G.I. Guarantee Watch: Ladner in Blunderland

by David Safier

I await the arrival of a letter from the Goldwater Institute which, I have every reason to believe, will tell me Matthew Ladner was correct to count bus drivers, maintenance workers and food service workers as bureaucrats, which allowed him to say that school districts have "an almost 1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio."

Meanwhile, with a new "Alice in Wonderland" hitting the silver screen today, I'm going to let that brilliant linguist and logician, Lewis Carroll (he was both, as most of you know), comment on the kind of illogic Ladner uses to arrive at his bus-drivers-are-bureaucrats definition.

Ladner, Daily Email: Bus drivers are bureaucrats.

Pigeon, Alice in Wonderland: Little girls are serpents.

Both Ladner and the pigeon have made an obvious error in logic — or, in keeping with the headline, a logical blunder.

The scene: Alice has just eaten from the caterpillar's mushroom and has shot up to an incredible height. With her head in the treetops, Alice hears a sharp hiss:

 [A] large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.

`Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon.

`I'm not a serpent!' said Alice indignantly. `Let me alone!'

`Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, `I've tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!'

`I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said Alice.

`I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've tried hedges,' the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; `but those serpents! There's no pleasing them!'

Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.

`As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the Pigeon; `but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven't had a wink of sleep these three weeks!'

`I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning.

`And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, `and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!'

`But I'm not a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. `I'm a–I'm a–'

`Well! what are you?' said the Pigeon. `I can see you're trying to invent something!'

`I–I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

`A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. `I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!'

`I have tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; `but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.'

`I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; `but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.'

Ah, Mr. Carroll: Wonder-ful. Um, Mr. Ladner: Blunder-ful.