Friday, March 12, 2010
Conversations: The “Milk Run”
FWP: Do you want me to pick up anything on the way home?
CSO: Wine and milk.
FWP: Oh, no. Wine only. You get the milk.
CSO: Why?
FWP: You can't get milk at the liquor store.
CSO: So go to a gas station!
FWP: Naah. I'd have to bring a vented can with "FDA Approved" stickers, and I don't want to go through all that crap about validating my credit card. Besides, which pump would I use?
CSO: The white one. You know, the one with the grade buttons that say "Whole," "1% fat," "2% fat," and so on!
FWP: You know what's worst about that?
CSO: What?
FWP: If you want to buy heavy cream, you have to prove you're over 18.
CSO: Oh.
That conversation took place this morning, Gentle Reader.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
U.S. Marines killed in WW2, 24,486. Sixty-four years later, Tom Hanks stabs them in the back.
Somebody may ask. How can a guy like Tom Hanks, who has Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers on his resume, suddenly and inexplicably decide the fight against the Japanese was based on propaganda and racism? Surprisingly to most people, Hanks has been going on TV lately making a moral equivalency case, saying that Americans and Japanese soldiers hated each other because each was different from the other (then he tries to link it to our distaste for Muslim extremists not only who launched a sneak attack on us, but who continue to want to attack innocent civilians; who want to kill us). Well, I think it’s time somebody put Hanks in his rightful place. The truth is, Hanks I’m convinced, is a fraud. I think that, when it comes to despising the U.S. military, he’s in bed with Barack Obama. Finally, Hanks, I believe, is admitting his Hollywood hatred for America and everything it stands for because he just can’t hold it in any longer. And I guess he feels that he’s rich enough that he no longer has to.
The background.
Seems to lil’ ol’ blond haired, blue eyed Rachel that, when it comes to American-hating guys like Hanks, love of money has always come way before hatred of country. But eventually the true colors show through.
Fact is, I believe Tom, somewhat ironically, despises most everything our country and military stand for. If somebody was going to make a killing off of WW2, he’d want it to be him. I believe that Hanks believed in his pre-Saving Private Ryan days that he could make a pile of money making war movies, while embedding within them the almost subliminal notion that the GI’s were no better than the Japanese or Germans. How many of us have actually bought into that lie? Did U.S. Marines in WWII commit equivalent acts of barbarism that the Japanese soldiers specialized in? You decide.
Here’s a sample of what the Japanese busied themselves with during the war years. Or, Tommy, is it just some Rachel concocted propaganda?
How about The Rape of Nanking for starters? The Bataan Death March. The Japanese practice of lopping off heads of prisoners of war. The barbaric, inhumane medical experimentation on American soldiers in 1945 Japan. Perhaps a little more atrocity history is necessary to put this moral equivalency lie to rest. My thanks to George Dunkan for the language and information that I have a feeling Hanks won’t be making any movies about. For Hanks to say that our greatest generation was no better than the enemies they fought, enemies who wanted to enslave the world cerca 1940, is unforgivable. I believe that Eddie Slovic had a thousand times the courage and love of country as a Tom Hanks. Who’s good at pretending. He’s an actor. In real life, I believe he’s nothing but a liar. Now let’s take a look at the kind of soldiers Tom Hanks compares the United States citizen soldier to.
This is a sample of what the Japanese were responsible for leading up to and during the second world war. “Known historically as the ‘Rape of Nanking, in 1937, (the real start of World War II) the Chinese capital had a population of just over one million, including over 100,000 refugees. On December 13, the city fell to the invading Japanese troops. For the next six weeks the soldiers indulged in an orgy of indiscriminate killing, rape and looting. They shot at everyone on sight, whether out on the streets or peeking out of windows. The streets were soon littered with corpses, on one street a survivor counted 500 bodies. Girls as young as twelve, and women of all ages were raped by gangs of 15 or 20 soldiers, crazed by alcohol, who roamed the town in search of women. At the Jingling Women’s University, students were carted away in trucks to work in Japanese army brothels. Over a thousand men were rounded up and marched to the banks of the Yangtze river where they were lined up and gunned to death to give practice in machine-gun traversing fire. Thousands of captured Chinese soldiers, many wounded, were also murdered. In the following six weeks, the Nanking Red Cross units alone, buried around 43,000 bodies. About 20,000 women and girls had been raped, most were then murdered. Department stores, shops, churches and houses were set on fire while drunken soldiers indulged in wholesale looting and bayoneting of Chinese civilians for sport. It is estimated that over 150,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were killed in this, the most infamous atrocity committed by the Japanese army.
