Triggered in Five Acts

Heard today that a university task force wants to ban students and faculty from using several words and phrases on campus.

No, not a public school in Florida, but a private institution here in Massachusetts named for Louis Brandeis, a legendary Supreme Court Justice from 1916 to 1939 who said:

If there be a time to expose through discussion the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Apparently, what happened at Brandeis University was not so much about misconceptions and false statements, but about individual words that might, well, trigger a student’s unpleasant memory and, in keeping with recent movements to restrict education in K-12 schools across the country, make him or her uncomfortable.

Reason I hesitate with the word “trigger” is that it is one of the words. “Trigger” may trigger a memory of gun violence, something that a considerable percentage of college students have either experienced at some close proximity, if not first hand. Says my source who has been teaching college in Boston these past twenty years since I left higher ed, “in any class of twenty students, you’ll have at least two or three.”

Might seem easy to dismiss this as a simple, innocuous accommodation. Sure, we can make the same points, teach the same lessons with, please forgive the pun, less loaded words. But do we want teachers to be so guarded that they self-censor their natural style? And what of comparisons and metaphors? Does a history teacher avoid comparing, say, the propaganda in Nazi Germany to a disease because some students likely have lost love ones to that disease?

Oh, sorry! That comparison was ruled off-limits long before Ron DeSantis was born, maybe about when Brandeis University, sponsored by the Jewish community, was founded in 1948.

Off limits or not, my comparison is calculated because it was triggered.

Earlier today I was on the phone to a friend in Florida and asked if she saw the clip of Donald Trump, with his characteristic repetition, telling the CPAC convention, “I am your warrior, I am your justice… I am your retribution, I am your retribution.”

Thought she’d want to know that, in our shared ancestral homeland a century ago, Benito Mussolini rose to power by repeatedly claiming, All’Italia serve un vendicatore! (“Italy needs an avenger.”)

Reminded of what was happening on the other side of the Alps, she was already going ballistic and cut me off:

Jesus, Mary, and Fred! That’s what they heard in the 1920s and 30s: ‘They beat us in World War I, time for us to beat them! And I alone can do it! Follow me!’

Adolf Hitler may never have used those exact phrases, but he did sell himself to a demoralized, defeated German public as their lone hope for a better future. If you allow for translation, the pitch was identical: Deutschland uber alles = “America First.” So, too, the justification: Lugenpresse = “Fake News.” As for the ridiculing nicknames and slurs, Hitler’s favorite, abschaum = Trump’s frequent, “scum.”

During the week of this writing, one of his tweets calls the Manhattan District Attorney investigating the payment of hush money: “HUMAN SCUM” (caps his), “an animal,” and a “degenerate psychopath” who “hates the USA.”

Also, as happens with all political cults of personality, their followers don’t hesitate to ridicule, condemn, threaten, and in some cases attack, harm, and kill anyone the leader names as a scapegoat for their problems. Within hours of that Tweet, death threats poured in to the Manhattan DA’s office, just as in 2018, within days of his claim of a “caravan of immigrants” about to cross the Rio Grande, aided and abetted by Jewish philanthropists, 11 people were shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Is it possible that Donald Trump’s most outlandish claim was not wild exaggeration as we all thought, but an understatement? He could shoot someone and get away with it in 2016. By now he can don a black wig with a flattened angle to one side of his forehead with a little square mustache under his nostrils, and still have no one on a national platform dare compare him to Hitler.

Where’s Charlie Chaplin when we need him?

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris in January, 2015, Several European parliaments considered outlawing satire aimed at organized religions. The series of attacks were triggered–a professor at Brandeis might say “prompted”–by satirical cartoons in a magazine named Charlie Hebdo depicting the Prophet Mohammed in ways that Muslim extremists found offensive.

The English parliament invited comments from those who might have insights into the conflict of faith and comedy, and they soon heard from Salman Rushdie who told them that laughter is thought:

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

If that’s true of jokes, it must be true of comparisons. Or do we no longer distinguish between comparison and equation?

Better question may be, do we no longer distinguish between schools and nursing homes?

Easy to say that there’s no comparison between a ban on several words at a small university in Waltham, Mass., and the outright censorship of history, theory, and ideas that the governor and Republican-controlled legislature have in mind for all public schools in America’s fourth-largest state.

Especially when we consider that at least twenty Republican-controlled states are waiting to see the result and, if Florida Gov. DeSantis is successful, repeat it–just as they all pounced on reproductive rights with bans as soon as the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

Admittedly, the comparison is minimal. However, although a blueberry will never be mistaken for a cantalope, both are fruit.

The fruit borne by seemingly minor accommodations like Brandeis’ ban is that it undermines any objections to Florida’s. And, oh by the way, it was liberals, not conservatives, who called for bans on Huckelberry Finn for years before anyone used the word “woke,” heard the term “critical race theory,” or insisted that we “Don’t say gay.” There’s a word for those who accuse others of what they themselves do, and the degree to which they do it does not lessen it. If it’s fruit, it’s fruit. It’s not one percent fruit or ten percent fruit. It is fruit.

