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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https://www.cbc.ca/comedy/four-poems-about-being-on-hold-with-customer-service-1.4407801

I Are Not Stupid

First hit me when I started sending inquiries to the English departments of local colleges looking to teach writing classes as I did in the Eighties and Nineties.

Even then, I was too surprised and encouraged by responses telling me just when to get in touch for likely openings next year to notice what was really new.

To be fair to myself, it was barely noticeable at the bottom of emails sent back to me, likely added automatically along with the rest of the identifying info–title, department, room and building numbers, school, address, phone, fax–below the sign off.

Only notice I took was to laugh it off and mention it to a few friends. The laughter was prompted by first names being so clearly male or female. English teachers are notoriously on guard against redundancy.

Does someone named David have to tell us to use “he/him” as pronouns for him? Did I need to put “for him” at the end of that question? Does Roberta need to add “she/her”? To take it a step further, isn’t that what the “a” in Roberta is for?

One friend who spent about four decades in higher ed, lasting far longer than I did, let me know that this trend began a few years back, and that it is now considered “academic courtesy” to state the pronouns by which we prefer to be called.

Since when are pronouns matters of preference? Do we also get to chose the adjectives that describe us? How about the nouns that state what we do, the verbs and adverbs that reveal how we do it? Let me see:

World-acclaimed flautist Jack Garvey, better known nationally as “The American Chaucer” for his hilariously incisive literary vignettes, will headline King Richard’s Faire this weekend with his energetically mesmerizing renditions of J.S. Bach, the Mothers of Invention, and the Monkees…

Back in August, I barely mentioned this in a blog headlined, “Call Me Rip,” poking fun at myself for waking up to so much that is new in higher ed since I left twenty years ago. Of course, I knew that a “pronoun controversy” over gender identification existed, and I’m gladly willing to address someone named Alia as “he” if that’s what Alia wants–or Arthur as “she” if that’s what Arthur wants.

But the controversy thickens, and I now draw a line. Consider this opening paragraph from a story in Boston Magazine this week:

On the first day of school at Old Rochester Regional High School in Mattapoisett, Alia Cusolito donned cool, 3-inch, dangling sword earrings. The sophomore also pinned a circular black button with “they/them” in silver letters onto their shirt and a pink “they/them” pin to their backpack. The buttons were a plea for respect and for acknowledgement from teachers and peers of Alia’s identity and preferred pronouns. The teen identifies as nonbinary.
Link below

If this appeared in a paper handed in by a student, I’d praise the smooth style and relevant content, including the “they/them” buttons, but my red ink would circle the use of their in front of shirt and backpack. As an English teacher, I’ll agree that Alia can identify as anything Alia wants, but with all due respect and acknowledgement, Alia is one person.

Moreover, with respect to the English language, “respect” does not mean accommodating anything anyone wants.

Many of my liberal friends may not want to hear this, but English does provide a neutral singular pronoun: It. If the rejection of that gender-free option is that it is de-humanizing, then the solution cannot be turning singular into plural, since that, according to the same logic, would be over-humanizing.

Again, please consider: If we use “it” to refer to one person, we will at least be using singular verbs: It is, It was, etc. But if we adopt “they,” we will launch further into the plural with matching verbs: They are, They were, etc. This will compound the confusion.

Or does anyone who wants this change expect us to force singular verbs onto plural pronouns? If so, they is sure to make us sound stupid. They is, They was, etc.

My objection is not about gender, but about numbers.

You may have noticed that I have already dodged the problem by using “Alia” three times in one sentence. Should I be teaching a nonbinary or trans student next year, that will be my recommendation. If the student complains, the student (I’m doing it again) will either find another class or get me fired.

As a practicing writer, my first obligation is always to language, much as a judge’s obligation must be to law regardless of cultural or personal preferences. And frankly, just for the sake of sound, I will never be reduced to using a plural pronoun for one person.

Yes, I know that at least one dictionary has accepted “they” as a singular pronoun, but wasn’t that for an unknown antecedent? To be a bit quicker than saying, “The diner choked on his or her turnip” if you don’t know the diner’s gender?

Dictionaries can make all the accommodations they want, for whatever reason they want, but English teachers cannot accommodate the awkwardness of “The diner choked on their turnip”–or the confusion of: The sophomore also pinned a circular black button with “they/them” in silver letters onto their shirt...

As alternatives, I suggest streamlining: “Alia choked on the turnip.” Who else’s turnip would Alia have choked on? Or repeating the name–“Alia pinned it onto Alia’s shirt”–if only because slight repetition is less distracting than awkwardness and confusion.

Such a stand may upset my liberal friends. If so, I ask that they consider their own stands over the years regarding the English language we have heard from Republicans on the national scene.

The first George Bush was frequently derided for his “spaghetti syntax,” and his son was a frequent staple of late night comics for such gems as, “Is our children learning?” Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato–on the blackboard of an elementary school of all places–became the moment most representative of his subliterate vice-presidency, and Sara Palin went on and on in a stream of gibberish.

