Category Archives: Words

Interesting letter from Eleanor Kitzman today

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I don’t read the letters to the editor as closely as I used to. OK, to be perfectly honest, I hardly read them at ALL now that I’m not paid to do so, unless someone brings one to my attention.

Today was an exception, though. As my eye ran over the page, something in the last letter jumped out at me. I saw the words, “As a former Democratic candidate for state superintendent of education,” and scanned to the bottom to see the writer’s name was “Carlos W. Gibbons.” Hmmm. I do not know a Carlos W. Gibbons, which made me curious, and I sent out an e-mail to someone who knows stuff I don’t know, and learned that apparently he is a veteran educator who ran for the office in the early 1970s — and the father of Leeza Gibbons of TV fame.

In any case, he was right to advocate that the state superintendent post be appointed by the governor.

But it turns out that, until a few minutes ago, I had missed today’s really interesting letter — the one at the top of the stack. Alert reader “Tim” brought it to my attention moments ago. I’m just going to go ahead and put the whole thing here, and hope I don’t run afoul of Fair Use. Because this was an unusual letter:

Keep ignoring reality, governor

I have known Gov. Haley for many years, and she is one of my five bosses on the Budget and Control Board. If the governor is ignoring reality as Roger Hawkins contends (“Haley can’t continue to ignore realities,” March 3), my advice to her is to keep it up; it has served her well.

Moreover, I’d suggest that others follow her excellent example. Rather than ignoring reality, however, I believe Gov. Haley has wisely rejected the so-called reality that others saw for her as a disadvantaged minority.

There’s never any shortage of people telling you that you can’t do something.

Perhaps more insidious are those who maintain that we need their “help” to overcome adversity because not everyone has the governor’s abilities to plow through the impediments of life or navigate around diversity issues. I couldn’t disagree more and would ask why not.

We may not all become governors, but we can achieve our goals if we stop seeing ourselves as victims.

We must be fearless and willing to work hard, make good choices and, most importantly, never give up in pursuit of a dream. (Don’t even get me started on yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works to an ethnic woman.)

Eleanor Kitzman

Columbia

Now, the thing that was unusual about this may not be immediately apparent to you. But if you had known any of Ms. Kitzman’s predecessors as chief of the Budget and Control Board, you’d know. It’s sort of hard to imagine — actually, impossible to imagine — Frank Fusco, or Fred Carter, writing (or even thinking) words that would be anything like those that Ms. Kitzman put in that letter. Whether you think of them as faceless bureaucrats, or as the very models of professional discretion that they were, it’s difficult to imagine them expressing their views in such a manner.

If you don’t know those guys, and don’t have that background, my reaction to Ms. Kitzman’s letter probably won’t make much sense to you.

Under those guys, the B&C Board (which should not exist at all, but you know that once I get started on that subject I can be all day) was a lot of things, but one thing it was not was a forum for expressing personal sentiments about particular politicians — the governor, or anyone else. There was a reason for that — the director worked for five bosses with five different egos and agendas. What was the point of being too closely identified with any of them?

I mean, forgive me for sounding like “yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works,” but gee whiz, folks… (I thought, as exclamations do, that “gee whiz” sounded appropriately whitebread and old fashioned, didn’t you? I’m trying to play my assigned part as well as I can, and these small touches mean so much.)

The letter was so… emotional. So indignant. So partisan, in the sense of taking one person’s side against another. There are other terms I could use, but you know what? I just keep coming back to emotional — which I suppose will just expose me to, um, passionate condemnation for gender stereotyping, but hey, leave gender out of it (isn’t that what the brutes always say — “leave gender out of it?” the cads…). Think that I’m saying it the way Lee Marvin said it to Robert Ryan, “I owe you an apology, Colonel. I always thought that you were a cold, unimaginative, tight lipped officer. But you’re really … quite emotional. Aren’t you?” (The way I look at it, you can’t get any further away from gender politics than by quoting “The Dirty Dozen.” Am I right or am I right?)

I read something like that, and I think, what possessed her to write that? Yes, she owes her $174,000-a-year position to the governor as a matter of political fact, but why call attention to that in such a dramatic way? Did the governor know she was writing that letter? Does the governor approve of her having written that letter? She certainly didn’t need such a defense; she would have been fine without it.

For my part, I hadn’t even read the piece she was referring to (remember, I’m no longer paid to), but I can bet you I went and read it after seeing that letter. It was… unremarkable, really. Kind of unfocused. Seemed like the writer was trying to make some strong points, but trying to be kind and gentle with it, and swinging back and forth between commending the governor for being a determined “don’t let anything stand in your way” type and admonishing her for engaging in “magical thinking.”

Was the op-ed from this Hawkins fella somehow an example of White Male Oppressor insensitivity? Did he show a lack of appreciation for the governor’s inspiring story of ethnic pluck that we’ve heard so… much… about…? Was he trying to brutally impose on her “the so-called reality that others saw for her as a disadvantaged minority?” Hardly. He had, on his own initiative, shown due deference to the obligatory talking points in that regard. In fact, he went on about it as much as Ms. Kitzman did:

Haley’s success to this point in her life has been built around navigating diversity, not letting it get in her way or positioning herself as just a diversity hire. She was born into Sikhism, an Indian religion that adopts elements from both Hinduism and Islam, and later converted to the Methodist faith.

Haley earned a degree in accounting — a profession dominated by men — and began her career at a waste-management and recycling company. Throughout her formative years, she never interacted with large numbers of people who looked like her. Her political career is also based on being an outsider. She recently told an audience that Sanford told her the state wasn’t ready for a female governor.

OK, wait a minute; here’s the trouble. Seems Mr. Hawkins was, rather than being too indifferent, a bit too CONCERNED about matters of Identity Politics, for he had just said:

What Haley has done that is troubling is appoint nine white men, three white women and one African-American woman to her Cabinet. None of her 16 executive staff members is African-American.

Hey, you know what I think about all that I.D. stuff — if you wanted a “diverse” Cabinet and staff in the superficial demographic sense, you should have elected the White Guy. (And if you ARE someone who cares deeply about such things, you probably DID vote for the White Guy, and Nikki Haley knows that, so quit your bellyaching. Whoops, I’m being insensitive again…) But this guy apparently DID care about it, and said so. And for this, he’s condemned as… what was it again… “yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works….” Yeah, that was it — no wait, I forgot the part about “to an ethnic woman.” Mustn’t leave that off.

Anyway, it just wasn’t the kind of letter I’m used to reading from B&C Board chiefs. This is going to be interesting going forward, folks.

But really, what DO you say?

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Trav Robertson, as we saw him during the 2010 campaign.

Still sort of reeling from this discombobulation called Daylight Savings, and having had three glasses of sweet tea with my lunch at Seawell’s — to no noticeably helpful effect — I decided to do a wide swing through Five Points to get some REAL caffeine at Starbucks on my way back to the office.

