English and It's Discontents

English and Its Discontents

            “Every time someone says ‘whom,’ I reply, ‘Whom? Meem?’”  Those were the words of my college Shakespeare professor regarding grammar and usage. He continued, “We follow these rules only because Eighteenth Century pedants (he used a more colorful word than “pedants”) wrote grammar books.” This comment came after someone asked about English usage in Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Julius Caesar Marc Antony describes Brutus’s stab wound as “The most unkindest cut,” which violates our rules for comparing adjectives. We have been taught to write or say either “most unkind” or as Microsoft Word instructs, “unkindest.”

            Did our usage rules really come from Eighteenth Century pedants? In part they did. Next question, why did the pedants write grammar books and where did they get their rules? Grammar books appeared when men found out they could make money in an emerging market, in this case the one created by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Of humble origins and not formally educated like the gentry, wealthy bourgeoisie bought the trappings of culture as the nouveau riche of our day do.

To formulate a set of rules, grammar book writers looked to ruling class usage and to Latin, then considered to be superior to all other languages. After all, educated people knew Greek and Latin. So now when we learn what has come to be called Standard English – we used to call it good or proper English – we are actually learning to speak ruling class English.

            The most annoying rules created by the grammar book pedants, which most people now ignore, come from Latin: we are supposed to say, “It is I” not “It’s me” because a pronoun following a linking (or copulative) verb (“is” a linking verb) must be in the nominative (or subjective) case. “I” is nominative, “me” objective (or accusative, as Latin students may remember). Another rule very difficult to follow: never end a sentence with a preposition, to which Winston Churchill is said to have replied, “This is something up with which I will not put.” Then there’s the rule about split infinitives. An infinitive is “to” plus a verb. An infinitive is split when a word or phrase is inserted between “to” and the verb. With some expressions following this rule is impossible. For example, “We hope to more than double our profits this year.” Inserting “more than” between “to” and “double” splits the infinitive.

            The problem with using Latin as a model for English grammar is that English’s antecedents are not Latin but varieties of German. Germanic tribes from the North German Plain, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, conquered the British Isles around the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, A.D. Our English developed from the Germanic languages they spoke. Angles lived in “Angle-Land,” which became England where English was born; and while contemporary English contains many Latin borrowings, as well as borrowings from French and other languages including American Indian dialects, linguists call those borrowings lexical, not grammatical. English is not grammatically Latin.

            Having said all that, and even though I love to make fun of usage rules, I believe that following sensible rules improves communication. Just as standardized spelling, developed as a result of printing and increased literacy, helps English speakers understand each other better, so do rules of usage. They fine tune understanding, for example, the differences between “uninterested” and “disinterested” or “imply” and “infer” or the universally misused and misunderstood words “affect,” “effect,” and “impact.” Also, learning grammatical structures makes it possible for people to learn to write and punctuate clearly, for example, rules such as this: “When an adverb clause begins a sentence, follow it with a comma. When it ends a sentence, no comma is required.” Obviously, people can’t understand this rule without knowing about adverbs and clauses. Unfortunately, most people either forget or never learn these English basics; nevertheless, proper form improves communication in writing and speaking.

In any event, widespread language lapses from Standard English don’t bother me because I don’t want to be a language policeman (political correctness in English bothers me a great deal, but addressing that requires another long article). More importantly, I value great literature with its infinite variety dialects and usages, and also the wonderful variety of English dialects spoken in America and throughout the English speaking world. I’m sad that many of us have had regional and cultural dialects educated out of us. Now, if I want to hear the English dialect my grandparents spoke, I must travel to isolated places like Smith or Tangier Islands in the Chesapeake Bay. I regret the loss; the broad midland English of the evening news now spoken by many Americans lacks the variety and richness of regional dialects, which I would much rather hear. To this end I’m thankful to country music for keeping Sixteenth Century Scotch-Irish accents alive.

             

             

           

           

Are We Safer Since 9/11/01?

Are We Safer?

            Every September someone on the TV news asks someone else if we are safer today than we were before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Republicans say yes. The absence of terrorist attacks here since 9/11 is their proof. Democrats say no. The absence of attacks proves nothing.          

