Category Archives: English

Part II: American Newspapers Dying Of Self-Inflicted Wounds. Good.

Affirmative Action, English, Internet, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

Why is the newspaper industry moribund and, we hope, beyond resuscitation? Veteran journalist William Murchison tells the story “of a profession invaded and subjugated by a type of journalist far less like the average reader than like, well, the members of a political science seminar at an upscale Eastern or West Coast university. That’s irrespective of whether such journalists ever caught sight of a college seminar room.”

“They tended to see journalism as a platform for identifying, investigating, exposing, and addressing social and political grievances: such grievances as often enough the customers didn’t see for themselves, but here was a new breed of newsmen to show them what they had missed.”

“The old-style newspaperman whom I came to know face to face in the ’60s was a differently colored nag. He — he usually was that — had far likelier attended a state school than Yale or Harvard or Berkeley, assuming he went to college at all. He was jocular and irreverent in a newspaperly sort of way. Never slugged down a drink of whiskey he didn’t like. Dressed with minimal attention to fashion.”

[SNIP]

I know exactly of what Murchison speaks. Back when I attended journalism school, my lecturers were tough, middle-aged, ex-army men (no women, mercifully). They smoked, drank, and dressed in rugged jeans. They taught you how to write a mean lead (or “lede”). If it didn’t spell out the Who, Where, What, When, and How of the story—well, you heard about it. If the superlatives flowed and your prose was flowery instead of succinct—you were mocked. You were taught a craft, not an ideology—although it was well understood that the richness of your frame of reference would enhance your writing.

“After Watergate,” continues Murchison, “the paradigmatic reporter was a man — or, now, a woman — with a high-minded mission; namely to instruct society concerning its tastes and habits; to improve things. No problem there — a little improvement never hurt anyone. Problems arose only when the bearer of news arrived at the home of the recipient of news with the look of a doctor preparing a rabies injection.”

The complete, American-Spectator story is “Authors of Their Own Doom.”

Part I of the post: “American Newspapers Dying Of Self-Inflicted Wounds. Good.”

Updated: Why Support IlanaMercer.com Through This Winter Of Our Discontent

America, Barely A Blog, English, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Israel, Justice, Media

On the front page of ilanamercer.com, under the heading “Contribute,” linked to the words, “here’s why,” is an essay detailing the reasons to support the site and its proprietor. The essay, “WHY SUPPORT ILANAMERCER.COM,” has been updated with the following compelling inducements:

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT (January 31, 2009): The economy is not the only object of cooling; the weather appears to be freezing over too. This is why the gabbling, hot-and-bothered Al Gore has substituted “global warming” with the more versatile “climate change.”

Here at the Weather Underground (and @ilanamercer.com), I’ve encapsulated the Gorian illogic thus:

“Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate Chicken Littles enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.”

As Karl Popper reminded us, “A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is,” of course, “non-scientific.” What eco-idiots have done is to immunize the theory of global warming against the dangers of scientific refutation.

LET THE SUNSHINE IN. Readers of Barely A Blog were, moreover, introduced, before most in the mainstream, to the concept of “sunspot activity.” In March of 2007, I published an article written exclusively for BAB by N. Baldwin, Jr. It was based on our friend’s book, “Global Warming: CO2, SunSpots, or Politics?”

The decrease in sunspot activity—the sun having entered what appears to be a period of solar inactivity, resulting in all likelihood in global cooling—was reported a year and a half later by “Space Daily.” Fully two years after our report, sunspots, solar flares and solar eruptions have entered the overheated debate about the climate.

Having failed their readers time-and-again, the establishment media is struggling to survive. Good. Why support a source of propaganda that blows hot air about global warming and is cool to the market economy, the source of our splendid standard of living? Why contribute to the success of major media that have failed miserably and consistently to predict the outcomes of unjust wars, or warn ahead-of-time of the economic havoc wreaked by profligate administrations and their printing press?

The role of the contrarian who cleaves to the natural laws of economics and justice is even more crucial in times of crisis. To get by, such commentators rely on discerning patrons.

You, the reader, are my mainstay. I know you value the ability to come to a place in cyberspace where you’re heard, challenged, entertained—even regaled—and (gently) guided. But understand: This is hard work. It cannot be done without your assistance.

I appreciate your generosity.

ILANA

Update II: Avoid The American English Department

Education, English, History, Literature, Multiculturalism, Propaganda, The West

It is old news that the academy has been contaminated by postmodernism.

For example, academic historians and their acolytes have worked overtime to replace the impartial, non-ideological study of American history and its heroic figures with “history from below.” This postmodern tradition regularly produces works the topics of which include, “Quilting Midwives during the Revolution.” Or, “Hermaphrodites and the Clitoris in Early America.”

As you well imagine, the libidinized annals of the “Hermaphrodites and the Clitoris in Early America” is not flying off the printing presses.

