Category Archives: Words

Why do some languages sound so fast?

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Stan Dubinsky brought this interesting piece to my attention:

It’s an almost universal truth that any language you don’t understand sounds like it’s being spoken at 200 miles per hour — a storm of alien syllables almost impossible to tease apart. That, we tell ourselves, is simply because the words make no sense to us. Surely our spoken English sounds just as fast to a native speaker of Urdu. And yet it’s equally true that some languages seem to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese leaves German in the dust — or at least that’s how they sound…

But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to Spanish doesn’t whiz by in half the original time…

To investigate this puzzle, researchers from the Universite de Lyon recruited 59 male and female volunteers who were native speakers of one of seven common languages — English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish — and one not so common one: Vietnamese….

The investigators next counted all of the syllables in each of the recordings, and further analyzed how much meaning was packed into each of those syllables. A single syllable word like “bliss,” for example, is rich with meaning — signifying not ordinary happiness but a particularly serene and rapturous kind. The single syllable word “to” is less information-dense. And a single syllabile like the short i sound, as in the word “jubilee,” has no independent meaning at all.

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: The average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information….

So basically, with some languages it takes more syllables to say the same thing. So you have to say them faster to arrive at the same destination in the same amount of time. Weird that people around the world would be synchronizing their clocks that way.

Now you know.

Once, we had a “young lady” reporter at the paper, and a governor wanted to SPANK her. No, really.

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Nowadays, we have our young lady governor calling a reporter a “little girl.” In the olden days, when men were men and so were governors,  they were somewhat more polite toward the youthful and female. But if they weren’t careful, they also came across as a bit kinky. I refer you to this column I wrote in 1994:

CARROLL CAMPBELL MUST LEARN HOW TO TAKE THE HEAT

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, April 10, 1994

Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Writer

If Carroll Campbell really wants to run for President of the United States, he will have to grow a much tougher hide.

The Governor is regularly mentioned as a top contender by some of the most respected political writers in America, including The Washington Post’s David Broder. But Broder and company are missing something. To use a baseball analogy, the top sportswriters have taken only a cursory look at this rookie. They’ve seen him field, throw and bunt. They’ve yet to determine if he can hit a curve ball. Or as Harry Truman might have asked, can he take the heat?

Mr. Campbell is an extraordinarily thin-skinned man for a politician. The general public doesn’t know this because Campbell manages his public exposure with an artful care reminiscent of the way Richard Nixon was handled in 1968. He stays above the fray.

But when he can’t do that — say, when someone surprises him with a tough question, off-camera — the image can fall apart. Experienced reporters have seen that carefully groomed mask shift, with remarkable speed, into a visage of suspicion and hostility. His eyes flash, and his answers, if he responds, are highly defensive. The motives of questioners are questioned.

This flaw isn’t fatal. People can change and, in fact, over the last couple of years, Mr. Campbell has mellowed. He’s become more statesmanlike and less confrontational. In seven years as governor, he has polished some of his rough edges.

At a luncheon briefing for editorial writers at the Governor’s Mansion in January, I saw the Carroll Campbell that Dave Broder sees. He was open, talkative and articulate, exhibiting an easy command of any topic that came up. In the next day’s editorial on his State of the State speech, I wrote about the “New Carroll Campbell .”

A month later, the Old Carroll Campbell was back.

It started with the effort by former state Rep. Luther Taylor to get his Lost Trust conviction thrown out. One of the tactics his lawyer used was to say the federal investigators had backed off investigating charges that could have implicated Mr. Campbell .

A little background: In 1990, when I was The State’s governmental affairs editor, we looked into these same charges and found an interesting story about how the Legislature gave 21 people an $8.6 million tax break. But we never found any evidence that Mr. Campbell was involved. And neither did the feds, with their far superior investigative powers.

Taylor alleged that the federal agents hadn’t gone far enough. The new U.S. attorney, a Democrat, agreed to investigate. The State’s federal court reporter,Twila Decker , concluded that the only way to check the course of the previous investigation was to gain access to Mr. Campbell ‘s FBI files, and she needed his permission. So she asked.

The Governor went ballistic. He requested a meeting with The State’s publisher and senior editors. This led to an extraordinary session on Feb. 17. Assembled in a conference room at The State were the various members of the editorial board and three people from the newsroom: Managing Editor Paula Ellis, chief political writer Lee Bandy and Ms. Decker . Mr. Campbell had a small entourage. Most of us wondered what the Governor wanted.

Over the next hour or so, we found out — sort of. Mr. Campbell had brought files with him, and between denunciations of those raising these charges anew, he read sporadically from the files. Each time Ms. Decker tried to ask a question, he cut her off, usually with a dismissive “young lady.”

Throughout the session, rhetorical chips fell from his shoulder: “This young lady had given me a deadline. . . . You’re smarter than the court. . . . I will not even be baited. . . . May I finish. . . . Now wait a minute, young lady; you’re mixing apples and oranges. . . . I really don’t care what you have, young lady. . . . You seem to be obsessed with ‘lists.’. . .”

No one in the room thought Mr. Campbell had done anything wrong, and everyone wanted him to have the chance to clear the air. But we were all riveted by his agitation, particularly as it was directed at the reporter. At one point, Editorial Page Editor Tom McLean felt compelled to explain to the Governor that Ms. Decker wasn’t imputing wrongdoing on his part by simply asking questions. It did little good.

