Goddamnit.
People magazine, which has been getting it wrong for 17 - make that 18 - consecutive years now, considers Kate Hudson attractive. Last year it was Drew Barrymore, which is already bad enough. But at least Drew Barrymore is cute. Kate Hudson?
No, no, no, wrong, and no.
It is well-known, but not widely acknowledged, that the most attractive person in the world is Jennifer Connelly, and has been since about 1986.
Out of character though this may sound, I actually feel a bit sorry for Barack Obama in the wake of yesterday’s press conference disowning Jeremiah Wright.
Don’t get me wrong. Obama’s full-scale, and belated, disassociation with Wright means that an unmistakeable hit has been scored. I have no desire to see this substance-free, condescending, feel-good smooth-talker sworn in as the next president of this fine country, so if this controversy is causing him trouble, then good. It helps that the controversy itself has merit. This isn’t a Lewisnky “Scandal” redux, where some poor, but essentially private (yes, yes, I know, “sexual harrassment” is illegal, but no one ever managed to convince me that any of what happened was against Lewinsky’s will at the time it happened), choices on the part of the president were taken WAY out of context to back him into the corner that resulted the lie that caused his impeachment. That was a setup - and based on things that are ultimately irrelevant to leadership competence. This thing with Obama isn’t that.
This thing with Obama, unlike a candidate’s private extra-marital affairs, is relevant. It is within the limits of acceptable public scrutiny. This would be the case even if Obama hadn’t made it the stuff of public discourse by titling his autobiography after a line in a Wright speech: We the People, knowing that our politicians present false faces to us during election time, are entitled to attempt to infer from a politician’s voluntary associations how he will actually behave in office. If you’re running for president, your church attendance record is fair public game. And if your church attendance record suggests that you are an unpatriotic bigot - as Obama’s unambiguously does - then the public is entitled to hold that against you when it goes to make its choice.
That said, and as much as I agree that Barack Obama is not a good choice to head the executive branch, I would like to make the case that he is, in one sense, a victim of circumstance.
In “The Speech” - in which Obama initially defended his association with Wright in spite of the pastor’s inflamatory comments - Obama said that this was an opportunity for the nation to confront realities about race. I agree - though Obama and I are not talking about the same “realities.” And when Wright himself said two days ago that attacks on him were attacks on culture of black churches, I agree even more strongly. Where I disagree is that this is an acceptable defense. The culture of whites and white churches has been under attack for some time. Why should black churches be immune?
The fact is that the culture of black churches is rotten in exactly the way Wright’s speeches imply. Do I know this first-hand? Not exactly. I have never been a member of a black church. But I did grow up in North Carolina, and after a while the signs are unmistakable. There were too many times in high school when a black person I knew from class would pretend not to recognize me if we crossed paths outside of school and other black people were around. Once or twice and you can explain it away. You know, “the sun was in his eyes” or somthing. When it gets to be a pattern, you come to know that the black community suffers from more “institutional racism” today than whites ever dreamed of. And the pattern is only confirmed when you turn on the TV and watch one Rodney King and Tawana Brawley and Duke Rape Case after another, where prominent members of the black community make statements that carry the unmistakable implication that the facts of the case and the public interest in seeing justice done are somehow less important than black people’s feelings.
This is a community failing. It doesn’t exist at all on the individual level. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; Wright’s comments two days ago are yet another reason we can’t pretend it doesn’t.
And so I feel sorry for Barack Obama. In disowning Wright, he did the right thing. It would never have been enough for some people, of course - because for some people nothing ever is. But it would have been enough for me — if only Wright hadn’t forced his hand in the way that he did. The sad thing is, Obama was getting away with it. Some Republicans dragged up some of his mentor’s statements - the kind of thing that would have easily buried a less talented speaker. But Obama is quite talented, and he managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in a carefully-worded speech that played on some of the sensitivities of the community. He was getting away with it, until Wright decided not to let him. And one can only assume that Wright decided this. He is, after all, only nationally prominent because a large section of the public objects to Obama’s association with him. Going on the air and repeating exactly the kinds of things that put Obama in the hotseat can hardly be something he imagined would help.
