Unwise Words to the Wise

Once upon a dine, the Port Tavern offered a chicken-curry dish that I not only ordered every time, but recommended to anyone dining with me.

Until one day when a waiter told us it was no longer on the menu. Asked why, he said the restaurant had “a new chef who doesn’t make it.”

The End.

Wait! What the knife and fork was that all about? A fair question from those whose appetites for food I may have whet only to serve up verbal linguine. Rather than describe my disappointment or recall what I had instead, I offer the vignette to pose a few questions:

Did I simply report something that happened, an easily verifiable fact? Or would you describe those few lines as “bad-mouthing” a local restaurant?

Answering this may not be easy for some. One the one hand, it did happen, so you can’t dismiss it as unfavorable opinion. On the other, it does tell of loss, so you can’t call it favorable.

How about the direct quote from the waiter? Have I violated his privacy? Should I report a result without a cause? Or should I include the cause but without quote or attribution? Maybe I could make the reader think there was a notice of the change on the menu:

After searching the menu twice, I took the hint from the new guy with the Greek name and ordered spinach pie instead…

Be that as it may, no one ever accused me of “bad-mouthing” Port Tavern, perhaps because I have continued to dine there with friends, as well as mention it to out-of-towners asking for recommendations in the lobby of the Screening Room conveniently right next door.
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That was then.

In recent years, increasingly, we hear the word ” bad-mouth” applied, as an active, aggressive verb, to anything that the object of it would prefer to keep quiet. Truth and accuracy have nothing to do with it.

When reporters tell us that Russian jets have bombed Kiev, do we accuse them of “bad-mouthing” Russia? When a Kremlin official justifies the attack, do we expect reporters to ask permission to quote him?

The thought of either is preposterous. Why, then, do we hear the charge on local levels where they turn attention to problems that might be solved into disdain for those calling for attention in the first place?

Paving the way for the recent rise of bad-mouth the verb was–and still is–bashing the noun and verb.

“Bashing” reared its empty head back in the 90s. Don’t know where it began, but it caught on everywhere all at once and across all walks of life. Democrats and Republicans alike have used it as an all-purpose shield. No matter what the criticism, no matter how well-founded, it can be dismissed as “bashing,” which implies that the problem is not the problem, the person calling attention to it is. Yes, the National Rifle Association would be proud.

More recently, the word hater, a noun, has widened the highway of narrow-minded thought, though every lane’s a breakdown lane. What makes it so jarring to people of my generation is that “hate” was always a word to avoid, as negative as it gets.

Notice, too, the parallel proliferation of love. For years, Madison Ave. has conditioned us to “love” certain cars, beers, cereals, laxatives, even insurance companies, and we always knew it was an exaggerated version of “like.” Now we hear political and sports commentators say they “love” or “don’t love” a candidate’s remark or a coach’s decision.

And we wonder why the emotional so often trumps the rational?

What makes “hater” yet more jarring is that this new usage is not limited to describe deep dislike and aversion, but anything less than enthusiastic approval. Once upon an attention span, you could say that you favored The Beatles over The Rolling Stones, and it was understood you still liked The Stones–or vice-versa.

Now it means you “hate” them, which may be a trivial matter regarding musical tastes, but has been a killer in a political system designed for consensus with primaries to winnow out extremists in favor of those with broader appeal. Anything less than 100% approval is all vice, no versa.

Result? Extremists win primaries, and some make it to Congress where they can condemn Jewish space lasers and ask the National Parks Service if it can change the tilt of the Earth’s axis to offset climate change. An entire political party can skip any commitment to a platform at its national convention and instead offer us a terse declaration that can be honestly summed up as Trump uber Alles!

Debasement of language is what George Orwell warned against in 1984 and what George Carlin harped on till the day he died in 2008. Orwell described Newspeak, a dumbed down language that made it impossible to think critically. Carlin traced the devolution of the WWI term shell-shock (“You can hear the bombs falling”) to today’s post-traumatic stress-disorder to illustrate how antiseptic words can numb us to urgent needs.

Where are they when we need them? Oh, say, can we read or hear them when we bemoan today’s “polarization” and “deep division”?

Might they tell us that the very language we use–badmouth, bash, hater, and more–polarizes us to the point that we see everything as all or nothing?

Politics? You can’t even regret out loud the absence of an item on a menu without some people thinking you want to burn the restaurant down.

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https://www.progressive-charlestown.com/2018/02/dumbing-down-america.html

Don’t Drink It Lightly

As soon as I saw the ad for a new beer called “Flight,” my imagination went on a flight of its own.

On the runway I thought I was trying to square the Yuengling Brewing Company’s choice of name with something on the menu of most brew pubs, and which waiters are quick to recommend if you show any hesitation in your choice of beverage.

As any connosieur of suds can tell you, a flight is an assembly of six or so beers and ales, porters and stouts, pilsners and lagers in small glasses artfully arranged on a wooden tray. The idea is that you and anyone with you can sample them before ordering one in a pint. It costs no more than a pint, and it lubricates cheerful conversation that your selection will be sure to elevate–yet another recent buzzword in the jargon of brew pubbers.

On takeoff, Yuengling’s choice of “flight” appears to be a way of telling us that it is a light beer without the stigma of the term “light beer”–something upscale for those who prefer to believe they are above the crowd. This happened about thirty years ago when Sam Adams brought out “Lightship.”