So I got my tall Pike, and once again impressed the baristas with my fancy gift card from across the sea (thanks, Mr. Darcy!), and on my way out ran into Trav Robertson, whom I hadn’t seen since the election. Trav, if you’ll recall, managed Vincent Sheheen’s almost, but not quite, campaign for governor last year.

We chatted for a moment, mainly about the state of news media today and how it relates to politics (he said one of the toughest things he found to adjust to in the campaign was this newfangled notion that the story changes at least four times in the course of what we once so quaintly called a “news cycle”), and we parted, and as I walked back toward my truck, who was coming up the steps from Saluda but Larry Marchant. He smiled and we shook hands, and turning back to see Trav standing at the coffee shop door, I said, “Well, here’s you, and here’s Trav Robertson — we’ve just got everybody here, Democrats and Republicans…” as I moved on toward my vehicle.

Which is a pretty stupid and meaningless thing to say, but what DOES one say in such a social situation? I mean, I’m not gonna say, “Well, lookee here, we’ve got Trav, whose candidate lost a close election to a woman you claimed to the world to have slept with, and I last saw you being made fun of by Jon Stewart….”

No, I don’t think so.

And really, I suppose it’s not all that cool to say it here on the blog, either, but… it seems to me there’s a social commentary in here somewhere, having to do with Moynihan’s concept of Defining Deviance Down or whatever. And when I say “deviance,” I’m not picking on Larry or anybody else, but talking about us, the people who are the consumers of such “news.”

I mean, how does one conduct himself in polite society — or any society — in which such things are discussed, disclosed, dissected and displayed publicly? Actually, “publicly” isn’t quite the word, is it? Doesn’t quite state the case. Way more intense than that.

If you’re Jon Stewart, life is simple. You make a tasteless joke or two, get your audience to laugh, and move on to the next gag. But what do you say if you’re just a regular person out here in the real world, and you run into the real people about whom these jokes are made?

Whatever the right thing is, I haven’t figured it out, so today I just fell back on the time-honored stratagem of ignoring any weirdness inherent in the situation, and saying something insipid. Which, in this polite state of ours, still works.

As for Trav and Larry — did they speak after I left? Do they even know each other? If they spoke, what did they speak about? I have no idea. I retreated to the office with my coffee.

Larry Marchant, as we saw him during the 2010 campaign.

I know where the governor got the idea for THAT

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Meant to say something about this Tweet a couple of days ago, but forgot until now:

Palmetto Family@palmettofamilyPalmetto Family
Gov. Haley’s SC Prayer Breakfast text: Jeremiah 29:11. #fb

Betcha I know where the gov got the idea for that!

That happens to be a favorite passage of her friend and mine, Nathan Ballentine.

If you’ll recall, the prophet Nathan brought that verse to my attention back when I first got laid off two years ago (has it been that long?):

Anyway, my point is to share what Nathan sent me. He e-mailed me to say I should consult Jeremiah 29:11. Which I did:

For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare, not for woe! plans to give you a future full of hope.

Just the right words, the ones I needed to hear. In this context I also love to read Matthew 7:7-11. (Look it up.) But I already knew that one. Nathan pointed me to a source of inspiration I had missed, and for that I am very grateful. I bookmarked it on my Blackberry, and take heart from it each day.

I also very much appreciate the verses that precede it, which I recently cited in my “Stand in the place where you live” post (1/17/11):

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses to dwell in; plant gardens, and eat their fruits. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters. There you must increase in number, not decrease. Promote the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you; pray for it to the LORD, for upon its welfare depends your own.

I’m sorry I missed the prayer breakfast. I would have liked to have heard that.

ARRGGHH! Here’s what I MEANT to say to Phillip

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This morning on a previous post, Phillip Bush said:

I think I have it straight, now: if you disagree with Brad’s position, you are guilty of being over-emotional. If you agree, you are being rational. Brad, you really need to let this one go. You like to talk about “left and right” and position yourself as someone in a calm, unemotional, rational center, but the truth that you have opinions on various issues just like anybody else. They tend not to divide in a partisanly-predictable way, which indicates that you think for yourself on each issue, and that’s certainly admirable. But we are all human, and every considered opinion by every truly thinking citizen (and you certainly are that, as are almost all the commenters here) is a combination of emotion and reason, at least as that individual sees it. You’re not immune from that combination of factors, and it’s argumentatively lazy to just dismiss someone’s disagreement as saying, in effect, “well you’re just emotional and I’m rational, so the argument’s over.” You were off base on the other thread on jfx’s comment, which was no less a combination of emotion and reason than your own reasons for endorsing our invasion of Iraq. Most conservatives who criticize Obama are NOT nutty “birthers” and practitioners of Obama-Derangement-Syndrome; and most who think Blair was a slick prevaricator on the war can’t be dismissed as purely emotional BDS-ers. (That would be at least half the planet in that case.)

I certainly don’t pretend that my opinions are devoid of an emotional basis: and for the record, going back to Mr. Schiller, my point was not that the right wing or the left wing is more prone to emotionalism or even rhetorical over-the-top-ness; but that anti-intellectualism per se is (at least at this moment in American history) a cudgel wielded in particular by the right. It’s inexact for you to say that Mr. Schiller was equally guilty of “the worst kind of anti-intellectualism”: that would mean he would be doing such things as criticizing Tea Party leaders for “sounding like a professor,” just one of the gibes (meant to be an insult, I guess) directed at our current President. Schiller was guilty of a lot of things, stereotyping and overgeneralization among them, but anti-intellectualism is a very different and very specific thing.

I’ve been running from meeting to meeting today, which is why I hadn’t posted anything until a few minutes ago. But I was here for about 15 minutes right after Phillip posted that, so I wrote a medium-length reply, and just as I was about to save it and run out… Google Chrome shut down. Then Firefox shut down. Then EVERYTHING ELSE I had open shut down, spontaneously. And my laptop started restarted itself, and just as I ran out the door screaming, I saw it was adding insult to injury by running CHKDSK.

“Sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

ARRRGGGHHHH!

When I get back, ol’ Hal calmly informed me that he had taken it upon himself to download the following::

– Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems
– Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems
– Update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter
– Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems

I’m betting none of it was necessary. And I don’t see why the blasted machine couldn’t give me heads-up first.

Of course, everyone here at ADCO will tell me that’s what I get for insisting upon being the only person in the office who doesn’t use a Mac. On that subject, and having just mentioned HAL, you might enjoy this Apple ad.

Anyway… if I can remember, here’s what I was going to say to Phillip… But first, I’m going to “Save Draft”…

OK, here goes…

Phillip, your initial observation — “if you disagree with Brad’s position, you are guilty of being over-emotional. If you agree, you are being rational” — is slightly off the mark. That’s not a hard-and-fast law of the universe. It’s more like a useful rule of thumb.