Why would Wright want Obama to fail? Why set him up to fail? Why not just wait a couple of months until after the election? Is this all about the spotlight? Wright wants it, saw his chance, and damn the consequences for Obama? Maybe. But Wright has already had a successful career and is retired from it. This isn’t exactly the point in one’s life where he grabs at the spotlight.
No, I have an alternate theory. This will be objectionable to many, but I do believe it. My theory is that black leaders like Wright - the manic street preachers of the community (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton et al) - are ironically but unmistakeably the interest group in this country that has the most to lose if we elect a black president. One thing that Obama’s brain-free college kid supporters get right about him is that his election would send a powerful signal (they like to use hyperbolic adjectives like “powerful” alongside noncommital phrases like “send a signal”) that America is putting its racist past behind it. And if that happens, what will the manic street preachers have to talk about? Make no mistake, Wright sold Obama out at a crucial point in the campaign for profit - because the profession he devoted his life to (racialist rabble rousing) becomes obsolete if Obama wins.
So I feel sorry for Obama, just as I feel sorry for anyone who gets stabbed in the back by his erstwhile allies. But I don’t feel sorry enough to vote for him. He made a choice when he decided to associate with such people, let him suffer the consequences. If the public can be gullible once, then Wright does us a valuable service by not letting it happen twice.
CARPE DIEM has two interesting posts on Russia. The first has to do with smoking and obesity. Basically, the author sits around in Moscow looking in vain for a fat man. And also for a non-smoker. And then he wonders whether smoking has something to do with Russian thinness. Indeed. It’s funny how obvious things like this sometimes take a really long time to occur to you. But I can remember going to Korea for the first time and being equally shocked by how thin everyone was - and that’s saying a lot, really, since I was just off the plane from Japan! One of my Japanese friends and I - when he came to visit - spent a long time puzzling over why, while people are generally thin in Japan, you do occasionally see real lardasses, but there simply aren’t any fat people at all in Korea. But IT’S THE SMOKING, STUPID! OF COURSE! In retrospect it seems so obvious. Because while we were busy talking about that, we also noticed that there was a lot more smoking going on than in Japan (which also says a lot). (And yes, there is statistical evidence to back up my claim that Koreans smoke a lot more than Japanese. The link goes to a WHO site that claims a smoking rate of 67% for Korea and 51% for Japan.)
Now here’s a comparison between Russia and Spain. The second one has to do with customer service in Russia, which the author claims has not fully recovered from the Soviet era. He starts with an annecdote about the opening of the first McDonald’s in 1990 in what was then still the Soviet Union. The elaborate training program focused on customer service, a novel concept in a commuist nation. One teenager in training is supposed to have asked, confused, why he should be nice to the customers since he was the one with the hamburgers!
The Soviet Union has been gone for 17 years now. I was in Barcelona in 1998, 23 years after Franco died - which, if you figure the 2 year transition period, put it at roughly the same timespan. What immediately shocked me was how terrible customer service in general was. I went abroad swearing not to be one of those annoying Americans who constantly complains about how much better things are supposed to be at home - but I just couldn’t help it. There’s indifference, and then there’s downright rude, and these people were the latter. I resolved to keep a stiff upper lip about it, but one of my German friends, when we were out of earshot of any Spaniards, let me off the hook by bringing up the subject himself. He’d been there for two years already and still hadn’t gotten used to it - and this is a German we’re talking about! He explained to me that it had to do with the Franco period - that in a dictatorship the shoe is totally on the other foot, and since the economy is controlled it’s the suppliers who have the upper hand. You get in the habit of bribing shopkeepers for favors, and so the mentality sets in that the shopkeeper is the one keeping the customer afloat, rather than the other way around. At the time I just sort of nodded but couldn’t really see the point. Surely even in a dictatorship profits are important, right? But now I read this about Russia and I wonder - because that was exactly the attitude in Barcelona when I was there. When I bought something from someone, it was as if the shopkeeper had done me a favor. Strange.