This may be too late for the university, but the rest of us need to heed its namesake’s advice:

… the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Is it possible that our seven-decade ban on any comparison to Hitler and the Nazis left us unable to identify and understand the rise of Donald Trump?

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Quite the motto! If the words “even unto” and “innermost parts” mean anything at all, then some ad hoc committee today might deem them uncomfortable. In 1948, “truth” was a promise. Today it’s a threat:

https://news.yahoo.com/university-warns-against-using-oppressive-171700004.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

Here’s Charlie Chaplin when we need him:

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/11/04/the-great-dictator/?chrome=1

Harpooneers of this World

More than anything, I wanted Chapter 62, “The Dart,” a more common word by which whalers called a harpoon. To get it, I asked for a ten-minute slot on the ungodly midnight watch.

That’s how the Moby-Dick Annual Marathon is divvied up. Each of the 25 hours it needs is a watch, all of which starts at noon Saturday and concludes at about 1:00 pm Sunday. Since 62 falls midway in the 135 chapters, I put in for 12:30-12:40 am and got it.

Three years ago, I guessed too late and read 69 and 70, “The Funeral” and “The Sphynx,” both strong stuff, as is every chapter in a long book that frequently bounds from comic to ponderous, from whimsical to confrontational, at times all at once. In 2020, I was mesmerized all the way to dawn’s invasion of the 3rd-floor windows of the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s reading room, inhaling as much as hearing every word.

True, I twice sat in the adjacent coffee room, conversing with a young couple who drove up from Maryland, and then with the owner of a boat shop who flew in from Chicago. He told me that there were readers from California and Europe. I don’t think there was as much of that this year, as there were noticeably fewer people listening in the wee hours, and far fewer sleeping bags in the wide corridor to the elevator. But, as Ishmael doesn’t hesitate to sometimes admit, I could be wrong.

Following the Sunday morning “Chat with Scholars,” one of several sideshows held during the main event, I had a memorable conversation with a recent graduate of College of the Atlantic up on the Maine coast. A Texas native, she’s now working for the National Parks Service in New Bedford, and may be the only person who has ever noticed that Ishmael describes an object that “fell to Ahab’s feet,” and remembered that Ahab had just one foot.

If only the world would pay a fraction of that attention to detail.

Details draw me to “The Dart.” The first of two compelling reasons is something that no one writing newspaper columns, as I’ve been doing for 40 years, can resist: Decades, perhaps a century before the term was coined, Herman Melville wrote an op-ed column.

In the persistent voice of Ishmael, one who challenges conventional wisdom every chance he gets, it opens with a description of how the whale boats were manned as they leave the ship in pursuit of a whale. He then finds fault: The harpooneers participate in the rowing, leaving them exhausted when it’s time to throw a 25-lb. spear. He offers proof: Low success rates. A solution: Leave them idle. Followed by a litany of reasons–“no wonder…”–that states a need. Followed by a concession of what will be compromised: The speed of the whaleboat. Countered by a claim of why the loss is negligible compared to how much more will be gained: Accuracy and efficiency.

In the best op-ed style, he ends the chapter with a “kicker” to drive the point home:

To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.

Coming at the end of about 650 words–standard op-ed length–that line by itself is the second reason I wanted “The Dart.” I memorized it long ago, a metaphor that applies to anyone if you replace the two nouns, “dart” and “harpooneers” with others that share the relationship of an object and the people who use it. To ensure the greatest efficiency of art, the artists of this world… To ensure the success of any attempt to influence a distracted public, the activists of this world… Call it an echo of Hamlet’s “the readiness is all.” At the reading, I was able to look up from the book and scan the audience. Most had their eyes down, reading along. Those looking at me sat bolt upright.

Not bad for people who had been up some 17 hours and counting. I was lucky that a friend from King Richard’s Faire read not long after, Chapter 66, “The Shark Massacre,” describing what happened to a whale’s carcass after it is stripped of blubber and oil and dropped back into the sea. Vinny, the tour de force of Toe Jam Puppet Band wildly popular with children in southeastern Massachusetts, might have been typecast for it:

[A]ny man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought that the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

We broke for the coffee room after he was done. Much of our conversation was about how Ishmael’s jokes, his whimsy and mischief, are much more prominent when heard aloud. And, oh, how they make Ishmael’s portentous and profound passages more palatable. He stayed until past 4:00 am when another friend of his read.

Another mutual friend was with Culture*Park Theater performing “Midnight on the Forecastle” (Chap. 40) on the museum’s auditorium stage, the only chapter performed rather than read, and with song and dance. Elizabeth, formerly of King Richard’s Gypsy Dancers, played Tashtego, one of the harpooneers, as she did three years ago.

But there was a new cabin boy. This year’s Pip, a New Bedford fourth-grader named Josiah Bodden, gained a fan club in the former whaling capital of the world when he faced the audience, jolted forward, fell to his knees, slid toward the front of the stage, threw his head back, shut his eyes, clasped his hands over his head, and closed the chapter with a prayer:

Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men who have no bowels to feel fear!