At the end, the Governor stormed out, without the usual handshakes around the table — without even eye contact.

Later that afternoon, Consulting Editor Bill Rone, who had missed the meeting, stuck his head into my office to ask what had happened with Mr.Campbell . Bill said he had run into the Governor in the parking lot, and that he had been upset about Twila Decker . He told Bill he had been so mad he had wanted to “spank” her.

Repeatedly during the interview, Mr. Campbell had expressed indignation that he was being questioned by someone who wasn’t “here at the time.” Is that what he will say when the national press corps starts taking him really seriously, and somewhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Georgia someone in the pack asks him about that capital gains thing in South Carolina? Or the 1978 congressional campaign against Max Heller? Or fighting busing in 1970? Or the Confederate flag?

Mr. Campbell has gotten altogether too accustomed to the relative politeness of the South Carolina press corps. Our group was throwing him softballs — real melons — and he went down swinging. What will he do when he faces major league pitching?

Of course, the late Gov.  Campbell didn’t mean anything kinky about it. He just wanted to punish her somehow. Putting Twila in the pillory would probably have satisfied him.

I remember one of the newsroom editors — someone who has not worked there for a long time — saying after he read my column, “Hey, I’d like to spank her, too.” He meant it the other way.

Perry damns himself with faint praise

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Just got this release from Rick Perry:

Rick Perry: They called Reagan dumb, too
CBS News
Bonney Kapp
August 30, 2011

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20099519-503544.html

Texas governor Rick Perry called into the Sean Hannity radio program Tuesday afternoon, where he responded to questions about his intelligence first raised in a Politico article with the blunt headline: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?”

Perry, who has surged in the polls since he announced his candidacy just over two weeks ago, shrugged off the speculation that has become fodder for cable news.

“It’s kind of the same old attacks that they made on President Reagan,” he said. “The better we do down here in Texas, my bet is the more they’re going to attack us and that’s fine. I think my record is going to stand the scrutiny of time across the country.”

Perry, who made many C’s and D’s as a student at Texas A&M, turned the attack on the Harvard-educated Barack Obama — whose transcripts have not been released to the public.

“What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers – over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster back in the ’30s and try them again in the 2000s — that’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb,” he charged.

And he didn’t stop there.

Perry stoked the ‘book smarts v. street smarts’ flames by chiding President Obama for surrounding himself with academics instead of people who’ve had “real life experience.”

“They are intellectually very, very smart, but he does not have wise men and women around him. And I think that’s what his real problem is. He has listened to the academics,” he said….

Ummm… Y’all know what I think: I think Perry is going to win the nomination — unless Republicans start thinking strategically and look harder at a guy like Huntsman.

But gee, fella. Oh, yeah? Welll… they said that other guy was dumb, too! Kind of a weak defense. I think if people were saying I was dumb, I’d have come back with something sharper.

Of course, I don’t think like a partisan, and I guess among Republicans, “they said Reagan was dumb, too” is a heckuva powerful argument.

As for the “We’ve tried smart people and it didn’t work…” I’m not sure that’s a strong refutation, either…

Can you tell the sex of the writer?

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I’ve given you nothing so far today, so perhaps even this, insubstantial as it is, will seem like something.

Among many things I did today instead of blogging was try to continue cleaning out my inbox, which a day or two ago was up to about 500. That happens because there are things that I don’t have time to deal with at a given moment, but that I want to do something with, so I leave them where I found them rather than filing them away, where I’ll never see them. And of course the next day another hundred and something come in, and I try to winnow those, but there are always a few more that end up staying there for the same reasons, and so on. Then, there are days I don’t really have time to cull at all, and things just get deeper and deeper.

No, it’s not a good system, but it is mine.

Anyway, I managed to dig today all the way down (I only have 211 left, mostly old stuff) to something I saved on June 3. It was this Tweet, which I had emailed to myself hoping to blog about:

Slate @Slate
Can you tell if this paragraph was written by a man or a woman? V.S. Naipaul says he can: http://slate.me/lWMWfg

Yes, I took the test provided by The Guardian — the one designed to determine whether I could do what Naipaul claimed HE could do, which was quickly tell whether something was written by a man or a woman.

And of course, I failed — I got 4 out of 10 right. Which is what the person who devised the test had intended. It’s easy enough to pick passages by men that sound like they are in the voice of a woman, and vice versa. To make it hard (or, in this case, to prove Naipaul is a sexist pig, which seemed to be the point — which he deserved, since he was being ungentlemanly).

Often, when I start out thinking, for whatever reason (say, an ambiguous byline such as “Pat,” or “Leslie”) that I’m reading something by a man or a woman and I’m wrong, at some point in the reading I go, “Wait a minute…” because something doesn’t seem right. And then I realize — the man is a woman, or vice-versa. Since, as an editor, I’ve had to critically read thousands of pieces from strangers, this has happened enough for me to note a trend.