Which all makes me wonder … when was Indiana ever a dictatorship? Because damned if that’s not exactly the impression I get here a lot of times too. I can remember one time me and all 32 years I’d been on this planet at the time walked into Marsh (a grocery store) wanting to buy beer. The cunt behind the register apparently gets her kicks carding people and wanted to see two forms of ID - which is ridiculous. I get that I look young for my age, but I’m nowhere near looking under 21! At best, she needs to do a cursory check to fulfill her legal obligations, but TWO forms of ID??? So I asked her if she was serious, and she said she was and acted irritated. I held up my license, which is behind a plastic screen in my wallet, and then turned it over to show her my student ID. She insisted that I pull each out and hand them to her. “Are you enjoying this?” I asked. She said “Sir, do you want the alcohol or not?” To which I responded “Do you want my money or not?” Honestly, there are plenty of stores in town that sell beer! But it’s constant here. Customer service just blows. I miss the South.
In response to my response to his post on pronouns, Mr. Tweedy has more to say on the subject. Specifically, he acknowledges, based on my evidence, that the underlying problem of pronoun ordering in conjunctive phrases is complex - though of course the point of his original post was just some random observations about certain limited colloquial forms, so no harm no foul.
To get at the solution, he (helpfully) goes through all the combinations of pronouns joined by “and” in subject position - marking each on a well-defined scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is (roughly) “most acceptable” and 5 is “not at all acceptable.” (Actually, it’s not quite a full factorial typology: he leaves out cases like “I and me” where forms matching in person and number are differentiated by case alone. This is understandable, since discourse situations that involve these forms are rare. If I were going to do a real study on this, I’m not sure whether I would choose to include them or not. Probably I would, for completeness, but there’s no doubt they introduce a confound.)
Based on this, he concludes that
It looks like, if you’re only going to inflect one, then it’s better to put the nominative inflection on the first (and so structurally nearest, if you’re assuming a conjunctive phrase joining the second to the first) item and leave it off the second than it is to do it the other way around.
He goes on to add that nominative marking on the first item is optional in colloquial speech, and that nominative can apaprently spread to the second item in a conjunctive phrase, but that it’s generally not a good idea to mark the second item nominative if the first item isn’t so marked.
But he acknowledges that he still lacks an explanation for why things like “*I and Frank went to the movies” are so terrible. After all, this has a nominative item structurally preceeding an item that’s ambiguous for case.
So there are still some pieces missing - and in fact I think I have an idea what they are.
Taking Mr. Tweedy’s ratings (though, I hasten to add that I definitely disagree with a number of them - for example (j1) “We and they went to the movies” is REALLY BAD for me, but it gets a clean bill of health from Mr. Tweedy) as input, I wrote a short program in Python to organize the data around features. Specifically, it takes all the input cases and scores a “violation” for the particular ordering based on the rating Mr. Tweedy gave it. So, for example, for “I and him went to the movies” (Mr. Tweedy’s item b6), which Mr. Tweedy gives a 5 (I agree), the program adds 5 to the total violation score for 1 >> 3 and n >> o and s >> s- where 1 and 3 are obviously person markers, “n” and “o” are “nominative” and “objective” respectively and “s >> s” just means that a singular form preceeded a singular form. “You” was obviously a bit tricky to handle this way - but since this is just a sweep for fun over a single “subject’s” grammaticality judgements, I simply encoded it as “b” (for “both”) for singular/plural and nominative/objective. Some more thought is probably warranted there.
In any case, these are the results (where high scores are worse - like in golf).
For singular vs. plural:
b >> s: 7
s >> b: 9
b >> p: 12
p >> b: 14p >> p: 22
s >> s: 35
s >> p: 36
p >> s: 38
So it doesn’t look like there’s much of an effect for singular vs. plural. It seems to be better to put singulars before plurals, and “you” before either (maybe?), but the effect isn’t very strong. The only thing of interest here is that singular seems to be bad in general. I mean, if you have it paired with a plural, then better to put it first, but best of all is don’t have it. So, proposed OT constraints (because I do think this problem warrants a constraint-ranking solution, and NOT a derivational/rule-ordered solution) would be:
For nominative vs. objective:
b >> n: 8
n >> b: 10
b >> o: 11
o >> b: 13n >> n: 22
o >> o: 25
n >> o: 33
o >> n: 51
So Mr. Tweedy’s speculation that the first element should be nominative is CORRECT. However, it seems that better still is just to have both in the same case. So right, nominative before objective, but there is also a case concord preference, and it seems to override the “nominative first” rule. Better to have both items in objective case than the first in nominative and the second in objective. (Note: I’ll bet, however, that there’s an exception to this → don’t have two of the same form one after the other - i.e. no “he and he went…”) You was again problematic. It seems best to put “you” before items of either case (stress on “seems;” there’s no real way to know what’s going on with “you” and case).
