Cultural Illiteracy and Linguistic Dumbing Down

Cultural Illiteracy and Linguistic Dumbing Down

            Recently an academic luminary from an elite university suggested that the American classic Huckleberry Finn be changed to eliminate offensive language, specifically a well known and hateful word, (changing it to “slave” as in “Slave Jim”). This peculiar sensitivity makes me wonder if the professor reads anything other than the unreadable, politically correct writing that now masquerades as scholarship in the English departments of most American universities.

I recently read Thomas Wolfe’s great American novel Look Homeward Angel, which contains offensive words like those in Huckleberry Finn.  Has the politically correct professor read Look Homeward, Angel? If he has, does he think the offensive language should be changed?

            Ernest Hemingway writes that Huckleberry Finn is the first authentic American novel because Mark Twain writes in the American vernacular, which often contains offensive words. Before Mark Twain American writers followed the belletristic style (after belle lettres) favored by anglophile critics. Great writer that he was Mark Twain broke new ground with Huckleberry Finn, the best anti slavery novel in American literature, but which is now distorted by half educated, politically correct English professors.

            I also wonder, has the professor read any American literature written by distinguished black writers? Richard Wright’s Native Son, for example, has as its main character the tragic Bigger Thomas. Any guesses as to why Wright chose the name “Bigger”? Will the professor bowdlerize Native Son to make it more acceptable to the sensitivity crowd? How about Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy?

            But cultural abuse of great literature goes beyond the elimination of so called offensive language in American classics and extends beyond the university. These days one can find Shakespeare’s plays written in contemporary English because, according to the dumber downers, Shakespeare’s syntax, word selection, and blank verse are hard for youngsters to understand. Funny, during my school days teachers and students read the plays together, and my teachers did a good job teaching students how to read and understand Elizabethan English. Furthermore, we memorized famous passages like Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar (“Friends, Romans, countrymen…”) and Macbeth’s reaction to Lady Macbeth’s death (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day…” etc.). 

            Then we have the egregious abuses of English as represented in dumbed down English translations of the Bible. Of all the English translations of the Bible, none approaches the Authorized Version (The King James Version) for the beauty of its poetry and its timeless ability to remain in one’s consciousness. When I was a child learning the Bible in my Methodist Sunday school and church liturgy, the King James Bible was the Bible I heard and I still remember its marvelous verses: “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” now dumbed down to “Let the children come to me” or “How can this be since I know not a man” now rendered as the incredibly clumsy “How can this be since I have not had relations with a man?” or “Whom God has joined together let no man put asunder,” which is now the wretchedly inclusive “Whom God has joined together human beings cannot separate.”

            The worst English Biblical translations occur in my Catholic Church in the tone deaf New American Bible, which, among other atrocities, renders St. Paul’s “I have fought to good fight” to the embarrassingly inaccurate “I have competed well.” Hearing that at Mass is like hearing long fingernails scrape across a chalkboard. And speaking of the Mass, the dumber downers have worked overtime there. Before Vatican II Catholics all over the world heard the beautiful Latin Tridentine or Pius V Mass at worship. Now they celebrate in the vernacular with hootenanny hymns and mistranslations of Pope Paul VI’s Novus Ordo Mass.

            Dumber downer translators and their advocates defend the new translations because the older ones are hard to understand. In other words people are too stupid or too unteachable to learn. Isn’t it interesting that illiterate slaves, who were forbidden by law to learn to read, listened to the King James Bible and not only understood but also created spirituals that demonstrated that understanding, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example?

            Fortunately for Catholics Pope Benedict XVI has made it possible for all priests to now say the Pius V Mass in Latin and the Church has also corrected the mistranslations of the Novus Ordo Mass. Can we hope that someday an educational reformer and cultural restorationist like Benedict will emerge for the whole society to restore beauty and taste to language, literature, architecture, and manners, and where bowdlerizers will be too embarrassed to advocate on behalf of their culturally illiterate and nihilistic ideas? That’s a most needed educational reform and one for which we must most devoutly pray.

Everyone must bring his book

It’s “Everyone must bring his book” not “Everyone must bring their book” because “everyone” is singular and “their” is plural. The rule: a pronoun must agree with its antecedent. Since “everyone” is the antecedent, the pronoun must be singular. Grammatical symmetry dictates this English usage rule. So, why do so many misuse the pronoun “their”? First, probably from ignorance, which is no crime. Unless someone (such as this writer) has a special interest in English usage, he probably will not concern himself with usage minutiae. Next, “everyone” as a singular pronoun seems counter-intuitive to some English speakers, so they intentionally and unashamedly violate the rule. Then we have the politically correct reason: using masculine nouns and pronouns to refer to both men and women is sexist.  