An hour or so later, the co-founder of the Newburyport Melville Society read “The Chart” (Chap. 44) which describes Ahab, alone in his cabin, studying maps rolled onto with their corners pinned into the wooden table. My bare description may make it seem like dry stuff, but Patricia, like so many of the 211 readers, made Ishmael’s mystical narration so vivid that the chapter’s kicker landed with the full force and relevance of any pronouncement today:

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Not long after that, the Newburyport Melville Society convened across the street in the Moby Dick Brewery for clam chowder and pints of Ishm-Ale. That, plus the unlimited coffee supplied by the museum overnight, the presence of Vinny, and especially the extra rush of adrenaline after delivering “The Dart” made it easy to stay awake past dawn.

Had planned to start home at sunrise, as I did last time, but couldn’t resist a Portuguese omelet at Tia Maria’s European Cafe, also across the street. Refreshed, I went back in for another scholarly session and a chat with my Newburyport friends before starting home well after 11:00.

Halfway home, I had to stop at Starbuck’s in Braintree, just off the highway, and sat for half an hour with a tall, black, dark roast before finishing the trip. How’s that for poetic karma? Starbuck helped guide me home from my pursuit of the White Whale.

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Screenshot by Richard K. Lodge, cropped by Lenovo.

Vinny Lovegrove, Photo by another reader, Cora Peirce of the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts & Rhode Island.

Beware ‘Bait Leader’

At the end–or is it the beginning?–of our annual string of shop-till-you-drop days, from Black Friday into this week, I learned of a tactic new to me, though it may be as old as Cyber Monday to you.

My cousin, who detests doing business online as much as I, was quite taken by television ads for a new toy “available at all Walmarts, Targets…” and a few other big box outlets, one of which was just around the corner from her. Billed as a toy for the six- to 36-month set, this proved irresistible to a woman who now has three great-grandchildren in that range.

Unable to find any “Star Belly Dream Lites” on her own, she asked an employee who pulled out and tapped his iPad before telling her that the soft, cutesy, colorful, battery-operated (three AAAs) dinosaurs, teddy bears, and unicorns that cast moving stars on a bedroom ceiling to help toddlers fall asleep is sold online only.

“The ads say ‘available at‘.”

“Yes, it’s available on our website.”

“The ads say at!”

“At. On. What’s the difference?”

Maybe it runs in the family, or more likely the two of us have reached the age where we know there’s no point in trying to reason with people who think language is fungible. Put another way, we accept a thing we cannot change.

In awe of a woman who has more great-grandkids than I have grand-kids, I told her she was right to turn and walk out rather than attempt an answer to his question. And since she was so enamored of the toy as a perfect gift, I agreed with her decision to go online and have Star Bellies sent to her–just as I have t-shirts from the New Bedford Whaling Museum sent to me every year in the weeks before Christmas.

Like my mother, her aunt, she gets them weeks ahead of time, and as soon as I could confess my last-minute habit, two Star Bellies and a similar doll with buttons embedded in its hands, feet, and ears were on the table in front of me. I became so engrossed in pressing those buttons for their various sounds, she said she would get one for me, whereupon I picked it up and shoved it back in the box.

Our conversation turned to and stayed on family matters until I took my leave, but something about her Walmart story seemed to be in the car with me. I killed the radio to think it through.

What’s happening here is somewhere between bait and switch and loss leader. Call it bait leader.

The toy is the bait, and it’s still available, but not where you are led to believe. Instead, they have you in the store for everything else. For the seller, it’s the best of both of those other tactics: There’s no need to switch, and there’s no loss.

Like most advertising, it’s likely well within legal bounds even if ethics are nowhere in sight. And I can’t tell who’s responsible: The toy manufacturer or the box stores? All of the above seems likely.

As I say, I’ve finally reached the age of serenity–which may be a kind word for senility–and I accept what I cannot change. So, Star Bellies need fear no class action suit from me. Nor do Walmart, Target, or any others practicing bait leader.

But I do retain the courage to do what I can, and so I thought I’d caution you about those ads. Beware those smiling faces who say “at” when they mean “on”–not on a shelf, but online.

Here’s to the wisdom to know the difference.

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https://www.mystarbelly.com/?mid=11179644

Mob Myth

So many punchlines, so little time.

A friend notes that Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley “kept blaming ‘the woke mob’ for the fact that his book didn’t sell.”

For starters, he can’t help himself. As a Trumpster, blaming others is in his DNA.

Second, his base is the MAGA crowd. For him to expect readers is like an arsonist expecting snowmen at a housewarming.

Third, with a title like The Tyranny of Big Tech, he forgets the sacred precept of the lobby his Republican Party best serves: Guns don’t kill people, people do. Hey, Josh, Big Tech doesn’t kill books, hysterically bad writing does!

Fourth, when a video of his impersonation of a jackrabbit in the Capitol emerged from the Jan. 6 investigation, the public judged his book by his run for cover.

My friend sent the note in response to my last blog regarding the word “woke” as constantly used by the Republican governor of the oversized, dual-purpose shooting range and golf course we call Florida. But I was more taken by the other word Hawley used.

The irony could not be more rich: The guy who raised his fist to the “tourists” at the Capitol in DC on Jan. 6 using the word “mob” to explain something (book sales) that did not happen.