Sometimes I’m wrong about my realization, though. I suspect, based on observations over the past thirty or forty years, that men and women (especially younger ones) are writing more and more like each other. Just as in other areas the genders are crossing paths. For instance… I’ve been driving for more than 40 years. For the last 25-30 years, I’ve noticed that young women are driving a lot more like young men than they did the first 10-15 — more aggressive, more likely to cut you off, more stupid in general, just like young guys.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed a number of trends among young guys that combine to make it harder to determine the presence of a Y chromosome in superficial behavior. OK, guys still do more stupid stuff than women do, since testosterone still exists in them, but it seems that some of them try harder and harder, and often succeed, to express themselves like women. I won’t go into detail because one of them might punch me. Not very hard, of course, the wussies, but I still would find it inconvenient.

Anyway, take the test if you like. I’ll bet you flunk it. I certainly did. I knew I would, so I played along. When I thought the deviser of the test was trying to lead me to answer a certain way, I did.

I think I could probably devise a test you could pass along these lines. (The way to do it would be to choose paragraphs that are characteristically masculine or feminine in tone. In other words, stack the deck toward being easy rather than hard. If you chose paragraphs at random, everyone would flunk that, too. Most paragraphs provide few clues.) But you know what? I think my not having time to do that is why this post idea has sat here for almost three months…

The nod and the wink? Deconstructing Perry’s comments about Bernanke

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I didn’t really notice Phil Noble’s release earlier about Rick Perry and Ben Bernanke (I’m drowning in email), until it was also forwarded to me by Samuel Tenenbaum today. Here’s the full release, and here’s an excerpt:

Noble Calls on Perry to Apologize for ‘Unacceptable’ Attack on South Carolina Native Son Bernanke

Gov. Rick PerryIn response to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s continuing suggestions that South Carolina born-and-bred Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke is not acting with America’s best interests at heart, SC New Democrats president Phil Noble is calling on the GOP front-runner to apologize.

“In the last few days,” Noble said, “Rick Perry has called our native son Ben Bernanke ‘treacherous’ and ‘treasonous’ and has questioned what his ‘true goal is for the United States.’ Somebody needs to tell Mr. Perry that we don’t talk that way about central bankers here in the South Carolina, and we certainly don’t talk that way about central bankers who happen to be Jewish.”

Noble continued, “The stereotype of the ‘treacherous” or ‘treasonous’ Jewish banker is one of the most poisonous slurs in all of recent Western history. And whether Rick Perry is exploiting this anti-Semitic stereotype today out of true malice or simple ignorance of that long and tragic history doesn’t really matter. Either way, it’s completely unacceptable, and he needs to apologize to Mr. Bernanke and all the people of our state for this grossly inappropriate attack on one of our most distinguished native sons before his Texas boot heel touches South Carolina soil again.

“Or, to put this in terms that even the Governor should understand: Gov. Perry, don’t mess with South Carolina.”

Samuel offered his own observation, which I’ve heard him make before in different contexts:

Remember Campbell and his political anti-Semitism [a reference to the campaign against Max Heller]? It is the old nod and wink game here. Call it the “nink.” Those who have the correct receptors get his message and those who do not, never would associate anti-Semitism with his statement.

True, as a goy, I did not at first associate what Perry said with Bernanke’s Jewishness. But then, I had not initially heard that one bit of comment from Perry, “… I think there will continue to be questions about their activity and what their true goal is for the United States.” To a Catholic, that sounds familiar. But still…

Samuel and I have a lot of discussions about stuff like this. We went to see “The Passion of Jesus Christ” together, along with Moss Blachman, on Saturday in 2004, and then we all went to lunch and debated it. We did not see it the same. But we agreed about one thing: We didn’t like the movie.

Bottom line, I don’t think Perry is going after Bernanke because he’s Jewish any more than because he’s from South Carolina. I think Perry is going after him because a section of the electorate he’s trying to woo deeply dislikes the Federal Reserve, and Bernanke just happens to be its current chairman. The Fed chair could have been a gentile from Oregon, and for that matter could be pursuing policies completely different from Bernanke’s, and Perry would still be on his case.

That’s what I think.

Esoteric word of the day: “quotidian”

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I’ve always enjoyed odd coincidences, such as this one today in the WSJ.

How often do you see “quotidian” in a newspaper? Not, um, every day, I would think.

But today, it was in two pieces, right next to each other, on the same page of The Wall Street Journal. This piece, and this one.

If I were the main character in “Rubicon,” or John Nash, the schizophrenic genius that “A Beautiful Mind” was about, I’d attach significance to this double occurrence.

But instead, I just enjoyed it.

You can still find good stuff in the NYT

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After a bunch of y’all piled on with me as I criticized The New York Times for that Haley piece, I felt a little bad for the Gray Lady. Especially since I know they do have good writing in the paper still. Or at least in the magazine. I enjoyed this passage from a piece by Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard:

Gingrich’s inattention to detail is one reason his speakership was so chaotic, as readers of a certain age will recall, and the primary reason he was shunned by his own party after four years with the gavel. “Lessons Learned the Hard Way,” released months before his defenestration, is a more conventional memoir than anything else Gingrich has written, and it was supposed to serve as a mea culpa for his mistakes as Speaker, as well as a bid to regain the loyalty of members who had grown tired of his boyish exuberance. It didn’t work.

