Category Archives: Words

‘Basic English’ little help on 2nd Amendment

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On tomorrow’s page we have a letter from someone on one side or the other of the 2nd Amendment debate (which side is irrelevant to my point) who writes "Anyone who has had any basic English course knows…," and then goes on to make some point or other about what he believes the Amendment to mean.

Here’s the problem with that: Basic English (or hyper-advanced English, for that matter) is little help in making clear sense of the 2nd Amendment. Read it — or try to: Those stray commas — you know, the ones after "Militia" and "Arms" — render it into gibberish.

I love commas; I truly do. I think the modern world is sadly lacking in commas. That’s why I loved this column by Robert Samuelson awhile back.

But apparently, they had a surplus of them in the 18th century — a regular plague, as with locusts. And they descended upon the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution, and left devastation in their wake.

‘Member’-ship

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My Sunday column was originally about 11 inches longer than the published form. One of the first things that went in editing it down was my parenthetical digressions, which are sometimes my favorite parts — even though they frequently have NOTHING to do with my point.

An example would be the one in the original second paragraph of the column, to wit:

    You did? Are you sure? I just ask because, as a member of the U.S.
economy (Can you be a “member of the economy?” I don’t see why not,
since everybody these days refers to uniformed military personnel as
“members of the military,” as though the Army were the Kiwanis Club or
something), I’ve got to tell you that I’m feeling a little
understimulated.

It’s a little difficult for me to explain why, but this is a pet peeve of mine. I hate hearing of military personnel referred to as "members of the military." It’s like calling soldier, sailors or marines fingers or toes (or some even less noble appendage), or comparing them to participants in some private club, which to me seems to denigrate their service in some undefinable way.

Those of you old enough to have a sense of perspective will realize that this is a fairly recent construction. I first started hearing it regularly in the 90s, maybe just after the Gulf War. It’s basically yet another awkward attempt to be "gender-inclusive." You tend to hear it as a replacement for the traditional "servicemen." Why we can’t say "servicemen and -women" when we mean to include both, I don’t know.

‘Nuts:’ The cartoon Robert didn’t put in the newspaper

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As I’ve mentioned before, for a regular guy who makes his living as a satirist, Robert Ariail can sometimes get all sensitive and even shy. He hates criticism, particularly criticism arising from a misunderstanding of his work (if he meant to offend you, he’s OK with that).

And sometimes he decides that his cartoon ideas are inappropriate. Sometimes he’s onto something, or at least it’s debatable. Other times, he may worry a bit too much. You might say that, on the spectrum of cartoon sensibilities, he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from this Dutch guy.

Anyway, his sensitivity on that point was one of the reasons why this cartoon didn’t make it into the paper. He was worried about the salacious nature of "nuts" the way Jesse Jackson had used it. But there were other reasons:

  • The simplest, and most obvious, was that he had an oversupply of cartoons, and we ran out of slots for running them in a timely fashion. There will even be on jammed onto our Monday letters page, which is unusual. If we still had a Saturday page, I probably could have argued him into using it there. But since I was out of space, when he said he’d just put it on his Web page, I left it alone. (In case you haven’t figured it out, we have different standards for what we’ll put on the Web, and what we deem paper-worthy. This is driven by factors ranging from the enduring concept of the "family newspaper" and the fact that on the Web, space is unlimited.)
  • He thought people wouldn’t get it, because it got so little coverage in the MSM, outside of Fox — and most of that coverage tiptoed around what he’d actually said. When he first mentioned this, I said that was an advantage if he was worried about salaciousness, since readers who had missed the reference would just take it on the level of saying Jackson and Wright are "nuts." Sure, that’ll offend some, but the offense is more in the realm of the kind Robert doesn’t mind, since that is exactly what he meant.
  • He lost some enthusiasm for the cartoon when he realized he’d misunderstood what Jackson had said. He initially thought he’d said, "Obama’s cutting off his nuts" by "talking down" to black folks. When he mentioned it to me, it caused me to say something like, "He’s cutting off some nuts, all right, and one of them’s Jesse, and he doesn’t like it." That inspired the above cartoon — Robert’s eyebrows shot up the instant I said it — and this blog post by me. But in the course of researching for a link for the blog post, I discovered Jackson had actually said something different — something more hostile, but something that didn’t quite fit as well the play on words upon which the cartoon is based.
  • He had another cartoon regarding what Jackson had said about Obama, and it was actually a better one, and it didn’t rely upon prior knowledge on the readers’ part. As it happens, we put it on the Sunday page, which is the biggest play we can give anything. You’ll see it tomorrow.

Seems like there were a couple of things that ran through my head in the couple of seconds after Robert told me he’d decide to use this on the Web only (and send it to his syndicate), but I’m forgetting them now.

(Trying to reconstruct one of those internal monologues this way is actually one of the fun things about blogging. Dostoevsky did this — far better, of course, but it appeals to me for the same reason. I pretty much fell in love with Crime and Punishment for good at about the point when Andrey Semyenovich Lebezyatnikov goes on and on about what ran through his head in a couple of seconds. I thought that was cool.)

Yessirree bobtail!

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Cindi’s got another column on tomorrow’s page that involves the S.C. legislative practice of "bobtailing." As usual, she uses the term as though it makes perfect sense, although it doesn’t.

Cindi defends the word as one that has meaning within the context of the State House, and she has enough of a point that I leave the term in when she uses it (Hey — you try to argue her out of it). Cindi uses the term because, as she put it, That’s what they call it, so that’s what it is. I’m grateful that in one recent column, she at least put the term, as used by S.C. lawmakers, in quotation marks.