The last reason for misusing “their” demonstrates continuing feminist insistence on political correctness (pc). Other pc examples include tone deaf words like “chairperson” and “foreperson.” One can envision the eventual replacement of “human being” with “huperson being” because “man” is obviously the source of evil in the modern world. “Man” and “mankind” have always been used to designate both men and women, but to the pc crowd these designations are sexist.

            In a radio PSA about children and homework, the President of the Tennessee Education Association (the TEA, which is the Tennessee branch of the NEA) tells “a parent” about the importance of helping “their child with their homework.” Now, if the august TEA President is unaware of English usage rules, here is the correction: “It is important that a parent help his child with his homework.” If, on the other hand, pc is her problem – the TEA President is female – but she still wants to demonstrate knowledge of basic English usage (which she should, after all she is a teacher), she can say, “It is important that parents help their children with their homework.” That construction maintains grammatical symmetry, plural pronouns (their) with plural noun antecedents (parents, children), while avoiding use of the dreaded generic male nouns and pronouns.

            How did it suddenly become necessary to abolish the use of generic male nouns and pronouns to stand for both men and women? Major blame falls upon the late Kate Swift who wrote The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, which the feminist community quickly embraced, and with which cowardly men have refused to argue. Many men, especially politicians, mainstream news anchors, corporate CEO’s, and academics, would rather walk barefoot across burning coals than risk being called sexist, racist, homophobic, or the epithet du jour.

The worst result of linguistic political correctness has been upon church hymns and English translations of Sacred Scripture. Recent English translations with “inclusive language” have removed much of the poetry from the Inspired Word.

            And by the way, feminists invented the sexist language notion. The use of generic “man” for men and women did not result from some male conspiracy to exclude women but from the etymology of “man.” According to Jacques Barzun, “the Sanskrit root ‘manu’ denotes nothing but the human being and does so par excellence since it is cognate with the word for ‘I think.’” “Woman,” says Barzun “is etymologically the ‘wife human being.’”

            Fortunately, most men and women react negatively to pc “inclusive language” when it goes too far, as most attacks on cultural tradition always do. For example, most people completely reject sex neutral references to God because in that context inclusive language is like fingernails on a chalkboard; only pc people dislike referring to God as “Him.”

I doubt that in public discourse we will ever have to endure such constructions as “Founding Persons” for Founding Fathers or “Forepeople” for Forefathers, but readers should not be surprised if such constructions sneak into their children’s schoolbooks. Pc cultural nihilism usually rules there.

           

           

           

             

           

Guns will not go away

Guns Will Not Go Away

The current gun control debate reminds me of the Nicholas Cage film Lord of War, which accurately and effectively demonstrates, even though it’s fiction, that it’s not only America but the whole world that is armed. The difference is that in America citizens have a legal, that is, a constitutional right to be armed. At the beginning of the film, Cage’s character, an international arms dealer, states that there is an AK 47, the Kalashnikov, for every twelve people in the world. As a weapons dealer his goal is to arm the other eleven.  

            The AK 47, semi automatic knock offs of which are everywhere, was invented by a Russian sergeant (he was later made a general in the Soviet Army) and is one of the most ubiquitous and most reliable weapons of its type in the world. The Chinese company Norenco manufactures versions of the AK as well as other pistols and rifles, which are sold everywhere. The rifle shoots 7.62x39 bullets, which are available worldwide, but probably in short supply here since the Sandy Hook massacre.

            Recent history shows that the election of liberal Democrats, mass shootings, such as the Gabby Gifford incident in Arizona, the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre, or the Sandy Hook shootings, and also inevitable hysterical and uninformed liberal gun control campaigns are good for gun and ammunition sales. For example, when Bill Clinton became President in 1993, 7.62x39 semi automatic rifles as well as 7.62x39 cartridges sold rapidly because gun owners feared that Democratic gun grabbers would enact confiscatory gun controls. There followed the semi automatic assault rifle law, a failed attempt to limit magazine size (to ten rounds) and assault weapons sales. Chinese gun makers quickly got around that law by merely making a few cosmetic changes to AK-47 style semi automatic rifles; moreover, thousands of large capacity magazines remained available.

            Later on gun and ammunition sales returned to normal and did not change until the election of Barack Obama, another liberal Democrat who gun owners feared would push for new restrictions on gun ownership, hence ammunition and gun sales exploded and the prices of both rose dramatically.

            This history shows that Americans are not fearful of each other but of government restrictions on gun rights. The rush to buy guns and ammunition after Mr. Obama was elected was not a fearful, hysterical exercise, but a rational decision based on the anti self-defense history of liberal members of the President’s Democratic Party.

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.