Admitting mistakes comes easily to no public man — as memoirs from figures like Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld demonstrate — but in “Lessons Learned,” Gingrich gave it the old West Georgia College try. This didn’t work, either. There’s lots of mea in “Lessons Learned,” but the culpa is all on the other side.

Early in the book, he offers an account of the drafting of the Interstate Transportation Bill of 1997. Most readers, he admits, might think such a story uninteresting. “But in this case most readers would be wrong.” In fact, in this case most readers would be right. The point of the story, though, is that Gingrich handled the transportation bill pretty damn well. Indeed, he handled nearly all his duties pretty well — except for when he worked too hard or cared too deeply or thought too much or trusted too many of the wrong people.

I only shared that for the play on mea and culpa. Good stroke, that.

I also appreciated the next paragraph:

Democrats, for instance. One lesson Gingrich claimed to learn the hard way was, as a chapter title has it, “Don’t Underestimate the Liberals.” As speaker, Gingrich discovered that Republicans are too good for their own — um, good. “The difference between the well-thought-out, unending and no-holds-barred hostility of the left,” he wrote, “and the acquiescent, friendship-seeking nature of many of my Republican colleagues never ceases to amaze me.” Democrats flatter themselves with the mirror image of this fantasy, of course, pretending to be envious of the robotic efficiency of Republicans and the freedom of action allowed them by their utter lack of conscience or shame. Self-awareness is not listed in the catalog of traits required for faithful partisanship. About the true nature of their enemies, however, if about nothing else, professional Republicans and Democrats are both exactly right.

I like it when partisans are described just as they are.

Can’t Is Not a Contraction (and other options)

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Some of y’all, being a hard-to-please bunch, were apparently less than impressed by the planned title of our governor’s long awaited memoir, “Can’t is Not An Option.” As Tim said:

“Can’t is Not An Option”. I guess her editor and publisher don’t not believe in double negatives. Essentially the title means “Can is an Option.” More Sarah Palindromisms, inventing the language as you speak…

OK, so let’s see if we can do better. Here are some, for want of a better word, options:

  • Failure Is Not An Option — The original, as spoken by Ed Harris as Gene Kranz in “Apollo 13,” works a lot better. More compelling. Better use of the English language. Of course, it doesn’t work for Nikki Haley. In fact, it’s about as wildly inappropriate as you can get. The phrase epitomizes the can-do spirit of a man leading a bunch of government employees determined to work together to accomplish something remarkable. No way Nikki would want any part of that. In Kranz’ place, she would have insisted that NASA was the problem, not the solution, and would be going on about how the space agency needed to be run like a business as the spacecraft ran out of oxygen.
  • Can’t Is Not a Doctrine — I like it, but I think she would disagree.
  • Can’t Do Cooperation
  • Can’t is Not a Contraction
  • Can I Have a Conniption?
  • Canned Heat, Fried Hockey Boogie
  • Can It, Knothead Unction

OK, so I’m running out of actual ideas here, although I don’t see that necessarily as a disqualification.

What do y’all have?

I’m just trying to pass the time here. It’s SO hard waiting until January, when the book comes out.

Corey quotes me well in The Nation

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Several weeks back, Corey Hutchins of The Free Times called to say he was working on a profile of Nikki Haley for The Nation magazine. He wanted to talk with me about it, and asked if I’d meet him for a beer at Yesterday’s. He didn’t have to twist my arm. (Note the ad — be sure to check out Yesterday’s. Good food, good beer, good company, reasonable prices.)

So we met, and I said a bunch of stuff, and later I got a call from a fact-checker at The Nation, so I knew that the piece was coming out soon. (Yeah, just like in “Almost Famous.” To a newspaperman, the whole “fact-checker” thing is weird. If you’re going to have a staffer check all the facts, why not just send them to do the story to start with? But when you’re using freelance, which magazines do, I guess this is something you have to do to protect yourself. When a reporter works for you, it’s different. You can fire his butt if he tries to put one over on you, and he knows it.)

Anyway, Corey did a pretty good job. Personally, I don’t normally enjoy reading The Nation, but this was good. And he did an excellent job of extracting something intelligent-sounding from my ramblings:

Still, like so many Palmetto State chief executives before her, Haley seems to be angling for a spot on a national ticket. She is already penning her memoir. “Every governor we’ve had since Carroll Campbell has had national aspirations, but with her it’s more naked and obvious,” says Brad Warthen, a Columbia advertising man who until 2009 was the longtime editorial page editor of the State. Warthen endorsed Haley in two legislative elections and chronicled her rise beginning about seven years ago. In that time, he says, she has morphed from a naïve newcomer, to a politician he thought could become a good force in the legislature, to something approaching megalomania.

“I think she’s had her head turned by discovering where demagoguery will get you,” Warthen told me. “I don’t think that’s totally who she was before. I think she has developed in this direction. It’s a B.F. Skinner behavioral reinforcement thing; she has been rewarded and rewarded and rewarded. This has worked for her. And she continues to charm the national media. Because you know what? They don’t care. It’s just a story.”…

You see what just happened? Yep. For the first time ever, after a 35-year career in newspapers, I was just identified in a national magazine as an “advertising man.” Move over, Don Draper. You’re about to be replaced in the national imagination.