I say it’s the wrong question. The 9/11 attacks killed about 3,000 people, a terrible event and one that required a strong and intelligent response, but at that time we were a nation of more than 280 million. Do the arithmetic. Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack on that day were infinitesimal. On the other hand you have a one in 75,000 chance of dying in a bicycle crash, a one in 68,000 chance of choking to death, a one in 20,000 chance of drowning, and a one in 5,300 chance of dying in an automobile accident. Is anyone frightened enough to give up cycling, eating, swimming, or driving a car? The truth is that one thing keeps us safe: mathematical probability.

            I once heard terrorism described as theater: a terrible spectacle but of not much consequence to most people. Terrorists know that people are more likely to be influenced by a terrible dramatic act than by the dry recitation of mathematical probabilities. That’s why they do what the do; more importantly, we should always remember that they do what they do because they are weak. Acts of terror are all that they have.

            But terrorism works in perverse ways. For us that one terrible act on 9/11/01 led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 4,500 more American deaths, increased federal spending, the needless creation of a new cabinet department, needless delays in air travel, and the Patriot Act, which gives government agents new power to limit individual freedom – as if they didn’t have enough now.

            All of which works to the benefit of those who love the bloated warfare/welfare state: national security experts of all kinds and from all areas, D.C. think tank employees, defense contractors, K Street lobbyists, government employees, and big media organizations and their reporters whose favorite pig wallow is war and disaster.

How all this government activity affects potential terrorists is anyone’s guess. I suspect it has no effect at all.

            Are we safer? As I said, it’s the wrong question.          

                       

           

Benghazi Was Not the First

Benghazi Was Not the First

            President Obama and his administration continue to receive deserved criticism for their handling of the Benghazi attack, but history shows that putting Americans in needless danger or leaving them to swing in the wind for political reasons is not new. Here are some of the more egregious examples from history:

            In 1983 some smart people in the Reagan State Department thought it a good idea to make 240 Marines sitting duck targets for terrorists at the Beirut, Lebanon airport. “Showing the flag” seems to be a recurrent theme in exercises like that. “A strong U.S. presence” was supposed to reassure U.S. allies in the region. Some reassurance: a truck bomb ended the lives of 243 Marines. At the time Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and his close advisers in the DOD objected to positioning the Marines that way, but the striped pants crowd overruled them. The buck stopped with President Reagan, of course.

The 1968 North Korean attack on the USS Pueblo, killing one crewman, followed by the taking of the ship and the one year imprisonment of the Pueblo crew provides another example of Americans hazarded and unprotected for reasons not understandable to ordinary people. In that Cold War environment where “everyone knew” that everyone else was spying, things like this were not supposed to happen.    

Pueblo was a small, lightly armed (two fifty caliber machine guns) intelligence gathering, converted cargo ship designed to listen in on electronic communication from the communist Asian mainland. No one was supposed to mind, you see, because Soviet fishing trawlers did the same thing off the coast of the U.S. A spying quid pro quo was supposed to exist between Cold War opponents. North Korean officials didn’t get the memo.

Worse, American Naval forces could have assisted Pueblo but did not. Put this one on the Lyndon Johnson administration. Then after their release from the North Korean prison; when Commander Bucher and the Pueblo crew returned to California, no one from official Washington greeted them. California Governor Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy greeted the skipper and his crew at the California airport but no one from the White House or the DOD. To add insult to injury the Navy wanted to court martial Commander Bucher for dereliction of duty. To his credit President Nixon stopped the court martial.

            The most disgraceful example of official abandonment of Americans in danger and the appalling cover-up afterwards was the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on the fourth day of the 1967 Arab Israeli War. The cover up, vigorously aided and abetted by the Israeli lobby and their handmaids in the US government and the US Congress, continues to anger and outrage Americans with first hand knowledge of the event, that is, those Naval personnel on board Liberty during the attack. In fact, when they have tried to get the truth of the incident to the nation they have been stonewalled by publishers and the media and called anti-Semites by the Israeli lobby.

