Straight-Talking in Al Franken's "Age of Neo-Sticklerism"

Franken: I am hoping for the pendulum to swing back,

and that we have an age of neo-sticklerism

where everyone is a stickler for the truth.

         The Honorable but still funny Al Franken, junior U.S. Senator from Minnesota, hopes for "an age of neo-sticklerism where everyone is a stickler for the truth" — but he doesn't "see that happening." I don't either, but in the Time of Trump and Tribulations, we should attempt to denormalize, so to speak, lying, and to limit bullshitting to contexts where bullshit is funny and fun, and everyone know the rules.

         I will contribute toward an age of neo-sticklerism with some curmudgeoning on my field of language.

         As a student of language and a human person, I know that it's unlikely we'll ever get most people most of the time to listen seriously to what others are saying, but I think we can get people more frequently listening to what they themselves say.

         So listen to yourself and think about what you say, and try to avoid talking what we intellectuals often call "weird shit." Or "weird shit," if you think about it, which few people do, so it's too familiar to seem weird.

         Start with figurative language.

        

Hyperbole: Hyperbole — overstatement, "hype" — is a figure of speech and can be fun, as in the American tradition of the tall tale. When a bit of hype become a cliché though, it's a problem because with clichés we don't think (which is the primary reason George Orwell disliked clichés so much).

         E.g., when people say they just love something. Okay, Would you run into a burning building to save it? If not, ratchet that back to "like." (Same with people, although that gets really complicated. Take seriously the moldie oldie advice "Be sure it's true"; it is usually a minor sin, but, indeed, in intimate human relationships, "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie," although lying may be less bad than telling some truths.)

         Or if you're tempted to demand 110% dedication from your employees or students or players, remember that there is usually only 100% of anything and you damn well don't deserve anywhere near all of anyone else's time and effort.

Absolutes (read again about "hyperbole"):

         President Trump is bigly on this one, and it's an old habit going back to at least to building temples to the god Jupiter, "Optimus Maximus": "Best and Greatest" or what we might call Biggest and Best. 

         Something doesn't have to be "the best" to be good or "biggest" to be big. Besides, such absolutes would invite serious listeners — and there are some out there — to come up with an exception. Any exception. "The exception proves the rule" means exceptions test rules. If you've thrown out an absolute, one exception disproves your "rule."

         One common form is "everybody" and "nobody." We should know better. If your kid comes home and tells you "Everybody in seventh grade is getting lip studs," you're going to say "Name two," rattle off some families you're really, really sure won't have kids with lip studs, and end the argument.

         Similarly with something like "Nobody would want …." Check out the Internet. If it's something sexual, there's probably a website devoted to devotees of what "Nobody would want."

         If you've dealt with humans a fair amount, you should know to be careful with absolute generalizations about people. There are always at least trivial exceptions, so even when you're really sure of your assertion, try, "With only trivial exceptions, if any, everybody/nobody …."

Political Metonyms/Synecdoches: This is mostly for journalists and other political writers and is more familiar than it sounds. If you're from the UK or part of the old British Empire, you can talk of a "Crown Prosecutor" without much danger of people thinking a piece of fancy headgear has a staff of lawyers (or barristers?).

         But if you talk of "Whitehall" for some part of the government of the United Kingdom — or "the Whitehouse" or "Kremlin" or "Capitol Hill" — there are problems. The buildings and such don't do things; people do, and you need to do your best to name the people or explain why you don't need to.

         It sounds much more impressive to report, "The Whitehouse said today," than, "a media release from some flack whose name I've forgotten reads in part." Still, in the Time of Trump and Tribulations, in the time of accusations of fake news — and the fact of fake news — in the time as always, where people who do stuff often want to avoid responsibility, spell it the hell out.