But (and this is the piece of the puzzle that Mr. Tweedy seems to be missing in his most recent analysis) the most striking result had to do with person.
2 >> 3: 7
3 >> 2: 7
2 >> 1: 12
1 >> 2: 16
3 >> 1: 41
1 >> 3: 58
This seems to show the clearest preferences. 2nd and 3rd person don’t seem to care which order they come in relative to each other. But both 2nd and 3rd person like to come before 1st person, and this is especially so for 3-1 pairings. If you simply add up the totals for each in the first position, then 2nd scores a 19, 3rd scores a 48, and 1st scores a whopping 74. Of course, if we do it the other way round and look at second position, 2nd has a 23, 3rd a 65, and 1st a 53, so one could make a case the other way (i.e. 3rd strongly dislikes being last, 1st too, and 2nd doesn’t much mind). But there are reasons to think that the ranking is, in fact, 2 >> 3 >> 1. This is because, taken as an ordering on pairs, 2 is definitely supposed to come first. It fares better than either 1 or 3 on individual pairings. If you think of it then as a problem of ordering the other two, having established the ranking for 2, then 3 is clearly supposed to precede 1.
And that, in short, is the answer to why “I and Frank went to the movies” is so bad, even though Mr. Tweedy is right that nominative should precede objective (keeping in mind, of course, that we don’t really know what case “Frank” is in - the point is just that there shouldn’t in general be a problem with nominative forms coming first). Because there’s another constraint that says “don’t put 1st person in front of 3rd person.” This equally explains cases like “He and I went to the movies” being acceptable whereas “I and he went to the movies” is bad, even though both are nominative-marked. It’s also, presumably, why I would have given “We and they went to the movies” a 5 (though I admit I’m puzzled why “They and we went to the movies” is so terrible - a 4 on my personal scale). I suspect Mr. Tweedy actually agrees. Marking that sentence 1 was no doubt a case of hypercorrection on his part (after all, these constraints are based on HIS judgments).
I’m willing to bet, in fact, that the constraint on person is more important than the constraint on case. But I’m hitting my lazy zone, so I’m going to leave it aside for now.
A couple of things to keep in mind with all this. First, these ratings really only reflect Mr. Tweedy’s personal grammar. Since he is a native English speaker, it’s highly likely that it agrees in large part with everyone else’s grammars - but of course the only way to tell for sure is to survey a bunch of people. That is, in fact, something that I would like to do eventually - but not just now. Second, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are other conjunctions besides “and,” for example, and I wonder whether it’s different for different conjunctions? Third, no care was taken here to balance out the typology. To do this kind of survey for real, I would have to make sure that each form showed up in the test the same number of times - which is obviously a headache when you’re dealing with hugely ambiguous forms like “you.”
But it’s nothing if not interesting. I declare the problem solved to my personal satisfaction. Nominative should precede objective, 2nd person should precede third person which precedes first, and the person ordering is more important than the case ordering, and the ban on case contours explains cases like “He and me went to the movies” being worse than “He and I went to the movies.” The rock in my craw is “They and we went to the movies,” which is just BAD. Better than “We and they…,” but honestly not by much. However, I think there’s an obvious explanation for this one that has nothing to do with the constraint ranking: simple semantics. “We and they” implies “we,” and so most people no doubt choose to say “we” (or possibly “we all”) in these cases. The constraint here is just *POINTLESS CONSTRUCTIONS.
So it turns out Facebook is useful for something. A friend sends in an email link to the “Lexicon” function, which tracks word frequencies over time. I tried it for “center” vs. “centre” and got an interesting sort of result. The two words show a frequency curve that pretty much exactly matches, with “center” being more frequent than “centre” - except at one random point last November “centre” was briefly more popular. I account for the striking similar curves by chalking instances of “centre” up mostly to typos. But that doesn’t explain last November. Sudden influx of Brits onto Facebook that month?