There were other good bits. Such as this, the result of an interview with John Rainey:

But Haley has been navigating a series of land mines—IRS disputes, questionable business deals and appointments, multiple adultery allegations—any one of which threatens to blow up her political career. “I believe she is the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction,” declared John Rainey, a longtime Republican fundraiser and power broker who chaired the state’s Board of Economic Advisers for eight years. A 69-year-old attorney, Rainey is an aristocratic iconoclast who never bought the Haley myth. “I do not know of any person who ran for governor in my lifetime with as many charges against him or her as she has had that went unanswered,” he told me on a recent afternoon at his sprawling horse farm outside the small town of Camden. “The Democrats got Alvin Greene; we got Nikki Haley. Because nobody bothered to check these guys out.”

OK, so John was way more provocative than I was. But I think I sounded more erudite.

It’s worth a read.

Coming soon: The Alvin Green graphic novel

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OK, now I’m feeling bad about an idea I let slide awhile back.

Corey Hutchins of the Free Times brings this to my attention:

Current and former Columbia Free Timeswriters are teaming up to produce a black-and-white graphic novel on the bizarre rise and fall of South Carolina’s Alvin Greene.

Last year the unemployed Greene unexpectedly won the South Carolina Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate, giving him the chance to face off against — and eventually lose to — incumbent Tea Partier Jim DeMint. Greene’s primary victory came despite the fact that he didn’t campaign, didn’t have a website, and was virtually unknown to the voting public.

“What happened in the summer of 2010 was the strangest American political story in modern times,” says Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins, who gained national attention by exposing Greene. “It’s no wonder that it came out of South Carolina, the state that James Petigru famously called ‘too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum’ more than 100 years ago.”

Hutchins is teaming up with former Free Times staff writer David Axe and artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner to serialize the comic online beginning in early 2012, following with a print edition in the spring.

In order to secure funding for the project, they’re using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to attract backers. As of this writing, the team is halfway towards reaching their goal of $1,000.

That’s pretty cool. Cool enough that it make me feel bad I never followed through on my own idea.

You know, I wanted to do a graphic novel about Mark Sanford back in 2009. I even had a couple of exchanges with someone with publishing contacts in New York. But when I didn’t find an artist who was interested right away (I felt like it had to be done immediately for readers to be interested), I dropped it. I was really busy job-hunting and stuff at the time. The images were key, and while I could have written the whole thing without them, I think it would have been an inspiration to see some sketches as I went along.

I had this one really vivid image in my mind as I tried to picture the visual style of the book. It was NOT of Mark Sanford, actually. It was black-and-white. It would have been an extreme closeup, taking about half a page, of Jake Knotts as he began the process of spreading the report that Sanford was missing, in his big bid to bring down his nemesis…

The image was inspired by images of The Kingpin in Spiderman (see this or this or this or this) … Only darker…

Anyway… I actually wrote a sort of treatment for my New York contact. I was really riffing on it at the time. I wanted it all to be told by a seedy, self-hating ex-journalist narrator, sort of based on Jack Burden from All the King’s Men. The narrator would be all conflicted and guilt-ridden, because he felt responsible for having created the central character. This would give his narration a certain bitterly ironic tone. (This character would of course in no way be based on any living former editors who maybe sorta kinda endorsed Mark Sanford in 2002.)

It had levels. It had edge. It had irony. Sort of Gatsby meets Robert Penn Warren meets “Citizen Kane” meets, I don’t know, “Fight Club.”

But now I can’t even find the blasted treatment. I think I lost it in that major Outlook meltdown of my e-mail.

But it would have been good.

Yep, they pinned the tail right back on ’er

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Here’s the typo of the day…

Personally, I have not followed the Sarah Palin emails nonstory, but my attention was grabbed when I saw the blurb under the headline on this Slate story:

Pro-Palin Vandals Hack Twitter in Revenge for Email Release

Crivella West faces retailation for uploading Palin’s emails electronically.

By Josh Voorhees | Posted Monday, Jun. 13, 2011, at 12:01 PM EDT

Yep, that’s what they did to ol’ Crivella West — they “retailated” her… pinned the tail right back on her.

Oh, wait… Crivella West is not a person. I had thought that maybe it was Cruella De Vil’s cousin, but turns out it’s an it, not a she. Apparently, it’s the “company that helped upload thousands of Sarah Palin’s emails to the Internet.” In case you care.

OK, so it’s not as funny that way. But I still smiled at it.

Now read THIS: Columbia makes the top 20

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Our new friends at Amazon — and I’ll have something to say about the compromise later (for starters, I think it’s good) — have checked to see which cities in the U.S. are the best-read.

And we made the top 20!

I must confess, I haven’t helped much lately. I mean, I do read at least a couple of papers a day, but as far as books are concerned, I’m mostly just been reading the same novels over and over, when I find the time for book-reading.

So congratulations to the rest of you, for making us look good.

Oh, and hey, Atlanta — not to mention Charleston or Greenville or Charlotte, which are nowhere to be seen — why don’t you pick up a book sometime? Sheesh!

Geronimo, bin Laden, history and popular culture

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That headline sounds like the title of a college course that might be briefly popular among those trying to fulfill a requirement in history or sociology or the like, doesn’t it?