Insert smiley-face emoticon.

But you were dead-on when you said, “you have opinions on various issues just like anybody else. They tend not to divide in a partisanly-predictable way, which indicates that you think for yourself on each issue, and that’s certainly admirable.”

Absolutely! Thank you for getting that! Of COURSE I have opinions! This is an opinion blog!

And thanks particularly for the “admirable” thing.

But to elaborate… as I try over and over to explain here, I am repulsed by the left and the right, Democratic and Republican, as they are currently constituted — because I DO think hard about each issue, which means I don’t accept the pat, off-the-shelf packages that the two predominant ideologies offer.

It’s like cable TV. The thing I’ve always hated about cable TV is that they won’t let me choose, and pay for, only the channels I want. Not because it’s technologically difficult, but because it doesn’t fit the cable companies’, or the networks’ and channels’, business model. They force me to take channels I don’t want in order to get the channels I DO want, because they make more money that way (I think; if that’s not the motivation, someone please explain it to me).

Same deal with the political parties, or the two main competing ideologies. Both Column A and Column B offer some ideas I like. But each of them also offers ideas I utterly reject. There’s no way I can buy either package and be honest with you, or with myself.

The problem is, our shared marketplace of ideas lacks a vocabulary for speaking of the way I think. I try hard to come up with a vocabulary of my own, using ordinary English words, but they so often run up against the problem that certain definitions and delineations are now assumed to be true by everyone, and my ideas don’t connect, even with very smart people. That’s because 24/7 we are bombarded with the political equivalent of Newspeak. If you’ll recall, the way Orwell conceived it, the goal was to reduce language so that it was impossible to express (and therefore, to a great extent, impossible to think of) ideas that were incompatible with IngSoc.

Well, today, the terms that most of us use for expressing political ideas are very limited terms handed to us by the two parties, their attendant interest groups, and increasingly simplistic news media, led by 24/7 TV “news” and the Blogosphere — all of whom find it in their interests to boil everything down to two choices — actually, two SETS of predetermined choices, so that once you pick one, everyone else knows what you think about everything.

I find this appalling. And I continue to resist it. And even though I’m not bad with words, I find it hard, like Winston trying to write half-formed heretical concepts into his diary, just out of sight of the telescreen. Only I’m publishing mine.

But it’s sometimes hard to express. And even when my friends and regular readers UNDERSTAND it, it’s hard for them to describe, because of our lack of that common vocabulary. So when Phillip says I “position yourself as someone in a calm, unemotional, rational center,” I know what he means, and he’s right to say it. But the fact is, I’m not in the center at all, although you’ll occasionally see me acquiesce to being called a “centrist,” just as a convenient shorthand.

But the problem with that term is that it implies that one MUST be on that one-dimensional line between left and right, and that if you ARE neither left nor right, you must be in the “center.” But I’m not. Sometimes I agree more or less with the left, and sometimes with the right. And sometimes neither the left nor the right is far enough out on its own wing to suit me. To paraphrase Billy Ray Valentine, when it comes to the political spectrum, I’m all over that place, baby.

I’m made this point before, such as on this post, and even back in my initial UnParty column. And in a variation on that theme, the Energy Party is all about taking the best ideas from left and right to do all we can to attain energy independence.

OK, I just went on at far greater length than I did on my failed comment earlier — perhaps out of frustration. And as I’ve written every word, I’ve been cognizant that if anyone is patient enough to read it all, he or she is likely to say, That Brad Warthen just thinks his thoughts are so far above everyone else’s that no one else is smart enough to understand him.

But that’s not it. If I were smart enough, I’d be able to explain it better, I suppose. I just get frustrated, because our common vocabulary HAS been reduced by people who have found it to their political advantage to do so, just like Big Brother, so I struggle to express what I truly think. Most people who are as uncomfortable as I am with the either-or paradigm just give up, curse politics, and walk away from it all. I don’t feel like I can do that as a citizen. I have to keep trying, whether I succeed or not. (And whether I get paid a salary to do it or not.) Which is why I’ve written all these millions of words over the years.

112 ways to spell ‘Gadhafi,’ or whatever that goofball’s name is

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I’m almost positive that in the early years of my career, the Associated Press spelled the last name of the dictator of Libya with a “K.” (Or was it a “Q?” It’s been a long time.) Then, at some point the AP Stylebook switched to “Gadhafi.” I sorta kinda remember this because back in the 80s my responsibilities as news editor at The Wichita Eagle-Beacon (since simplified back to The Wichita Eagle) included supervising the national desk (which dealt with national and international news), as well as the copy desk (the final arbiters of how things were spelled in the paper).

And every paper I’ve ever worked at conformed, more or less (there were sometimes local exceptions), to AP style. But some larger news organizations, just to be different and arrogant, have maintained their own, separate style bibles. And it sometimes seems that every one of them asserts its individuality by spelling Col. Moammar’s name a different way.

Me, I’ve been spelling it any way I have felt like spelling it at any given moment here on the blog. Because, after 35 years of following arbitrary rules invented to establish uniformity, I can do whatever I want now. (Freedom, Baby!) My only obligation to you, the reader, is to ensure that you know about whom I’m writing. And there are various ways to communicate that, mostly having to do with context.

And why not do whatever feels right, when there is no consensus among the MSM?

For instance:

As mentioned, the AP spells it “Gadhafi.” Now, anyway. (It’s frustrating that my Google searches have not yet produced the old spelling.)

The New York Times, with its usual “this is the way WE do it, so that, by God, is the way it’s done” manner, spells it “Muammar el-Qaddafi.” Note that they don’t even do the first name the usual way. On subsequent references, they drop the “el-” and go with “Colonel Qaddafi.”

The Times (as in the real Times, of London), spells it “Muammar Gaddafi.” The Jerusalem Post agrees. So, amazingly, does the BBC (an emerging consensus, where I thought there was none?).

The Washington Post agrees with The Times on the last name, but not the first: “Moammar Gaddafi.”

NPR, which isn’t a print medium anyway, sticks to AP style, apparently: “Moammar Gadhafi.”