PHILIPPINES MASSACRE
“A full account of all massacres of Filipinos by Japanese troops would fill several books. In Manila, 800 men, women and children were machine-gunned in the grounds of St. Paul’s College. In the town of Calamba, 2,500 were shot or bayoneted. Around 100 were bayoneted and shot inside a church at Ponson and 169 villagers of Matina Pangi were rounded up and shot in cold blood. At the War Crimes Trial in Tokyo, document No 2726 consisted of 14,618 pages of sworn affidavits, each describing separate atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops. The Tribunal listed 72 large scale massacres and 131,028 murders as a bare minimum.
THE CHEKIANG MASSACRES
“The Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo brought a retaliation against the Chinese people that staggers the imagination. On April 18, 1942, sixteen twin-engined Mitchell B-25 bombers, each carrying one ton of bombs, and led by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, were launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Their mission was to bomb the Japanese capital, Tokyo, and then, unable to land back on their carrier, proceed to friendly airfields in China, 1,200 miles across the East China Sea. Some of the planes reached their destination safely but the others ran out of fuel and crashed after their crews had baled out. Sixty four airmen parachuted into the area around Chekiang. Most were given shelter by the Chinese civilians but eight of the Americans were picked up by Japanese patrols and three were shot after a mock trial for ‘crimes against humanity’. The Japanese army then conducted a massive search for the others and in the process whole towns and villages that were suspected of harboring the Americans were burned to the ground and every man, woman and child brutality murdered. When the Japanese troops moved out of the Chekiang and Kiangsu areas in mid-August, they left behind a scene of devastation and death that is beyond comprehension. Chinese estimates put the death toll at a staggering 250,000. Lt. Col. James Doolittle was later awarded the US Medal Of Honor. (The Chinese Department of Defense claims that 1,319,659 Chinese soldiers were killed between 1937 and 1945. It estimates the number of Chinese civilians killed during this period at over 30,000,000)
ATROCITY ON LUZON
“While many atrocities were committed on Luzon, this one stands out for its sheer bloody mindedness. Fourteen Filipino resistance fighters surrendered to the Nippon savages after their ammunition was expended. Tied together neck to neck and with hands tied behind their backs, they were marched three miles to their place of execution. Ordered to sit down, another group of prisoners were brought in and forced to dig fourteen holes two feet wide and four and a half feet deep. When the digging finished the fourteen Filipinos, with their neck ropes removed, were forced to jump into the holes while the other group shoveled the earth back into the hole and stamped it down hard until only the head and neck of the victims were visible above ground. Their repugnant duty finished, the grave diggers were then lined up and shot in cold blood. The attention of the Japanese was now focused on the fourteen heads awaiting decapitation. A few soldiers had gone behind some bushes to defecate and after scraping together their excreta on to banana leaves they returned to the buried victims and kneeling down offered each head a last meal. Unable to move, the helpless men could only shake their head from side to side whereupon the Japanese soldiers stuffed the revolting faeces into their mouths amidst peals of laughter from their comrades. After they had their fun, the serious business of execution commenced as an officer drew his sword and with deft strokes separated the fourteen heads from the bodies. No one was ever punished for this foul deed.
MURDER ON WAKE ISLAND (January 12, 1943)
The stubborn defense of the island by the tiny garrison of 388 US Marines and 1,200 civilians workers lasted for fourteen heroic days. On December 23, 1941, Major James P.S. Devereux of the 1st. Defense Battalion, US Marine Corps, and Commander Winfield Cunningham of the Naval Air Station, realizing that the odds were hopelessly stacked against them, called for a cease fire, raised the white flag and surrendered the island. In January, 1942, the US Marines, numbering 1,187, were herded into the cargo holds of the 17,163 ton Japanese luxury liner Nitta Maru, for transportation to Yokohama and then to Shanghai. Those left behind included the civilians and the wounded Marines. A year passed and on the night of January 12, 1943, the Japanese accused the civilians of being in secret radio communication with US naval forces. The 97 American civilians still on Wake (actually 98 but one was caught stealing food and was beheaded) were marched to the beach and there lined up with their backs to the ocean and brutally murdered by machine guns. After the war, the Japanese commander on Wake, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara, and eleven of his officers, were sentenced to death by a US Naval Court at Kwajalein. Sakaibara was transported to Guam to await his fate. There, on 19 June 1947, he was executed by hanging. The murdered civilian POWs were later buried in Honolulu Memorial, Hawaii.