Just ran across this WashPost piece from six days ago, stepping away from emotion over the use of “Geronimo” as the name of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, and noting the parallels between the U.S. military’s pursuits of the two men. I found it informative, so here it is. An excerpt:

The similarities are not in the men themselves but in the military campaigns that targeted them…

The 16-month campaign was the first of nearly a dozen strategic manhunts in U.S. military history in which forces were deployed abroad with the objective of killing or capturing one individual. Among those targeted were Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein.

The original Geronimo campaign and the hunt for bin Laden share plenty of similarities. On May 3, 1886, more than a century before a $25 million reward was offered for information on bin Laden’s whereabouts, and almost 125 years to the day before the al-Qaeda leader’s death, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a joint resolution “Authorizing the President to offer a reward of twenty-five thousand dollars for the killing or capture of Geronimo.”

In both operations, the United States deployed its most advanced technology. Whereas a vast array of satellite and airborne sensors was utilized in the search for bin Laden, Gen. Nelson Miles directed his commanders to erect heliograph stations on prominent mountain peaks, using sunlight and mirrors to transmit news of the hostiles. Neither system helped anyone actually catch sight of the man who was sought.

Small raiding forces … proved more decisive than large troop formations in both cases. In 1886, Lt. Charles Gatewood was able to approach the 40 Apache warriors still at large with a party of just five — himself, two Apache scouts, an interpreter and a mule-packer. He convinced Geronimo and the renegades to surrender on Sept. 4, with a deftness that would have been impossible with 5,000 soldiers. Similarly, the United States could never have deployed the thousands of troops necessary to block all escape routes out of Tora Bora — the deployment of 3,000 troops three months later to Afghanistan’s ShahikotValley in Operation Anaconda failed to prevent the escape of the targeted individuals from similar terrain — but a lightning strike by a few dozen commandos was successful.

Both campaigns also demonstrated the importance of human intelligence to manhunting. Gatewood was alerted to Geronimo’s location near Fronteras, Mexico, by a group of Mexican farmers tired of the threat of Apache raids, but he also needed the assistance of Apache scouts familiar with the terrain and with Geronimo’s warriors to close in on his quarry. So, too, according to administration officials, did the success in finding bin Laden depend upon the interrogation of his former confederates in al-Qaeda and upon the efforts of local agents in Pakistan to track the courier who led U.S. intelligence officers to the Abbottabad compound….

And so forth. By the way, on a related topic, here’s a piece written by a paratrooper on the history of U.S. soldier’s tradition of yelling that name when jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. Apparently, it all came from a 1939 movie starring “Chief Thundercloud,” a.k.a. Victor Daniels (not to mention the immortal Andy Devine!).

And talk about your coincidences… I had been clicking around through my Netflix instant queue one night recently and watched a few minutes of the ubersilly “Hot Shots Deux,” starring Charlie Sheen and Lloyd Bridges. (Hey, in small doses, I very much enjoy the whole “Airplane!” comedy genre — even when Leslie Nielsen is absent.) The scene below was part of what I saw. The very next morning, I first read of the controversy among some American Indians over the “Geronimo” operation… Seemed ironic. You know, what with Charlie Sheen being such a paragon of sensitivity and all.

Oh, and what do I think of it? The same thing I think about the Redskins, the Braves, et al. It’s a tribute, not a sign of disrespect. You really have to want to be insulted to take it that way. But as you know, I have little sensitivity toward — or, admittedly, understanding of — the complex resentments than can be felt by people to whom Identity Politics is important. And I hate arguing with people like that, because I’m willing to grant that in many cases such people DO actually feel hurt, with or without justification that makes sense to me. But it seemed like it would be a cop-out if, after bringing up the subject, I didn’t share my own opinion, for what little it’s worth, and however lightly I may hold it.

Some nice writing; that’s all I’m saying

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I don’t know whether Joe Roman can write, but Katherine Mangu-Ward certainly can.

I generally like reading the book reviews in the WSJ (which run every day but Saturday on the paper’s THIRD opinion page), but Ms. Mangu-Ward’s review of Mr. Roman’s book Listed particularly grabbed me.

My favorite part was the first two sentences of her lede, which I highlight:

Wolves are notoriously slow to hire lobbyists. Lichen doubly so. It’s no surprise, then, that the Endangered Species Act is a law written by humans and used for human ends. Ever since the act’s 1973 debut, supporters and opponents have accused each other of playing politics with the fates of nearly extinct plants and animals. To be fair, both sides are usually right. In “Listed,” conservation biologist Joe Roman recounts the uses and abuses of a well-intentioned but all-too-human law.

The very next sentence was nice, too:

The difficulty of getting off the list of endangered species ranks right up there with unsubscribing from the Pottery Barn catalog.

I was also partial to this part:

Wolves are the exception: Yesterday, President Barack Obama swiftly and unceremoniously booted the wolves of the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes off the list. Humans have strong feelings about wolves—probably because, as predators, they have been one of our major rivals for ungulate calories over the millennia—and government officials are no exception.

I mean, apart from ending the first and last sentences with “exception,” which I just now noticed.