But folks, that’s just the beginning. ABC, apparently aiming to make print media look ridiculous (which isn’t hard when it comes to something like this), has compiled a list of 112 ways to spell the guy’s name. I’ll give you a few of them, and you can go to the story on the web for the rest:

  • Qaddafi, Muammar
  • Al-Gathafi, Muammar
  • al-Qadhafi, Muammar
  • Al Qathafi, Mu’ammar
  • Al Qathafi, Muammar
  • El Gaddafi, Moamar
  • El Kadhafi, Moammar
  • El Kazzafi, Moamer
  • El Qathafi, Mu’Ammar
  • Gadafi, Muammar
  • Gaddafi, Moamar
  • Gadhafi, Mo’ammar
  • Gathafi, Muammar
  • Ghadafi, Muammar
  • Ghaddafi, Muammar
  • Ghaddafy, Muammar
  • Gheddafi, Muammar
  • Gheddafi, Muhammar
  • Kadaffi, Momar
  • Kad’afi, Mu`amar al- 20
  • Kaddafi, Muamar
  • Kaddafi, Muammar
  • Kadhafi, Moammar
  • Kadhafi, Mouammar
  • Kazzafi, Moammar
  • Khadafy, Moammar
  • Khaddafi, Muammar
  • Moamar al-Gaddafi
  • Moamar el Gaddafi
  • Moamar El Kadhafi
  • Moamar Gaddafi
  • Moamer El Kazzafi
  • Mo’ammar el-Gadhafi
  • Moammar El Kadhafi
  • Mo’ammar Gadhafi
  • Moammar Kadhafi
  • Moammar Khadafy…

That last one, before I stopped to keep myself out of Fair Use trouble, is awfully close to the way I think the AP used to do it. But I can’t say for sure.

So now you know. That is to say, you know that nobody knows.

“What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness”

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Isn’t that a great headline?

Stan Dubinsky sends out a lot of cool stuff to read via e-mail. You should ask to be on his list — if you’ve got time to read the stuff. I don’t really, but I do tend to glance at the headlines to see if anything draws me in (which, Journalism 101 here, is what headlines are for). And “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness” definitely did the job.

And the piece was worth reading. An excerpt:

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985….

Undergraduates… seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness….

We all note, and many of us decry, what social media have done to (and for; there’s an upside as well) effective and elegant use of language. But I found this piece interesting because it went far beyond that, and identified an insidious enemy not only to communication, but to clear thought as well.

That enemy is Vagueness.

What are you trying to say, Wesley?

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The other day I ran into Wesley Donehue at Starbucks (see that, Starbucks? yet another product placement you’re not paying for), and we talked briefly about my appearing on “Pub Politics” again, which would make me a member of the Five-Timer Club. I’m totally up for it, particularly since I’d like to discuss this aptly titled “rant” on Wesley’s blog.

I think I want to argue with him about it, but first I have to get him to explain more clearly what he’s on about.

I say “rant” is apt because it seems to come straight from the gut, without any sorting or organization from the higher parts of his cortex — and Wesley is a smart guy. The problem I have is that his thought, or emotions, or impulses or whatever, don’t add up. They just don’t hang together.

He makes the following unconnected points:

  1. Where does the media get off making like it’s a champion of transparency?
  2. How dare WACH-Fox defend itself from a slur leveled at it by Gov. Nikki Haley on Facebook?
  3. The media are just lashing out, because they are becoming irrelevant in the new media age, when politicos can go straight to the people.
  4. “Transparency” doesn’t mean going through the MSM, so the media have no legitimate excuse to criticize the gov.
  5. Any problems the media have are their own damn’ fault, for failing to be relevant and keep up with the times.

Did that cover everything? I may have missed an unrelated point or two.

Here, respectively, are my problems with his points:

1. Golly, Wesley, the MSM may be guilty of a host of sins, but suggesting they are somehow an illegitimate, insincere, incredible or inappropriate advocate for transparency is most illogical. They’re kinda obsessive about it, and this might be a shock, but they were into it a LONG time before Nikki Haley ever heard of it. Finally, the media are the one industry in society that actually have a vested, selfish interest in transparency (unlike certain politicians who TALK about it, but belie their commitment to it with their actions) — they kinda rely on it in order to do what they do — so I’ve just gotta believe they really mean it.

1a. Furthermore, what does this have to do with the ongoing talk about the gov’s failures to be transparent? What did I miss? This seems to me to be about the TV station defending itself from the governor’s insult. The transparency issue — the one that I hear folks in the media talk about, anyway — has to do with everything from Nikki not wanting to disclose questionable sources of income and refusing to release her e-mails back during the campaign, all the way up to meeting with two other Budget and Control Board members while excluding the others. I’m missing the connection in other words, between this incident and your complaint that the media are going on inappropriately about transparency.

2. Well, let’s see. The governor wrote “WACH FOX 57 is a tabloid news station and has no concept of journalism.” Wesley, I don’t care whether the governor said that on Facebook, or through an interview with the MSM, or in a campaign ad or by use of skywriting. The choice of medium does not take away from the fact that that was an extraordinary thing for a governor to PUBLISH (and that’s what she did; if governors and other empowered “ordinary” folks are going to take it upon themselves to communicate directly with the people without the offices of the MSM, perhaps they need to take a little seminar on the difference in significance between merely muttering something to your friends, and publishing it). Next — are you really suggesting that WACH or any other business does not have the right to defend itself when maligned by the governor? I assert that they have that right under the 1st Amendment, whether they are Joe Blow’s Used Cars or the MSM.

3. This one’s really interesting. I’ll grant you, WACH looks pretty lame technologically when it fails to provide a direct link to the FB post with which it is disagreeing. (Here you go, by the way.) But beyond that, let’s talk about the new rules. Here’s the kind of thing that happens in this wonderful, marvelous new world in which anyone can publish their thoughts and don’t have to go through the stuffy ol’ MSM. In the old, benighted days, a former employee of the governor (and of the last governor) might go around muttering about having had an illicit personal relationship with the governor, but he would have been ignored. Now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology that you extol, he can publish it himself with practically zero effort or investment. So it’s out there — because, you know, those bad old editors can’t keep it away from the people. And then it starts affecting the political campaign, and therefore becomes news. Now, let me ask you — when that same blogger follows that up by publishing salacious details related to his allegation, having already caused it to be a news story, what are the media supposed to do? Well, I don’t know, and others aren’t sure either. Me? I ignored it. WACH made the call that it made. Did the governor have the right to get ticked and trash WACH because of it? Yes, she did. (Although it was, as I say, pretty extraordinary for a sitting governor to say something like that about a business in her state.) Did WACH — that poor, pathetic institution that’s falling apart as you say, have the right to defend itself? Of course it did.

4. Who said it did? I missed that. Maybe you have a link to it; I’d be interested to read/hear that argument.

5. The problems that the media have result from a massive restructuring of the way businesses — the ones they relied upon for the advertising revenue that underwrote the gathering of the news — market themselves to the public. The long-term trend has been away from mass-media advertising on the local level, and to more targeted approaches. Nothing about what the media have reported or not reported, or positions they have taken, have anything to do with it. The public is lapping up news and commentary more hungrily than ever — from the MSM as well as other sources. But the business model that supported newsgathering — the model that’s falling apart — has nothing to do with that; it’s a whole separate transaction from the one between a medium and its readers/viewers/listeners. So you’re way off base there.

Anyway, have me on the show and we’ll talk further. Keep the beer cold.