THE ‘AKIKAZE’ EXECUTIONS (March 18, 1943)
“The Mitsubishi built destroyer Akikaze (Lt. Cdr. Sabe Tsurukichi) was ordered to sail to Wewak in New Guinea to remove some German residents who were suspected of using radio transmitters to report ship movements to the Americans. Forty civilians were rounded up, most of them German clergymen, plus a few nuns with two children. About thirty more civilians were picked up when the ship stopped at Manus Island before proceeding to Rabaul. En-route, Captain Tsurukichi received a radio message from the 8th Fleet Headquarters to dispose of all neutrals on board. On the aft deck a wooden scaffold was erected and a sheet hung across the deck to shield the executions from the rest of the prisoners. One by one the victims were led from their cabins, interrogated and blindfolded and taken to the rear of the ship. There, they were hung on the scaffold by the wrists from a rope and pulley and as their feet cleared the deck they were shot by a four man rifle party. Their bodies were then thrown overboard. The two children were taken from the arms of the nuns and thrown into the water. The men were killed first then the women, the whole procedure lasting three hours.”
(George Duncan, Massacres and Atrocities of WWII)
BACK TO RACHEL
I know it’s a chore to read through all this, but just imagine what it was like trying to live through it.
Incidentally, Hank’s “Band of Brothers”, as I see it, was filled with ludicrous suggestions that there was also a moral equivalency between the German and American soldiers while anybody at Malmedy would disagree. As I remember, in virtually every Band of Brothers episode there was a gratuitous shot of an American soldier killing a white-flag-waving German soldier in cold blood. High ranking American officers were generally painted as cowardly, callous fools. Why didn’t at least the TV reviewers in the mainstream media pick up on this? Isn’t the answer so obvious? Because they agreed with it.
Hanks, last week, went on foaming at the mouth spewing, in Rachel’s opinion, contempt for American soldiers by implying the Marines in the Pacific were out to “kill them all”. Give me a break. The Japanese believed surrender would bring dishonor to themselves and their families. The Japanese respected no one who surrendered. For the most part, the Japanese hated taking prisoners and wouldn’t be taken prisoner. The United States soldier was 7 times more likely to die as a prisoner of the Japanese than of the Germans. When the Japanese weren’t engaging in bayonet practice with POW’s, you might find them playing games with Chinese babies, throwing them up in the air, and trying to impale them with their bayonets. What a way to pass the time. What a pitiful excuse for an American, in my humble opinion, Tom Hanks really is.
The Value Of Ignorance
One of the preeminent trumpet calls of the "health care reformers" is the demand that insurance companies not reject a prospective purchaser with "preexisting conditions." In other words, Smith, an applicant with heart disease, cancer, or AIDS would have to be considered as acceptable for coverage as Jones, an applicant in perfect health. The "reformers" would undoubtedly bridle at the suggestion that Smith pay an increased premium for those conditions, or accept that expenses arising from those diseases receive limited or no reimbursement.
Quite a lot of Americans whose "compassion" organs swell and stiffen at the sight of any sort of suffering don't realize that that provision alone would constitute an irrecoverable step toward government-only single-payer medical care. But then, quite a lot of Americans don't understand the nature of insurance.
Insurance doesn't lower the cost of the exigencies it covers. Quite the contrary: it increases them, in some cases rather sharply. Consider automobile insurance as a typical case. Without insurance, insuree Smith pays repairman Davis directly for his labor and the materials he needs. With it, Acme Insurance pays the greater part of Davis's bill, while Smith pays Davis a "deductible." That certainly seems more favorable to Smith than the former situation. But to make that possible, Smith must pay insurance premiums that will cover:
- Davis's labor and materials;
- Davis's costs in dealing with the insurance company;
- A portion of the salaries of Acme Insurance's employees;
- A profit to Acme Insurance's stockholders.
No, he doesn't do that directly, nor does he do it alone. The process is an aggregated one, summed over all Acme's policyholders and extended through time. Nor is the effect uniform; some Smiths will "make out," over time, because they have a significantly higher than average number of insured accidents. Inversely, some Smiths will pay far more in premiums than their cost to Acme in payouts, because they have few or no insured accidents. But overall, Acme must take in a significant amount more than it pays out to be a viable business.
This pattern applies to all insurable human contingencies.
Now ponder the factors Acme's representatives must consider in deciding whether or not to sell a policy to Smith, and at what premium to price it:
- How old is Smith? (Accident frequency correlates inversely with age of driver.)