Yes, if we’re going to describe what these folks do we need to use the lingo, but this is just an example of our lawmakers abusing language. They use the term to refer to ADDING something, or somethings, to a bill — something that doesn’t belong there. In the English language, the term "bobtail" indicates that something has been TAKEN AWAY — or mostly taken away.

To "bob" a tail is to cut most of it off. It applies to things other than hair, of course (I refer you to Fitzgerald’s "Bernice Bobs Her Hair.") A Bobtail Cat is so called because he has a mere stump of a tail.

Far more accurately descriptive is the "Christmas Tree" metaphor, of hanging amendments on a bill in the manner of ornaments. Unfortunately, in South Carolina, "bobtailing" is what they call it. I just thought I’d point out that they are WRONG to call it that.

The real Room 101

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HOrwellgeorgeaving made a reference to "Room 101" in Orwell’s 1984, I went to find an explanatory link. (On some
level or other, the very existence of hypertext is one of my biggest motivations for blogging. Even though most of y’all may not — and probably don’t — follow the links, just finding them and setting them up releases endorphins in my brain. I dig making the connections; my favorite literary device is allusion.)

In this case, I was more than usually rewarded.

Like Winston Smith, you probably know already what Room 101 is. As O’Brien explains it to the prisoner,

    You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the
answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the
worst thing in the world…
    The worst thing in the world… varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.

In my case, it was having blood drawn, which is why it took me almost 49 years to work up the nerve to start making donations at the Red Cross.

But the really cool thing, the point of this post, is to share with you what I learned by reading the Wikipedia link:

Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House where he used to sit through tedious meetings.

Boy, can I identify with that! I certainly hope Wikipedia was right on that one, because it really brings Orwell down to where I can relate.

Here’s a creepier fact I ran across, about the days when the Stasi terrorized East Germany:

The people of the GDR lived through their own private Nineteen Eighty-Four every single day. Funder describes Orwell’s book as "like a manual for the GDR, right down to the most incredible detail". The party, if not the proles, knew that very well. She remembers that the much-dreaded Stasi chief Erich Mielke even managed to renumber the offices in the secret-service headquarters. "His office was on the second floor, so all the office numbers started with ‘2’. Orwell was banned in the GDR, but he would have had access to it. Because he so wanted the room number to be 101, he had the entire first floor renamed the mezzanine, and so his office was Room 101."

More about the ‘good old boy’ system

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My column today may appear to be about our endorsement of a candidate for the state Senate. But that was just an excuse for writing about something I’d been thinking about for 20 years — the meaning of the phrase "good old boy," as used in S.C. politics.

This post is to include some additional stuff that I didn’t have room for in the column, in addition to what I already wrote about the movie I referred to.

First, there was my reference to Billy Carter. Remember that he was the one who tried to define the difference between a "good old boy" and a "redneck." He said a good old boy drives down the road in his pickup truck drinking beer and throwing the empty cans back into the bed of the truck (or into a recycling bag, in another version). A "redneck" throws them out onto the road.

In any case, his point was to make a "good old boy" out to be something not so bad. And indeed, through the 70s and into the 80s, while a Northerner or even a snobbish Southerner might look down on a "good old boy," it wasn’t necessarily a pejorative. It was an OK thing to be.

As I said in the column, my first memory of hearing the phrase used politically by a Southerner as a bad thing was after I returned home to South Carolina in 1987. I kept hearing of the way that Carroll Campbell had used it in the 1986 campaign.

As I noted also in the column, when used as Campbell used it ("good old boy system), the phrase seemed a bastardized hybrid of two very different concepts — an uncultured, generally rural, working-class white Southern male on the one hand, and a member of the very upper crust (Old Boy Network) in Britain or the American Northeast, referring to alumni of the poshest schools.

A footnote: Not until after I had written the column, and was looking for links for the blog version, did I learn that someone else had drawn the same contrast, in a letter to the editor in The New York Times in 1991. That writer, a William M. Ringle of McLean, Va., also used Billy Carter in defining one of the phrases, by the way. Finding that made me feel slightly less original, but then also slightly less crazy. The main point is that Mr. Ringle saw the two phrases as just as jarringly incompatible as I did:

According to your report that Yale University’s Skull and Bones club has voted to accept women into its ranks (news article, Oct. 26), the secret society "can no longer rightly be considered just a ‘good old boy,’ network." You make the common mistake of splicing "good ol’ boy" onto "old boy."

An old boy is an alumnus, originally of a British public school, which is of course a private school. Such old grads have been credited with creating the kind of network that Skull and Bones supposedly fosters. Old school ties maintain the bond.

Good ol’ boys, however, are Southern Americans not known for a burning desire to go to Yale. Even if they got there, they wouldn’t be tapped for Skull and Bones. Gregarious, charming and politically wise though they can be, they can’t be imagined swapping stories, between bites of Moon Pie and gulps of R. C. Cola, with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. or President Bush. Billy Carter might epitomize the good ol’ boy.

Despite strained similarities, old boys are old boys, and good ol’ boys are good ol’ boys, and never the twain shall meet.

Anyway, back to Carroll Campbell, who had hit upon this odd usage. It was really rather brilliant for a man who would be the first Republican governor since Reconstruction who was not elected by a fluke (the Establishment’s — or shall we say "Old Boy Network’s" successful scuttling of the Pug Ravenel candidacy). Since everyone in power in the state was a Democrat, it was appropriate to evoke the concept of the Old Boy Network in opposing that entrenched power. And "good old boy" was a familiar Southern term by then, giving the concept a particularly South Carolina flavor — one that conveniently evoked the notion that by voting Republican for a change, you would be raising yourself above those rednecks who are running things. This played subtly to the traditional notion that Republicans were in a higher social class than Democrats.