Promise to Egypt: All your dreams will come true

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Since it’s way historic and all, I thought I’d put something here about the news that’s been breaking in recent minutes (you’d have seen it earlier if you followed me on Twitter), so y’all can talk about it even though I don’t have time to say much right now:

Military says Mubarak will meet protesters demands

By MAGGIE MICHAEL
Associated Press

CAIRO (AP) — President Hosni Mubarak will meet the demands of protesters, military and ruling party officials said Thursday in the strongest indication yet that Egypt’s longtime president may be about to give up power and that the armed forces were seizing control.

Gen. Hassan al-Roueini, military commander for the Cairo area, told thousands of protesters in central Tahrir Square, “All your demands will be met today.” Some in the crowd held up their hands in V-for-victory signs, shouting “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” a victory cry used by secular and religious people alike.

The military’s supreme council was meeting Thursday, without the commander in chief Mubarak, and announced on state TV its “support of the legitimate demands of the people.” A spokesman read a statement that the council was in permanent session “to explore “what measures and arrangements could be made to safeguard the nation, its achievements and the ambitions of its great people.”

The statement was labelled “communique number 1,” a phrasing that suggests a military coup…

OK, the military coup part may give us pause — more about that later when we know more — but what a heady moment for all those folks who’ve taken to the streets.

How about that quote?

“All your demands will be met today.”

Reminds me of Pedro’s extreme, over-the-top, meant-to-be-seen-as-ridiculously-hyperbolic campaign pledge (which was recommended to him by campaign consultant Napoleon Dynamite): “Vote for me, and all your wildest dreams will come true.”

Perhaps the general is overselling as well — and again, it remains to be seen how the people would feel about a junta (you might say that, like Pedro, the military is offering Egypt its “protection” — but if Mubarak is stepping down, that’s something Egyptians had hardly dared dream a month ago.

So, wow. This is quite a moment.

Schumer was just testing us

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I knew that following Adam Baldwin on Twitter (no, not one of those Baldwins — we’re talking Jayne Cobb from “Firefly”) would pay off eventually. Today, he brought my attention to this:

Adam Baldwin @adamsbaldwinAdam Baldwin

QFE: “We have 3 branches of government. We have a House. We have a Senate. We have a President.”- Sen. Schumer (D-NY) ~ http://bit.ly/eqwbNq

Hey, we all misspeak. And maybe the good senator was just checking to see whether the viewers were paying attention.

Here’s a question: Would Jayne Cobb have known about the three branches of government? Probably not. Of course, in his ‘verse, all you need to know is that there’s the ruttin’ Alliance, and there’s the freedom-loving Browncoats.

Being watched in Airstrip One

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Last night I was watching an episode of “Law & Order: UK” on BBC America, and was impressed by the extent to which the writers just expect you to keep up with the idiom, and the small differences between American and British culture and assumptions. For instance, there’s a scene in which detectives are fretting over the fact that they can’t easily retrace a suspect’s movements: He doesn’t carry a mobile, and probably doesn’t have an Oyster card. Then, a moment later, there’s a reference to CCTV.

The folks who do the show’s website are less respectful of the audience’s intelligence. The “British Terms Glossary” wastes time with “bloke” and “coppers” and “flat” and “guv.” Let’s face it, folks — if you don’t know what those mean, stick to re-runs of “Hee-Haw” (“Hey, Grandpa: What’s for supper?“) or the like. They also define “mobile,” but we know what that is too, don’t we?

The Oyster card is more subtle (and, you would think, a far more likely candidate for the online glossary than “Tube”). It’s the card you buy, and top up (do we say “top up”? I forget — but they say it a lot over there) as needed, to use the magnificent London system of public transportation. You swipe it to get through a turnstile on you way into a Tube station, and — here’s the pertinent part — you do the same to get out at your destination. Which means there exists an electronic record of your movements through the city. In the previous scene we had learned that the suspect had a fear of crowds that kept him away from the Tube. So, no Oyster card.

Of course, most people know what Closed Circuit TeleVision is. But it took me a day or so to consciously realized the implications of those signs I saw everywhere: “CCTV in operation.” (I actually had to think a minute to separate it in my mind from CATV, the old term for cable TV back in the days when it was the Community Antenna for small towns and rural communities, before it went all urban.)

What they meant, of course, is that you are under surveillance a huge proportion of the time. Yes, I know businesses here have CCTV, and footage from such cameras is often important in crime investigations. But it’s just nowhere near as ubiquitous as in London, and it doesn’t loom nearly as large in public consciousness. Watch TV news there, and it seems that every other word is CCTV, whether you’re talking the images of the crossbow robbers holding up a post office, or the images of murder victim Joanna Yeates (THE big story while we were there) picking up a couple of items at Tesco, or a routine crime at an off-licence. (Now there’s a term I had to look up — turns out “off-licence” doesn’t mean the shop is extralegal, that it lacks a license; it means it HAS a license to sell alcohol for OFF-premise consumption, as opposed to a pub. Generally, it’s what we’d call a convenience store.)

Of course, such consciousness of being watched — that those bright yellow signs — are a large part of the deterrent effect in themselves.

All of which is fine by me. As I always say, knock yourself out, Big Brother. I was conscious that some of my more libertarian friends back here in the States might have found it all creepy, but at no time in my sojourn in Airstrip One — I mean, England — did I feel the least bit put-upon or oppressed.

To me, it was part and parcel of being in a place that is very much like home, with freedom-loving people who respect the dignity of the individual, but where the politics is not plagued by the legions of radical-individualist paranoids who resist any effort at putting any sort of rational infrastructure in place. I loved the novelty of being in a place with such a dream public transit system, and where waiters and bartenders don’t mind not getting tips (or at most, don’t expect more than 10 percent) — after all, what are they worried about? They have health benefits they cannot lose. And I was very happy to pay the taxes that helped pay for it all. Some friends advised me that I could get a VAT refund on leaving the country, but there was no way I wanted that. I was happy to pay my share.

(And yes, sometimes it all goes overboard, which is why the coalition government is cutting back — AND raising taxes, remember, which they’re able to do because their conservative party doesn’t make a religion of irrational tax hatred. But on the whole, it was wonderful to be in a place where it’s assumed that one should have the Tube, and the buses (that’s “coaches” to you) and trains and parks and fantastic free museums (contributions suggested, but quite low and entirely voluntary) and a population of people who don’t fear being ruined by an unplanned sickness.

And which doesn’t mind being on Candid Camera, if it means you might catch a crossbow robber now and then.

Stand in the place where you live

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Strong misgivings: Yossarian and the chaplain.

For the longest time, I didn’t have a quotation on my Facebook profile. This didn’t seem right. I’m all about words. I’m all about pithy expressions of one’s world view, yadda, yadda. (Although I fear that now that I no longer have the discipline of writing a weekly column, I’ve gotten somewhat lazy about it, hence the “yadda, yadda.”)