Reminds me of people who insist that the Electoral College protects us from “mob rule,” as the framers intended. By the time the debate gets past all 18th and 19th century considerations, you realize that “mob” to them means “urban.”

Challenges aimed at Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona in 2020 were more specifically attacks on Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Phoenix. And who lives in cities?

The claim of “States Rights” was nothing more than a disguise for their attack on cities–just as it once was for the South to justify slavery.

Democrats need to keep this in mind in preparation for 2024. While it’s true that there is a racist motive for the voting restrictions recently passed in Republican controlled states–and that those motives should be addressed–most of those restrictions target urban populations at least as white as minority when taken as a whole.

Who lives in cities? All of us.

Let Republicans use the word “mob” all they want. Bend it with irony, and it soon becomes a joke: Ads, all set in cities, showing lines of people waiting patiently at a polling place, enjoying an outdoor concert, coming together at a public celebration, cheering at a high school game, grieving together at a funeral, making their case peacefully at civic meetings. All with the word “Mob” superimposed on the screen and heard in laughing voice-overs, followed by the word “city” voiced with point and purpose.

In short, make a mockery of claims by a political party that is itself a mockery.

Bottom line: For all our talk of “inclusion” and “diversity,” the words “race” and “racist” by definition divide us. “Urban” and “city,” meanwhile, leave no voters behind.

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https://www.newsweek.com/video-josh-hawley-running-capitol-mob-memes-1726994

Wake up to Woke

For those who missed it, Gov. Ron DeSadist’s victory speech in Florodor harped on a single word: “Woke.”

He used it at least a dozen times, most sound-bitingly when he sneered: “Florida is where woke comes to die!”

Harping on charged words and phrases has been Republican MO for over 40 years when Ronald Reagan turned “liberal” into a synonym for “socialist.” It worked well for him, but it wore thin by 1996 when Republican presidential nominee Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas thought he could unseat Pres. Bill Clinton by using the word “liberal” two or three times in every sentence. If you think I’m exaggerating, check youTube.

From then on, Republicans paired “liberal” with other buzzwords–radical liberals, liberal extremists, socialist liberals, etc.–and helped it along with a resolve to keep using “extreme” and “hardline” every time they mentioned environmentalists and feminists, as in feminist extremist and hardline environmentalist.

So it was until 2016 when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders hit the national stage. Sanders made liberalism appear to be a humane, acceptable degree of socialism. Trump turned extremism and radicalism into the Republican brand.

No wonder that the Republicans who hope to survive Trumpism need another buzzword.

Rather than waiting twenty more years to feel another Bern for what is actually being said–and spread–Democrats should embrace the word “woke.” Do they recall that “Obamacare” was coined by Republicans as a slur before Pres. Obama himself started using it as matter-of-fact shorthand?

More to the point is Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court in 2010. In his announcement he praised Kagan for her “empathy,” a word on which Republicans pounced as if it were a synonym for “communist.” They got some traction because it’s not a common term, and Kagan herself had to reassure them in confirmation that empathy would never override law in her decisions.

“Woke” is a slang term for “aware.” Whether it originates from politics or music, from the media or from a minority group is of no matter to Republicans. While repeating it, as DeSatan always does, in menacing tones and contrived contexts, they count on woke’s unfamiliarity for traction. In another kind of word, Republicans are making “awareness” ugly.

Like saying DeSanctimonious, DeSatan, or DeSadist for DeSantis. Or hailing King Ron the Wrong of Florodor when you want to give them a taste of their own snake oil.

Democrats, therefore, need only call the word “woke” what it is. Who can argue with anyone being aware of things?

I suppose that the Hershel Walkers and Sarah Palins of the world could argue that “woke” is a word they never heard in the Bible, or that it does not appear anywhere in the US Constitution. I’ll leave the good book to ministers and rabbis and priests to confirm the first claim, but the First Amendment’s provision for freedom of the press tells us that self-government depends on what Jefferson called “an informed citizenry.”

Woke is how democracy stays alive.

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https://www.etsy.com/listing/570572709/

Time to Use the F-Word

My good friend Helen Highwater, who lives on a handsome pension provided by a most productive career as a writer and editor, was not pleased by my recent use of an f-word to describe one of America’s two major political parties:

Here and now, if THEY are fascists, are WE not socialists? Both terms can be justified from grains of the truth. Both fan the flames on the other side, pushing us apart.

To me, use of the word fascism seems increasingly ineffective rhetoric. Both sides use it against the other. What is fascism? My favorite definition comes from The American Heritage Dictionary.*

In my own words: The wedding of capitalism and government, under which lies and fear-mongering are business as usual.

That was a reference to my blog’s claim that lies and fear are all there is to Republican political ads, as if they turned FDR’s claim on its head and are campaigning entirely on fear itself. Helen did back off a bit:

Maybe I am lily-livered. Does sound a lot like Trump & MAGA.

Our 2 parties are both fluid enough (and corrupt enough) to reverse their principles in a relatively short time. Both sides are against it until they are for it . Both sides have their own vision of what freedom means, and it always means contradicting the other side.

Meanwhile, Bernie remains the most clear-eyed pol on the scene.

Yes, we are socialists, I answered, referring to roads and bridges, airports and railways, fire and police protection, public schools and libraries, Medicare and Medicaid, public parks and restrooms, water fountains and snowplows.

