"Think of all the people the Lord hasn't sent here..."

That's a line from Michael Smith's beautiful song "We Become Birds."  The whole of the line is "When you're put here, it's for a reason/...."  Not Michael W. Smith, the mega-selling Christian popster, but Michael Peter Smith, the criminally underknown/hence underappreciated Catholic folk singer known best, if at all, for "The Dutchman," which Steve Goodman had something of a hit ( a folk hit, which means he might have sold as many as twenty copies) with.  When I first heard that line I thought that like many of Smith's "Catholic school years" songs, it was knowingly dumbly ironic, poking gentle fun at the sorts of believers he obviously was familiar with from his Catholic schooling.

Then came Rick Santorum.

On March 29 of last year, Candidate Santorum uttered these immortal thoughts:  "The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don't have enough workers to support the retirees.  A third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end (sic) in abortion."  Holy Mother-of-Pearl (Hester, right?):  Where does one even begin, with that?

Leaving aside politics (which I expect I'll be addressing in future), religion (ditto), and abortion,  ( hopefully not, except to say that it's less than a quarter, not a third, of pregnancies which are aborted, and that number seems very high to me) and just dealing with Logic and Reason vis-a-vis that quote is daunting enough.  I mean, ( I mean) it's really hard for me to get my head around that statement enough to address its sheer idiocy, but I feel I have to try, somehow.  Like I owe it, to someone....

More than 30 years ago, I sat in Prof. Mahlon Barnes's Logic class at the University of Hartford as he gleefully, in exposing some logical fallacy or another, said "Show me that set, the one that contains 'no people.'"  BTW (hey, c'mon, I'm hep), you should Google "logical fallacies" sometime.  It's pretty amazing how routinely they're used unchallenged in daily political discourse.  Anyway, how do you talk about the grouping "no people," or "people who haven't been born" in a concrete way, as if you knew or could say something about them?  It's like arguing about whether unicorns had spots or were just solid colors.  If you're gonna raise that "issue," wouldn't taxes have been higher, to pay for their schooling?  And unemployment rolls would have swelled even more during The Great Recession if they'd all (who, again?) been here.  Not to mention "welfare queens"(St. Ronnie's memorable term) and drug use and teen pregnancy (no contraception or Sex Ed in a Santorum Administration, of course) increases with all those extra people.  Shouldn't we in fact be grateful to all the people who haven't gotten here yet?  Sheesh, it's already hard enough to find a parking spot.

With all due respect to Dr. Barnes (who I believe has joined the set of "Those Who Were Here Once, But Are No Longer"--and shouldn't we be pretty pissed at them, too, for not helping us now?  It's Obama's fault, you know.), I can't remember which fallacy he was illustrating at the time.  I should be wicked mad at the brain cells which never came to me, but what the hell.   It does put me in mind of a similar sort of quandary, though:  When I was working in Maine years ago, I had a co-worker who once, angry at having scraped against a nail that hadn't been fully driven, asked "Who didn't drive that nail?"  Well, didn't we have fun answering that one: "Uh, Mother Theresa, Mao, Eisenhower, , my paperboy, that bird flying by...."  And now we could add "All those people who haven't been born yet!"

So the show this week (Tuesday, noon til two pm, eastern, 100.1 fm, wool.fm):  In honor of Rick "Theocracy and Ideology Trump Logic and Reasoning Every Time" Santorum,  I'm playing "logic" (of which there are few)  and "reason" (enough, I think) songs.  And, more than likely, "We Become Birds."

Hope you're not among the millions and millions who won't be there....