Loads of other people — people who were not overly thoughtful students of rhetoric, judging by the quotations they chose — had multiple quotations. They had all sorts of things they wanted to say — or rather, things they wanted to let other people say for them.

But the thing is, I like so MANY things that I read — one of my problems in reading books is that, as I read them, I follow people around reading great passages aloud to them (and a well-written book will have at least one such passage per page), which is why people avoid me when I’m reading books — that the idea of singling out one, or two, or even 10 such quotes just seemed too restrictive. I thought, What is that good that I’m willing to have it almost as a personal epitaph? People will see that and think this sums me up. What quotation is there that I like that much?

It would need to be semi-original (obviously, if it were entirely original, it wouldn’t be a quotation). It couldn’t be trite. I couldn’t have seen anyone else use it. It needed to say something I believe. And it needed to be something that has truly stuck with me over time, as opposed to, say, the funniest recent thing I’ve read on Twitter.

So one day it struck me that I should post this:

“I wouldn’t want to live without strong misgivings. Right, Chaplain?”
— Yossarian, in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22

So I did.

And for the longest time, that stood alone, and I was satisfied to let it do so. I liked it on a number of levels. For instance, in a day when our politics are dominated by people who are SO DAMNED SURE they’re right and other people are wrong, it had a certain countercultural UnParty flavor to it. At the same time, it’s not an existential statement of doubt — the fact that he’s saying it to a chaplain, one who certainly believes in God (although in an unorthodox way, being an Anabaptist), anchors it in belief, but still expresses the idea that one should always be willing to question one’s assumptions.

It also said something I wanted others to know about me. Because I tend to argue whatever position I’m arguing rather tenaciously, even vociferously, people tend to think I’m inflexible. They’re wrong about this. I can usually think of all the reasons I might be wrong just as readily as they can, perhaps even more readily. (After all, one of the main steps in building an argument is imagining all the objections to it.) For instance, take our arguments over the Iraq War, or the debates I have with libertarians. My interlocutors think I’m a bloodthirsty war lover, and a rigid authoritarian. But I’m not, not really. I have a tendency to argue very insistently with your more radical libertarians because I think they go overboard, and that I have to pull REALLY HARD in the other direction to achieve any balance. And on the subject of the war, well… when you reach the conclusion that military action is necessary, and that action is initiated, I feel VERY strongly that you have to see it through, and that the time for debating whether to initiate it is long past. At least, that’s the way I saw the Iraq situation. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think there were viable arguments against it in the first place — I was just unpersuaded by them.

I suppose I could go on and on about why I like the quotation, but that’s not what this post is about.

This post is about the fact that I thought that quote was sort of lonesome, so I added another today:

“Stand in the place where you live.”
— R.E.M.

And here’s why I picked this one.

I’ve always had a beef with people who constantly tear down the place where they live. You know, the whiners who always want to be someplace else. The people who seem to think that if it’s local, it’s no good. These people are destructive. They’re not good neighbors to have.

You know that I’m a born critic, and I’m constantly expressing dissatisfaction with aspects of Columbia, or South Carolina. But I do it from a love of my home, and from a determination to make it better. If there’s something you don’t like about your home, you should be trying with all your might to make it better.

To me, this is a fundamental moral obligation. And like most true believers, I can find Scripture to back it up. Remember the passage that Nathan Ballentine came up with to encourage me when I got laid off? It was Jeremiah 29:11:

For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare, not for woe! plans to give you a future full of hope.

Well, when I looked that up, I found that I liked what preceded that just as much, the passage in which the prophet told the people not to whine about being in exile, but to affirmatively embrace the place where they were, and get on with life in it:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon:
Build houses to dwell in; plant gardens, and eat their fruits.
Take wives and beget sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters. There you must increase in number, not decrease.
Promote the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you; pray for it to the LORD, for upon its welfare depends your own.

Let’s repeat that last:

Promote the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you; pray for it to the LORD, for upon its welfare depends your own.

Amen, I say unto you. Stand in the place where you live.

The president’s speech in Arizona

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Something else I hadn’t been keeping up with the last few days… I was still out of the country when the Arizona shootings happened, and the couple of days I was stuck at home because of the snow, my newspapers either didn’t come or came after I had quit looking for them.

But I know that others among you were paying rapt attention. I know Samuel Tenenbaum was. I saw him at breakfast this morning, and asked him how he did. Well, he said, he had been in mourning Saturday night, but after the president’s speech last night, he felt a lot better. (When I wondered why the shootings — once I realized that was what he was talking about — affected him so deeply, he explained that he knew “Gabby” Giffords. He said he met her at one of the Laders’ Renaissance Weekends, and that she and Inez had been on a panel together.)

Since that encounter, a couple of other folks have mentioned how awesome the president’s speech was last night. So now, as I type this, I’m listening to it. I’m going to pause now and listen to the rest of it… In the meantime, y’all can start leaving comments…

… the part I’m listening to right now, when he’s just finished his well-researched eulogy for the dead and is applauding the heroes of the day, demonstrates a superb job of connecting emotionally with his audience, with the nation. That’s impressive, and appropriate. But here’s the bit I’m waiting for:

The president directly confronted the political debate that erupted after the rampage, urging people of all beliefs not to use the tragedy to turn on one another. He did not cast blame on Republicans or Democrats, but asked people to “sharpen our instincts for empathy.”

It was one of the more powerful addresses that Mr. Obama has delivered as president, harnessing the emotion generated by the shock and loss from Saturday’s shootings to urge Americans “to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully” and to “remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” he said, “it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”…

That, of course, is a topic near and deal to me, and few speak more eloquently about the need for civility than Barack Obama. (It’s one of the reasons we enthusiastically endorsed him in the primary in 2008.)

I’m listening to that part now… as I hear it, I’m a bit lost because I missed the back-and-forth of the last few days that prompted the president to feel like he had to urge us not to claw at each other over this. But I’ve caught snatches of it, and I can extrapolate the rest. I know how the 24/7 spin cycle, and the parties, and Twitter, and all of that work. So without fully knowing the background, I fully appreciate the message…

I particularly like his urging the nation “to rise above ugly political debates and see civic life ‘through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol” of adults,” and his exhortation that any debate engendered by this horror be worthy of the victims. Of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, he said:

“I want us to live up to her expectations… I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.”

He urged us to make sure “that our nation lives up to our children’s expectations.” Amen to that, Mr. President. Amen to that.

Taking nasty pleasure in the King’s English

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Being at the source of our beloved language, I particularly enjoy this e-mail that Samuel Tenenbaum passed on. I’d read some of these offerings from some of the cleverer practitioners on both sides of the pond, but not all:

When Insults Had Class


These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.


The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
She said, “If you were my husband I’d give you poison.”
He said, “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.”