            Here’s what happened: As the Liberty, a World War II cargo ship which had been converted to carry sophisticated electronic intelligence gathering equipment, steamed slowly in international waters fourteen miles from the Sinai Peninsula, waves of low-flying Israeli fighter bombers attacked the ship with rockets, napalm, and cannon. The air attack lasted twenty minutes. Liberty was left afire, listing sharply. Eight crewmen had been killed and the Captain seriously wounded. About a half an hour later Israelis attacked again, this time with torpedo boats, killing twenty-five more Americans. In total the Israeli attacks killed thirty-four Americans and wounded 171.

            Claims of mistaken identity by Israeli officials were and continue to be lies, for Liberty carried a large American flag; furthermore, six hours before the afternoon attacks Israeli recon aircraft had flown over the ship. They knew who they were attacking and did it anyway because they feared that actual intelligence would conflict with the official Israeli accounts of the events that precipitated the Six Day War.

            For starkly immoral political reasons President Lyndon Johnson’s administration covered up the true circumstances of the attack, and under the influence of the Israeli lobby succeeding administrations have continued the cover up. Appeasing an influential American lobby was and has been more important than the lives of American sailors and Marines.

            And by the way, going back to the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor one can see another example of Americans made sitting ducks by politicians. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Samuel Richardson advised President Roosevelt that stationing the fleet in Pearl Harbor was provocative. He therefore advised moving the fleet back to Long Beach, California. For that Roosevelt replaced him with Admiral Husband Kimmel, who, after the infamous attack, became a favorite political scapegoat.

            And so on. I also suggest readers look at the impossible situation Major Robert Anderson faced at Fort Sumter prior to the War Between the States in 1861.

            From time immemorial leaders of powerful nations have shown little regard for the lives of their fighting men. Power warps their character, or maybe those who seek power have none to begin with.

           

 

What Happened to Washington's Birthday?

Who Stole George Washington’s Birthday?

            As a few local citizens celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday here last month I had these thoughts about national holidays:

            For many years the nation celebrated George Washington’s birthday every February. Then one day George Washington’s birthday disappeared to be replaced by something called Presidents’ Day, as if all Presidents were equally entitled to a day.

Now the only national holiday celebrated in honor of a famous American is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. How come? Was King more important to America than George Washington or the framers of the Constitution? Who codified the free speech and assembly rights that King and the crowds at the Lincoln Memorial exercised during his famous 1963 “I have a dream” speech?

            What about important captains of industry like John D. Rockefeller, Ida Tarbell’s slanders notwithstanding, whose entrepreneurial skills produced an oil production and distribution system that has for more than a century fueled American prosperity, not to mention his philanthropic legacy that continues everywhere to this day? Then there’s Samuel Colt and Henry Ford; the economies of scale from interchangeable parts and mass production made it possible for Ford’s workers to buy the cars they were building. We also have market entrepreneurs like Commodore Vanderbilt and James T. Hill, and on and on. All these men contributed greatly to America’s economic progress, and without economic development there would have been no social advancement for anyone, minority or non-minority.

            What exactly did King do? Give him credit: he led the successful Montgomery bus boycott that ended the back of the bus humiliation; he developed a Gandhian non violent strategy of civil protest that served the country and the civil rights movement well for a time; and he delivered a very effective speech – the “I have a dream speech” – that aroused the conscience of many Americans. Even with all that it took the assassination of President Kennedy to motivate Congress to pass the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

            People forget that at the time of his death King had gone out of fashion with many in the civil rights movement. Stokely Carmichael’s “black power!” had become the civil rights rallying cry while Malcolm X had replaced King as a favorite leader. Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and other urban blacks made fun of King calling him “de lawd.” Carmichael further devalued the idea of non-violence, calling it a sometimes useful tactic but adding, “If some honky touches me, I’ll break his arm!”

            As with Lincoln and JFK, after King’s murder all the faults and controversies surrounding him disappeared to be replaced by almost universal adoration, the kind of deification that came to Lincoln and JFK after their violent deaths.

            As Washington, Madison, and the Captains of Industry have marched through history their faults have become known and then embellished by the multi-cultural blamers (who are compulsive America haters) while their contributions have been ignored. Those same blamers, however, will brook no criticism of King even though it’s indisputable that he consorted with communists, was a compulsive womanizer, and plagiarized his Boston University doctoral dissertation.

