Column One

What all's in a name?

What's in a name? Lots in the case of Jacob Trieber v. Prejudice of Every Kind. There's not only justice, history and pure Americanism but ironies galore. For just as this historic figure was recently being given his due when the Helena-West Helena federal building was renamed the Jacob Trieber Federal Building, it came complete with a politically correct version of his saga celebrating, yep, racial quotas by some other name, in this case diversity.

Just listen to Rayman Solomon of Rutgers Law School praising Jacob Trieber, the first Jewish judge in the U.S. to serve on the federal bench, for all the wrong reasons, beginning with effusive compliments for those Ivy League schools that are changing the names on their buildings to match their preconceptions, not to say preoccupations:

"We live in a time when great institutions, such as Yale and Princeton, are forced to re-examine the naming of buildings for men who failed in their actions to rise above the prevailing prejudices of their time." Even though they were embodying them.

Or here is our own United States senator and distinguished bore, The Hon. John Boozman, tripping all over himself in the process of trying to squeeze more contradictory concepts than can be fit into a coherent view of anything at all:

"Trieber paved the way for diversity on the federal bench, sought equal justice for all people. His decision on the bench helped fight injustice and laid the foundation for equality with a lasting civil legacy that continues to impact our country."

How's that for pure-dee word salad? Forget how he turns a noun (impact) into a verb, a common enough stumble. Just ask how you can squeeze all those warring ideas into one. The answer: You can't. But that doesn't stop our doubleplusgood experts from plowing straight ahead into utter confusion. There is nothing so simple they cannot turn it into an unintelligible mishmash.

Words are but the currency of thought, and like economists who believe they can inflate the currency yet retain its value, they have mistaken the counterfeit for the real. Welcome to the Weimar Republic, where Germans had to use wheelbarrows to transport all their worthless banknotes just to buy a loaf of bread.

Only a Soveconomist might think any of this made any sense at all, though the Russians themselves were never fooled. They understood they were living with a pretend government they could neither believe nor trust. Yet we're all supposed to go along with this high-falutin' rhetoric that contradicts itself with every breath. If somehow you can find your way through this word jungle, you're way ahead of me. I gave up long ago. And never want to go back there again--yet keep finding myself circling back to where I started.

A whole generation seems to have lost sight of Henry David Thoreau's admonition when it comes not just to prose but ideas in general: Simplify, simplify, simplify. Thoreau had to be content with repetition while our masterminds find all kinds of ways to repeat themselves without saying anything at all.

The greatness of Jacob Trieber is only brought out by the smallness of those who would praise him now. Jacob Trieber was an admirably simple man who made an admirably simple contribution to the law in his time, and one that has endured until ours. What a pity it's being turned into a mine of misunderstandings.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 09/18/2016

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