Category Archives: America

UPDATED: Meanness Shines Through The Shock

America, Etiquette, Family, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

This is one of those things one gets into trouble for noticing and pointing out. So I’ll go ahead and point it out, ’cause—boy!—did I notice it.

Gene Rosen, “a 69-year-old retired psychologist… took … four girls and two boys” from the Sandy Hook Elementary school into his home near the school, shortly after the shooting.

Rosen said he had heard the staccato sound of gunfire about 15 minutes earlier but dismissed it as an obnoxious hunter in the nearby woods.
“I had no idea what had happened,” Rosen said. “I couldn’t take that in.”
He walked the children past his small goldfish pond with its running waterfall, and the garden he made with his two grandchildren, into the small yellow house he shares with his wife.
He ran upstairs and grabbed an armful of stuffed animals. He gave those to the children, along with some fruit juice, and sat with them as the two boys described seeing their teacher being shot.

But this good Samaritan’s offering did not quite meet the standards of one of his small guests. The boy responded with a comment Rosen thought so adorable, he “wanted to tell him, `I love you. I love you.'”

“This little boy turns around, and composes himself, and he looks at me like he had just removed himself from the carnage and he says, `Just saying, your house is very small.'”

Is that not a rude and unkind quip?

Just saying.

UPDATE (1/11): Everyone on Facebook ducked the issue of how badly behaved kids have become. Myron Pauli at least responded by changing the subject. But pretending the problem doesn’t exist is becoming harder. Fox and experts are catching up with a topic I’ve been covering since the early 2000s and before. “We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists.”

UPDATE III: Botching English (‘Creative’ Is NOT A Noun)

America, Education, English, Literature

Bill O’Reilly has a ludicrous segment on The Factor, where he pretends to introduce his listeners to English words that he supposedly uses.

Last week he introduced the word “chimera,” in which he pronounced the “ch” as you would in “chimp.”

Having actually used this lovely word before I was convinced that the “ch” was pronounced as a “k.” And so it is.

Oh, BO also habitually conjugates incorrectly, saying “laying around” instead of “lying around” in his “Talking Points.” A lot of American writers do that.

I recall that when he was on WND, in the early 2000s, O’Reilly would make this same conjugation error (it drives me to drink), and I’d drop him a polite note. He never replied, but he quickly fixed the mistake. (Myself, I thank my readers profusely when they save me from myself, as they often do, and request that they keep their eyes peeled for any future faux pas.)

Another common error, in enunciation, this time, is “macabre.” The Americanized dictionary support the locals’ hideous habit of saying “macabra.” Sorry. The “re” in “macabre” is silent.

Still on enunciation: “PundiNts.” Even Hillary Clinton inserts an “n” between the “i” and the “t” when pronouncing the word “pundit.” Why?

“Flaunting” laws instead of “flouting” them is especially infuriating. When a politician uses “flaunt” instead of “flout,” as Colin Powell once did, the ultimate penalty should be exerted.

Today (1/3/213) I ran for cover as Bob Costa, National Review’s youthful editor, spoke about a GOP revolt against House Speaker John Boehner. Costa said the following on the Kudlow Report:

“… if he lost 17 Republican votes that means he would have went to a second ballot.”

Costa should have been flogged for not saying, “He would have GONE.” (Although nobody would know why he was being flogged.)

Together, let’s conjugate the verb to “go,” Mr. Costa. “I am going. I will go. I went. I have previously gone. I had gone. I would have gone.”

My first language is Hebrew. However, I like to think that thanks to the drilling I was given, in Israel, by my old English teacher (a Yekke), I can conjugate my verbs.

When it comes to spelling, however, I am lost without Windows.

UPDATE I (Jan. 3): MERCER MISTAKES. One of my wonderful readers has already corrected my TV mistakes in the article, now on RT. He writes: “You had a typo.
Jon Hamm, not John Han. Also, ‘Mad Men’ is an AMC show, not HBO.”

UPDATE II (Jan. 6): RICHARD BURTON. The great Richard Burton, both chivalrous and brilliant, said: “I am as thrilled by the English language as I am by a lovely woman.”