            King’s contributions were important but not the most important, as having a national holiday in his honor suggests. Bring back George Washington and let those who venerate King celebrate without a government sanctioned day off.  

           

Achievement Testing is Forever

Standardized Achievement Testing Is Forever

“Bad Teacher” is a profane and obscene film that people should avoid. Unfortunately I didn’t, but I always look to salvage something of value from every experience, good or bad, and I found something in this film worthy of discussion: public school standardized achievement testing. In this film the bad teacher steals the answer sheet for an Illinois state achievement test and drills her students on test question answers. They score highest in the school district, and she wins 6,000 dollars, which she wants for plastic surgery. It is interesting to note that at this writing the school systems of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C are under investigation for widespread cheating on standardized tests.

             Standardized achievement testing has been around for years and has political origins. Current testing projects began when citizens asked these questions: “How come so many youngsters graduate without basic skills? Many cannot read at grade level or do basic arithmetic, and most have little or no knowledge of their nation’s history or its government. How come? We must do something!”

            Of course schools have given standardized tests for years. For a long time the New York Regents exam was held up as an example of the kind of test states should require for graduation. Unfortunately, as more students entered high school more failed the exam, causing a lot of fatuous hand wringing about cultural bias. I don’t know what New York does these days.  

I can remember being herded into the school cafeteria long ago for several exhausting days of testing. Incorrigible seventh graders at the time, we made testing into a game. Instead of trying to answer questions, many of us made designs with the opscan-like blocks on our answer sheets. (They didn’t have opscan in those days, but answer sheets had four blocks like opscan sheets. Tests were graded with punched out overlays.)  Some made diamonds, others triangles. We had great fun.

Who knows how our school did? I do know one thing. Many of my classmates went to college and on to successful careers in engineering, law, medicine, and business. The friend seated across from me making zig zag designs on his answer sheet graduated from Georgia Tech and has had a successful engineering career.

            About thirty-five years later, in response to the question, “How come our children don’t learn?” state legislators got involved and mandated still more testing. In Maryland, where I then lived and worked, Project Basic was created to teach basic skills. Basic skills tests, called functional tests – a writing test, a basic math test, and a citizenship test – were given to ninth graders. All students had to pass the tests to graduate. Since many entering ninth graders lacked basic reading and math ability, remedial classes were formed to teach them what they should have learned earlier.

            The tests measured subject matter I learned in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Unfortunately, many of our entering ninth graders lacked these basics, hence the emphasis on testing. Later on the state department of education created a more advanced and accelerated battery of tests, which also became the focus of school instruction.

            By the time No Child Left Behind (NCLB) came along, Maryland schools were well along in testing. Wrong headed though it is, NCLB is just another step in a process begun years before by state legislators and educationists trying to improve the schools, or more cynically if one wishes, to justify their jobs and their expenditure of taxpayer money, or, even more cynically, to centralize education and remove local control.  

            An unfortunate result of functional testing in Maryland was its effect on mentally challenged students. Before the functional testing program these students participated in vocational development programs where they learned entry level job skills and were placed in jobs while still in school. After testing began, parents were asked if they wanted students to get a regular high school diploma, in which case they had to pass the functional tests, or to continue in vocational development. Sad to say, many parents chose the former, causing special education teachers to shift their focus from vocational development to test preparation.          

Standardized achievement testing is unavoidable in today’s educational environment. Rational instruction should produce sensible testing and successful students, but too many cultural currents beat against school success, especially in school systems where disadvantaged children form the majority. In spite of all the blather one hears about education from all political sectors, right to left, no one really knows what to do about public education, or at least, no one knows how to create politically viable solutions to public education’s intractable problems.

            But educationists can write tests! The names may change but programs like NCLB        will continue.

           

           

           

Is Secession Possible Today?

Can Secession Come to America?

If states seriously threatened secession, the President would send troops in faster than President Eisenhower sent the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957, so legal secession cannot happen here even though the Declaration of Independence encourages it and nothing in the U.S. Constitution forbids it. But since Mr. Lincoln especially, Presidents have rarely been bothered by the Constitution. Like dictators and other tyrants, they do what they have to do to keep power. To most Presidents as with most career politicians, power is the highest good.  