Being upfront about it–calling things what they are–is precisely what makes Bernie “the most clear-eyed pol on the scene.” That was all I said at the time, still taken back by her “both sides” remarks. I’ve never claimed the Democrats are or ever were anywhere near blameless, and I certainly have a public record of criticisms of Obama, both Clintons, Al Gore, all the way back to Michael Dukakis. And I still think Debbie Wasserman Schultz should be in jail.

But to imply that Democratic faults and missteps in any way offset attempts to overturn an election, to discredit elections before they happen, and elect candidates in swing states who vow to control the vote in 2024? Can I compare Newburyport’s Turkey Hill to Alaska’s Denali? It has snow. Sometimes.

Such talk is paralyzing at the very worst time for us to be paralyzed.

Before I made this case, Helen wrote again:

Watched the DeSantis v. Crist debate.

Moderator was from a Sinclair affiliate. Looked like a Barbie doll with extra eye make-up. BUT she handled it fairly and firmly.

Sinclair is a right-wing chain of news outlets. The “Barbie doll” look of news anchors at right-wing outlets was the subject of my recent blog, “Lashing Out.”

Like other debates this season, the format does not give the candidates more than 60-seconds for any response, with 30-second rebuttals. Brutal. Even closing statements are 60-seconds. There are no opening statements–they go right into questions, but every candidate I have seen uses their first 30-seconds for a standard thank-you opening statement.

Seems designed to elicit sound bites. Or is it “out of respect” for the short attention spans of R candidates and most of the audience?

Like Demings at Rubio, Crist was very aggressive against DeSantis. And effective in my view. DeSantis actually called him a donkey at one point. He just smiled, and said he could take the heat, then blasted DeSantis for being a bully toward women, students, and minorities.

“”Donkey”? When DeSantis was asked about Dr. Fauci, he said he wanted to “throw that elf across the Potomac.” Belittling names and thuggish insults are a hallmark of fascism, and upwards of 40% of American voters relish it.

As I’ve written before: We should not have been surprised in 2016 when Trump “got away” with his ridicule of a handicapped reporter and his “grab ‘m by” comment. Not only did he not lose votes by those remarks, he gained from them. DeSantis has learned the lesson quite well, which is why just yesterday Trump excluded him from a Florida rally where he appeared with Marco Rubio.

I noted the difference between the American Heritage definition (below) and Helen’s (above): Violence.

Can anyone name a single Democrat anywhere since George Wallace who threatened, implied, or hinted at it? Meanwhile, even lily-livered Lindsey Graham hints at it. Poll workers have quit in droves, some run out of town. Been to any town hall meetings lately?

All these years, it’s been an absolute that nothing be compared to Hitler and the Nazis. Today I wonder just how much that self-imposed mental blinder helped pave the way for 2016. Of course they call us fascists. All while swastikas appear on the banners, the bumpers, and the tattoos at their rallies.

Now we know what the lyric “look away” in “Dixie” really means.

Helen herself pointed out the tactic regarding Cheney over a decade ago: Accuse opponents of your own crimes. Hell, they go further. Biden, Hillary, Pelosi are pedophiles. Should we speak more guardedly to accommodate that?

Speaking of Pelosi, I sent that answer just hours before a thug broke into her San Francisco home and beat up her husband while yelling, “Where is Nancy?” Like the armed and masked “poll watchers” in Arizona this week, this is the ripple effect of January 6. Seems to me that if elected Republican officials can continue to call Jan. 6 a “normal tourist day,” then we should be calling it exactly what it was and still is.

Helen and I aren’t all that far apart in this debate, and I have to admit that she’s the more pragmatic. As she just responded:

I’ll practice guarded restraint to get along with various family, friends, & strangers. Still, when they are willing to talk, I am too.

Maybe I’ve been listening to too many friends in self-help programs, but I’ve come to believe you can’t solve problems until you call them by honest, accurate names.

But if you want to know how I really feel, make it two f-words.

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* Fascist (n).

1. often Fascism

a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.

2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

E Pluribus E

Got into the car yesterday to start home and heard a reporter on WBUR talking of the musical recordings of FC. Missed the opening of the story, which I assume included the identity of FC, and so the confusion I’m about to describe could be dismissed as my own fault.

In my defense, it is the nature of radio to serve an audience, much of which is on the road, getting in and out of cars at random times. Why else do they measure ratings according to morning and afternoon “drive times”? Or brag about “driveway moments”?

Since I liked the snippets of music I was hearing, the report drew my interest, and there was something satisfying about hearing that FC is a student at Northeastern University in Boston where I once taught.

Then the reporter says that “they are from Dorchester,” and I’m wondering who “they” are. Now I’m thinking that FC is the name of a group, possibly “Eff Cee,” and the reference was to one member who, back during the Clinton Administration, might have landed in my writing class.

Or maybe all of them, as I keep hearing “they” and “them” while driving out of Bradford, through Groveland, and into Georgetown. Yet, when the reporter aired FC’s answers in a pre-recorded interview, it was always the same single, high-pitched voice.