UPDATE III (May 15): ANOTHER NO-NO. “Creative” is not a noun. Don’t call yourself a “creative.” You will stand out not for your creativity (a noun), but for your pretentiousness.

Tom Wolfe’s Big, Bad Book

America, Celebrity, English, Intelligence, Literature, Sex

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A careful guardian of the English language Tom Wolfe is not. The infelicities of style and substance in the novelist’s latest book are summed up by Stephen Abell, in the Times Literary Supplement’s November 9, 2012 issue. Abell’s verdict about the door-stopper, Back to Blood: “While it is big, it is not particularly clever”:

…as we struggle through his fourth blockbuster, Back to Blood, we begin to reflect that size, in literature as in life, is not everything. We can at least confidently point to some of the products of Wolfe’s recent cramming …

… [Wolfe] direct[‘s] much of our attention beneath the sheets. Not that sex in Back to Blood goes on merely in the bedroom. In one ill-conceived set-piece, Norman and Magdalena attend a regatta, which becomes a floating orgy with pornography being displayed on the giant sails of some of the boats (complete with rather startling “labia majorae three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center”).

Sex unquestionably brings out some of the flaws in Wolfe’s prose. For example, its effortfully mimetic approach, where the writing enacts the sounds it is describing. This is from a superfluous trip to the “Honey Pot” (an unimaginative strip club), where Wolfe wants to leave us in no doubt about the pole-straddling gyrations of the woman on stage: “BEAT thung CROTCH thung TAIL thung CRACK thung PERI thung NEUM thung”. Or its obsession with transcribing sounds to needless effect (which creates sentences that make it look as if the author has fallen asleep against his keyboard): “unhh, ahhh ahhh, ooom-muh, ennngh ohhhhunh”. There is crass imagery (“his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle”) and glib alliteration (“lascivious looks of men lifting the lust in the loins”). And there is the relentlessly anatomical categorization: “pectoral glories”, “mons pubis”, “their montes veneris”.

…The corollary is, needless to say, a simplistic attitude towards men, and manliness. Men in Back to Blood are judged by the quality of “not being a pussy”, and by their muscularity (an area where Wolfe has an almost fetishistic eye): …

… The notion of an anatomical approach is also crucial to understanding Wolfe’s writing style more generally. He is a founding father of what might called “List lit”, in which constituent aspects of life are broken down into a catalogue of parts. So, for example, when a character sits before a desk, we are immediately presented “with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony”.

At the basic level of sentence structure, this often means that Wolfe’s descriptions (and the descriptions are unquestionably his; they do not vary with the characters on whose perceptions they are apparently based) are filled with minor variation, as if he wishes to create an effect of mass multiplication simply by using near-synonyms: “they looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up”; “he could insult people to their faces, humiliate them, break their spirits . . . make them cry, sob, blubber, boohoo”.

The result is a novel which is bright and busy, and full of information rather than imagination.

MORE.

For The Love of A Brother-In-Arms, And ‘Big Brother’ Be Damned

America, BAB's A List, Ethics, Fascism, Military, Nationhood, War

Robert Glisson rides with the ““Patriot Guard Riders.” I do not identify with the military mission, but who can fault the humanity of the effort?

For The Love of A Brother-In-Arms, And ‘Big Brother’ Be Damned
BY ROBERT GLISSON

The late October morning sky over northern Oklahoma is overcast as you follow the bikes in staggered formation, onto the Air Guard base. They make a circle and line up on each side of the exit concourse behind the guard shack that splits the exit from the entrance. The rumble of Harleys in neutral is heard, as the heavy bikes are backed to the curb, nose pointed toward the exit at a forty-five degree angle. Silence returns as one by one the kickstands drop and the riders unhorse.

Ride Captains in maroon caps begin passing US Flags on eight foot PVC shafts to the riders quietly. Two lines of scruffy men and women dressed in black leather or dark waterproof raingear line themselves ten feet apart smoothly, quietly on each side of the street, forming a corridor of red-white-and blue a hundred and twenty feet long. Hardly a word is spoken, as the flags begin gently waving in the cool damp fall breeze.