Embedded Lies, or at Least Embedded-and-Assumed Arguable Assertions:

         This one I've written on before, in the case of the phrase "alcohol and drugs." There's an assertion buried in that phrase: "alcohol is not a drug." One can argue that the phrase is just a short form for "alcohol and other drugs" or "alcohol and illicit drugs" or "alcohol vs. drugs used by less respectable people than alcohol users." Uh-huh. Just say "alcohol and other drugs," or be prepared to argue, "Alcohol is not a drug," and offer a sensible definition of "drug" that excludes alcohol.

         Well, and so forth, including "polite nothings" where every now and then maybe we should tell someone, "Well, you've got other clothes that make you look better" and respond to "How are you?" with something short but fairly honest, or maybe just "Thank you for asking."

         It's difficult: English is a highly figurative language, and the vast majority are harmless (any many are fun). Listen, though, for the dangerous ones and try as much as possible to stick to truth.

         Except when you're sitting around swapping lies, and everyone knows that's what you're doing. But when someone says, "Really?!" and it's not, emphatically not really real, just say, "Nah. I'm bullshitting."

         Oh — and if you've got a job as some high-power but ultimately sleazy flack doing PR or deceptive advertising: Quit. Repent. Go straight.

Book Review, Gregg Bogosian's TREASURE CAVE

LINKS:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

LuLu

Entertaining and Useful New Telling of an Old Story

         Treasure Cave is a late addition to the "Seckatary Hawkins" series of boys' stories and books written by Robert F. Schulkers from 1918 to 1942, with Treasure Cave written by Gregg Bogosian and published by him in 2017. In  terms of Schulkers's time-line, Treasure Cave is additionally somewhat backdated, so to speak, being set mid-June to early July of that crucial year, 1914: i.e., climaxing around the time of the US Fourth of July celebration preceding the start of World War I on 28 July 1914. 

         Bogosian has produced an interesting and useful volume.

         Treasure Cave is first of all an entertaining original novel set in the tradition of "boys' adventure novels" such as "Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, Kidnapped and many others," as Bogosian's Preface indicates (p. xiv) and alluded to in the novel when we get the titles of some of the books on "a big shelf" in the bedroom of the co-hero, Sam Morgan (p. 5, quoted here).

         I liked the novel.

         One of my pleasant childhood memories is exploring the basement of the duplex we had started renting in and coming across a box of old boys' books, which included such classics of the form as Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon (1913) and stories of the derring-do of American volunteers in the RAF and later the US military during World War II. So Treasure Cave pushed hard on some of my nostalgia buttons.

         I also liked what I've called above the "volume," with a less innocent appreciation: as someone who was a working member of an English department in the late 20^th and very early 21^st centuries. For Treasure Cave as a volume, a book, contains a variation on an old-fashioned "boys' book" novel and other material that make it — with "it" hovering in its reference between "the novel" and "the volume" — that make it a serious look at boyhood in the river boundaries between Ohio and Kentucky in the between-war period (i.e., US Civil War and the Great War in Europe), a kind of metafiction, and a highly contemporary exercise in bringing into question a central binary opposition and taking a stab or two at some of polite America's sacred cows.

         Warning: SPOILER follows eventually, and more quickly a partial disclosure on my part (nobody can give full disclosure), and some mild pedantry.

         The disclosure can start with my noting that I don't know if the metafictional/deconstructive stuff was Bogosian's intention. I do believe that Gregg has a sound background in at least the basics of literary criticism and production since he took an English course from me early in my career in college teaching and near the beginning of his college-studenting; and he and I were two of three co-authors of an unpublished, highly allusive, Leftist novella set in — at the time of composition — the still fairly distant turn of the millennium (with a very elegant science-fictional premise suggested by Gregg). It is quite possible the postmodernist or postmodernish aspects of the Treasure Cave volume just follow from Bogosian's ethics and thoroughness as a scholar.

         The volume has four main parts: a 6.5-page preface by Bogosian informing his readers about the "Seckatary Hawkins" stories by Schulkers; then there's the Treasure Cave novel in 188 pages; and then over 45 pages of Endnotes, and a scholarly Bibliography of seven pages.