Eventually, one of those answers included the word “non-binary,” and soon after the reporter added that FC stands for “Felicia Clarice.” So it’s all explained by what is lately called “a preferred pronoun.” FC, who is one person, prefers to be mentioned as “they” and “them.”

By now you’ve heard the reasons why plural pronouns–they, them, their— should or should not be used for individual people.

Plurals have long been commonly used when the speaker does not know the identity of a person. When we say, “they ran a red light,” it is understood that the driver of the car could be he or she. This is different. This is a request–at times a demand–to use a plural pronoun when we do know the identity of the one person of whom we speak. As a consequence, journalists are expected to do this while audiences unknown to them supposedly keep track of the plural-for-singular references.

In a free and open society, those who consider themselves neither male nor female should not have to hear themselves referred to as either. On the other hand, news sources should be committed first and foremost to clarity, not to any preferences held by those about whom they report.

Lost in that debate is a third party: The English Language.

When someone says “my preferred pronouns,” they presume that a part of speech belongs to them. The error is not in the phrase “preferred pronoun,” but in the possession inherent in the pronoun, “my.” If pronouns “belong” to individual people, then logically so do nouns, adjectives, and other parts of speech. This is why it was been so easy for the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson to ridicule it.

So, too, easy-going people who support all gender rights but are always ready to share a laugh, like my editor, Helen Highwater, who says my pronouns should be “nit, wit, and twit” no matter what I prefer.

Among the sayings you may see on t-shirts and elsewhere is “Ask Me About My Pronouns.” Something crucial will be missing from any possible answer. At the risk of putting this in an uncomfortable political context, most everyone who agrees with the sentiment–or who, like me, agrees with the intent, but not the expression–is right now engaged in a contest. Round one is just two months away, round two two years from that.

Whether or not we believe in or respect non-binary genders, American elections are inescapably binary. No way around it, like it or not. One side supports gender rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, environmental protection, occupational safety, affordable education and healthcare. The other side does not. That first side bases much of its (our) argument on truth and accuracy in science, in history, in language. The second insists on myths, manipulating science, whitewashing history, distorting language.

What does it do to the first side if the second side can point at the request–now available on t-shirts–to “Respect My Pronouns,” and demand, as they will, that we “Respect Our Language”? What does it say that, in such a debate, theirs will be the most inclusive pronoun, our vs. my?

More to the point, what impression will it make on those with no connection to either side as they look for the more reasonable and comfortable choices put in the most understandable and familiar terms come this November, come 2024?

Anyone’s mere use of pronouns is unlikely to influence moderates or independent voters, but the insistent requests for their acceptance and general use cannot help advance any urgent rights or causes.

Worse than that, we will make the other side seem more reasonable, if only because they will be more clear.

Regrettably, the English Language has no more say in America 2022 than it did in Orwell’s Oceania 1984. Ironically, non-binary people are forcing a binary debate: Those for them vs. those against them.

Neither side would ever accept the existing singular, neutral pronoun, it. Nor should they, for a reason too obvious to state. Rather than argue either side of the case, here’s a proposal to satisfy both, along with the logic by which I arrived at it:

What do the words she and he have in common? The letters HE. So far, no good because this leaves us with one of the two pronouns we want to avoid. So what is there in he that is part of both she and he without indicating either?

Answer: E. Why not? We already have a single-letter pronoun. And like I, a long E, pronounced EE, for as long as you want it.

Some wise-ass, like the guy in the supermarket last week wearing the shirt that says “I don’t care about your pronouns,” might demand, ” What about H?”

Either he missed the first-grade instruction that every word has to have a vowel, or he actually thinks that while writing about how we must protect one rule–the plural pronoun–I’m going to endorse breaking another.

Be that as it may, the better reason to use E is sound. Moreover, like the word you, it will sound fluid in all three cases:

E was in the supermarket.
I ran into e at the supermarket.
I ran into es car in the supermarket parking lot.

Well, that’s what bumpers are for, but there might be another bump in that last example. Vocally, the S sounds fine following the long E. In print, the tendency might be to put an apostrophe between the two.

But pronouns are purposefully free of apostrophes, and for clarity’s sake we should keep them that way. Just as plurals should be kept plural.

I’ll be interested to hear from those whose everyday language might be altered by what I propose. Unlike that guy in the supermarket, I do care about pronouns.

Not my pronouns, not his pronouns, not your pronouns, not anyone’s pronouns, not even es pronouns, but pronouns that, like every noun, every verb, every adjective, every preposition, every article, belong to the English Language, each and every one.

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Here’s a proposal made over a year ago. Certainly preferable to the use of plurals, but the sound is unnatural, like an affected foreign accent.

Hard to imagine a grown man wearing such a thing, but I saw one last week.

Terms of Beguilement

Though all attention is on Russia and Ukraine, there’s an unmistakable American echo in this invasion. Not rolling in on tanks or flying over in planes, but finessed with language.

When Donald Trump seconded Vladimir Putin’s description of his invading forces as “peacekeepers,” he was echoing the “alternative facts” offered by his faithful advisor, Kellyanne Conway, in the days following his inauguration.