Many thought it failed because no one realized it was a light beer. I toast to differ: By far it was the best light beer on the market, but who with a taste for a craft beer such as Sam Adams wanted anything light? And who with a taste for anything light wanted anything from Sam Adams?

By the way, the handsome dude in the vest raising a tankard on the label before they changed it about ten years ago was Paul Revere, not Sam Adams. But neither of them is on my passenger list, so back to Yuengling:

Did it choose the name as a way to tap into the brew pub mystique?

Let’s leave that question in the air and pour through other possibilities they may have considered. Fasten your seatbelt because turbulence foams ahead, though nothing your designated pilot hasn’t quaffed before. I mean, who hasn’t flown through, taxied around, and landed in the alphabet?

Alight — Very nice double-entendre that suggests an easy landing while telling you it’s beer.

Blight — In a column years ago, I made a reference to “Bud Blight,” a name I still use when talking about the world’s worst beers. No matter that the column was an April Fool’s Day spoof of local restaurants–two re-named with anagrams, “Flop Sailor” and “Sloop Fair,” as giveaways in this old seaport town–the editor thought it a typo. She probably should have censored my description of pea soup. There’s a lot you can do with the word “pea” without changing the spelling. And in food? Oh, boy!

D’Light — Another choice double-entendre, French for “of light” and a guarantee to make you happy.

Elite — Be sure to pronounce it EE-Light, but change the spelling a la Miller, and let the printed word imply itself. This should appeal to those who aspire to a higher taste, a la Michelob’s “You can have it all” ads back in the ’80s.

High Light — Tempting, but invites confusion with Miller’s “high life.”

K’Light — Might shine if advertised with kleig lights.

Li’Light — Suggesting “little” as in less calories, but the hokey sound would appeal only to the straight and narrow. Not a brewery’s demographic (NBD).

Lightly — For people who drink decaf or prefer white bread over whole wheat or rye. NBD.

Plight — Another one for the satirists, though it might appeal to the chronically depressed.

Slight — Ditto satirists, but with potential for those with inferiority complexes.

X-Light — X seems to be the go-to letter for anyone wanting to imply power, edginess, and/or a mystique. Lately it has served as a neutral plural to avoid the Spanish Latino or Latina by people who somehow fail to notice that they need only omit the O or the A to have both noun and adjectival versions, both neutral. Consequently, this one risks the implication of being unnecessary.

There are other ways to do it, of course. Just last month Modelo of Mexico took the Spanish word for gold and introduced “Modelo Oro,” so sonorous with all those Os, with a pitch calling it “The Gold Standard of Light Beer.”

With that in mind, here’s an addition to our list above:

Blinded By — Might work if the ads were set to the interminable Manfred Mann hit back in the Seventies.

As we’ve already seen with Lightship, a brewery could draw a name from its own brand as portrayed in its public relations. For example, Anheuser-Busch might offer:

Clightsdale — Who doesn’t love those mega-horses? But who could keep a straight face seeing them representing anything called “light”? People would buy it for laughs, as they do goofy greeting cards or gag t-shirts that say things like “Best thing about the good old days was, I wasn’t old, and I wasn’t good.”

A contradiction in terms? Who cares? Remember when Molson tried to latch on to the cross-currents of the Nineties’ Zeitgeist by emphasizing the words “extreme” and “smooth” in the same ads? Did they hire Ronald Reagan’s PR team? In a world of “You can have it all,” there’s no such thing as contradiction.

By now you may be wondering if I have tried Yuengling’s Flight. A fair question to which there are four answers, one of which might be ruled foul by an umpire owning stock in liquor stores but fair by any ump seated in cabin and picking up his own tab:

First, anytime I see the words “light” or “diet” or “lo-cal” or “fat free” on any bottle, jar, box, carton, or barroom tap, my mind says “taste free,” and my taste buds say “no, thank you.”

Second, “light” is a euphemism for “watered down.” In days of old, it was called “small beer.” There’s a character in one of Shakespeare’s histories who says it should be a felony to drink it. According to his journal during the rebel campaign against the British across New Jersey, George Washington would disagree. In it, he tells us he brewed “small beer” to give some taste to the polluted creekwater he had to boil before his troops could drink it.

Third, as far as I know, except for re-named, straightforward “Sam Adams Light,” the best brewers do not make it. When Coors Light first appeared back in the Eighties, I asked a friend who took up home brewing what he thought of it. He gave me a stink-eye stare as he savored a sip of his own superb, creamy creation before he finally and very, very dryly answered: “I think it’s redundant.”

Fourth, I won’t spend a cent on any product made by companies that finance right-wing candidates and causes. Coors, if it was honest, would have a pitchman named John Birch. Yuengling went out of its way to make its support for Trump known in 2016.

That last reason suggests something else they may have had in mind down there in Pottsdam, Penna., when they chose the word “Flight” for their new brew. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, let’s hope it’s one-way.

May not be a drink I’d buy, but surely a plane I’d fly even if I have to walk back.

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The back of a t-shirt sold by the Ginger Man pubs in Texas and in Manhattan and Boston. I’ve had and worn out two, one that said Austin, the other Houston on the front. I wore one into the Ginger Man in Manhattan on an evening five years ago that the founder of the small chain, Bob Precious, happened to be there. He joined my friend and I for conversation and fetched us a round on the house.
https://thegingerman.com/

For this, try squinting your eyes and imagining that the year is 2017, and the shirt is brand new.

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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