Two Senior Ride Captains begin an inspection walk inside the corridor of proud, straight figures. Many of the men and women have lost the battle with gravity and the razor; but, the grip on the staff is steady, the eyes focused on a point a thousand yards away. Satisfied that the formation is ready, the SRCs walk back slowly to the line’s tail, stopping at each flag to personally thank the rider holding the flag for his or her time.

The backs of vests and jackets of the riders carry multiple Colors, insignia and rockers; American Veterans MC; American Legion; The Priesthood; Christian Motorcycle Association; Faith Riders; Mongols Vandals; Outlaws; Forgotten Few. Some are loners- no colors, no rockers, nothing to show any association or organization or location; but, all are part of the Patriot Guard Riders at this time. Patriot Guard Riders in Oklahoma do not wear colors and have no identification insignia. PGR in other states do wear colors; for states membership is free; 264 K members at this time, not all attend missions.

It begins to rain lightly, fingers get colder and stiffer, but the line holds steady. An Air Force lieutenant exits the Administration building, speaks briefly to the captains and returns to his warm office. “The Angel Flight (Plane carrying the soldier’s body) was delayed in its take-off from Dover AFB. They will be at least fifteen minutes late.” The line of men and women holds. Twenty minutes later, “The flight is delayed due to the heavy cloud cover over the country. It will be another fifteen minutes.”

The line holds quietly, no one complains.

The PGR line remains still and quiet in the drizzle as the Airmen jostle into position to form another honor line. A sergeant with the Air Guard News appears with his camera. The PGR has stood for approximately an hour so far. “The plane is now on the runway, the Military Honor Guard is transferring the coffin to the coach. They should be here in fifteen-twenty minutes. Ten minutes later the rain slacks off and riders can now hold their head fully upright without having to blink away the rain.

The procession stops just pass the line and before the exit unto the city street. Young Airmen quickly come, take the flags from the riders. Bikers now freed, hasten to the waiting wet bikes, brush off the seats and mount up, denim against wet leather. The air is filled with the sound of motorcycles forced into a hasty warm-up by their owners. The V-Twins respond eagerly. Within moments the line of flag-carrying motorcycles is moving up past the coach into lead position. The law enforcement vehicles will take a position at least five hundred feet ahead to protect, but stay apart from the procession. Without a word, the bikes roll out onto the wet pavement, wet flags attached to the rear, trying to wave in the dismal, damp air as they begin a forty mile highway escort, taking a fallen warrior home.

Another day, servicemen and women exit an aircraft and walk through a double line of flag-bearing PGR to welcome them home or, if leaving, walk through the same line to board a plane to their duty station. Older PGR Captains, assume the position of fathers to reassure the serviceman’s wife that the separation is only temporary and that their husband will return, just as they did long ago.

This is the Patriot Guard Riders, a volunteer group of citizens, mostly ex-military and motorcyclist but not necessarily either one. The PGR is formed to support veterans. Originally formed to shield the family of soldiers killed in action from protestors at funerals, it has grown to honor and respect all veterans and servicemen. Non-political, it contains men and women of all political, religious, and opinion stripes. Ex-service salute, civilians place their hands over their hearts, all show respect.

It is said that the US is the only country to have barn raisings. I can’t say that for sure. But I can say that the volunteer spirit in the United States is second to none. Most of this country was built by individuals working with other individuals long before governments were formed. Some feared that without the draft, there would be no military. They missed the spirit of the people who love their country and countrymen. The Patriot Guard Riders is only one organization among many. Habitat for Humanity is a ‘barn raising’ group of volunteers that now covers the world. The Red Cross, Salvation Army, and the Southern Baptist Disaster Crews: These are but a few organizations that reflect the ‘Spirit of America. There Civil War Enactors, Single Action Pistol associations, the clubs, Masons, Rotary, Lions, Moose, Eagles, Knights of Columbus, etc. It is that American spirit that says “Get up, make a difference.”

It is the true spirit of this country.

*********
Robert Glisson is a retired Oklahoma Probation and Parole Officer, fiction writer, vineyard worker (you don’t own it, it owns you), amateur wine maker (you have to drink your mistakes, whoopee), and biker by choice. He is also a longtime reader of Barely A Blog. Robert served in the US Navy between 1960-1964, inactive reserve 65-66- 66-68.