The next one I did was “color” vs. “colour.” Nothing to report there: both hold steady, with “colour” significantly less frequent. When I tried with “tire” vs. “tyre,” it didn’t even return a result.
Sociolinguists must think this is the cat’s meow.
Mr. Tweedy has an interesting entry today on language use. Well, 1/3 of it is interesting, anyway - the part about the use of ‘I’ vs. ‘me’ in formal and informal English.
I seize on this because it happens to be one of my biggest pet peeves about the way some people speak English (no surprise to anyone - for all we Linguists go on about being anti-prescriptivists, we ALL find ways to justify nevertheless being annoyed at how some people speak). Namely - people who overuse ‘I’ rank in at just barely more tolerable than those who overuse ‘whom’ in my registry of demons.
On the whole, I agree with Mr. Tweedy’s analysis - so jump over and have a look if you have the time. The gist of it is this:
The data is(are, whatever) correct, of course - but I’d honestly never noticed the ‘Frank and me’ vs. ‘Me and Frank’ effect - whereby the first is somehow worse than the second - in informal English before. And in fact, if you’d asked my opinion without pointing that out to me, I would’ve predicted just the opposite. Reason being - as Mr. Tweedy points out (though not in precisely these terms) - accusative (more properly, ‘objective’) case seems to be the default case in English. When someone asks you “Who wants candy?” your response is invariably ‘me,’ rather than ‘I.’ Now, as Tweedy points out, it’s natural to say ‘I do’ (and in fact, ‘me do’ is completely ungrammatical) - presumably because the tensed verb(-placeholder) ‘do’ assigns nominative case to ‘I.’ Meaning that as a standalone lexical item - the first person singular pronoun is probably ‘me,’ and it only changes to ‘I’ in a specifically case-marked form; objective case is default in English.
So in a conjuntive phrase, I would rather expect the second member to be the unmarked one.
Mr. Tweedy thinks differently, and argues for an “end of phrase” effect for case marking. Basically - the second item in a phrase is more likely to be marked. So if it’s “Me and Frank went to the movies,” then “Frank” gets marked because it’s second, but of course this marking is vacuous for proper names (indeed, any specified nouns) in English. And if it’s the other way around, then “me” gets marked, and this time we can see the marking: it turns up as “I.”
I think he would’ve been on more solid ground arguing for a “closest conjunct” effect (basically, whichever is closer to the verb gets marked), and here’s why.
First of all - let me take issue with the second part of his justification. As (further) evidence for his “end of phrases get marked” thesis, he cites the case of “Jon’s and Bob’s car” vs. “Jon and Bob’s car.” Both are OK - point being, we mark the end of the phrase obligatorily, the first member optionally. Actually, I think this is a misanalysis of this particular case. In fact, in the “Jon’s and Bob’s car” case, it’s that BOTH “Jon” and “Bob” have phrasal status. Witness things like “The king’s money” vs. “The king of France’s money” vs. the completely ungrammatical “The king’s of France money.”
Now try it with “King and queen.” “The king’s and queen’s of France’s money” simply won’t do. BUT - we can say “The King’s and Queen of France’s money” - it’s just that we understand it to be the case that the King is not the King of France (actually, no one is, but never mind ;-), but rather some other King, and “of France” modifies only “Queen.” Why is this so? Well, presumably because “King” and “Queen of France” are members of separate phrases. Reality is that we’re allowed only one ’s marking per phrase. So if we’re coordinating two items with ’s on them, we’re really coordinating two (single-word, in this case) phrases.
But so far I’m just nit-picking. This still works for Mr. Tweedy’s explanation, right? Because in the case of “[Frank and I] went to the movies,” then we can analyze “Frank and I” as a phrase and say that only the last item in it is case-marked, right?