The brilliance of this combination of ideas was that it gave voters an opportunity both to identify subliminally with a higher social class (if you voted for Campbell, you were not a "good old boy"), while at the same time satisfying a populist urge to strike a blow at the Establishment (the "Old Boy Network"). One could hardly find a better psychological formula for encouraging people who weren’t used to doing so to vote Republican.

The phrase worked so well that over the years, people across the political spectrum took it up. You found women and blacks — generally Democratic constituencies — using it to describe the white men who kept them from power. The meaning in those contexts was simpler, because it directly replaced "Old Boy Network."

Cindi Scoppe, in editing my column, said I was full of it. She said there was nothing new or original about Campbell’s use of the phrase "good old boy system." But I believe she thinks that because she doesn’t remember the time before that. Cindi came to work at The State in 1986, fresh out of college (UNC). She didn’t start covering state politics until I recruited her from the metro staff in 1987 or 1988. I, on the other hand, had dealt with politics professionally since 1975, mostly in Tennessee (as likely a place to find good old boys as anywhere).

Nevertheless, she did plant a small seed of doubt. Fortunately, Bob McAlister was able to clear it up for me. I called Bob late Friday just to give him a heads-up that indeed I was about to use the quotes I had dragged out of him a couple of weeks earlier. And Bob insisted that the "good old boy system" WAS original to the 1986 Campbell campaign.

In fact, he believes (immodestly) that a TV commercial he produced, entitled "Good Old Boys," was what won the election for Campbell. The thrust of it was to drive home the cozy relationship between the developers of what then was called the AT&T building on the site of the old Wade Hampton Hotel (neither Bob nor I could remember what it’s called now; it’s had several aliases). The clincher was a picture he had taken of a banner in front of the building itself supporting Democratic nominee Mike Daniel.

But while Bob took credit for the spot, and therefore for the victory, when I asked whether the "good old boy" rhetorical strategy was his, he said no: Carroll Campbell had been using it in the campaign all along, and it was original to him.

The tension between "good old boy" and "Old Boy Network" inherent in "good old boy system" had never consciously occurred to Bob, he said.

What’s a ‘Good Old Boy’ to you?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MORE THAN THREE decades ago, I saw a “B” movie that was a sort of poor cousin to “In the Heat of the Night.” It was about a newly elected black sheriff in a racially divided Southern town, and the white former sheriff, played by George Kennedy, who reluctantly helps him.
    At a climactic moment when the two men seem to stand alone, a group of white toughs who had earlier given the sheriff a hard time show up to help. Their leader gruffly says that they’re doing it for the sake of the old white sheriff, explaining that, “You always was a good old boy.”
    Or something like that. Anyway, I recall it as the first time I heard the term “good old boy.”
    It got a good workout later, with the election of Billy Carter’s brother to the White House. But the first time I recall hearing it used prominently as a pejorative by a Southerner was when Carroll Campbell ran against the “good old boy system” in the 1980s.
    The usage was odd, a fusion of the amiable “good old boy” in the George Kennedy/Billy Carter sense on the one hand, and “Old Boy Network” on the other. The former suggests an uncultured, blue-collar, white Southerner, and the latter describes moneyed elites from Britain or the Northeast, alumni of such posh schools as Cambridge or Harvard. Despite that vagueness, or perhaps because of it, the term remains popular in S.C. politics.
    Which brings us to Jake Knotts, who represents District 23 in the S.C. Senate.
    Jake — pronounced “Jakie” by familiars — could have been the prototype for that George Kennedy character, had Hollywood been ready for something with a harder edge. He is a former Columbia city cop who by his own account sometimes got “rough.” He offers no details, but a glance at his hamlike hands provides sufficient grist for the imagination. According to a story said to be apocryphal, he once beat up Dick Harpootlian for mouthing off to him. (The mouthing-off part gives the tale credibility, and longevity.)
    After Jake was elected to public office, he further burnished his “rough” reputation with a legislating style seen as bullying by detractors, and tenacious by allies.
    This newspaper’s editorial board has always been a detractor. You see, we are high-minded adherents of the finest good-government ideals. Jake’s a populist, and populism is common, to use a Southern expression from way back. In our movie, we’re Atticus Finch to his Willie Stark. (See To Kill A Mockingbird and All the King’s Men.)
    We were against video poker; Jake was for it. We were against the state lottery; Jake was for it. We were for taking the Confederate flag off the State House dome; Jake was against it.
    We were for giving the governor more power over the executive branch; Jake was against it.
    In 2002, we endorsed a candidate for governor who agreed with us on restructuring, and didn’t seem like anybody’s notion of a good old boy. He styles himself as the antithesis of back-slapping, go-along-to-get-along pols, to the extent that he doesn’t go along or get along with anybody.
    That’s fine by the governor, because his style is to set forth an ideological principle, see it utterly rejected by his own party, and then run for re-election as the guy who took on the good old boys.
    Jake’s notion of the proper role of a lawmaker isn’t even legislative; it’s helping — he might say “hepping” — constituents on a personal level. This can range from the unsavory, such as helping out a voter charged with a crime, to the noble, such as paying out of his pocket for an annual skating party for kids who’ve gotten good grades.
    Jake’s slogan is “for the people,” as simple an evocation of populism as you will find. To him, theJake_sign
proper role of the elected representative is to make sure government “heps” regular folks rather than working against them.
    That means he will take a bull-headed stand against the concerted effort to undermine the one aspect of government that does the most to help regular folks — public schools.
    This brings us to what caused us to do something we thought we’d never do — endorse Jake Knotts, the sentinel of the common man who doesn’t give two figs for what we think the proper structure of government should be.
    We’re endorsing him because he stands against the Old Boy Network (see how different these terms are?) of wealthy out-of-state dilettantes who don’t believe in government hepping folks at all, and want to make our state a lab rabbit for their abstract ideology.
    We are not comfortable with this. We’ve had some terrific arguments about it on our editorial board. It was not one of your quick decisions, shall we say.
    Occasionally, when we have a really tough endorsement in front of us, I quietly call a knowledgeable source or two outside the board, people whose judgment I trust, to hear their arguments.
    On this one, I talked to three very different sources (one Democrat, two Republicans) who shared values that had in the past caused us to oppose Jake. All three said he had won their respect over time. All said he was a man you were glad to have on your side, and sorry to go up against. All three said that between Jake and his opponent who is backed by the governor and the Club for Growth and the rest of that crowd, they’d go with Jake.
    Not that they were proud of it. All three spoke off the record — one got me to say “off the record” three times. I complained about this with the last one, saying it was all very well for him to urge us off-the-record to endorse somebody on-the-record, and he said all right, he’d go public.
    It was Bob McAlister, Carroll Campbell’s chief of staff back in the late governor’s glory days of fighting “good old boys.”
    “I don’t agree with Jake on a lot of issues,” Mr. McAlister said, but “at least you don’t have to wonder where he stands on anything, because he’ll tell you.” In the end, “There’s a place in politics for his kind of independent thought…. I think Jake Knotts has served his constituents well.”
    In his own staid, doctrinaire-Republican kind of way, I think Bob was saying he thinks Jake is a good old boy.