         One kind of metafiction might be said to remind us that we're reading fiction by laying bare some of figurative framework of the figurative architecture of the story. By the time he's finished with his scholarly apparatus, Bogosian has revealed the interior frame, plumbing, wiring, and construction schedule (and invited such an extended metaphor by featuring in the novel the hero's figuring out the details of the architecture of a house).

         Anyone teaching how to write historical fiction would do well to consider assigning Treasure Cave for a step-by-step walk-through of how an author uses historical materials.

         The volume is also useful for anyone looking at images of childhood and indirect evidence on actual childhood, especially of the boy variety in a period different from our own but relatively close in time.

         An adventure tale is going to be far more adventurous than real life, and this adventure story is undoubtedly far from the verity of kids' lives in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky ca. 1914, even when school is out. Still, stories must be verisimilar: offering not verity —historical truth — but what can pass in literature: verisimilitude.

         As Bogosian points out in his Preface, Schulkers shows a pretty rough world, where pubescent boys form gangs (in the old, neutral sense of the word), own rifles, and have dogs for fighting as well as pets; and a boy shooting an enemy's dog attacking a friends is a serious event, but definitely a possible one (p. xix-xiv). Depending upon age and class, near-teens and teenagers might be employed in manual labor, go on camping trips on their own, swim in rivers, hunt small game, explore caves, and, generally, manage much of their affairs without adults.

         This is an important point about some continuity and also important changes in American childhood. My students barely believed that we had high school sororities and fraternities in late 1950s North-side Chicago, and year-clubs and other clubs as well; and those teen-run groups organized softball and touch-football leagues and dances and in one case ran a charity. I didn't own a rifle in Chicago, but I certainly fired 22's from an early age, and I owned knives and was pretty good at throwing them. And I'm talking here of a nice Jewish boy from a middle-class urban family.

         So I find it realistic that relatively rural kids such as those we see in Treasure Cave have access to small-caliber rifles and can own some pretty tough dogs — and spend a lot of time without adult supervision and working through largely on their own issues of race and class: there are still Civil War vets alive in 1914, and the War was still a conscious issue in border-state Kentucky and only mostly-Union Ohio. Since Bogosian was compiling his research, the US Civil War has again become a conscious issue, so that point readers should accept without difficulty.

         Kids' actually finding treasure is less realistic.

         SPOILER REMINDER.

         All of Treasure Cave is divided into three parts, the first part narrated by and starring Sam Morgan, nicknamed "Scout": not Seckatary Hawkins, but a smart kid, and a good and brave one, if a little impatient with a younger sister and all "Frilly girl things" (p. 2). A standard enough boys book hero. Part II introduces Sam and other young Morgans to Hawkins and his club, and we learn that "Sam" is short for Samantha, who is a tomboy in the terminology of the time (and since at least the 16^th century), if not in the book.

         And here let the argument begin.

         Sam "Scout" Morgan shows no solidarity with other girls, who are rare in this boys' book. But Sam lives in Kentucky in the time of the Kentucky Equal Rights (for women) Association (pp. 11, 192 n. 3), not in the time and places of the National Organization for Women, much less the 1969 and briefly following Redstockings of New York and San Francisco. And definitely female Samantha is a co-hero of a classic boys' book.

         Is this «Good for the women?» Segue here to arguments over Ellen Ripley in Alien (1969) and Aliens (1986), and thereafter, or Sarah Connor of Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991). Except in Treasure Cave — when the argument returns to Treasure Cave — such contentious issues are usefully complicated by the distance of time and culture, the esthetic decorum of having Sam a 1914 tomboy, and the whole issue of girls at any time who act in the world as they please and are willing to tell disapproving older sisters to cram it (although Sam would never, ever say such a crude thing).