- What does Smith drive? (High performance cars get into more accidents per capita than standard cars.)
- What's Smith's driving record? (Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance, but it's a damned good guide.)
- How much driving per year does Smith do? (Accident frequency is roughly constant per mile driven.)
- Where does Smith do the bulk of his driving? (Some routes and some neighborhoods are "black dot" zones where accidents occur more frequently than elsewhere.)
- Does Smith have any objectively detectable conditions that might reduce his competence behind the wheel? (Epileptics, the survivors of heart attacks, and persons with multiple-personality disorder are disfavored for accident insurance.)
All these things help Acme to determine whether Smith falls within the statistical envelope on which its policies and premiums are based -- in other words, whether Smith is a "good risk."
The critical consideration in all the above is available knowledge. Acme cannot know that Smith will get into a series of expensive crashes; it must attempt to estimate the likelihood from the factors listed above. What Acme can know is the statistical pattern that applies to Smith's "cohort:" the group he occupies on the basis of age, car, driving record, miles driven per year, and so forth.
If Acme could predict, with perfect accuracy, that this coming year, Smith would get into a crash with million-dollar consequences, it would rightly refuse to insure him. Conversely, if Smith could predict with perfect accuracy that he would not be involved in an accident of any sort, he'd be a fool to buy insurance...though doubt it not, Acme would be happy to sell it to him.
Thus, the insurance industry depends both on knowledge and ignorance: knowledge of the statistics pertinent to the policies sold and the accidents covered, and ignorance of which specific insurees will fall victim to insured hazards in the foreseeable future. If either party knows too much about what's likely to befall the insuree, they won't be able to strike a deal. To improve its odds, Acme probes Smith's relevant characteristics. If it appears too likely that Smith would cost Acme more in payouts than he'd pay in premiums, it will decline to insure him.
There are clear parallels between auto insurance and medical insurance. The foremost is between Smith's driving record in the former case and Smith's medical record in the latter one. Certain preexisting medical conditions virtually guarantee large costs in the future. If Smith is afflicted with degenerative circulatory disease, or cancer, or AIDS, he's guaranteed to cost someone a bundle. Acme will rightly refuse to insure him against costs accruing from them; it simply knows too much about his probable future to bet against odds that steep. To deny Acme the right to withhold coverage for those conditions is to demand that Acme operate as a charity rather than as a profit-making business.
This is integral with the Left's demand that "health care" be deemed a "right." One cannot legally deprive another of his rights; thus, medical care providers in a health-care-is-a-right regime are compelled to labor over any sick person regardless of his ability to pay them for their products and services. If any payment is to be rendered, it must be by the State, out of its tax coffers, for no profit-making business could survive under those constraints.
A health-care-is-a-right regime both destroys the medical insurance industry and conscripts anyone foolish enough to go into medicine. Cost control proceeds first by the State's decree of a schedule of fixed prices for medical goods and services, and later, as shortages of medicines, medical devices, and medical-care providers develop, by rationing.
Medical innovation grinds to a halt. What intelligent, hardworking man would willingly labor to develop advanced medicines, prosthetics, and techniques if it would mean a life enslaved to the State? To add insult to injury, as the State has a powerful incentive to deflect criticism of its policies onto private parties, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medical researchers are made to bear the brunt of public displeasure.
This is but one of the many irrefutable arguments against the federalization of medical care through medical insurance. The consequences sketched above aren't just likely; they're utterly guaranteed. Indeed, Americans can see them in effect in every nation on Earth that's allowed the nationalization, in any style, of its medical-care sector.
It's been said many times that Europe's flaccidity with regard to its military defense has been made possible by the benevolent American giant, which outspends all the rest of the world on military preparedness and will leap to the aid of its beleaguered friends even without being asked. The same is true of medicine. Europe has ruined its medical-care sector through nationalization. In consequence, Europe has no medical innovation activity of significance, and well-to-do Europeans flock to America for treatments unavailable or unreliable in their homelands.
If we foolishly follow Europe into medical servitude, whose innovation and dynamism will buttress the health of Americans?
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Life Imitates Hollywood
Many of you may remember the 2002 Stephen Spielberg scifi production of Minority Report, portraying a future society in which the government assured its citizens that certain individuals were “about to commit” crimes and therefore justified “preventive” arrests and prosecutions.
Those of us who viewed the film experienced relief that “our” form of government would never engage in such outrageous practices. Think again gentle reader.
In the southern Oregon community of Medford, a furloughed Oregon Dept. of Transportation employee has been taken into “protective custody” for legally purchasing 3 firearms over a period of two days.