Knottsjake_001

What is ‘our community?’

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From time to time, a comment by one of y’all causes me to comment at some length, and I decide to make it a separate post. This is one of those times.

A modest Everyman who calls himself "john" had this to say back on this post:

Well bud, I think the votes are in.  Like I keep telling you, your views do not fit in our community…

First, let me clarify that I think he meant me, not bud. I’m less clear on what he meant by "our community." I think it’s an interesting question to pose to all: What, in the context of these discussions, does "our community" mean?

It’s like with editorials: WE can mean a number of things when we say
WE — it can be the editorial board, or rather the consensus thereof.
It can mean WE South Carolinians, or WE Americans, or WE who hold a
certain truth to be self-evident. When the meaning seems vague, I work with the writer to try to sharpen up what WE mean by the word.

So what does "our community" mean? South Carolinians? Americans? People
living in Zip Code 29201? Is it "our thing" in the Sicilian sense? Are you presuming to speak for the readers of
MY blog? If so, you have to deal with the fact that the READERS of the
blog and the people who regularly comment — perhaps I should have
emphasized REGULARLY there — are almost certainly different groups, in
terms of prevailing views on this and other issues. Of course, there’s no way to
establish whether that’s the case or not (beyond the anecdotal evidence
of all the nice people who say they read my blog but don’t want to
comment because they don’t want to mix it up with you ruffians — the
wimps); it’s just that my experience causes me to doubt that those who push themselves to the fore are representative.

To give you a stark example… back in the fall of 2001, when the
consensus in this country was strongly in favor of toppling the
Taliban, a majority (or a very large percentage, anyway; we didn’t keep
count) of the letters we received for awhile there were AGAINST
military action in Afghanistan. People who were FOR the action — the
overwhelming majority — saw no need to write letters, because there
was no argument to be made. That is, until they saw some of the
anti-war letters we were running. Then they weighed in in response.

Never for one moment was I fooled into thinking the antiwar letters represented a majority of Americans, or South Carolinians, or readers of The State.

A blog, which its more or less instantaneous interactivity and
reinforcement (positive and negative), has a tendency to run off in one
direction or another very quickly, with moderate views quickly
intimidated into silence (people of moderate temperament generally have
better things to do with their time, or so they quickly decide — again, the wimps). There are a few brave moderates who hang in there with us, until they
can’t stand it, and go away for awhile. Certain other types are with us
always.

Anyway, I’m getting far afield: Within the context of these discussions, what does "our community" mean?

Modest hoopla

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This is a subtle thing, but I’ll share it anyway.

I couldn’t help noticing something that this release from Buddy Witherspoon…

Buddy Witherspoon for U.S. Senate
www.BuddyWitherspoon.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  –  June 9th, 2008

The Buddy Witherspoon for U.S. Senate campaign will be hosting an Election Night gathering on June 10th at 7pm.  The event will be held at Sticky Fingers, which is located at 380 Columbiana Blvd., (near Columbiana Mall) Columbia, SC.  Buddy’s supporters and the media are welcome to attend.
            ###

… and this one from Rob Miller…

June 9, 2008
Media Advisory

Rob Miller to Address Supporters Tuesday Night
Rob Miller, Democratic candidate for Congress in the Second Congressional District of South Carolina, will address supporters Tuesday night in Columbia at his campaign’s Primary night celebration.

Miller for Congress Primary Night Celebration
June 10, 2008 – 7:00 PM
The Inn at USC – 1619 Pendleton Street, Columbia (Palmetto Room)
            ###

… had in common. Namely, neither is claiming that this will be a victory celebration, as so many campaigns tend to do.

In Mr. Witherspoon’s case, the lack of hubris is well advised. In the other case, I’ve had the impression that Rob Miller had a pretty good shot at his party’s nomination in the 2nd congressional district. His opponent might have rank on him, but I don’t think that gives him the advantage. We’ll see, though.

Spelling, parts of speech, and other hard stuff

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Rob Godfrey over at the S.C. GOP sent out a note to make sure we all knew that, in endorsing Barack Obama, Rep. John Spratt misspelled the Illinois senator’s name — not once, but five times.