Yeah, I know — it’s very WSJ to run a piece casting doubt on the value of such gummint meddlin’ as the Endangered Species Act. But I’m just saying it was well-written. I always appreciate that, whatever the writer may be trying to say…

She mostly seemed to like the book except at the end, which causes her writing to take on a sharper edge:

But the book takes an abrupt turn in its final pages. Mr. Roman offers a plan “to make extinction as unacceptable as slavery and child labor” and lists nine steps—he says he drew them up with biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and others. Mr. Ehrlich is most famous for predicting, in “The Population Bomb” (1968), that overpopulation would cause mass starvation. It is his cold voice, not Mr. Roman’s friendly one, that leaps off the page: “Stabilizing the human population, even humanely reducing it, will improve the lives of people and wildlife.” How the world’s population will be “humanely” reduced isn’t explained.

Anyway, I probably won’t ever get around to the book, but I enjoyed the review. I don’t say nice things about what other people do enough, so I thought I’d say this.

Say what you mean; mean what you say…

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Just got another one of those frothing fund-raising emails from the Democratic Party, this one signed by somebody named Jackie Speier:

Last night House Republicans voted in favor of an appalling piece of anti-choice legislation that could force victims of rape and incest to relive their trauma during an IRS audit and deny millions of American women access to life-saving reproductive health care.

Their assault on women has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with forcing extremist beliefs into the tax code of the United States of America.

And they didn’t stop there. They used the occasion to sneak in a provision restricting the definition of rape to deny victims access to reproductive health care — even after they claimed to have removed the language in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

We must take immediate, decisive action against this attack on women’s health and reproductive freedom.

Hey, sign me up! I’m all about some “anti-choice” legislation — that is, when it’s about limiting the “right to choose” abortion, or the “right to choose” to force me to underwrite someone’s private education. Or anything else that’s such an appalling idea that the only way you think you can sell it is in terms of “choice.” As though we lack freedom if we’re not totally free to do anything and everything.

Notice how advocates of “choice” have trouble saying what it is that they’re actually for? They have a jargon that is unself-consciously comical in its aversion to plain speaking.

I mean hey, I wish you the best of “health.” As for “reproductive freedom” — go ahead, reproduce all you want; no one’s stopping you.

I think we need a constitutional amendment limiting the 1st Amendment so that it doesn’t protect political speech that mangles the language.

OK, not really. But one does grow tired of such abuses.

And now for something completely different: Some Holy Week Ezra Pound

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Today there was a review in The Wall Street Journal of a book compiling letters that poet Ezra Pound wrote to his parents, which I read with some interest.

I don’t really know all that much about Pound. I remember something about him boxing with Ernest Hemingway, I recall that he was sort of a godfather to some of the young expatriates of that generation, and the fact that he took an EXTREME wrong turn when he came to support Fascism.

But my horror at his politics doesn’t keep me from appreciating an interesting piece of writing, any more than I dismiss Lindbergh’s achievement as an aviator because of his political sympathies.

And not being an English major or anything, I’m only familiar with one thing about his work. My uncle had this anthology of English literature lying about at the family home in Bennettsville, and I read this poem by Pound in it, back in my college days. And it’s always stuck with me as one of the most distinctive and iconoclastic portraits of Jesus I’ve ever read, even more so than Anthony Burgess’ version. Aside from the words, I like the rhythm of it; it’s almost like a sea chanty or something. I tend to like things that cause me to think a little harder and question my assumptions about someone, especially someone as important as Jesus. Even when it comes from a fascist.

This being Holy Week, I thought I’d share it:

Ballad of the Goodly Fere

Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O’ ships and the open sea.

When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he.

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
“Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?” says he.

Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.

I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.

They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.

If they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
“I’ll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Though I go to the gallows tree.”

“Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead,” says he,
“Ye shall see one thing to master all:
‘Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.”

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.

I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o’ Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi’ his eyes like the grey o’ the sea,

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret
Wi’ twey words spoke’ suddently.

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.

I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.

Two kinds of (mildly) offensive on Palm Sunday

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Two Tweets bugged me, just a little, on Sunday. I respected this special sabbath by not commenting on that day itself. But since I think it offers some insight to how both the left and right alienate me (and therefore help to define this blog), I offer them now. The first was from our governor:

Nikki Haley (@nikkihaley)
4/17/11 1:43 PM
Spending the day appreciating the sacrifices He made for us and our blessings on this beautiful Palm Sunday in South Carolina.

The second is from someone I never heard of — she was retweeted by Howard Weaver, a former McClatchy VP:

Annie Heckenberger (@anniemal)
4/17/11 1:19 PM
dreamt I stood in mass & told off a priest, closing w/ “ur the reason This Brand is failing in the western world.” James Franco was there.

Can you see, without my explaining, why these examples of typical attitudes on the left and right would put me off? If not, I’ll briefly explain…

The first is, simply put, an example of public prayer of the sort that was proscribed in Matthew chapter 6:

“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

Frankly, I have what some might regard as a conflicted view toward that passage, although I prefer to think of my position as “nuanced.” For instance, someone who doesn’t understand my view might say I should also be put off by my friend Warren Bolton when he writes such a column as his Passion Sunday reflection. Or they might wonder why I quietly return thanks before eating in public places. It’s because, in our cases, I see it as countercultural.

