D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e      january 2005

Matters of Fact

Where is Jack Webb ("Just the facts, ma'am") now that we need him?

The "Me Decade." The "Roaring Twenties." Here we are, almost halfway through the first decade of the 21st century, and we still don't know what to call it--the Aughts? the Zeroes? the Zips?--much less have a nickname that'll stick.

May I make a modest suggestion? This seems to be shaping up as the "Don't Confuse Me with the Facts Decade."

Our current lackadaisical approach to the facts was brought home to me recently by one of my daughter's college term-paper assignments. She was supposed to write about a historical event from the viewpoint of different generations--a Baby Boomer, someone from the "Greatest Generation," etc. According to her professor, I did not qualify as a Baby Boomer, despite being born in 1956. Somehow this professor had decided that generations span only seven years (talk about precocious offspring!), not 17 or 18, and thus the Baby Boom ended with 1952.

I sputtered with arguments and emailed citations to my daughter. Even the US Census Bureau agrees that the Baby Boom generation dates from 1946-1964! No matter. Evidently facts make no difference. Reality is what the teacher says it is.

I guess I expected better from a professor at her pricey private university, rated among the nation's best bastions of academe. I knew better than to expect average Americans, weaned on a daily diet of misinformation and superstition, to respect the facts, but still I was startled by a Gallup poll I read a few days later: 45 percent of Americans believe that humans were created by God in our present form, and 20 percent believe that happened a mere 10,000 years ago. Never mind the vast fossil evidence of precursors to homo sapiens, or the array of geological and paleontological facts tracing the history of the earth back considerably more than 10,000 years. (If you have any lingering doubts on this subject, I recommend the November 2004 issue of National Geographic--hardly a radical rag--whose cover provocatively asks, "Was Darwin wrong?" and answers unequivocally, "No.")

Another recent poll found significant numbers of Americans believe, despite all the evidence that's emerged to the contrary, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was somehow partly to blame for the 9/11 attacks. Facts? We don't need no stinkin' facts.

You can certainly believe in God--as many prominent theologians have elaborated--without ignoring the facts that date human development back far beyond 10,000 years ago (a date that appears nowhere in the Bible). You can even believe that America's invasion of Iraq was a good idea, spreading democracy through the Middle East, without clinging to mistakes about its justification. What's not acceptable is making decisions about the world, our government's policies or our education system (60 percent of Americans think the oxymoronic "creation science" should be taught in schools) based on willful disregard for the facts. At least it's not acceptable to those of us in what one White House insider recently dismissed as "the reality-based community."

Not that New Mexico hasn't benefited over the years from Americans' loose regard for the facts. Roswell, for one, has turned the 1947 crash of an experimental weather balloon into a tourist industry predicated on the notion that the object was actually an alien spacecraft. Still another poll shows that 65 percent of Americans believe what crashed in Roswell was a UFO.

Now, it's not illogical to believe in extraterrestrial life, and you might even reasonably suspect that not all purported UFO sightings have as yet been adequately explained. But Roswell is a terrible example for UFO devotees to hang their hats on, simply because the facts are otherwise: Among other things, meteorologist B.D. "Duke" Gildenberg, who worked on the US government's secret Mogul balloon project in Alamogordo, has unequivocally identified the Roswell crash object as Mogul Flight #4.

Another overlooking of reality underlies Gov. Bill Richardson's recent call to expand physical education programs in New Mexico's schools, including elimination of alternatives to P.E. for graduation standards. The governor (who could use a good workout himself) certainly has a worthwhile goal: combating the epidemic of youthful obesity.

But before we turn our schools into a sprawling replay of that Dodgeball movie, shouldn't somebody look at the facts? President Eisenhower created the President's Council on Youth Fitness in 1956, and the program was renamed and expanded by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s, leading to a heightened emphasis on physical education in elementary and secondary schools. And yet, according to 2003 testimony by Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, since that time the percentage of American children who are overweight has more than tripled. School P.E. programs have utterly failed to counteract the burgeoning fondness of American youth for junk food, television and video games. So maybe, looking at the facts, we should consider a different approach, not more of the same?

OK, so is there anyone I haven't managed to offend here, in the spirit of starting the New Year off with a bang? College professors to UFO buffs to P.E. teachers--yep, that pretty well covers it.

But the point of course is not to offend, or to challenge your right to believe whatever your heart tells you to. It is rather to suggest that your head needs to play a part as well. Get informed--before, not after forming an opinion about some aspect of the world. Hold our leaders to a rigorous standard of evidence: What are the facts? How do we know? What are the actual results of some cherished program, whether liberal or conservative?

That's where publications such as Desert Exposure come in. Along with entertaining you and introducing you to colorful personalities in our region, we hope to occasionally arm you with the facts. You may disagree with our interpretations or presentations of those facts, but our commitment to you is to try our best every issue to get those facts right. When we screw up--and we will--we'll fess up and correct our mistakes.

Seems to me that's the least you should expect from any publication you trust. I hope it will help make this "Don't Confuse Me with the Facts Decade" a bit less confusing, a little more factual.

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.

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