Within days of Conway’s oxymoronic claim, bookstores sold out of 1984, George Orwell’s 73-year-old classic dystopian novel, and the publisher ran another edition. The rush had not so much to do with surveillance and a police state, or with conformity and loyalty oaths, as it had to do with Orwell’s theory of the distortion of words and revisionist history to achieve all of the above.

All those years we thought 1984 a warning against oppression, it never occurred to us that it might serve as a blueprint for oppression.

We like to think that we control language, but as Orwell reasoned, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Indeed, in 2017, many Americans began believing in “alternative facts.” In 2020, it turned into alternative science, and by 2021, who knows how many of COVID’s victims died of it?

We can thank those who parse Putin’s “bizarre” tirade at the start of the invasion for its distortions of history and language, but we need to start parsing equally bizarre language that is taken for granted–sometimes written as law–right here in the USA.

This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of the murder of Treyvon Martin in Florida.

We all know the story and still feel the racial fallout. Rather than rehash, let’s strip it of race and all other detail, and consider only its language:

One person, A, walks past another, B. With a gun, B follows A. A keeps moving away from B. B pursues A. B catches A, an altercation starts, the gun fires, A is dead. B does not deny shooting A. In court, B is acquitted when his lawyer invokes something called “Stand Your Ground.”

In a nutshell, B, who pursued A, is judged to have stood. Unless B left his home and went after A on a conveyor belt (which he himself would have to have owned since the defense was “standing his ground”), this is transparent bullshit.

In any other English-speaking country in the world and at any other time in history, this would be unthinkable. Here in 21st Century America, “Stand Your Ground” is law in many states.

Before long, as most observers tell us, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could determine the fate of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women full reproductive rights.

Anti-Choice activists–to use a far more accurate name for a movement that ignores the necessities of life after birth–have been waiting all these years for a shift in the Supreme Court. When Amy Coney Handmaid Tale Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they had it.

Whether we call them Anti-Choice or Pro-Life, and whether we prefer to avoid the word “abortion” (as I just did) with other terms such as “reproductive rights,” they have made a 49-year habit of using the phrase “abortion on demand.”

Again, strip this of the issue and all details:

A woman seeks medical treatment. Does she demand it? Is any clinic ever obligated to give it? If the clinic says no, is there a consequence? If the clinic says yes, does the woman have to pay? What kind of demand is it if there’s agreed-upon payment? Is the payment on demand?

Let’s apply Anti-Choice “logic” to other services whether we pay out of pocket or are covered by insurance: Do we have hernia repairs on demand? Cavities filled on demand? Oil changes on demand? Our driveways shoveled by the neighbor’s kid on demand?

The only other common use of those two words is a commercial pitch from a company that streams movies into your home. They want you to demand what they have.

Again, you smell the bullshit as soon as you open your nose.

In a courtroom, you’d think that “abortion on demand” would be ruled out of order as prejudicial language, but after 49 years of repetition, judges may no longer notice it.

Just as few notice the gratuitous prejudice in phrases frequently in the news, from “hardline feminists” and “environmental extremists” since the 1970s to “radical left” in recent years. Sometimes it’s done with a change of one word, as when the estate tax is called “death tax.” Or an obscure phrase with a menacing sound used repetitiously to make anything the speaker doesn’t like sound evil, such as “critical race theory.”

Those who do this do not want you to be aware of ills they’d rather live with, that may be to their benefit. But they can’t condemn something as undeniably positive as awareness, so they abbreviate the word into one menacing syllable. Hence, states such as Florida are now passing “anti-woke” legislation.

In the parlance of today, prejudicial language such as on demand has become “normalized.”

As has “stand your ground.” And “peacekeeper,” not in the short time since Putin and Trump used it, but since 1986 when the US developed “peacekeeper” missiles to counter an arms buildup by the USSR. Or since 1943 when the US Navy launched a patrol frigate named “Corpus Christie.”

That last was five years before Orwell wrote 1984. Maybe he took it as a blueprint for his warnings of debased language that flew off the shelves of bookstore weeks after Trump’s inauguration.

Given what has been said since, it’s too bad he’s not around to write a sequel.

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https://www.activistpost.com/2016/06/5-ways-orwell-1984-has-come-true.html

Of Schools and Nursing Homes

Lotta talk about books being banned, and I should probably hold my tongue rather than confuse the issue by plagiarizing Shakespeare’s “pox on both your houses.”

Truth is I’m very much in the house that has Maus, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, and others on its shelves and tables available to children as soon as they are able to read them. Problem is that I’m also an ardent advocate of Huckleberry Finn, a book that many in that same house have wanted banned from schools due to the use of a slur common at the time it was written.

For years I marveled at the irony. Twain’s narrative of a runaway white boy who aids and abets a runaway slave is arguably the most profound statement ever made against racism by a white writer. For it to be under attack from those who profess to be against racism struck me as a self-inflicted wound, a PR gift to that other house that condemns ours as “cancel culture.”

Social media has taught me otherwise. Huckleberry Finn is as readily condemned by some on the left as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank are condemned by the right for a reason that has nothing to do with ideology, left or right:

Very few people on either side ever read books.

