Category Archives: English

Updated: 'The Shangri-La of Socratic Disinterest'

Canada, English, Intelligence, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Rex Murphy, easily Canada’s finest political writer, has furnished us with the best description of the Bill O’Reilly Show: the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest.

I would imagine that to practice the Socratic Method, a man must possess a curious mind and be less of an egotist, attributes the intellectually incurious Mr. O’Reilly lacks.

In any case, “the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest” is a wonderful turn of phrase.

Update: I see we’ve been visited by one of the many fans of the big-government, interventionist neoconservative Bill O’Reilly. Did I miss that lot! This from “DUMB AND DIRTY NEOCON ARTISTS”:

Like any leftist, neocons support the meddlesome expansion of the “Managerial State” at home. Somewhat at odds with many liberals, the neocons want to take the same intrusive crusade abroad. This is what defines Bush’s neoconservative administration: social engineering both at home and abroad.

Update III: Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable

Democracy, Education, Elections, English, Etiquette, Family, Intelligence, Liberty, Propaganda

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM weekly column, “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable”:

“Don’t ask why the ‘news’ is all aflutter for Meghan McCain, but earlier in February, she issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, on a forum – ABC’s ‘The View’ – that is a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity:

The Tea Party Movement was ‘innately racist,’ Meghan said. This was why “young people were turned off by the movement.” And , in her most grating Valley-Girl inflection: ‘I’m sorry—revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word vote in English.’

The rude reference was to Tom Tancredo’s observation that people ‘who cannot spell the word vote or say it in English’ are determining elections in America.

The former congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was on to something. The Founding Founders decided in their wisdom that only propertied males would vote. To justify distaff disenfranchisement look no further than ‘Meghaan.’ As to the other limitation: The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today’s pillage politics – and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. And all too well did the founder know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied.

But what would ‘Meghaan,’ a member of the Millennial generation, know about a group of truly great revolutionaries whose average age, in 1776, was 44?

“The ‘Meghaan’ Millennials are a generation of youngsters that reveres only itself for no good reason.” Yes, ‘Meghan is a member of a studied cohort, born between 1980 and 2001.” Read more about these “needy and narcissistic dullards.”

The column is “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable.

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Feb. 19): To the critic hereunder: The column references “The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work,” an article that distills the conclusions of a book packed with data. The method of the column: go from the particular to the general; go from one colorful case everyone knows and move to the general.

Update II: “Thomas” below is yet another instructive case study on the Millennials, their demeanor and capabilities. Note the run-on, ungrammatical, misspelled, incoherent sentences. T. has not been taught to write a simple sentence with a subject, a verb and the attendant clauses. Not his fault, I guess, but I know many self-taught individuals who’ve made up for the deficiencies of their teachers just fine.

He’s arrogant and insulting; is big on the ad hominem and the non sequiturs; but incapable of putting forth an argument. An example of a non sequiturs hereunder: I should be picking on another generation, he says. Maybe, but this column is about his generation (I presume). The the fact that another generation is problematic doesn’t invalidate a critique of the Millennials. See what I mean by a non sequituir?

My column argued that, for the most, not his but my generation has invented and is perfecting the gadgets he cannot do without, yet he repeats the following fallacy: The twitterering twits are prescient and streaks ahead of us, their parents.

In fairness to the poor creature, I have received many such letters in my career. They tend to be from younger people, but not always.

Finally, another typical sign of grandiosity: He has not read the posting policy on this blog. Since rules are not for his ilk, he does not dare limit the reader’s exposure to this word salad of his. A good teacher would have red inked this letter, and taught the young man to say what he is struggling to say in one short paragraph.

As you can imagine, there are a dozen more insulting messages demanding space on this, my private property. The insults, moreover, evince the utter absence of intellectual curiosity—T. had not read any of my writings or my bio, so has cheerily lumped me with all of Hannity’s handmaidens.

Update III (Feb. 22): Robert’s point I’m afraid is simplistic; and certainly not the thrust of my article. Hint: Most everything I direct my cultural commentary at, and this column is no exception, can be summed up thus: ORDERED LIBERTY. Ordered liberty is about hierarchy. Read “THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARIES.” Perhaps the larger philosophical point of everything cultural I write will become clearer.

Update II: A Poem

English, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Pop-Culture

BEAK

By Kit Wright

To the clicking of knitting needles, I fell asleep on the train
And I dreamed of knitting, is this what they call woolgathering,
Dreamed of my mother purling and plaining to patterns
In Woman’s Own Woman. I woke to a woman
Whose long mauve thumbnail was sharpened into a spike
And she texed, texed, texed with that pecking beak.