         Bogosian is provoking an argument here, one basic to the book. And in smaller things he provokes some useful peripheral arguments.

         For example ….

         For example, a rather obnoxious young visitor to the Morgans, with the improbable name of "Mickey Maus," brings news about an explosion on a steamboat and is asked "Was anyone hurt?" and replies, "No'm. Killed a nigger." This raises some consternation from his small audience of women from the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, but he is confronted on his word choice and attitudes by Sam (p. 12). Bogosian doesn't endnote Maus's words, counting — possibly with too much optimism — on his readers to recognize his lifting some famous lines from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: “Good gracious! anybody hurt?” / “No’m. Killed a nigger.” Followed by Aunt Sally's reaction, very different from that of the women in Treasure Cave, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt" — and on for a long, totally insensitive speech by Twain's character, Aunt Sally.

         Huck Finn was acculturated in a White racist society and has to overcome what respectable people in his society have told him was the respectable Christian way; Mickey Maus is just a young racist, and that's believable. Huck would say "nigger"; Mickey Maus would say "nigger"; it's crucial to the point of the scene and important for what follows that Maus say "nigger"; and Bogosian has him say it.

         Similarly, Bogosian kind of takes on the Commonwealth of Kentucky and a good deal of contemporary political culture in having a singing of "My Old Kentucky Home" with the word "darkies": which Seckatary Hawkins, as one of the "white fellas" stops, while the "colored boys" stop his stopping them and give the Whites, and most directly Hawkins, "A bit of a history lesson" (p. 158-59). Here and in an endnote (p. 230, n. 5), readers get "A bit of a history lesson" on Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!" as "actually an anti-slavery ballad," with "the darkies" or similar phrase necessary to make the point. (The song opens with The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home. / 'Tis summer, the darkies are gay," but Bogosian passes on what to do with "gay" for an audience nowadays.)

         So: The plot of Treasure Cave is a serviceable boys' book adventure of boys' (and one girl's) squabbles and fights and cooperation and finding various treasures through what educated Medieval sorts would have called sapientia et fortitudo: the wisdom — or intelligence or cunning — of Romance heroes, and their strength and fortitude and courage: mostly Sam and Seckatary's intelligence, but with respect for all these virtues in many of the characters. And Treasure Cave has a happy and properly educational ending with, as the chapter title hath it, "The Best Treasure of All" (hint: it has to do with reuniting families, a major motif since, say, Joseph identified himself to his bothers in ancient Egypt [Genesis 45] through Tom Cruise reuniting with his ex-wife and kids in the most recent War of the Worlds [2005]).

                  It's not a book for everyone, but Treasure Cave should be read and used and argued about by a substantial audience.

Eugene Robinson on Mass Murder

REFERENCE: Eugene Robinson, "Sadly, the carnage will never cease," Ventura County Star 3 October 2017: 13A ; "The carnage will continue," The Washington Post, 2 October 2017

  

            Eugene Robinson will get corrected frequently for his assertion that Stephen "Paddock was using a fully automatic rifle" in the massacre on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday, October 1, 2017. Apparently Paddock had instead a number of legal semi-automatic rifles with legal "bump stocks," that in the words of Lisa Marie Pane of the AP "allow a semi-automatic rifle to mimic a fully automatic weapon by unleashing an entire large magazine in seconds" and were all he needed for his point-and-spray approach to marksmanship with human targets.

            I wish to correct a less technical assertion in Robinson's fine column: "There can be no rational motive for mass murder"; unfortunately — tragically and worse than tragically — here Robinson is wrong. Mass murder is always and necessarily evil, but it can be the result of rational — measured, calculated — choices.

            If you're one Great Khan or other and have united the tribes on the Eurasian steppe and need to keep them united and producing income and not revolt, it is rational to set them moving into China and Europe. With Genghis Khan, the most impressive of the lot, the project killed some forty million people.