Another equally powerful force against secession is the Federal government’s money. Citizens and states depend on social security, military pensions, highway funds, education funds, and other programs of largesse. Dependence upon Federal money would dampen secession sentiment faster than armed troops. No matter how citizens may feel about the current state of affairs in the nation, they cannot afford legal secession.

            But Americans also cannot afford the out of control government now moving inexorably towards financial ruin. So, even though secession cannot happen in the near term, its feasibility is worth discussing. Contrary to what the history books teach, the first secession did not occur in the 1860’s but earlier in 1775 when disgruntled American colonists decided that the King’s tax burden was too high. Compare the colonists’ taxes to contemporary America’s and some might ask, “What were they fighting about? They had it good.” Nonetheless, following the dictates of the Declaration of Independence, American colonists seceded from Great Britain and formed their own nation.

            Then, following the precedent established by the nation’s founders, southern states began the secession movement that led to the War of Northern Aggression. Secession was Constitutional; attacking seceding states was not, but Lincoln showed little concern for the rule of law. Lincoln, who succeeded famously in thwarting secession, killing 800,000 Americans in the process (800,000 is a new scholarly estimate based upon continuing research) is considered America’s greatest President by many. That’s a historical rule: kill more people; earn more praise; see more monuments to yourself built.

 A kind of secession does exist, however. Like our continuing de facto racial segregation, de facto secession has been with us for some time. As Pat Buchanan writes, Americans are seceding from each other. The Red State/Blue State divide is a real and a cultural, more than a political phenomenon. Red America is religious, culturally conservative, family oriented, hard working and frugal. Citizens of Red America believe in God’s objective moral truth (that is, the Natural Law or the Moral Law, explained simply and eloquently by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity). This truth is permanent and unchangeable and continues regardless of what human beings may think from time to time. Citizens of Blue America, on the other hand, are moral relativists, where truth is a plastic or malleable idea and changes in accordance with convenience and fashion. This difference of viewpoint creates a cultural chasm too wide to breach. More than anything, this contributes to the continuing in-migration of Americans from Blue Nation to Red Nation.

Most Americans who migrate to Red States say they move for economic reasons like lower taxes and lower housing costs. Others cite quality of life: less urban congestion and lower crime rates, but the unstated (and politically incorrect) reason argues most convincingly: people prefer to be those with whom they share common moral and cultural characteristics. The diversity police of course apply the racist label to Red America.

Enlightenment propaganda notwithstanding, human beings are tribal creatures. History and contemporary culture shows that tribalism trumps everything. What is happening in America is what happens everywhere: Balkanization based on ethnicity, religion, and race. We are now two Americas: non white and white, and as years pass, the tensions that once existed between non-white and white ethnic groups will end as each isolates itself from the other. Tensions among non-white ethnicities will increase, as is now happening in Los Angeles between African Americans and Latinos (and which, for obviously politically correct reasons, is never reported by the MSM). History shows that these tensions will escalate as white Americans, who will one day be outnumbered, withdraw to protected enclaves in Red States.

Secession is here to stay.  

Gun Control through the Years

Gun Control through the Years

            Fifty years ago this November, Lee Harvey Oswald used a mail order, military style, bolt action Carcano rifle equipped with a scope to murder President John F. Kennedy. Earlier that year, using the same rifle Oswald had taken a shot at General Edwin Walker, called a right wing extremist by the media, and missed. According to Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, which chronicles Oswald’s life and the Kennedy assassination, former Marine marksman Oswald had practiced with the rifle many times at an abandoned gravel pit.

            Like most bolt action military rifles manufactured for infantry use, the inexpensive Carcano was an accurate and effective weapon in practiced hands. Oswald bought the rifle and scope by mail order for about $16.50.

            Predictably, immediately after the assassination the gun control crowd blamed the rifle and bemoaned the fact that it was so easily available through mail order. As a result, not long after the assassination Congress passed and the President signed a law prohibiting such mail order gun purchases. Rifles could (and still can) be bought by mail order, but the law requires that they be delivered to local gun dealers and picked up there by buyers.