In 1994, the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, whom Ronald Reagan offered as role models for us all, used the word “persecution” to fend off investigations of their rampant graft. Today, Republicans use it in press conferences to dismiss questions they’d rather not answer. Joan of Arc never had it so good.

Atop this silly cake, Trump’s gaslighting repetition of content-free words was–and still is–frosting both sugar-coated (tremendous, fantastic, the most beautiful, the biggest, the greatest in history, wonderful) and toxic (disgraceful, shameful, horrible, vicious, unAmerican, tough). All of which added to an endless stream of sentence fragments that never found completion.

For over 30 years, we liberals have been pointing to Republican misuse of language as an indicator of distorted policies and proposals, often as an attempt to hide what they really have in mind. How many times have we cited Orwell’s basic premise: Debased language reveals debased thought?

Can anyone who starts making singular names plural continue to do that? As my students liked to say back in the Nineties: Hello???

If this is how it’s to be (how they’s to be?), how loud will the laughter be from Republicans, especially when most, if not all, otherwise liberal English teachers will be laughing along with them?

As the second paragraph of the magazine’s story tells us:

Cusolito’s efforts at Old Rochester Regional are part of a growing movement nationwide. Transgender and nonbinary students are increasingly saying to teachers, peers, and schools: Call us what we want to be called.

Really? Alright then, if you accept that, please send any questions or comments on this blog to me, George Carlin, Jr., President, Pronouns R Us, East Wing, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, 20500.

Be sure to enclose a donation. And leave the amount blank. We’ll fill in the numbers we want.

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You may need a subscription to access this: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/09/28/magazine/very-scary-thing-tell-someone-why-gender-pronouns-matter-schools/

https://www.scribendi.com/academy/articles/they_as_a_singular_pronoun.en.html

A Planet Where Facts Don’t Matter

We hear and worry about Covid-19 developing new strains, and wonder if our vaccines are enough to protect against them. Something similar is happening with our news and how we perceive it.

Just as Pfizer and Moderna went full-tilt last year to stop a worldwide health crisis, writers such as George Orwell and Sinclair Lewis devoted themselves to exposing a very different kind of crisis both before and after World War II.

We recall Orwell’s1984 as a political warning, but it would be more useful if we looked past the conflicting ideologies and regarded it as a statement on language. The rules of 1984‘s “Newspeak,” the language of te fictional Oceania, explain much of what America has been hearing these past five years.

And it was never more apparent than in the Republican response to Pres. Biden’s address to congress and the nation last night.

Easily, the most cited tenet of Newspeak–which Orwell simply took from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels–is, if you keep repeating a lie, it becomes true. America–a nation with a creation-myth that starts with a young boy’s declaration, “I cannot tell a lie”–is now, after four years of non-stop lies, a country that cannot tell the truth. That is, we cannot tell what truth is, and so we hesitate to believe our own eyes and ears.

How else to explain that it took 330 days of reliving the trauma of a murder on video seen by millions, all nine-plus minutes of it, to convict the murderer? Some rejoiced that the verdict was “proof the system works.” But that length of time and the unrest it caused suggest that it works about as well as a riding lawnmower would serve to take a family of four cross-country.

Any one of us would have an easy time finding a few falsehoods from any president as far as memory serves. Even Eisenhower wouldn’t come clean about the spy-plane over Russia. Clinton had several doozies that prompted one columnist to dub him, “The Madison Avenue President.” Interesting theory that still holds true: Americans are so saturated in the fantasies and absurdities of television and radio commercials, that we can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. This, by the way, is what a young playwright named Bertolt Brecht said of the rise of the cabaret in Germany in the 1920s, greasing the skids for “theatrical leadership.” Hello Hitler!

But Americans never suffered lies so blatant and sustained as we did from 2017 to the beginning of this year, culminating on Jan. 6–and with residual effects in states with Republican-led legislatures across the country.

The Democrats have addressed this with the Voting Rights Bill, which Biden endorsed with emphasis last night. He could have included a mention of statehood for Washington DC–over 700,000 taxed Americans without representation in Congress–but in a speech which he claimed he wanted to be non-combative, that was left unsaid. Seemed like the right move until Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina put the “butt” in rebuttal.

Here’s where I imagine Orwell might have perked up and Goebbels would have smiled with admiration: Scott molded his entire speech around a clever catch phrase: “Common Sense, Common Ground.”

Who can disagree with that? Two commonly accepted and approved phrases that we could apply to anything. Which is what he did by repeating the combo more often than a teenager says “like” in an excited conversation, all with an upturned smile and a sing-song lilt. Lewis might have asked, “Can it happen a second time?”

