Mitt Romney's difficulty with his history at Bain Capital may be our most nearly perfect example of how ignorance and misunderstanding, willful or otherwise, render our political discourse impotent.
Businesses that do what Bain does are sensitive about the common analogy comparing them to scavenger species in nature. In large part this is owing to how we are trained from childhood to think of nature in terms of postcard vistas, pettable furry things with large eyes, and the romantic notion of some sort of sweetly cooperative community of creatures. We tend not to teach children about vultures, fungi, slime molds, or maggots. More importantly, we do not teach them why such things are every bit as important to the ecology as Bambi.
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