            Incidentally, bolt action military rifles like the Carcano, for example, the popular Mouser 8mm K-98 and the .30-06 Springfield, originally designed to be assault weapons for soldiers, have been modified over the years for hunting. “Sporterized” .30-06 Springfield rifles were once very common (the father of one of my childhood friends had one and used it often to hunt deer). The K-98 Mouser action has also been very popular with hunters and in practiced hands can take down a 600 pound elk at some distance. Magazine capacity is limited; five rounds for the K-98, but practiced, skilled riflemen with plentiful supplies of five round stripper clips can load and fire very rapidly. German soldiers used the rifle to great effect in both world wars. And of course Tennessee sharpshooter Sgt. Alvin York used the bolt action Springfield rifle in World War I to kill enemy machine gunners. He also used the venerable seven round semi automatic 1911 .45 caliber pistol to kill more German soldiers.

            In 1966, armed with a high powered 6 mm hunting rifle, University of Texas engineering student Charles Whitman barricaded himself atop the Texas Tower at the University in Austin, then shot and killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-two others.  The rifle and ammunition had been purchased legally. And the people killed by Whitman’s limited magazine capacity hunting rifle were just as dead as those killed more recently by weapons with high capacity magazines. Like Oswald, Whitman was a former Marine. 

            After Whitman was killed by courageous police officers, an autopsy of his remains revealed a brain tumor. Further investigation uncovered information that he had told a doctor he felt like killing people. In any event, the mail order gun purchasing prohibition didn’t stop Whitman.

            Sometime later gun control fanatics shifted their attention to handguns, saying things like “Handguns have no use but killing people.” One could buy long guns off the rack in gun stores without a background check, but in Maryland where I lived in the 1980’s and 1990’s and also in other states, buyers had to wait a week before picking up handguns they had purchased. Some states prohibited handgun purchases by out of state buyers. In addition, at that time Maryland had strict rules about carrying handguns in vehicles: they had to be unloaded and out of the driver’s reach and could only be carried to and from shooting ranges. None of these laws kept Baltimore from being among those big American cities with the highest murder rates, but legislators and gun controllers felt good about making life inconvenient for law abiding gun owners.

            Later on in the 1980’s gun control enthusiasts developed an obsession with “Saturday night specials,” inexpensive handguns then widely used by robbers and muggers. In Maryland a Saturday night special law was passed over the objection of self defense advocates, and gun controllers once again felt warm and fuzzy.

            Gun controllers’ current obsession with assault rifles began in the 1990’s and was followed by the assault weapons ban, which had no effect on gun violence. In fact one of the nation’s murder capitals and also the President’s hometown is Chicago, where most of the killing is done not with assault weapons but with handguns.

            As for assault weapons, any firearm can be used to assault people, just as any knife can be used to stab people, but rifles with beautifully polished wooden stocks and pretty blued barrels don’t look as menacing to clueless gun control advocates as do semi-automatic AK knock offs or .223 caliber AR-15’s, some of which to me look like Mattel high capacity squirt guns.

            In the early years of the 2000’s, driven around by his mentor John Allen Muhammad, teenage DC sniper Lee Boyd Malvo used a .223 Bushmaster to murder nine  innocent citizens and wound three others. The Bushmaster can carry a high capacity magazine, but he could have been just as murderous with any hunting rifle, for he never took more than one or two shots from his hiding place in the trunk of their modified sedan. Killers with a will and a plan will not be deterred by laws that ban ugly weapons with high capacity magazines. 

            But the call for banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines has nothing to do with saving lives and everything to do with disarming law abiding citizens. It’s the camel’s nose in the tent. Using phrases such as “No hunter needs a thirty round magazine,” gun controllers hope to turn public opinion towards more restrictive laws. When a new gun ban doesn’t work, they will then push for more restrictions. Dishonest protests to the contrary, their true goal is the abolition of private gun ownership. They have an irrational fear of law abiding gun owners, not because they fear for their safety, but because law abiding gun owners show a sense of independence that threatens the gun controllers’ religious attachment to and their worship of the all powerful government.