“That depends, Sir,” said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”


“He had delusions of adequacy.” – Walter Kerr

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” – Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”  Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” – Moses Hadas

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” – Mark Twain

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends..” – Oscar Wilde

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend…. if you have one.” – George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second…. if there is one.” –  Winston Churchill, in response..

“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” – Stephen Bishop

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” – John Bright

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” – Irvin S. Cobb

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” – Samuel Johnson

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” – Paul Keating

“In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.” – Charles, Count Talleyrand

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” – Forrest Tucker

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” – Mark Twain

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” – Mae West

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go..” – Oscar Wilde

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts.. . for support rather than illumination. ” – Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” – Billy Wilder

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” – Groucho Marx

I haven’t heard anyone say anything that clever since I’ve been here, but I am enjoying the accents.

Sorry, but commies don’t get to DO holy war

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Especially not extremely backward, stone-age commies led by a guy who looks and acts like an alien (a reference to my favorite Economist cover ever, below)

Did you see or hear the latest?

NKorea threatens ‘sacred’ nuclear war if attacked

By FOSTER KLUG and HYUNG-JIN KIM – Associated Press
POCHEON, South Korea — North and South Korea beat the drums of war Thursday, with each threatening the other with immediate retaliation if attacked.
Seoul has staged days of military drills in a show of force meant to deter North Korea, including live-fire exercises earlier this week on a front-line island shelled by the North last month. Angered by the exercises, North Korea threatened Thursday it would launch a “sacred” nuclear war if Seoul hit it and warned that even the smallest intrusion on its territory would bring a devastating response.
The two sides are still technically at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce not a peace treaty, and a U.S. governor who recently made an unofficial diplomatic mission to the North has said the situation on the peninsula is a “tinderbox” and the worst he had ever seen it.
Still, the latest rhetoric seemed likely to be just that, words aimed at stirring pride at home and keeping the rival at bay.
Defense chief Kim Yong Chun said North Korea is “fully prepared to launch a sacred war” and would use its nuclear capabilities, calling Monday’s drills a “grave military provocation” that indicated South Korea and the U.S. are plotting to invade the North.
Kim told a national meeting in Pyongyang that the North’s military will deal “more devastating physical blows” to its enemies if they cross into the North’s territory even slightly. He also threatened to “wipe out” South Korea and the U.S. if they start a war, the official Korean Central News Agency said in a dispatch….

Here’s an interesting side topic for consideration by you lovers of language: Why is it that hyperbole seems to translate so badly from culture to culture? Or is it just a dictator thing? We’re all still having fun with Saddam Hussein’s “mother of all battles” — to which, after it was over, we could well have taunted “Maybe next time you ought to send the DADDY of all battles,” were George H.W. Bush given to trash talk. I certainly had a lot of fun with it back at the time — sending out memos to the newsroom, in connection with coordinating our war coverage, couched in Saddam style (I ran across one of those recently, and meant to post it — now I don’t know where I put it).

And now this — which frankly, I don’t think anybody’s going to be quoting 19 years from now. I mean, it just doesn’t work. Sorry, Kim, but you don’t get to have a “sacred war.” You’re a godless commie. Did you forget, or what? Stalin would have never slipped up like this. And another thing, Poindexter: If Stalin had threatened “devastating physical blows” — well, first of all, he would never have used a pantywaist construction like that, but if he said something LIKE it — you knew he’d have backed it up. You, not so much.

It’s just … embarrassing…

Lie of the year: “Gummint takeover of health care”

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A Tweet from the WashPost brings to my attention this item:

PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘A government takeover of health care’

By Bill Adair, Angie Drobnic Holan
Published on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 11:30 p.m.

In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama’s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a “government takeover.”

“Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”

The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the “public option” concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.

But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections….

And indeed, it’s tough to think of a bigger lie recently propagated than the idea of the lame, tepid, timid health care bill that Dems crammed through over Repubs’ kicking and screaming was anything in the same universe as a government takeover of anything.

If only it were. That is, if only it were a takeover, not of “health care,” but of the mechanism for paying for it. A few minutes ago on the radio, I heard ol’ Henry McMaster rumbling in that distinctive old-Columbia drawl of his about that mean awful nasty mandate, and again found myself wondering how he or anyone can even begin to imagine that we could address health care expense in any meaningful way without a mandate of some kind. Not THIS mandate, but a real one — a mandate for all of us to be in the same system, the same risk pool. Nothing else would really work.

I experienced actual gummint-run health care when I was a kid, because my Dad was in the Navy. Navy doctors, Navy hospitals. And let me tell you something: It was great. My Dad devoted his career to his country, frequently (at sea, and in the Rung Sat Special Zone of Vietnam with the river patrol boats) putting his life on the line. And in return, my family’s health care was taken care of. Made all the sense in the world to me. Way I see it, we should all pay into the system one way or another — for most of us, through taxes or premiums or whatever you choose to call them — and then everybody’s in the pool and we achieve maximum economies of scale.

But essentially, even that wouldn’t be a gummint-run health-care system, but a government-run (actually, I don’t care who runs it, as long as we’re all in it and nobody’s adding cost by building profit into the transaction, and the way you usually accomplish that is with a public approach) medical insurance program.

But we never even considered THAT. No one dared, from the beginning of the debate, breathe the two words that should have been nonnegotiable — “single payer.” Which is idiotic. No, we started with a premise far short of that, and negotiated farther and farther away from it until we ended up with something that bore no resemblance to anything even within that universe.

And still, people like Joe Wilson went around saying “government takeover of health care” as if the words coming out of their mouths bore some relationship to reality.

Talk about a big lie. Yeah, you lie, Joe. Whether you understand that you’re doing that or not. Even if you believe it, which you most likely do.

But I find myself wondering — when he said it, did anyone actually believe it? I mean, besides Joe? I find that hard to fathom, if anyone did…

Oprah helps out another struggling writer

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Got an ad from Barnes & Noble via email saying, “Just Announced!… Oprah’s Latest Book Club Pick.”

Turns out it was something called A Tale of Two Cities by one Charles Dickens. I’m glad Oprah decided to help the guy out. He deserves a wider audience. I see he’s from London. Maybe I’ll look him up when I’m there at the end of the month, give him a little publicity on the blog.

This reminds me of two things:

  1. I still haven’t read that book. I’ve started a couple of times, but didn’t get into it, which my eldest daughter finds incredible, since it’s one of her faves. Maybe I should try again, after I get done reading Tony Blair’s book. I’m in a sweat to finish Tony’s, you know, in case I run into him over there. What if I I ran into him at Starbucks or something (hey, it’s a small country), and he asked what I thought of his book and I hadn’t read it? What a proper flat I should look. (And yes, I know my British slang needs updating. It’s not even up to Dickens’ era, being stuck in about 1810.)
  2. I read an interesting book review this morning, about a book titled The Other Dickens, a tale of Charles’ wife and how beastly he was to her. Which, of course, also reminded me of how I hadn’t read A Tale of Two Cities.

