Reading Is Fundamental

 A while back, I followed through on my somewhat absurd threat to explain the infield fly rule. That one came about as a response to artificial intelligence "making sense" out of things by breezing through Al Gore's Internet to provide a skimmed version of what anybody and everybody else believes is "sense." I will take my stance one step further here by asserting that I would take Artificial Intelligence a lot more seriously if I knew that it had actually sat through an extra innings baseball game that ended up being decided by the aforementioned rule. 

At the time I was making a point about the way so many of us tend to take for granted that certain bits of cultural ephemera are exactly what they have been told they were by someone else. This reminds me of the way baby birds get fed by mommy birds regurgitating into their gaping beaks. You should always trust whatever your mom decides to barf into your mouth. Or your elected representatives. This same group of people who complained bitterly when they were given "only three days" to read the ninety-nine pages of the debt ceiling bill. Who has time to read when you're spending all that time complaining about having to read? 

Which moves us down a notch to the most recent argument about things we should read and understand before we have arguments about them: The Presidential Records Act. This little bit of cultural ephemera came to be in 1978 and was put into active use in January 20, 1981. It is not a fun read. It's about a page long, and even though the text is a little dense, it reads pretty clearly as a road map for how presidents, sitting, former, and incumbent should handle their records. What it doesn't mention is how presidents, sitting, former and incumbent should handle confidential documents. It does address how presidential records move from private to public, and that these records become part of the National Archives. It was written to keep the mess that happened at the end of the Nixon administration, when Tricky Dick tried to take all of his dirty laundry with him, from happening again. To wit: "Prevents an individual who has been convicted of a crime related to the review, retention, removal, or destruction of records from being given access to any original records." You know, like somebody who has been impeached twice, indicted a couple of times, and currently under investigation for sedition and insurrection. 

So, if you're watching the television and someone comes on foaming at the mouth about how the former game show host is absolved from keeping top secret documents in a bathroom because of the Presidential Records Act, keep in mind that their intelligence is either artificial or inadequate.