Rob calls our attention to this item on the subject on The Politico. Actually, it was really short, so I’ll just reproduce the whole thing here:

It’s the little things

Memo to South Carolina Rep. John Spratt: If you’re going to go to all of the trouble of putting out a statement in which you endorse Barack Obama, it might be a good idea to spell his name correctly.

Spratt’s statement — in which he says Obama’s "eloquence" sets him apart — misspells the candidate’s name as "Barak" not once but five times.

By Tim Grieve 03:02 PM

Mr. Spratt, who has been described as one of the smarter people in the House, should be ashamed, and I’m sure he’s embarrassed.

I should mention however, that Rob has his own problems — a chronic inability to distinguish a noun from an adjective, on display once again in a release I got from him yesterday. Ironically, it was also on the subject of "Barak" Obama:

COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson today released the following statement on the Democrat Party’s presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama:
    “After the most divisive presidential primary in history, Democrats appear to have settled for the most inexperienced presidential candidate in history.  But don’t take my word for it.  Members of Barack Obama’s own party have criticized him for lacking the experience to lead on issues that matter most to Americans.
     “If Barack Obama can’t unite his own party, we certainly can’t trust him to unite our country.”

If you’re going to keep disagreeing with it, at least learn its proper name…

Radical Chic, and Mau-Mauing the Superdelegates

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Four quick things:

  1. First, don’t try to figure out the headline on this post. It doesn’t exactly make sense; I just liked it.
  2. Second, The Washington Post has a piece today suggesting that if Hillary Clinton is going to point to Barack Obama’s associations with ’60s-era radicals, she’ll need to answer for her own experience "in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law
    firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers."
  3. Third, when folks do give Obama a hard time about the Weather Underground, why do they talk about Bill Ayres, when the guy’s name rings no bells for me? Why don’t they speak instead of Ayres’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who is way more famous and way, way more memorable? She and Obama worked in the same law firm once, and when an Obama fund-raiser was held at Ayres’ home when he was running for state Senate, it was her home, too? This seems to me a slight to female radicals everywhere, and they are not a category of woman one usuals wants to cross…
  4. Finally, which do you prefer, Weather Underground, or the much-cooler, Dylan-inspired "Weatherman?" Not that I’m trying to influence your decisions…

HERE’s that Wolfe quote

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Back on this last post, I made reference to something Tom Wolfe had written, and I just had to run it down, and it turns out to have been from The Right Stuff, and most delightfully of all, it was making fun of my least favorite sector of the MSM:

In the picture on the screen all you could see was the one TV woman, with the microphone in her hand, standing all by herself in front of Annie’s house. The curtains were pulled, somewhat unaccountably, inasmuch as it was nine o’clock in the morning, but it all looked very cozy. In point of fact, the lawn, or what was left of it, looked like Nut City. There were three or four mobile units from the television networks with cables running through the grass. It looked as if Arlington had been invaded by giant toasters. The television people, with all their gaffers and go-fers and groupies and cameramen and couriers and technicians and electricians, were blazing with 200-watt eyeballs and ricocheting off each other and the assembled rabble of reporters, radio stringers, tourists, lollygaggers, policemen, and freelance gawkers. They were all craning and writhing and rolling their eyes and gesturing and jabbering away with the excitement of the event. A public execution wouldn’t have drawn a crazier mob. It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity…

Mind you, this was long before the 24/7 cable "news" channels took this sort of foolishness to exponentially greater lengths…

Must intellectuals use the language properly?

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First, I realize to what extent I’m opening myself to criticism, but then, when did I ever call myself an intellectual, other than ironically? So have at me, for whatever sins against the language you can find on this blog. I know they are many; one thing I had to do in resolving to maintain a blog to begin with was accept the fact that I would have to write and publish more quickly than I could do so without error. So go for it.

On to my subject: I don’t know whether you clicked through this post on Foreign Policy‘s "Public Intellectuals" reader-participation feature. If you did, you might have found the accompanying article by Christopher Hitchens, "The Plight of the Public Intellectual." Do so now, if it’s not too much trouble. It won’t take long. I’m just asking you to take a quick glance at the first paragraph, which goes (for those of you too lazy to click) like this:

Has anyone ever described themselves as an “intellectual,” or given it as the answer to the frequently asked question, “And what do you do?” The very term “public intellectual” sometimes affects me rather like the expression “organic food.” After all, there can’t be any inorganic nourishment, and it’s difficult to conceive of an intellectual, at least since Immanuel Kant, whose specialization was privacy. However, we probably do need a term that expresses a difference between true intellectuals and the rival callings of “opinion maker” or “pundit,” especially as the last two are intimately bound up with the world of television. (I recently rewatched the historic 40-year-old ABC News confrontation between Gore Vidal and the late William F. Buckley at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The astonishing thing was that the network gave these two intellects a full 22 minutes to discuss matters after the news. How far we have fallen from that standard of commentary.)

Actually, you only have to read the first five words:

Has anyone ever described themselves…

… to which I respond, No, I don’t believe anyone ever has.

Do you not find this painfully jarring? You don’t see it? It’s the number disagreement, dammit! It jumps right out and smacks me in the face. I could not make a mistake like that. There are all sorts of mistakes I can make, and not bat an eye or any other part of my anatomy, or yours either. But this one is a mistake that I find it hard to imagine myself making.

Of course, Mr. Hitchens being an intellectual and all, I find myself doubting that it’s a mistake. There is a school of thought out there — one of the more twisted branches of feminism — that hold that it’s better to refer to a person of nonspecific gender as plural rather than commit the unpardonable sin of using the traditional English standard of the inclusive "he" — or rather, in this case, "himself."

