolution in schools as a brain-dead Bible-thumper who should have gone extinct with the rest of the dinosaurs.
There’s just enough truth in either caricature to make it seem credible to those already on-side. And so little truth that they’re easy to ridicule.
In the last federal election, Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer treated each other as straw men.
In the U.S., Donald Trump constantly creates straw men as a negotiating tactic. He charges his opponents -- North Korea, China, Iran, and Mexico -- with planning to do things they have no intention of doing. Then, when they don’t do what they never intended to do anyway, he can claim a victory for himself.
Becoming aware
I must confess that I sometimes create my own straw men. I criticize the least defensible views of climate change deniers, to show that my own views are more reasonable.
Do I actually convince anyone?
I doubt it. Often, it feels more like spitting into the wind.
As a debating tactic, invoking a straw man tends to push you towards one of three options:
· Ignore the straw man, and thereby leave the charges unchallenged.
· Refute it, and find yourself allied with your opponent against a position neither of you hold.
· Digress into explaining the flaws of the straw man argument, and get distracted from the main issue.
None of those choices are helpful. Especially when dealing with recorded messages from Dallas. Or tweets from Washington.
The best defence against the “straw man” is to become aware of its seductive allure. Wherever it comes from. Even if you create it yourself.
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Copyright © 2020 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
It was risky, I guess, maybe even foolhardy, to try to imagine how people would react to the certainty of death as a plane goes down. Thank you for not telling me so! The fact is that, unless someone has extraordinary psychic abilities, we will never know what it was like on Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752, or any of the other crashes I mentioned.
Mary Collins came closest to telling me I didn’t know what I was writing about. “A good friend lost her husband in the Ethiopian Airline crash in March last year,” she wrote. “He was world renowned for his work for the environment, particularly forests and woodlots. As you know, they had a ghastly six minutes of the plane racing up and down and up and down as the pilots tried to control it. I can't imagine what it's like for the remaining families to imagine their loved ones living through those six minutes.”
Frank Martens reflected on his own experience of almost crashing: “Like most people I have had some near-death experiences – car crashes, train derailments, commercial flight diversions. With enough time to think about it, a person generally shows some physical signs of fright.
“Having gained a license as a private pilot in my forties, a friend and I decided to build an ultralight from a kit in the days when they were a bit of a fad.
“One day, flying at about 100 feet, the plane suddenly went into a nosedive. I clearly recall saying to myself, ‘Frank, you can kiss your ass goodbye,’ but from the training I had had in light aircraft, I instinctively pushed the stick forward (which would seem contrary to what you would think should be done) and the plane came out of its dive. I leveled out and landed to catch my breath. Obviously, I had stalled the aircraft. Without proper instrumentation, the plane couldn’t signal the stall as in commercial craft.
“I’m not exactly sure how I felt at the time. Perhaps shock. Certainly some fear. But with enough presence of mind to remember the training I’d previously had.”
Bob Rollwagen took a larger overview: “Life is a lottery. If you survive birth, you have drawn a winning ticket. [But] we do not get the same opportunity; circumstance plays a big role. Just think of the visitor to Iran who decided to stay one more day and changed his flight. I have been in situations that I might not have survived but I did and I am still puzzled as to how and why.
“While I work every day to appreciate my life, I would be frustrated and mad if I was going down in a plane. I am not sure if you get much time to have these emotions. Accidents happen. Fingers crossed. Life is not necessarily fair.”
John McTavish remembered one of his heroes: "’This is the end. For me... the beginning of life.’ So said Bonhoeffer as the Gestapo interrupted the little worship service that he was leading in the spring of 1945 for his soon-to-be-free fellow prisoners.
“Whatever truth Bonhoeffer was voicing that day, we can only hope and pray that it was also somehow comforting the passengers on the flight out of Tehran.”
Tom Watson agreed with my scorn of media coverage: “As you suggest, one of the preoccupations of some media outlets, in discussing the downed plane was with the political implications for President Trump. In the grand scheme of things, who gives a tinker's damn about Trump's popularity?”
Fran Ota responded to Gery Kenney’s letter, last week, about U.S. interference in other country’s business: “Norio and I lived in Viet Nam from 1971-74, leaving six months ahead of the North Vietnamese takeover. Street knowledge said there would be a major change in April of 1975, so it would be good to get out early. A cursory glance at the history of Viet Nam has the U.S. prolonging the war when peace was all but assured, assassinating Ngo Dinh Diem essentially because he wasn’t taking things the right way, and replacing him with Nguyen Van Thieu. Both, if I recall, were U.S. educated, but Thieu essentially did what he was told. He was a violent dictator. And the ‘elections’ were entirely rigged. False or faulty ‘intelligence’, murder of civilians, bombing of hospitals and orphanages, and throughout it all, the notion of American exceptionalism.
“The problem is, as Gary Kenny notes, scratch almost any American deep enough and they’ll reassert that same sentiment. And until they learn they are not entitled to do whatever they like, in whatever country, it will be hard to address anything else.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.