            If you've come from Europe to the New World to kill and conquer for profit, and you come across a mountain of silver and cities rich in gold, and if the local inhabitants are only lightly armed and frequently just die off from diseases you survived as a child — then it is rational to do what you came to do and enslave and kill as best calculated to maximize profit. An occasional Jesuit might ask you rhetorically, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" (Mark 8.36), but you can answer, "He gains the world, father," and as long as you keep sending back to your royal masters a big portion of the loot, and convert some of your new slaves to the true faith — you won't get into trouble in this life.

            Or if you're in California for the 1849 Gold Rush or in the Congo Free State for ivory and rubber around 1900 and you've been brought up as a committed or casual racist, then push the locals off any land you want or reduce them to serfs — or "Exterminate all the brutes!"

            The belief in evil is dangerous, especially believing in it as an absolute that allows you to judge guilty whole cultures for celebrating murderous conquests or slavery or female infanticide; "Evil" is a necessary concept, however, precisely so you can condemn mass murder (etc.) as evil and not have to fall back on calling irrational a tactic well calculated to fulfill one's greed or lust for power and fame.

<https://tinyurl.com/y8nn3edr>

PBS Vietnam Series, Finale, "The Weight of Memory," 28 September 2017

Excellent project all together; for what it's worth some comments.

      * This is trivial, but they got across the green of the Vietnamese countryside: a brilliant, unforgettable green. Not as much as the earlier series, they also did well to suggest the occasional terrible beauty of the war, and to get statements from a US veteran or two on the exhilaration and community of combat. I cannot speak to that point personally, but in terms of men's behavior, the polished-up version of General Sherman's "War is hell, and all its glory moonshine" has got to be balanced, at least for some, by positives, including, with a lot of irony, beauty and community.

      * The final episode didn't make up for the previous one's unfairness to George McGovern and John Kerry. McGovern was a good and honorable man, and far more right than wrong. With Kerry, they let stand without any response the accusation that in his testimony to the Congress for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War he passed along lies about atrocities by US forces. The last word on the subject is from an American combatant who said that he was certain atrocities occurred but that wasn't what he saw, not part of his war. I believe him, but what is actually the case in terms of the war and the stories Kerry told the Congress?

      * There's a book on Vietnam movies by the PR officer for General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. He found THE DEER HUNTER mostly pretty silly but praised it for showing a small-town's friendly wellcome-home for returning Vietnam soldiers, as opposed to the usual Hollywood curses and spittle. The US is a big country, and in the Midwest outside of Madison, WI, and some other places, the party line among the Peace Movement — as opposed to "The Revolution" — was to treat grunts and low-ranking officers as (as a critic of the Wall put it) victims of the war and potential and important allies. (The VVAW were crucial for the anti-War movement.)

      * The approach of the documentary necessarily avoided the wonkish "Well ...?" Well, were US actions in Vietnam finally, on balance, right or wrong? Was it a just war, or a "mistake" that with so high a body count would be a crime? The US lost, and we're still here and doing OK, and, arguably, would be better off if we hadn't fought. Therefore no vital interests were involved, by definition of "vital"; certainly there was no existential threat to the Republic. Alternative, the US opposed the Communists with vigor, and the Philippines and Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, et al. aren't part of a Stalinist world. Indeed, the USSR fell, and the Cold War ended before World War III. All of this precisely because the US showed that JFK was right and we would (just about) pay any price — and inflict huge damage — to preserve capitalist, liberal freedom: our spilling so much blood and spending so much money proved that. The approach of this PBS series was effective, but a wonkish word or two would have helped.

     * I really do have to visit the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington,  DC. I wanted to leave a stone there that I had picked up at Kent State, but left the stone at My Lai instead. Still, I do need to see the Wall.