So it seems that one of three things seem likely:

  1. It was an honest slip, on Mr. Hitchens’ part as well as at least one (and probably more) editors’. (The fact is that even if one agrees that we should no longer assume the masculine form is inclusive, one can write around the problem without committing the sin of number disagreement.)
  2. It was a positive assertion of a sociopolitical point, and one that I would have thought far too trite for Mr. Hitchens, who — while I may disagree with him on the existence-of-God thing, is a man of discerning and courageous intellect, one who doesn’t tiptoe around words to avoid offending. Doubt me? Read this piece about Iraq, "A War To Be Proud Of."
  3. This disturbing usage has become so ubiquitous that even top intellectuals — and their editors — think nothing of employing it.

Whichever explanation applies, I was surprised to see such an article begin that way.

An intriguing way out for Hillary

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With John McCain beating either Democrat in polls, and the prospect of months of exhausting Democratic Party infighting ahead, an intriguing idea was offered on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal today. It was proposed as a way for Hillary Clinton to save face, and for the party to regain ground lost to the bitter primary campaign. And the power to act lies entirely in the hands of Harry Reid:

    The solution that is within his power is simpler, yet more profound than any of the extraordinary political events America has witnessed this election year. It requires only the rarest of things: an individual willing to set aside his own power and ambition for the good of his party and his country. It is this: Mr. Reid could step aside as leader of the Senate and hand the post to Mrs. Clinton. Only the proffer of this consolation prize would likely persuade Mrs. Clinton to drop her divisive, and now futile, quest for her party’s nomination.

Neither Sen. Reid nor Sen. Clinton is likely to actually listen to this advice, for a simple reason: The author of the piece is Richard N. Bond. Since he is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, he is persona non grata to Democrats.

He would be persona non grata to me, too, as founder of the UnParty. But over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that former party chairs can be decents sorts. Look at Henry McMaster and Joe Erwin (and don’t look at Dick "Bad Boy" Harpootlian; that would spoil the picture). And besides, it’s an important UnParty tenet to be open to good ideas wherever they may come from.

Is this a good idea? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. Read the whole piece, if the link allows you to, and let me know what you think.

An amusing aside (amusing to me, anyway, as a word guy). Mr. Bond is addressing himself to Democrats — sort of — yet he can’t help engaging in a linguistic tic that labels him immediately as a partisan Republican: He refers to "Democrat primaries," and "Democrat presidential hopefuls." What makes this stand out particularly is that he was actually trying to write in a neutral fashion, acknowledging the difference between a noun and an adjective. Elsewhere, he refers correctly to "a smashing Democratic win," "Democratic gains," "a dream Democratic year," and even, if you can believe it, "the Democratic Party!"

So he tried hard, but couldn’t quite carry it off. He reminds me of Gordon Jackson as Flight Lt. Sandy McDonald, "Big S" in "The Great Escape." Remember how he drilled prospective escapees in their German, and would trip them up by suddenly speaking English, causing them to speak English, and he’d lecture them on not falling for such a cheap trick? Then he fell for it himself during the actual escape. (I couldn’t find video of that scene, but as a consolation prize, here’s a clip of Steve McQueen’s legendary motorcycle chase scene.)

Habitual use or abuse of language carves deep ruts in the brain, and it’s hard to keep your tongue out of them, however hard you try.

Wright context doesn’t change message

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OK, I finally got around to watching one of those longer clips of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — specifically, one that contains the "God Damn America" part. I’ve been told many times that I just needed to get the context to understand that what he said shouldn’t be understood in the stark way that I have understood it.

The Rev. Joe Darby, in his op-ed piece on today’s page, suggested the same point:

… America is still focused on a few ten-second sound bites from Rev. Wright’s 30- or 40-minute sermons

Anyway, I watched this six-minute, 48-second clip — and it doesn’t change a thing. "God Damn America" still means "God Damn America." There’s no part in which he says, suggests or even hints that he didn’t really mean it, or that he thought America was in danger of damnation, and he wanted to save it. No, if anything, it’s clearer that he meant what he said.

But I think some of the well-meaning folks trying to explain all this to me are actually misunderstanding me. Start with the assumption that I somehow lack information. Aside from the above quote suggesting I need the context of the remark, the Rev. Darby also says:

Dr. Wright’s critics also need to learn more about the historically black church and its clergy…

I surely don’t claim to be an expert on the black church, especially in the presence of Joe Darby, who lives it. But no one has told me anything about the black church, in the course of "explaining" Mr. Wright to me, that I did not know. Sure, maybe something is lost in translation, but so far I’ve seen no indication that that’s what is at work this time.

But what Mr. Wright said is clear. The six-minutes-plus of context that went before "God Damn America" was exactly what I would have guessed went before it. Essentially, it was a review of history, mixed with a small dollop of political partisanship (the comparison of not-so-bad presidencies with the current one). Short version: The government has upheld oppression of black people during the course of American history.

Folks, I’m an American history major, and I’ve lived in this country for most of 54 years. What part of the rather sketchy overview in that sermon do you think I didn’t know already? If I’d been sermonizing, I could have added a lot to it — including the fact that the blood offering of the Civil War, as horrific as it was, seems to have been an inevitable sacrifice to expiate the sin of slavery. And I would have said the evil didn’t end there, nor could it, there being original sin in the world, and no one of us since Jesus Christ born free of it.

But I wouldn’t have said "God Damn America." Not in a million years. For me, the point of bringing up evil is to try to overcome it — as I believe two people Mr. Darby mentions (King and Bonhoeffer) were trying to do.

