When President Obama gave his speech on the importance of education to American students today, many of them never had an opportunity to hear his words of encouragement and inspiration.  The reasons why are both varied and utterly irrational.  

Rumors swirled that the President would use this time to bolster support for health care reform, or otherwise forward some sinister Socialist or Communist political agenda.  In essence, inflamed by the excesses of a “lunatic fringe” political discourse gone rampant in recent months in this country, some parents either voluntarily withdrew their children from attendance in school today, or demanded that the local school districts not air the nationally televised speech.

Suffice it to say, the seeds of ignorance are sown by those who wallow in it’s misery.

In 1991, when the first President Bush gave a similar speech to schoolchildren, Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House from of Georgia, asked, “Why is it political for the president of the United States to discuss education?”

Exactly! 

Alchemy was the medieval study of the chemical transmutation of lead into gold.  The purveyors of ancient alchemy falsely claimed that by mixing a chemical concoction with lead, they could turn the lead into gold; these men were the charlatans of that era - people believed them simply because they would through slight-of-hand, perform magical acts of mineral transformation.  The irrational notion that lead could be turned into gold caused people to believe that acquiring this somewhat common element would lead to unimaginable wealth.

Of course, we now know that lead cannot be transformed into gold by any chemical process.  In fact, the only way to cause a transmutation of lead into gold is through physics – by way of a nuclear reaction.  Of course, the energy necessary to turn lead into gold by this means far outstrips the value of the resulting gold.  In other words, the end result is completely irrational in relation to its cost, and makes no sense.

When something as benign as President Obama’s speech to the schoolchildren across America can be magically transformed into a looming political, social or cultural cancer, we have reached into the surreal realm of irrational political alchemy.  Now everything that President Obama says or does is ostensibly cloaked in the veil of an ominous agenda.  To so poison the very idea of a President telling children to stay and school and pursue the benefits of an education forebodes of something far more dangerous in regard to the law of unintended consequences.  In other words, the cost of the current trend of twisting truth into fiction will far outstrip any perceived value it may have claimed. 

Paradoxically, this next generation which is currently in school, will later look back at the first decade of the new millennium and judge harshly those forces presently at work that are designed to ensure that the truth is irrationally transformed into an evil fiction with just a few false words.  And all of it done with a perverse, reckless abandon. 

Publisher’s Note:  the image posted above, The Alchemist, was created by artist Nicole Cardiff, and can be found at http://www.fantasygallery.net/cardiff/art_2.html.