In two days, the man bought a Heckler & Koch .45-caliber universal self-loading handgun, a Walther .380-caliber handgun and an AK-47 assault rifle, Medford police Lt. Bob Hansen said. All of those firearms were purchased legally, with required record checks by the Oregon State Police.
Please note that the state mouthpiece media is dully identifying all of these semiautomatic firearms by their politically correct Pelosi/Feinstein nomenclature.
The identity of the person detained in this swat team operation has not been released. He is being held for a 72 hr. “psychiatric evaluation”. At the end of the 72 hrs. a psychiatrist, psychologist or social worker may have him detained for an additional 90 days. The record of this detention will preclude him from “owning any firearm for the remainder of his life”. So much for the protections of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
If any of you yet entertain the fiction that we live under a government who respects the liberties earned during the unpleasantness of 1775-1783, I suggest you reconsider subscribing to such nonsense and proceed accordingly.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ!
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Below the belt television. The Glenn Beck program.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big Glenn Beck fan. It’s just that last night I want to report that his show was a dud. I stayed up till one in the morning to see the Massa/Beck main event, and it ended up being no Ali, Frazier Thriller in Manila. It was more like two dopes groping for their last cogent thoughts. By the third round, I almost expected the local police to come in and rope off the area as a crime scene. For it was criminal to ask people to spend time at such a boorish event. While Eric the Irascible did get off a few wild rights about the wrongs of fund raising requirements and the criminality (in mind only) of accusatory letters from disenchanted former supporters, Beck didn’t connect with anything.
If I leave my metaphorical allusions behind, I’m left with what appears to be a very sordid, sorrowful, troubled, fast talking Eric Massa, owning up to his mistakes (tickling sessions with aids that appear to have gotten out of hand), without admitting any real or legal wrongdoing. Massa, another in a long line of New York government big shots who lost their way big time, just decided to resign from Congress because he didn’t live up to his own “elevated standards”, while leaving America high and dry with ObamaCare, which could very likely turn out to be the most distasteful example of governmental backwash since Roe v Wade. Get this. Massa says he’s the vote that gives Obama the one needed to pass the sick fraud on the American people known as ObamaCare. So instead of staying and staving off a legislative train wreck, Massa resigns and lets the Obama Shower stalkers, in the deviate tradition of Psycho’s Tony Perkins, get their way. I swear, Eric strikes me as one of those guys who, to get back on a even keel, would literally have to spend years in the world’s best mental health facility in Austria where a team of eminent psychotherapists devote all their time and energy working with and thinking about just him. In my professional opinion, Eric’s one acetylcholine reaction away from a George Bailey moonlit swim.
Of course, what’s a good fight summary without a sexy sidebar story. And I’m not talking about the homosexuality sub-theme that Beck and Eric lap danced around. I’m referring to Glenn Beck’s petulant inability to nudge Eric in the direction of telling us something we don’t know about the inner workings of an Obama team that makes the mafia look like a bunch of Long Island school boys from Friend’s Academy. I would have liked the justice department (only if the other Eric {Holder} was away in Munich reviewing the progress of the witless protection program) to wire Massa up for some good corrupt overheard dishing among Rahm, Barack and Eric both in and out of the shower. I wanted to overhear the dirt, the lowdown on our Masta’s role in the NYC trial of the 9/11 boys, Barack’s role in freeing the Black Panther voter intimidation clan, Barack’s admission that he agreed chapter and verse with Jeremy the hateful. Furthermore, the President admitting to lying about earmarks, about CNN coverage, about Obama’s intention to shred the Constitution, to legislatively repeal the second amendment, to redistribute wealth, to destroy the free enterprise system. Just for starters.
As I see it, the least that my friend, Glenn Beck, could have done to liven up the show was to connect Eric up to a lie detector before it began. Then, tonight we could have heard the results. At the least, it might have proved to be useful fodder to suggest the ObamaBoys are the miscreants that there’s no doubt in my mind they truly are. In mind, body and spirit.
Unfortunately, nothing of this nature happened. It turned out to be mind numbing TV. A featherweight event. For this kind of light sparring, from albeit a girl’s point of view, you didn’t even have to wear a cup.
E-Book Review: Asulon
Asulon, by William McGrath
A Christian / martial arts / high fantasy quest novel. Wow.