Update I (Jan. 18): Amazing. That readers of this blog would imagine I’d post a postmodern poem. The last bit of poetry I posted was that of the superlative Louis MacNeice. See “The Magic Of MacNeice.”

I skimmed “BEAK” in the Times Literary Supplement and liked it because it was so “plain” spoken and hit home hard in a few short sentences.

The guy dozes off on the train to the sounds of tapping, which triggers dreams of his mother’s pacifying knitting activity. He awakens to see beside him one of the millions of modern automatons texting feverishly with a beak-like implement. Haven’t you seen this specter all around you?

To me, “BEAK” is about a yen for a more comforting time in our collective past. It seems simple and un-intellectual (although not easy to write). It’s not written in post-modern parlance either. Any half-decent writer will admire “purling and plaining to patterns…” Neat.

My intention was not to perplex, but to please.

Update II (Jan. 19): The modern woman scares this man with her sharp edges. That’s another sensibility that jumped out at me.

And since BG brought up imagery, I was reminded of the wool shop situated in the central bus station of the Netanya of my youth. I had decided to master the art of knitting for a boyfriend of 4 years. (I wrote about the “the (unrequited) love of my life” in “About A Boy.”) Before being drafted, he was to get a pullover with intricate ropes down its considerable lengths, as he was “a powerfully built six-foot-three.”

It was a once-off affair: I mean the knitting, not the boy. The shop keeper provided all the instruction, patiently. The project was ongoing, and I’d pop in twice weekly on my way to school, for her to untangle knots and help when a new obstacle in the pattern presented itself. There was something so quaint and comforting about the deft wool lady and her knitting needles.

Does this poem evoke a sense of loss—perhaps becasue women no longer engage in homey activities we once associated with the comfort of mom, kindly shop lady, etc? When I read this little (never great, just neat) poem, I knew the poet was an older gentleman.

Homework: Check my instincts. Google his name to see if I am right.

Updated: Reduced To Grunts By Grown-Ups

Education, English, Intelligence, Literature, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason, The Zeitgeist

Reid Buckley on teaching a writing course to the functionally illiterate students in a run-of-the-mill American university:

“…These young people had not been taught to edit. They had not been taught self-criticism. They had been reared in an environment of self-esteem, even when this went unexamined and was unearned. And when they returned a week later with the fruits of their labors, I was appalled. I took the papers home and spent two afternoons and two evenings past midnight editing them.”

“I had to contend with an illiterate heaping of multisyllabic social-studies mush whose meaning was either obscured or contradicted by other heapings of academic mush, as indecipherable as they were ungrammatical. Illicit inferences lurked under false premises like salamanders under rocks. Logical connections did not exist. Non sequiturs were thick as chiggers. Do not mention grace or style. Of the 28 papers I labored through, only in two did I detect talent buried in the rubble. I had never seen anything so hopeless.”

“When I proceeded to go over the essay of another young man, his voice caught in his throat and he broke down. I was taken aback. We hadn’t proceeded beyond the first page. His wasn’t the worst effort, either. But he wasn’t protesting my criticisms. To the contrary. ‘You’re right,’ he kept repeating, tears flowing, ‘It’s awful. I can’t write my thoughts down. They come out a mess, I know!’ And then he related a scandal. Not in four years of high school and three years of college had a single teacher expressed concern about his writing or offered to edit it. When he said this, other students spoke out to confirm cognate experiences. ‘What can I do now?’ this young man asked me despairingly. ‘I graduate in two months!'”

“The dimensions of his doom and that of these other young people hit me with full force. Not once in their educational lives had they been taught to impose order on chaos, that being contrary to the central dogma of liberal-arts education in our country today. There is no such thing as choosing, as distinguishing between the false and the real, discriminating between good and bad. The cost of this heresy to our nation is beyond calculating: for two generations our businesses, professions, universities, and politics have been populated by moral illiterates who reject reason.”

“The art of writing is the soul of reason, from which all civilization has spun. If one cannot give expression to one’s thoughts, one is reduced to grunts. These young men and women were to be graduated in two months’ time. Yet they were functionally illiterate, as the saying goes—a hideous euphemism for being thrust into the adult world intellectually crippled. Several other students who crowded around me now claimed that never had they had their written work reviewed. I was incredulous. “Never?” “Not once!” came their reply…”

[SNIP]

Do read “The Write Stuff.” It’s a tad overwritten, in my opinion. Reid, moreover, fails to distinguish between the problem of functional illiteracy and the blight of postmodern writing. The two are distinct, with some overlap. In all, the extent of the horror of the betrayal of generations of students by pedagogues cannot be repeated often enough. Kids don’t deserve this.

Update (August 26): Edmund Burke: “Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” (From “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”Vol. iii. p. 335.)