Not A Blog™

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You can’t make this stuff up.

The background to this one is pretty straightforward. A few weeks ago, I was in Washington DC visiting the National Museum of Natural History. I entered an exhibit toward the back of the mineralogy wing where there were two large nuggets of platinum on display. As the display says, platinum nuggets are not common, but they do exist.

As my friend and I are standing there admiring this precious metal, a small girl points excitedly at the display and says exactly what I’ve got there. The father (who may or may not have been wearing glasses and carrying a camera; I don’t recall), said, without turning around, that there’s no such thing.

I suspect a few moments later he turned around and saw the display. But at that moment of time where he was denying the existence of something literally four feet behind him—a more perfect metaphor for the state of rational discourse in this country today does not exist.

I don’t begrudge the guy getting his facts wrong. I hope he realized the mistake and learned something that day, but he hadn’t gotten to the display yet and probably just didn’t know very much about platinum. It happens.

The larger problem is that many people are doing this on an ongoing basis, every day, in a more abstract sense. Many more people do turn around and see the display—and immediately denounce it as an evil falsehood, made up to poison our children and destroy civilization as we know it. The cartoon is a concrete version of a more complex problem, but the connection is, I hope, clear.

-Pulsar