Asulon is the first volume in a (probable) three-volume high fantasy by law-enforcement consultant and martial-arts instructor William McGrath. I surmise that McGrath is also a believing Catholic; Asulon is pervaded with Catholic sensibility and belief, practically from the first page to the last. However, that doesn't get in the way of a slam-bang swords-and-sorcery-fest to gladden the bloodiest heart. When McGrath summarizes the book by saying "The book of Revelation set in a fantasy environment with political conspiracies, military adventure, and martial arts action thrown in. If Tom Clancy, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien collaborated on a novel, the result might look something like this," he's not kidding. Well, except for the matter of style, but we'll get to that.
The central plot thread concerns the succession to the throne of Asulon, a constitutional monarchy, and its implications for a mercantile plot already in operation outside its borders. Its king, Argeus, who has only recently ascended to the throne, has taken a bold step by which to limit the power of his Senate, much to the dismay of certain forces inside and outside his realm. In consequence, Argeus is assassinated early on in the tale by a complex and clever technique. His twenty-year-old son Daniel, the principal protagonist, is unprepared for the position and its duties.
Every male in Asulon's line of succession is expected to prepare for the duties of his potential position by studying for a term in Caer-Albion: the fastness of Anak, last of the Grigori angels, who rules Logres, an island kingdom to the west. More, every heir is expected to wed one of Anak's daughters, a tradition unbroken for a thousand years. But Daniel's journey will not be unobstructed: the same forces that contrived Argeus's death are determined to slay Daniel as well.
Most of the story concerns that journey and the opposition Daniel and his mentor Moor must defeat. The pace seldom slackens. Also interwoven is a romantic thread: Daniel is drawn to Rachel, a Seer who accompanies him, despite the marital tradition that pertains to his position and his House. More, Daniel's party encounters tragic events at Caer-Albion that threaten to shake the world (and not coincidentally provide the cliffhanger that impels the reader to buy the next book).
Asulon's flaws are twofold. The first is its derivative nature: McGrath has borrowed heavily from Christian Scripture, including Genesis and Revelation, for the material from which to forge his plot. That's not fatal; indeed, it's been done before, to good effect. But the reader is too frequently reminded of those sources, which weakens Asulon as an independent creation.
Second, McGrath's style is closer to modern-colloquial fictional style than to the more formal cadences to which high-fantasy aficionadi are accustomed. That impedes the "buy-in" critical to a story dependent on magical and supernatural themes. That effect isn't fatal either, but Asulon's setting and premises would be easier to accept if the style had been more in the high-fantasy tradition.
Still, it was an entertaining read, especially for one who agrees with its Christian theses and premises, and who delights in finding them at work in a fantasy adventure. C. S. Lewis would have clucked over some of the technical and stylistic missteps, but I think he, too, would have read to the last page, looked up at the end, and said, "So when's Book Two coming out?"
Theme: Duty is the hardest of all masters. I concur: A
Plot: B
Characterization: B+
Style: B-
Recommended.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
A night at the Oscars has taken me aback.
I can’t remember precisely the last time I talked to John Hughes. It was before he left for California to make a name for himself amongst the glamour and glitter of Hollowwood. Was “Hollywood or bust” his last quip? For sure, I don’t know. I do know that I’m still unsettled by life and death. Here one day. Not here another. In the office, one of my writer bosses (not John) dropped to the floor directly in front of me. When my face fell on his, I fought to bring his pulseless body back to life. I can still feel the death lip lock. Pumped his chest just as I was taught. I remember thinking the first responders would do a better job than I. And was wrong. Guilt and grief fueled tears for years. That was a long time ago.
Sunday night, I saw the Oscars and watched the tribute to John. Here’s something few knew. When John set out to make his first Hollywood movie, unknown to the producers, he had three completed scripts in his pocket. John received a couple of hundred thousand for the first one. And after the movie’s success, they asked him to write a couple more, and for a lot more money. Writing them was as easy as spending thirty minutes at the Xerox machine. Today, I spent an hour and a few dollars having my taxes done. In between deductions, I thought about headlines for Eternity Road, reducing to writing two that I thought had promise. Which in a sense would put me two headlines ahead of the game. This evening, instead of watching American Idol, I would have started the body copy. But something stopped me. Not so much the fact that I’m kind of disgusted with the Rahm/Massa feud, (I feel dirty just thinking about it) and politics in general. Not so much because of that. More so, the culprit was my reaction to our Curmudgeon’s mania; the inexcusable grammar in everyday use that passes for English; the pointedly pathetic piggish English spoken by everyone from downscale to upscale America. It’s more than a pet peeve. I virtually despise it. It’s one of the few hates embedded in my DNA.