Sorry, but I can’t accept that the Rev. Wright was saying "things that challenge America to rise above its sins of prejudice and greed." No, if he’d said America was in danger of damnation, or headed straight thataway, rather as Jesus said to the Pharisees in the example cited by my colleague Warren Bolton this week, that might have been seen as a challenge, perhaps even a well-intentioned warning. (Personally, although he had more right, being God, than anyone else to do so, I don’t remember Jesus ever damning anything more sentient than a fig tree.)

But Mr. Wright didn’t call on us to do anything. Instead, he called on God to damn America.

One last point — Mr. Darby seems to assume, as have other writers, that those who say things like what I just said are against Obama. Well, I’m not. But just because I like a guy, I’m not going to sugarcoat a problem. As I said, Obama gave a brilliant speech, but he did not succeed in separating himself from what the Rev. Wright had said. He couldn’t. If he had disowned him at this point, it would have been crass opportunism, and beneath him.

So this guy I like — Obama — has a problem, one he can’t get rid of. Just as another guy I like, John McCain, is way old — nothing he can do about that, either.

I would suggest that if anyone out there supports a candidate and thinks that candidate is perfect, he should look a little harder. Nobody meeting that description has come along in two millennia. Thus endeth my sermon for today.

‘God Damn America’ means what it means

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Over the last couple of days, I’ve seen and heard a number of explanations, or attempts at explanations, regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright having proclaimed, "God Damn America."

Most of them have been along the lines of the old cliche, "It’s a black thing; you wouldn’t understand," although no one has used those precise words. Well, I accept that on one level or another, I can never fully understand where any other human being is coming from. My own brother has the same genetic background that I do and grew up in the same household, but each of us has had a separate experience of life that has shaped us differently and causes us to express ourselves differently. The farther you get from being my biological brother — or, to describe someone I’ve spent a lot more time with than my brother, my wife — the wider that gap will get. The more different our experiences, the more different our perceptions of the world, and the more different our ways of speaking of the world.

But I’ve got to tell you, "God Damn America" is not a statement that is fraught with nuance. It’s very clear, uncompromising and all-encompassing. In all the explanations I’ve heard for that statement, no one has suggested that the words mean anything different. In English, they can only mean one thing. If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says "God Damn America," I know what he means, even though he and I probably have a lot fewer reference points in common than the Rev. Wright and I have.

And if the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, speaking from his pulpit, deliberately and clearly calls upon God to damn America, and urges his congregation to send forth the same prayer, I know what he means. It means asking God to send America to hell forever. Damnation, under any sense of the word that I have every heard of (and no one has offered an alternative definition in response to this issue), and within any theology I have heard of (and again, no one has offered a different theological meaning of the word), means that and nothing else.

It doesn’t say, "America has a lot to answer for." It does not say, "America is guilty of terrible crimes." It does not say, "America has treated you and me and millions of others horribly and inexcusably, and we can never forgive that." It means to curse America beyond redemption, beyond improvement, beyond a second or third or billionth chance. "Damn" means "damn." It goes infinitely beyond any other obscenity you might utter in expressing your displeasure with America. If you say — and pardon my implied language — "F— America," that is at least something from which the object of your anger might recover. If you say "Kill America," you have at least described something from which it might be redeemed. But the Rev. Wright did not say those things. He said "God Damn America."

I understand hyperbole. I know all about exaggeration for effect. I know that many people have profound, complex reasons for being angrier about the way the world is and has been than I ever will. But this is not about exaggeration. This word is not a matter of degree. It is not about merely using a word that goes quantitatively too far.

I also understand that black homilitic and worship traditions are very, very different from that of, say, my own church, or any that I regularly attended growing up. I’ve been in this country most of my life (like Obama, I’ve lived abroad), and I took in that fact long ago.

And I’ve read the news stories — here’s one that was in our paper today, and another I saw in The Wall Street Journal — that quote experts explaining that it’s different when Jeremiah Wright says it. But it isn’t different. There is no moral context, no separate historical grounding, no cultural style, no emotional framework that gives the words "God Damn America" a different meaning. When, in The State‘s story, the Rev. Joe Darby — whom I have known and respected for years, and to the best of my knowledge would never say "God damn America" — speaks of "the role of the historical black church in ‘speaking truth to power’," I know what he means. I agree that has been the role of the black church, and it has played that role well, and employed hyperbole in the course of doing so. But the point seems to me irrelevant. In what way, shape or form does "God Damn America" constitute speaking truth to anyone?

I also get it that I’m the clueless white guy. I’ve pled guilty to that before. But again, I remain unconvinced that I am too clueless to understand what "God Damn America" means.

Now — does what I am saying here change the fact that I respect and admire Barack Obama, and think he should get the Democratic nomination for president? No, it does not. To the contrary, I was very much impressed by the speech he gave on the subject yesterday, which in so many ways spoke to the qualities that I respect in Sen. Obama. And note that he strongly repudiates his former pastor’s message.

Am I saying he absolved himself from his connection — his extended, deliberate, close association — with a preacher who would say, "God Damn America?" No. He did not do that. And after all the years he has been going to that church, I can’t imagine any words he could say that would accomplish that feat. And if he did, he would be rightly criticized for politically convenient timing.

As a voter, and as a writer who comments upon politics in this country, I am deeply impressed by the transcendent way in which Barack Obama addresses the intensely, damnably pervasive issue of race in America. He says just what I want a presidential candidate to say on the subject, and he says it better than any politician I have heard. He reaffirmed that for me Tuesday.

But I do have to set all that alongside the fact that he has deliberately associated with the man who said — and apparently meant, since I’ve heard about no repudiation from the preacher himself — "God Damn America." That will be something that Barack Obama as a candidate will just have to live with. It can’t be changed, any more than John McCain can change the fact that he would be 72 years old if inaugurated (a very different sort of problem, but just as immutable).

Those are both inescapable facts, and voters will have to decide what weight to give them if these are the two nominees in the fall.