Well, yeah, but how, then, do we explain all of this:
It’s easy to see that the whole thing comes tumbling down. Mr. Tweedy’s theory, as stated, can get away with number (1) - although I’ve given reasons to doubt that marking ever shows up (even optionally) on the first item in a phrase. But let it go - he gets an explanation for (1). But if his explanation is right, and the first conjunct can optionally be case-marked, then what’s wrong with (3)? Why can we optionally case-mark ‘him” as “he” in (1), but not “me” (as “I”) in (3)? Likewise, according to this theory, (2) - in which case marking is only on the second conjunct - should actually be better than (1), and yet it’s worse. Mr. Tweedy could get around this, maybe, by claiming that “him” isn’t the default form of “he” the way “me” is the default form of “I” - but he would still be unable to explain example (4). He would CERTAINLY be unable to explain how (4) is possibly worse than (5) (in which there is no nominative case marking on the second conjunct), and yet (5) is better than (4)!
So Mr. Tweedy’s missing some pieces here.
Not that I have an alternate explanation myself. Conjunctive phrases are NOTORIOUSLY difficult to handle in standard Syntax. But here’s my oh-so-modern Minimalist suspicion: there is some truth to the idea that pronouns in English are clitic-like. Notice that “order in the phrase” plays a role for what you can and can’t get away with, but that it doesn’t map onto all pronouns in the same way. That’s a big clue that we’re dealing with peculiarities of the lexical items themselves, and not any kind of nice syntacitc generalization about English. Rather - it seems to be a PF-level effect. “Pronounce this this way here and some other way elsewhere.” And in the case of “I,” it’s sort of a “pronounce me last” effect. Synactically it’s a full member of the conjunct phrase, but phonetically it can only be pronounced last. (Note this holds even in the hypercorrected forms - when people say crap like “I feel the magic between you and I.” Even those troglodytes can’t get “I feel the magic between I and you!”) More evidence: note that (5) gets really bad all of a sudden if you swap places: “BAD: Him and me went to the movies.” There are some dialects where you can get away with that, but in the standard dialect it’s right out. Again - the ordering effect seems to be a peculiarity of the lexical items - not anything deeper than that. “Me” just likes to be first is all. Still not convinced? Try these two on for size:
Neither is particularly good, but dontcha like (1) A LOT better than (2)?
I’m telling you - all it is is an ordering effect, no different from, say, the fact that in Romanian, all the object clitics go in front of the auxilliary - bucept the feminine one, which randomly goes after the main verb.
(1) and (3) are “I saw him/her” (respectively). (2) is “I didn’t see anyone.” It’s there just to show that clitics in general go in front of the auxilliary - it’s only the feminine (accusative) one that’s weird and goes after the main verb.
I think something similar is at work with pronouns in English. There are no revealing syntactic principles at work here - just like there is no deep reason why the feminine clitic is the odd “man” out in Romanian. It is that way … because it just bleedin’ IS that way! The solution for English pronouns in conjunctive phrases is a simple PF-side constraint ranking problem. It’s one of those times when Optimality Theory really is the way to go in Syntax.
Under today’s “Are you fucking kidding me?” category: Stephane Dion is hot under the collar because the Tories were caught overspending their elections limit by $1million - aprox. 5.5%.
Don’t get me wrong - it all seems very shady. The way I understand it, party headquarters tranfered funds to the coffers of 67 or so local candidates who were under their spending limits. I don’t know much about elections law in Canada, but I gather that would’ve been OK if the candidates had spent the money on their own campaigns. Instead, they claimed deductions on the surplus and then transfered it right back. Somehow this was supposed to escape the RCMP’s notice…don’t ask, doesn’t make much sense to me. Sounds like the kind of thing that would’ve easily turned up on any run-of-the-mill government audit - but this is a new story, so I guess details will surface as it goes on.
I would just like to say that, wrongdoing or no, it’s awfully rich of the LIBERAL Party to be whining about this.
Dion said the money could have influenced the outcome of the January 2006 election, which saw the Grits ousted from power and the Tories form a minority government.
“Yes, it may have had an effect,” Dion said. “We’ll never know for sure, but you don’t cheat for nothing. You cheat because you want to have an effect. You want to have more voters for you in an illegal way.”