About that review, in the WSJ — I was struck by this bit of criticism:

There is a rather significant moment in 1849 when he insists on chloroform at the birth of Henry Dickens. A tender gesture aimed at sparing his wife pain? Ms. Nayder has other ideas: “a victory of male medical expertise over natural forces,” she decides, in which such “victory” is “compromised by the method through which it is achieved: the dissociation of mind from her body . . . and her consequent objectification.” This is sharply put, but you have a feeling that Dickens’s omitting to send out for anesthetics would have been equally culpable.

The bit about “objectification” gestures at another of Ms. Nayder’s contexts, which is her determination to give Catherine not so much a life of her own as one acceptable to the ukases of 21st-century academe. Nobody in “The Other Dickens”—remember that this is the age of Gladstone and Disraeli—does anything that is merely idiosyncratic: Having been “disempowered,” they perform “transgressive acts” that may or may not leave them in a state of “valorization.”

In other words, the author was somehow ideologically incapable of reaching the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, Dickens was, as an individual person, simply a jerk.

This got me to wondering about something else, after having watched “Frida” last night and being immersed in arguments among Mexican communists back in the 1930s: Which is more given to silly, pompous jargon — feminism or Marxism. Discuss.

Fiction tries to describe a strange new truth

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Sure, he wove a tangled web out there in the cold, but in a way things were more straightforward for le Carré's Alec Leamas.

I really value my Wall Street Journal. Every day, it reminds me what a well-run, thoughtful newspaper that still has some resources to work with can do. And in spite of its staid, conservative reputation, it manages to do some really interesting, creative things.

Graham Greene, creator of Our Man in Havana, would have had just the right touch.

Today, we see what happened when the editors got this idea: With WikiLeaks creating a reality that no novel ever imagined, what would three spy novelists have to say about this strange new world? What does spy fiction look like in a world without secrets?

I devoured it, as I am a fan of spy fiction. And while I am not a reader of any of the three writers they chose (Alex Carr, Joseph Finder and Alex Berenson), they rose well to the occasion of having to write on a newspaper deadline. Sure, they lacked the mastery of the language of John le Carré, and the dry wit of Len Deighton. And none of them have the touch of the late Graham Greene, whose sense of the absurd (think Our Man in Havana, to which le Carré paid tribute in The Tailor of Panama) would fit so well the perversity of Julian Assange et al.

But as I say, they did fine, each taking a different approach. Alex Carr did the best job of portraying the human cost of trashing security, with a U.S. intelligence officer anxiously racing to warn her Afghan source that he has been compromised by WikiLeaks’ callous disregard for his young life.

Those of you who still fail to get, on a gut level, what is wrong with what Wikileaks does should read that one if none of the others.

Joseph Finder had the most complete, in the literary sense, tale, managing to be fairly clever and tell a full story with a twist at the end, and do it all in just over 1,000 words — the length of one of my columns when I was with The State.

Alex Berenson sets a scene pretty well in his piece, but doesn’t resolve anything. It’s a mere snapshot smack in the middle of a story. I still enjoyed reading it.

Yes, it’s fiction, but fiction can communicate truths that journalism cannot. Most of what helps us understand our world, really get it, is in the mortar that lies between the solid fact-bricks that journalism provides. That mortar consists of subjective impressions, emotions, unspoken thoughts — things only an omniscient observer (something that only exists in fiction) can provide.

If you can read those three pieces — I’m never sure what people who don’t subscribe can and can’t read on that site — please do.

What would Len Deighton's Harry Palmer do?

“Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, tail on his hat…”

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A reader this week reminded me of something that I may have known, but had forgotten — that long before he was the funniest deadpan comic actor in America, Leslie Nielsen was … “The Swamp Fox” on TV. She wrote:

I occasionally post on your blog as Abba.  Would you consider posting this clip from YouTube showing Leslie Nielsen, who died this week, as South Carolina’s Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, in Disney’s series from the early 1960s – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vvQJ7ZDg1Y.  Here’s a longer version – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGN1pDzYAY&feature=related.  Leslie Nielsen never looked so good!  This clip has the catchy theme song that I remember so well from my childhood.  We used to play the Swamp Fox on the playground at school, and many of the boys in my class had tri-cornered hats with fox tails attached.  Hear the song once, and you’ll be humming it all day long!  A fitting tribute to Leslie Nielsen from our corner of the world, I think.

I loved that show, which ran from October 23, 1959 (right after my 6th birthday) to January 15, 1961 — hardly more than a year.

Like the far, far more successful “Davy Crockett” series and generally forgotten “Gray Ghost,” these shows inspired me and other very young kids to run out and play at being actual figures from history. (Anyone remember that goofy, overly elaborate way Col. Mosby saluted? I thought it was cool, and used to go around imitating it. Wouldn’t you like to see video of that?)

Actually, to take that a bit farther… to this day, whenever I hear the words “Tory” and “Patriot,” I think of first hearing them used on “The Swamp Fox.” So while my understanding of the term was to grow and expand later, I actually had a minimal working knowledge of what a “Tory” was at the age of 6. If I ran into a 6-year-old who used a term like that today, I’d be shocked. But it was common currency among fans of “The Swamp Fox.”

I can also remember a conversation I had with my uncle about “The Gray Ghost.” I was confused about the whole blue-vs.-gray thing (especially since I was watching it in black-and-white), and I asked him during one show, “Are those the good guys or the bad guys?” My uncle, who was only a kid himself (six years older than I) could have given me a simplistic answer, but instead, he said, “Well, they’re both Americans…” and went on to suggest that a case could be made for both being good guys. That sort of rocked my world. There was no such ambiguity on the Westerns I watched. This was my introduction to the concept that in war, in politics, in life, things can be complicated, that there are many shades of gray. Perhaps the track that set mind on has something to do with why I don’t buy into the whole Democrat-vs.-Republican, left-vs.-right dichotomy that drives our politics. After all, they’re all Americans. And in the wider world, they’re all humans. Even the Nazis. (Of course, this doesn’t keep me from understanding that when humans’ actions go beyond the pale — as with Nazis, or terrorists — they must be opposed, with force if necessary.)

Also, while at first I didn’t think I remembered the “Swamp Fox” theme song, as I listened to it repeated over and over on that clip above, I had a dim memory of being struck by the odd syntax of that second line, “no one knows where the Swamp Fox at” — I didn’t know WHY it sounded odd (I was just learning to read, and hadn’t gotten to grammar yet), it just did.

In other words, these shows — which presented very simplistic, often inaccurate glimpses of history — not only helped feed a lifelong interest in history, but helped foster the ability to think.

So… TV doesn’t actually have to be junk, although it’s often hard to remember that these days.