Hell, few are willing to read blogs of 1,000 words or op-ed columns of 650. Notice the comments drawn on social media by links to articles of any length. For starters, the number is a fraction of comments–or likes–gained by a picture of a dog or that morning’s breakfast. And most of those respond only to the photo and the caption, maybe to the opening line, with no indication of or response to the substance of the blog or column.

Given that, how could anyone think that more than very few Americans have the attention span for books that typically range from 70,000 to 150,000 words? As the writer of books, blogs, and columns, I risk sounding as though I’m indulging in self-pity, but I can assure you that these results have no effect on me. How else could I keep at it? Why else would I?

I resolved long ago that I’ll do all I can do and let indifference fall where it may. Writers far more profound and prolific than I have and will continue to suffer the same fate. I imagine that they do it as I do it, because we cannot not do it, and because if enough people in our own house ever wake up, we’ve placed plenty of food for thought on their breakfast table.

If nothing else, at least our grandchildren will have evidence that we didn’t hold our tongues, that we made efforts, that we tried. I can hear Lachlan and Briana exclaiming long after I’m gone: “So that’s what happened on Planet Zobo!”

Between now and then, there’s a chance that what they read of Planet Earth’s history will be censored by the same people who insist that statues are the way to know history.

That’s what the residents of that other house say. It would be an easy position to discredit if not for the overly-policed language in our own overly-sensitive house that makes their claim of “cancel culture” stick. It would be taken seriously if we didn’t keep the other side laughing with our own ridiculous pronoun wars. It would be simple to show that the use of “critical race theory” is a fabricated scare tactic applied to anything about race–about slavery and Jim Crow, about segregation and discrimination–if not for our own myopic idea that language of the past should be sanitized for the present.

It would be a slam dunk to keep Art Spiegelman and Toni Morrison in public schools if we weren’t calling fouls on Mark Twain.

You cannot condemn one book for a word that creates discomfort, and then ridicule those who want to condemn other books that reveal the source of that discomfort. For that matter, this is a superficial debate that obscures the purpose of education: These are schools, not nursing homes.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t held my tongue. That, and the fact that history’s foremost recurrent lesson is that problems are never solved until those who want them solved are willing to piss people off, right and left.

If she/her, he/him, they/them think that’s a pox, so be it.

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https://www.dmarge.com/2016/09/controversial-banned-books.html

Really Got a Hold on Us

“Due to high volumes, you may experience long wait times for customer support. We greatly appreciate your patience.”

So says the actual text on a hi-tech service. Such statements are common, not just in the world of hi-tech, but for utility companies, appliance manufacturers, and others. On the surface, these statements are in simple, plain English.

Below the surface, we can translate them into simple, plain economics. Here’s how Helen Highwater hears it:

In order to pay our top execs enough for them to put up with constant demands from regulators and politicians, we are unable to hire enough customer support staff–even if we had qualified candidates to fill those new positions.

This scam goes hand-in-pocket–their hand, our pocket–with claims of inflation.

We believe those claims because we have seen prices climb in every aisle of the supermarket. Within months, for example, the prices of haddock and cod–both once plentiful here in New England–have jumped from $8 and $9 per pound to $13 and $14. As bad as that is, it seems reasonable compared to the next tray where halibut has jumped from $22 to $30.

But what do fish, or fruit or frozen dinners have to do with CEOs whose income is now 350-times that of their average employees, enough to launch them into space for ten minutes before they return to thank those employees for making the trip possible?

All while many of those employees field calls from customers they’ve had on hold for far longer than the boss’s extraterrestrial fling. Customers who, through no fault of their own, have lost all patience. Employees who, through no fault of their own, suffer the brunt of unnecessary pressure.

All the recent talk of inflation begins with gas prices, which is where our abject failure to learn history may prove fatal.

Sorry, let me rephrase that: Here’s where the American public’s refusal to learn history will earn the word suicide on democracy’s death certificate.

More than a few times, this country has seen the price of gas plummet during recessions and then climb in keeping with recovery. Less economic activity means less demand for gas, and a robust economy creates more. Forget about lessons of the 20th Century. We saw this in the transition from Bush/Cheney (who tanked the economy) to Obama/Biden (who revived it) just 13 years ago.

Is it possible that a nation so proud of its history–no matter the opposed interpretations of it, or expressions placed on public pedestals or in history textbooks–does not remember the difference between 2008 and 2009?

Instead, we look for the easy target.

Inflation covers all of the above: Fish, fruit, frozen dinners, gas, hi-tech products and services, and on and on. And it’s just as easy to pin blame on whoever is on top at the time. Why bother with the complexities of cause and effect, supply and demand, or climate change, when you can simply look at a name? Let’s go Brandon!

If we did look beneath the surface of this plain, simple English, we would see the plain, simple economic fact that really has us on hold:

Exploitation.

Instead, we look for an easy fix: Make America Great Again! And for a Fixer: I alone…

The only way out of this would be to remember that none of us are alone. Quite the opposite. We are E pluribus unum whether we want to be or not, and the overworked agent at the other end of that phone is under the same manufactured weight that forces impatience on our end.

Failing to see that inflation is a euphemism for exploitation, we continue to target each other and settle for temporary fixes.

Could say that we are putting–and keeping–ourselves on hold.

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