I’m scratching my head trying to figure out how a measly million dollars is supposed to have been decisive in an election that the Tories were winning handily until the last couple of weeks. More than that, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out how the “Sponsorship Scandal” and “You had an option, sir” Party suddenly grew a conscience about these things?
I will make a prediction, though. In the end this hurts Harper and the Conservatives … not one whit.
I was generally unaware of who Joe Queenan was before I read Samizdata today. What an oversight!
The link goes to an interview with a guy full of great one-liners spitting vitriol about things I, too, love to hate. In fact, my bone to pick with the Samizdata piece is that they zeroed in on the wrong quote. Surely it should’ve been this one instead:
But, Bill Clinton has all of the hypocrisy of baby boomers and all of the false sense that if you simply say the right thing, it’s like you did something.
Quoted for the bit about saying the right thing, not the specific reference to Clinton (whom Queenan goes on to defend a bit). Right on! Ok, ok, I realize it’s bit rich to be saying this on a blog - but that’s hit the nail right on the head about what’s wrong with political discourse these days.
One of these days I’ll sit down and write a compendium of all the undergraduate writing errors that slowly eat away at the precious time I have on this beautiful planet by poisoning me with a bitter vinegar hatred of everything living. The number one worst thing that an undergraduate can do, and of course therefore never fails to do, is use the word “utilize” every goram time. As though there were some phonological process in English whereby taking an ordinary verb and using its meta-aspectual form rendered your writing sophisticated. [-ize] → [+ize]/ [+ intellectual], or something. But if that’s number one, then number two is surely clawing for moral approbation from your reader by using ever-stronger adjectives. Like when people say of a racist “I believe in free speech, so I defend his right to spout his vile and disgusing opinions.” Just fucking tell me about your support for free speech you twit - I don’t have to know that you, like 99.99% of everyone else on the planet, actually takes the extremely normal position of disapproving of racism to even greater heights to get the point there, sport. Call it Tori Spelling syndrome - because my favorite mass media example (with “Islam is a religion of peace” in close second) comes from her gushing about the gay wedding she officiated.
“It was so beautiful as I united Tony and Dex as life partners in love. They wrote their own beautiful vows and there was so much love surrounding them that there wasn’t a dry eye in the driveway! … It was a magical evening of pure love.”
So you’re saying it was beautiful? And that there was love?
In second place for Queenan’s cool lines is this one:
But, [Katherine Powers] really, really hated ["Balsamic Dreams"]. And when I saw her review I thought, “Bingo. This is great. This is really cool. I hit the target. Some old lefty, movement person in Boston hates the book because I made fun of Jimmy Carter or the old hippies.” It’s better than people liking it. That’s an exhilarating feeling.
Eff-n right it is. I would much rather watch some smug leftist sputter with indignation than I would get applause from a room full of the like-minded. Some people deserve to be made angry.
So, maybe I’ll pick up one of his books someday. Though I strongly suspect I’m too lazy…
Sometimes people you hate say things you like. The link goes to an article about the campaign in Pennsylvania, where Hillary Clinton was taking a swipe at Barack Obama by promising
“I don’t want to just show up and give one of those whoop-dee-do speeches and get everybody whipped up,” she said. “I want everyone thinking.”
OK, so we all have our guilty pleasures. I don’t mean to suggest any kind of support for Hillary Clinton, but Barack Obama seriously gets on my nerves - and for exactly that reason.
There’s a bumper sticker from the last campaign that I think of when I hear Barack Obama speak. It reads “‘Yee-Haw!’ is not a foreign policy” - a criticism of Bush, obviously. The idea being that you can’t just say “freedom” endlessly and talk about how great America is and expect things to work out. At some point you have to get your hands dirty and work with the world as it really is - and that’s a complicated thing that doesn’t admit of a one-size-fits-all solution. Well, that’s more or less how I feel about Barack Obama. You can’t just say “hope” and “unity” endlessly and expect things to work out. At some point, it doesn’t hurt to outline a program.
I wonder, actually, how many people with those “Yee-Haw” bumper stickers are now canvassing for Obama? Wouldn’t it be fun to know?