Donald Trump vs. the NFL et al.: Free Speech, Patriotism ... Blacklists and Firing Blacks

Coming to very different conclusions, a couple of my friends going back to high school have argued or allowed on athletes' "taking a knee" that "it is within the rights of the owners to fire them." Under the "employment-at-will doctrine," this is indeed the case, though there are competing theories on job security.

Firing for political reasons, however,  is also in the tradition of the 1940s and 1950s Blacklists 
and the attenuated loyalty-oath requirements which lasted for teachers in the two states I worked in until, at least, 1971.

Additionally, given the racial implications, Americans should overcome our historical amnesia enough to recall the brag of the National States Rights Party during the time of the civil rights movements that they have "been preaching a 'Fire Your Nigger' campaign at our meetings to force more of them to leave the South" (my on-line source cites here The Kansas City Star for 7/21/63; I can remember a later call by White racists — White Citizens Councils? — for a "Fire Your Nigger Day").

There's history here, and some pretty nasty parallels, oNr parallels once we pass the possibly unique instance of a US president taking time away from fire, storm, and flooding national disasters and picking two fights involving nuclear weapons — to defend patriotic gestures and question quiet protest.

Trump: Tweets, Basic Calendar, Geography ... and the Next Dark Age

On 8 August 2017, President Trump threatened North Korea "with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before." The 8th of August falls between the 6th of August, the anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and 9 August, the bombing of Nagasaki. So whatever Mr. Trump intended to say, in that context of basic calendar what he did say was a threat against North Korea of "fire and fury" exceeding two smallish atomic bombs, a degree of "fire and fury" that would require a hydrogen bomb or several substantial fission bombs.

On 19 September 2017, in a prepared speech to the United Nations, Mr. Trump claimed great patience for the US but "if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea," presumably referring to destroying the Democratic Republic of North Korea as a functioning state but possibly meaning more — although it's hard to conceive of what that "more" could be unless he was thinking of North Korea as its human population (ca. 25.4 million people) and was threatening genocide, or had some idea that North Korea as a geographical entity could be destroyed by military action.

Whether the President of the United States on his own may legally order preventive genocide or even just state destruction by very-high high explosives is a question I now submit to readers expert in the law, but I will move from the initial calendar issue to a point from maps.

The City Distance website saith that Pyongyang, DPRK, is 684 km / 425 miles from Vladivostok in the Russian Federation, as the crow flies or fallout drifts, and about 810 km / 503 miles from Bejing, China. The Chinese border city of Dandong is about an even 100 miles from Pyongyang, 161 km; Dangong's population varies by how one defines the city, but just under a million people would give a fair idea.

It's not entirely clear how the governments of China and Russia would react to North Korea's being reduced — totally — to radioactive glass, but China has made it clear that it doesn't want to deal with large numbers of North Korean refugees, which would result from anything short of literal genocide; and it is a safe bet that both Russia and China would be very upset with radioactive fallout falling out on their territories, plus smoke, toxic gasses, and maybe a short-term nuclear winter or other climate change, including long-term warming.

Perhaps Mr. Trump should consider his reaction if China practiced some very hard-nose capitalism-by-other-means and nuked all Mexican maquiladoras 100 miles (161 km) or so south of the Rio Grande. Or he should consider Air Force General Buck Turgidson's description of Russian reaction upon seeing on their radar a wing of US B-52's entering their airspace: "[T]hey are going to go absolutely ape, and they're gonna strike back with everything they've got."

Call me a pessimist and/or an old softy, but I believe the Congress of the United State should specify — immediately and by a veto-proof majority — that the President of the United States is authorized to go nuclear with a counterattack to a nuclear strike on the US and can use subnuclear means of a wide variety to preempt an imminent attack of significant danger to the Republic and/or to large numbers of Americans. BUT: No preventive wars or nuclear strikes, especially on the scale of genocide. Zip, none, nada; and an order for such a nuclear strike is illegal, to be disobeyed by all people under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and to result in the arrest of the Commander-in-Chief, as a person subject to the UCMJ.