That trooper was hardly alone

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Don’t think there was anything particularly rare about the language that trooper used in the notorious video.

Warren Bolton says he’s gotten "some pretty interesting feedback on my trooper column" in today’s paper. He shared this "gem" with me a little while ago:

Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 2:47 PM
To: Bolton, Warren
Subject: Re: Trooper’s actions

Bolton;
The only thing that trooper did wrong was in not shooting the bastard down. At least that would have put one less nigger crimmal [sic] out of business.
Val Green

Warren gets this sort of thing all too often. So perhaps you can see why he worries that, as he said in his column today, "we’re not there yet" in the year 2008.

Bud testifies about the constitutional amendment

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Just so you know Bud Ferillo thinks about more than spending Belinda Gergel’s money, here’s his testimony to the Senate subcommittee considering whether to amend the S.C. constitution to read that the state "will provide a high quality education, allowing each student to reach his highest potential."

Bud, as you may or may not know, is the guy who made the film, "Corridor of Shame:"

Presentation of Bud Ferillo
Senate Subcommittee
On S.1136
March 13, 2008
9:00 AM
          It is a privilege for me to address the subcommittee this morning, something I have never done before.
          While I served this state, in the 1970’s and 80’s as Chief of staff to House Speakers Rex Carter and Ramon Schwartz and as Deputy Lieutenant Governor under Lt. Gov. Mike Daniel, I come today as a private citizen still in awe of these halls and full of respect for those of you in both parties who serve our state today.
          The Constitution of the State of South Carolina which the legislation before you would amend was adopted in one of the most difficult periods of our state’s history by some of our most unenlightened elected officials. It was the era of Jim Crow and the long shadow of slavery has given way to legalized racial segregation, a cruel, one sided system of rights and privileges for the few over the many. It was not until 1911 that South Carolina attained a majority white population and so the constitution adopted in 1895 was not a declaration of human rights. In fact, it sought to enshrine the benefits of government only to those with political and economic power.
          Our racially segregated public schools remained separate and unequal for another two generations because that was state policy. Even with the Brown decision in 1954, rising from the school desegregation case of Briggs vs. Elliott in Clarendon County, it was not until Governor Hollings declared in 1963 as he left office that “South Carolina had run out of courts” and the state negotiated the admission of Harvey Garnett into Clemson University, followed a year later by the integration of USC and our public school system.
          This difficult history is painful to recall and painful to hear but it explains why we have attained no little progress in securing quality public education for all the children of the state. To be honest, we have not been about the business of providing quarterly education to all the children of South Carolina for very long.
          Even today, sadly, the legal position of our state in the Abbeville vs. State of South Carolina school funding case, still places South Carolina on the wrong side of history. This state continues to claim it has no obligation to provide even a “minimally adequate” education for our children.
          I have come to you today as a witness to the failure of our state to achieve either minimally adequate education or the opportunity for our children to achieve an excellent education which would equip them to contend in a world changing before their eyes at warp speed.
          My plea today is a simple one: I urge the General Assembly to put the issue of high quality public education to the people of this state to decide.
          Our sister states of Virginia and Florida have shown the way by amending their constitutions to require their states to provide high quality education to their children.
          A state’s constitution is its highest standard of governance; it is the document that enshrines our noblest aspirations; it is the final repository of who we are and what we care about as a people. While we were born into an unjust society in South Carolina; we do not have to grow old in it.
          I respectfully urge this subcommittee to favorably report S.1136 so that it might begin its rigorous journey through the legislative process and be given to the people of this state to determine in the general election of 2010. The amendment will serve a useful purpose in setting the highest standards of educational attainment against which future legislative actions and funding can be judged.
          My friend and ally John Rainey, who will address you shortly, and others across this state in a coalition too broad and lengthy to name will soon launch a petition campaign that will allow South Carolinians to participate directly in the legislative process.
          We will soon unveil the web site www.goodbyeminimallyadequate.com where South Carolinians may sign a petition in support of this constitutional amendment. It is our ambitious but accepted challenge to present the signatures of 1,000,000 South Carolinians in support of S.1136 to the General Assembly during the opening day of the 2009 General Assembly.
          We cannot miss this opportunity to involve the people of our state in this process which will, to a large extent tell, us everything about what kind of state we have and what kind of future we will pass on to those who follow.

I’m not entirely sure what practical effect Bud and other advocates believe this wording change will have. I mean, even based on the "minimally adequate" interpretation, all that a court case that started in about 10,000 B.C. has accomplished was a ruling saying South Carolina should do better at early-childhood education, to which the Legislature responded by nodding vigorously, expanding a pilot program, then forgetting about it.

Such a wording change might make a lot of folks feel better, but the fact is that if South Carolina wants to pull up its rural areas to the educational level of the suburbs — which it must do if we’re ever to begin to catch up to the rest of the country — it will do so, whether the constitution mentions education at all or not.

Harry then and Harry now

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A news item this week provided an unusually striking opportunity to trace the descent of the King’s (or potential King’s) English:

First, Shakespeare’s Harry:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:

And then, our own latter-day Harry expressing the same sentiment:

    "It’s nice just to be here with all the guys and just mucking in as one of the lads."

Oh, well. The real Henry V might have said it much the same way, the Bard notwithstanding.

Harry

Nice lede on Buckley!

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Just thought I’d share, as one who loves words, the start of the NYT‘s Buckley story this morning:

    William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died on Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.

Nice. Not great, but nice. It’s good when an obit can bring a smile while remaining respectful.

And speaking of words — no, I did not misspell "lede." It’s a jargon thing.

The hed was good, too: "William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies; Sesquipedalian Spark of Right."