I firmly believe that the main reason why feminism isn’t taken seriously is that it’s so often oblivious to its own double standards. If there’s one complaint that men have made loudly, clearly, and consistently about feminists since the 70s, it’s that they are singularly incapable of playing fair about “liberation.” For example - although there are notable exceptions, it’s a rare thing for a feminist organization to seriously campaign for the inclusion of women in Selective Service registration. Another thing you rarely hear is complaints from feminists about the “underrepresentation” of women in professions like trash collection and sewer line maintenance. Again, no doubt there are some feminists of integrity who consider this an issue on par with the corporate glass ceiling, but for the most part it’s hard to divorce oneself from the idea that women’s organizations are simply gunning for more privilege.
In pop politics, we usually hear this complaint in the context of chivalry. Men are rightly confused here: women get angry when we whistle at them, and yet they still expect us to do the asking for dates. We’re not expected to pay for everything anymore, but generally speaking, you’re expected to pay for the first couple of outings. What gives?
This attitude was on full display in today’s paper. The link goes to a column by Rachael Goldberg that is a muddled mass of contradictions essentially amount to “I want chivalry when I want it, not when I don’t.”
She takes as her starting point an incident when she was shopping with one of her male friends. He’d put some water bottles on the bottom ledge of the shopping cart, and she politely asked him to lift them for her. He politely asked her to do it herself, which she did - much to the chagrin of the checkout girl, who commented that chivalry was truly dead.
“Honey, did that boy just make you put that up there?” I nodded sadly. “Yes, yes he did.” And the cashier replied, “Wow. Chivalry really is dead.”
Now - let me go on record saying that I definitely don’t mind lifting water for girls. My problem here isn’t with the assumption that men should do these things, but rather with the double standard Goldberg goes on to express.
Being chivalrous can include all these horrible masculine stereotypes of men needing to be strong and needing to protect and save women. This in turn implies that women must be weak and need protecting. And you know me: The eternal gender-rights advocate does not support any of that.
Well, one wonders, if you’re an “eternal gender-rights advocate” who can’t abide those “horrible masculine stereotypes of men needing to be strong and needing to protect and save women,” then WHY THE HELL DID YOU ASK THE GUY TO LIFT THE WATER FOR YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE?
While I don’t mind lifting water bottles - my arms are strong enough for it - an offer to help out would have been appreciated.
Why? If you don’t mind lifting water bottles, then why not just do it? On what basis should he have offered to help? Apparently, if this is to be believed, because it’s “common courtesy.”
It’s not about being weak or strong. It’s just about being a nice person who is considerate of others. And in such a misogynistic society, being considerate of women is something that’s always needed.
In other words, what we’re in the presence of here is someone who wants her water bottles lifted for her without the assumption that men are stronger than women.
Well, sorry, but NO. It doesn’t work that way. If we’re in a situation where a man and a woman are in the grocery store, and the woman is closer to the water bottles, and we have no underlying assumptions about the relative body strength of men and women, then we go to the default system: the closest person in a state of physical health does the lifting. That’s how it would work among an all-male group, that’s how it would work among an all-female group, and if we’re true believers in equality, that’s how it works in mixed groups as well. If, however, we’re in a mixed group and the rule shifts from “nearest person does the lifting” to “nearest male does the lifting,” then we’re implicity adopting social roles. Again, for the record, I don’t have any particular problem with these social roles. What I have a problem with is my having to keep up the shit end of the stick while Miss Princess gets to pretend that we’re completely equal.
Equality means “same standards apply.” It doesn’t mean “standards apply and don’t according to the whims of the female.” It CERTAINLY doesn’t mean “standards apply and don’t according to the whims of the female, and she reserves the right to make moral judgements about her friends based on standards she hasn’t made clear to them.”
So - Rachel Goldberg: get over yourself. I think you’ll find that chivalry is far from dead - it’s just that it’s dead for you. And that’s as it should be: chivalry is a system for people with manners - something that derives from social expectations. If your social expectations are “people do nice things for me, and I am inconsiderate of them,” then you have completely failed to internalize the system. We - all of us - get to pick one of two attitudes to chivalry. Either we like and expect it, and thereby consent, to some non-trivial degree, to the social roles that give rise to it, or we don’t like and don’t accept it, and thus we carry our own water. Even the women.