My father was a writer; my mother an unmitigated grammarian. Being St. Louis Catholic liberals was probably their only major flaws. I can vouch for the fact with zero possibility of error than my mom would have voted for Obama. Even with all of Obama’s overwhelming concupiscence to run this country into a ditch, she would have voted for him, again and again. Ugh. How I miss her. If the DNA starts the pattern, the people you meet along the way are a girl’s finishing school.
His name was Mr. Matthews, which isn’t a name changed, as they say, to protect the innocent. A very, very tough Marine officer was he before we met. But defending our shores wasn’t to be this wonderful man’s life’s work. Teaching was. He was your consummate high school Latin teacher. A dear classmate of mine will take us the rest of the way as we share with you a bittersweet all expenses paid trip back in time. Then I’ll get back to politics.
“Ready on the right; ready on the left; ready on the firing line. Ain, Anderson, Bell, Bellmar,…the call rolled on.” Thus did our Latin classes with Mr. Matthews begin, year after year. We weren’t Marines and we weren’t fighting in the Pacific, but in Mr. Matthews’ class you knew there was discipline and purpose: learning, knowledge and growth. He did not lecture, threaten or cajole: by his very presence and command he inspired a desire for knowledge and achievement. He set the bar and expected we would meet it. We tried very hard. But we learned far more in his classroom than a dead language. We learned English syntax and grammar; more precisely because we were translating from Latin to our own language which required him to teach us real fluency in English. We learned history, both ancient and recent. He led us to realize important values that history teaches. And we learned respect for this scholar and guide. Most of all, we learned to love learning.” (George Reid, 2004)
If my friend, the dear Curmudgeon, had ever met him, he and Mr. Matthews would have had much to discuss. For they would have had much, much more in common than the Island.
Ave, Magister Optimus, nos qui dedicimus, te salutamus.
American media—truck stop whores for the left.
The modern left has its roots in the political phenomenon of the 1930s when progressivism, communism, fascism, socialism, and Nazism coalesced under the common flag of centralized governments and an ideology of collectivism. This worldwide movement went largely unchallenged ideologically until the reassertion of classical liberalism through the American conservative movement in the 1950s. . . .
* * * *
Any shred of leftist intellectual honesty and journalistic curiosity was obliterated once Senator Obama threw his hat into the ring as a presidential candidate. The “mainstream” media whored out its last shred of credibility in a non-stop sycophantic obsession with this man of mystery. Having no desire to investigate clear connections to domestic terrorist William Ayers or Obama’s twenty-year relationship with black nationalist Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the media concentrated on defending the idea of “hope and change” personified.
When faced with some aspect of the behavior of our media (or leftist in general), I often reflect on how every American soldier killed in battle between 1945 and the present was killed by a weapon fired by, manufactured by, designed by, controlled by, purchased by, transported by, or financed by communists. Billions and billions of dollars have been expended to fight communism. Our domestic politics have been polluted by communist money and subversion.
But this has no significance to our media. They have no sense of “us.” There is nothing of “ours” that can be violated by any hostile actor or creed.
How else to explain the legacy media’s complete, utter indifference to Obama’s mentor Davis being a communist; his father being a communist; his buddy Ayers being a communist and a terrorist; his mother, grandfather and grandmother being leftists; and Obama’s referring to himself as a “progressive”?
Answer: You can’t. The legacy media couldn’t care less if a candidate for one of the highest political offices in the land grew up and lived large portions of his life with communists and radical leftists. They are simply indifferent to the fact that candidates for high office are fundamentally at odds with the political heritage of this country. Because they too are indifferent to it, if not at odds with it.
”American Media, Blaming the ‘Right’: From Duranty and the KGB to Reuters.” By Andie Brownlow, Pajamas Media, 3/8/10.
H/t: Dissecting Leftism.
Public Enemy # 1.
Mr. Mosab Hassan Yousef—the son of an imam who was one of the founders of Hamas—was tortured and imprisoned by the Israelis. He later worked for Israeli security against Hamas, converted to Christianity, left Israeli service, and wrote a book, Son of Hamas.
Here are some of Yousef’s thoughts on what obedience to Allah means to even a moderate and logical Muslim:
It’s ironic that every scholar, sheikh, mufti, imam, qadi, ayatollah, mullah, or caliph who can recite the Koran backwards and prove the earth is flat will go ballistic in their efforts to root out apostasy, heresy, polytheism, and all manner of disloyalty to Allah but the ultimate disloyalty is that of Allah to the Muslim faithful. He sentenced them to 1,400 years of backwardness and subjection to the very worst aspects of human nature. 1,400 years!Do you consider your father a fanatic? “He’s not a fanatic,” says Mr. Yousef. “He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don’t want to admit this is an ideological war.