Jesus was speaking within the context of a culture that rewarded public piety. You advanced your position in society by praying on a street corner. In the United States of the 21st century, you’re asking to be regarded as a nut if you do that. Big difference. And if you’re a newspaperman, well… if you’re not, you probably don’t understand the degree to which that is NOT the way to get ahead in the world. (Of course, being a newspaperman, period, is no way to get ahead in the world, but I’m speaking of the times when Warren and I were coming up in the business, before the collapse.) So I always encouraged Warren to write columns like that, for the same reason I encouraged him and other board members to write columns, period (and to some extent why I started blogging) — so that readers would know the people behind the editorials. And that is definitely who Warren is.

But there are certain subsets of society where Pharisaic behavior is to your advantage. And that is the case among Nikki Haley’s political base. So I see something like that from her, and I think, “That’s exactly what Jesus was on about.”

Now, if she had done something WITH it — made some original observation or something, that somehow played off the liturgy — I wouldn’t have bridled at it. But what she said was so bumper-sticker, so unoriginal, so “Look at me; I’m a Christian,” that it saddened me to see it. (And yes, I know that judging other people’s expressions of faith doesn’t seem like something that puts me in too well with the Lord, either. But I thought there was some relevant commentary to be made here. I hope I’m right.)

Then there was the second Tweet, which is just a pointless little fling at religion (particularly the flavor to which I subscribe) that was SO gratuitous, and in its own way SO like what Nikki did, that it helped inspire this post. How, you ask, was it like what the gov did? Here’s how: This writer ALSO had nothing to say to the world except to declare, to a certain subset of it, “Look at me! I’m one of you!” In her case, it was, “I have generalized hostility to organized religion, and particular to those atavistic creatures, Catholic priests!” Or perhaps it was simply, “I am a thoroughly modern young woman!” to put it on its most basic level.

The thing that got me about it was that the object of her scorn in the dream wasn’t a particular person with a particular narrative that the reader might join her in condemning. No, he was merely “a priest,” making her dream diatribe a blanket condemnation of all priests — which was all that was needed to establish her credentials with the social subset she was appealing to.

Now, fact is, this one does have some extenuating features. For one thing, it includes self-deprecating humor, with the addendum about James Franco. That lightens up the whole tweet. (I mean, I assume it was self-deprecating. If I had a dream about James Franco, and told the world, I would certainly be holding myself up to ridicule.) And her bit about “the Brand” makes me slightly curious to hear more. Is she saying she cares about and wants to protect and/or improve The Brand, and how does she define that brand? Such a discussion might prove productive.

For that matter, I can defend the governor’s Tweet, too, as being innocuous, even positive. I certainly don’t disagree with anything she said. And I realize that criticizing her for it can be seen as nitpicking of a low order. I also realize that honest, praiseworthy expressions of faith can easily, and unfairly, be mistaken for cynical, self-serving public piety. There can be something wonderful and uplifting about pausing to say “Behold this beautiful day that the Lord has made,” and I’d hate to inhibit anyone from doing so. (And if Nikki had sent that Tweet back before she became the darling of the Tea Party and so nakedly, obviously ambitious, I might have retweeted it with an “Amen.”)

But as it is… I’m just sharing with you how I reacted to those two Tweets, which came within moments of each other — and soliciting your thoughts as well.

Ladies, forget Cosmo. We’re just not that complicated

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A colleague shared with me this amusing post about what one can learn from Cosmopolitan about headline writing.

An excerpt:

Do you ask your audience mind-blowing questions?

As a reader, I appreciated how Cosmo asked me some thought-provoking, introspective questions. Do you do this with your readers?

Should You Be Gross Around Him?

What’s Up With Men Cheating Down?

Can Soy Harm your Fertility?

And finally, my favorite question:

Do You Work Too Damn Hard?

Um, not really. I just spent the whole afternoon reading Cosmo. But thanks for asking.

Of course, the only thing I know about Cosmo is the headlines that I see in the checkout line. Well, the headlines, and the come-hither babes on the cover.

And I am mystified that anyone would buy the magazine. Or rather, that anyone would buy one more than once. Because the lede headline is pretty much always about revealing the supposed mysteries of having a sexual relationship with a man. Like we’re complicated or something. Men and sex are about as complicated as a dog and his dinner bowl. Or, as the classic joke would have it:


How to Impress a Woman
  Wine her, Dine her, Call her, Hug her,
Hold her, Surprise her, Compliment her,
Smile at her, Laugh with her,
Cry with her, Cuddle with her,
Shop with her, Give her jewelry,
Buy her flowers, Hold her hand,
Write love letters to her,
Go to the end of the earth and back for her.

  How to Impress a Man
   Show up naked.
Bring beer.

And truth be told, it doesn’t have to be imported, or craft, or anything like that. Pretty much any old beer will do.

Another middle-aged white guy heard from about Kitzman letter

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And the thing is, this one is one of Eleanor Kitzman‘s bosses — House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper, 50.

This came in over the transom yesterday, and I suppose it’s the letter that John O’Connor (oh, and happy birthday today, John) referred to in this story.

Of course, I kid about the “middle-aged white guy” thing, because I find Identity Politics (particularly as practiced by Ms. Kitzman) so wonderfully goofy. But the real issue is how unprofessional it is to play the defensive toady to ONE of your bosses in such a public manner.

So I can see how Rep. Cooper would not approve.

Pretty scathing, huh?