Scott is a true student of the “windmills cause cancer” and “Norway rakes forests” school of public speaking. Everything to which he applied his happy little bromide was a lie: Voting is now easier in Georgia. There is no systemic racism in the USA. Trump stopped the virus. Republicans are for working families… Echoes of “Camp Auschwitz,” as the Trump insurrectionist’s shirt called it, were deafening: “War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength.” As one of the cable-news pundits exclaimed, “What planet is he on?”

Unfortunately, he’s on this one where he has just created a new strain of the “Big Lie” virus. Instead of repeating the lie, he repeats the pablum, pouring it like dark amber maple syrup all over as many lies as his allotted time allowed.

Good news is that we need not wait for Pfizer or Moderna to concoct another vaccine to protect us from sugar-coated delusions about race, economics, or the environment. We need only pay attention, know our sources, and understand that a knee on a neck in Minneapolis is a microcosm of the macrospasm that is America today.

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https://www.newsweek.com/tim-scott-republican-racism-said-comments-republicans-1587341

The headline is from former George W. Bush speechwriter Nicole Wallace, now a host on MSNBC, answering her own question: “What planet is he on?”

Hoaxaholics

So now he’s claiming that the reports of his turning a blind eye to Russian bounties on US soldiers is “a hoax.”

You know. Like Russian interference and his obstruction of investigations described in the Mueller Report no matter what Barr’s whitewash says: “Hoax!”

All the testimony about the phone call with the Ukrainian president that led to impeachment, much of it from decorated, career military officers: “Hoax!”

COVID-19 in early March after he was already briefed otherwise. “Hoax!”

All this time since the campaign–and, if you live in New York City, since the fraud and bankruptcies of his entry into real-estate–we have wondered how anyone can possibly believe, much less support him, and he has been giving us the answer over and again all this time.

In a single word.

Not merely by repeating it, but by creating his own examples as if they are anything but: Windmills cause cancer, Finland rakes forests, Clorox prevents contamination, George Washington captured airports.

And let’s not forget his star turn as a meteorologist last hurricane season.

By this time, any belief in or acceptance of his denials and absurdities reveals a disease. It may not yet be diagnosed, and it may take a while to formulate a 12-step program, but the name should be obvious.

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By Juhele – Openclipart, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88923327

funny warning signs. Internet hoax and fake news alert

As Vivid as Valid to This Day

When I saw the photo of the Republican president’s prepared remarks before him at one of the first coronavirus briefings, I was immediately transported back to a college freshman writing class 52 years ago.

Before me, before the class, was a man in his mid-to-late-20s, leaning back as he usually did in front of his desk rather than sitting behind it, expounding on George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

Can’t recall any real fright at the Hong Kong flu pandemic that had the world’s attention in 1968, but Prof. McHale’s point is as vivid as it is valid now as it was then:

Referring to Orwell’s warning against the use of language to demonize foreigners for political gain, McHale asked: “Why is it always ‘the Asian flu,’ the ‘Taiwan flu,’ the ‘Spanish flu’? Why isn’t it ever the ‘American flu,’ the ‘Philadelphia flu’?”

All of this came back to me twenty years later–32 years ago–when the elder George Bush’s presidential campaign mockingly attacked Democratic candidate, Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis, for suggesting that struggling farmers in the Midwest should invest in Belgian endive as a cash crop.

In fact, it was one of nine crops that Dukakis recommended, but the foreign name was something on which Bush could pounce—nor did it hurt that “Belgian” back then was still often followed by “Congo” in the public mind. No need to say it, just let the insinuation do its work.

Nor did it matter that the Reagan administration in which Bush was VP was itself promoting Belgian endive throughout the campaign year of 1988 by offering grants to farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula to grow it.* All that was needed was to impress the foreign word on American perception.

And connect it to Dukakis who, incredibly, never mentioned the Reagan Dept. of Agriculture’s grant offerings–as if he was unaware of them.

Just as it came back to me in 1988, that class in 1968 returned full force last month.

Whether or not it occurred to McHale that few if any of us 17- and 18-year-olds knew that “the Spanish flu” ravaged the world just 50 years earlier, or that the City of Philadelphia insisted on holding a parade resulting in a spike of deaths—compared to St. Louis which cancelled a parade and avoided the same—didn’t matter.

What mattered was the choice of words, the bias of geography, the effect of racism without having to acknowledge that race had anything at all to do with it.

And that’s what I saw on the Republican president’s prepared remarks: The typed word “coronavirus” crossed out with “Chinese” written over it in thick, black Sharpie, likely the same Sharpie that directed a North Atlantic hurricane inland all the way to Alabama.

Jay McHale, who passed away two years ago this month at 77, left his students with many indelible messages, most of which might be summed up as always question authority.

Today, his most urgent, lasting message is to always question authority’s choice of words.

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Photo above is McHale with Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso during a seminar on Jack Kerouac he organized at Salem State, April 1973. Here’s how he appeared in class:

https://obituaries.salemnews.com/obituary/john-jay-w-p-mchale-1045444766

*Delmarva, the peninsula that juts south of New Jersey between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic = DELaware, MARyland, VirginiA.