“The problem is not in Muslims,” he continues. “The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy.
And counting.
”‘They Need to Be Liberated From Their God.’ The ‘Son of Hamas’ author on his conversion to Christianity, spying for Israel, and shaming his family.” By Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal, 3/5/10 (emphasis added).
Safire’s Ghost: English Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow
[in a deep, Hitchcockian drawl] Good evening. Among your Curmudgeon's manias is the destruction we of the English-speaking world have experienced through the abuse of the English language. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that a typical English-speaker of a century ago would have difficulty making himself understood by the typical English-speaker of our time. The reasons are many and fascinating, which is why your Curmudgeon has decided to inaugurate this new series of essays. (Besides, his Co-Conspirators are holding down the political end of things rather well, so why get in their way?)
Long, long ago, on a Website gone but not forgotten (see the Screeds section), your Curmudgeon argued for strict prescription in the teaching of the English language. His contention, which remains as it was, is that strict rules that are never violated make it easier both to learn a language and to use it effectively. When all the language's speakers hew to the same set of strict rules, there's little or no possibility of misunderstanding among them: a far cry from our current milieu.
That opinion drew quite a bit of controversy. You might have thought that your Curmudgeon had advocated bastinado for any teenager who says "y'know, like." (Yes, he's taken that position in the past, but only among close friends.) The notion that strict prescription might somehow impede the acquisition of language skills is apparently widespread among Americans today, but it's one he's never understood.
English is reputed to be the hardest of all contemporary languages to learn. There are a number of reasons for this:
- English has a huge vocabulary: well over two million words and growing rapidly.
- English is rich in "synonyms:" words that mean almost the same thing, but not quite.
- English has a complex syntactical structure that incorporates elements from many older languages.
- English possesses a large number of idioms: word combinations whose meaning is difficult to deduce from the individual words.
- English has a propensity to import words from other languages, but not always in the strict sense they have in those languages.
- Because of all the above, and because of its geographical dispersion, English suffers from regionalization -- that is, the creation of regional dialects distinguished from one another by regional usages, regionally popular idioms, and pronunciations -- far more than most other languages.
Yet, despite all that, English is the international language of our time. The dominance of the most important communications-intensive enterprises -- aviation, finance, and data processing -- by English speakers has compelled the world to accept it as the international lingua franca. The most difficult language in the world to learn is thus the language everyone is expected to speak!
And most persons whose mother tongue is English barbarize it routinely.
The process starts in our schools. They're called grammar schools, but the term is ironic rather than descriptive. Grammar of the prescriptive sort is no longer taught in them. Rules of structure and usage might inhibit the little tykes from expressing themselves, with God-knows-what deleterious effects on their self-esteem. We can't have that!
High school and college students are seldom "graded down" for poor grammar or syntax. After all, there are more important things to discuss, such as whether the poor have a right to federally funded abortions, the brassiere is a tool by which the evil capitalist patriarchy oppresses womyn, or the war to depose Saddam Hussein was a CIA-Halliburton plot. On many campuses, twitting a young woman for saying "Mary and me want to get married" is a prosecutable offense.
The accelerating specialization of our commercial culture adds to the problem. It's become impossible to gain expertise in any of a huge number of fields without first learning its "jargon:" its private language of terms, references, and conventions an outsider would find impenetrable. While this might be an unavoidable consequence of our ever-ramifying division of labor, it also creates "communities of communication" whose members can understand one another, but who can be understood by no one else. Inevitably, such jargons penetrate the "common" tongue, at least deeply enough to support the marketing, sale, and support of the associated products, which complicates the language still further.
Given all that, the proliferation of GruntSpeak and the unending repetition of "like" and "y'know" and (worst of all) "y'know like" to fill conversational lacunae is understandable. It's the persistence of a Remnant to whom the distinction between a participle and a gerund really matters that's the miracle.
The late William Safire was one of your Curmudgeon's heroes. Safire was a master of the language, more advanced in his comprehension of its rules and norms than any other writer of his time, not excepting the much loved and mourned William F. Buckley. He bent great effort to conveying the rules of good, grammatical English to his readership, and strove to exemplify those rules in everything he wrote. His loss is a great loss to the English-speaking world.
As much as anything else, this series of essays will be a tribute to Safire's ghost, and the great work his passing has left unattended.
Watch this space.