The deconstruction of fields of study has engulfed universities, not sparing the hard sciences. Women’s Studies courses and English departments are most likely to be littered with the ideology’s lumpen jargon. There, text is routinely deconstructed and shred. Subjected to this “academic” acid, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot are whittled down to no more than ruling class oppressors, their artistry reduced to the bare bones of alleged power relationships in society.

Easily the worst offender is the American English Department. Phyllis Schlafly wrote the following in “Advice To College Students: Don’t Major in English”:

“In the decades before ‘progressive’ education became the vogue, English majors were required to study Shakespeare, the pre-eminent author of English literature. The premise was that students should be introduced to the best that has been thought and said.”

“What happened? To borrow words from Hamlet: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.’ Universities deliberately replaced courses in the great authors of English literature with what professors openly call ‘fresh concerns,’ ‘under-represented cultures,’ and ‘ethnic or non-Western literature.’ When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism. That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called ‘Shakespearean Sexuality,’ or ‘Chaucer: Gender and Genre’ at Hamilton College. …”

“Twenty years ago, University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom achieved best-seller lists and fame with his book The Closing of the American Mind. He dated the change in academic curricula from the 1960s when universities began to abandon the classic works of literature and instead adopt multicultural readings written by untalented, unimportant women and minorities.”

“Bloom’s book showed how the Western canon of what educated Americans should know – from Socrates to Shakespeare – was replaced with relativism and the goals of opposing racism, sexism and elitism. Current works promoting multiculturalism written by women and minorities replaced the classics of Western civilization written by the DWEMs, Dead White European Males.”

“Left-wing academics, often called tenured radicals, eagerly spread the message, and students at Stanford in 1988 chanted ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go.’ The classicists were cowed into silence, and it’s now clear that the multiculturalists won the canon wars.”

“Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton have been replaced by living authors who toe the line of multicultural political correctness, i.e., view everything through the lens of race, gender and class based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society. The only good news is that students seldom read books any more and use Cliffs Notes for books they might be assigned.”

[SNIP]

In its December 12, 2008 issue, the Times Literary Supplement has some fun at the expense of a pompous graduate of this pathetic tradition. The incomprehensibility factor, as they call it:

“Once the habit of writing comprehensible English has been unlearned, it can be difficult to reacquire the knack. Here is an example of a sentence which purports to be written in English, but which, we propose, is incomprehensible to all but a few. It is taken from Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting time and space in narrative fiction by Hilary P. Dannenberg”:

Historical counterfactuals in narrative fiction frequently take an ontologically different form in which the counterfactual premise engenders a whole narrative world instead of being limited to hypothetical inserts embedded in the main actual world of the narrative text.

About Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park Dannenberg the dolt writes that it “undertakes a more concerted form of counterfactualizing, in which both the character and the narrator separately map out counterfactual versions of the concluding phase of the novel’s love plot.”

In studied contempt, the TLS marvels that Coincidence and Counterfactuality “is published by the University of Nebraska Press. Just think: someone read the book and endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs—yet hardly anyone can understands what’s in it.”

Now that’s good, clear English everyone gets.

Update I (December 22): a good friend of mine, also a fine and successful novelist, relates this amusing incident:

“I once got hired by the U of Chicago to edit their academic press. The manuscripts were atrocious. I could not understand what was written, and used a red pen heavily in the margins of the manuscripts. After my corrections arrived, I was fired immediately. They told me I was not ‘intellectually sophisticated’ enough for the job. To which I replied: ‘You’re right: Fuck you.'”

Update II: Would I have, like my friend, responded so confidently and cleverly, as our reader suggests? I don’t think so. I’d probably become defensive, and return an analytical evisceration, which would have been wasted on the these literary offenders. My friend’s repartee is much more effective: it’s economical and intellectually apt, given its targets.

Updated: And It Came To Pass, That THE TIMES Parodied Obama, And Behold It Was Very Good, And Truly I Say Unto You, It Rocketh!

Barack Obama, Britain, English, Intellectualism, Journalism, Media

The blog’s title is Rob Stove’s, the epistolary Wizard of Oz.

Gerard Baker’s lampoon of Obama was read on Fox-News’ Hannity & Colmes. Mr. Hannity credited “My producer,” rather than its talented author (who narrated). The banal front men and women of American punditry prefer not to doff a metaphoric hat to their betters. In fact, unless absolutely irresistible—as this piece surely is—they prefer that the less known about ideas not their own, the better. Dimming debate so that they are never outshone is the impetus behind the men and women of America’s malpracticing media. The result: a paucity of original thinking in American public life. Mencken would have been unemployed today, because brilliant (and non-partisan).

Satirical writing such as Baker’s is seldom undertaken by American pundits, whose writing is strictly prosaic and pedestrian. Likewise, it remains unappreciated by readers. Rob tells me that “in Australia there seems to be this notion that if a writer uses nuance, he must be homosexual.” I’d argue that this perception is rooted in a culture that still values manliness, albeit in its symbolic manifestation. Anointed public intellectuals in the US are almost always the “girlie boys”—down to their trendy eye wear, fussy falsettos, and pasty faces. Their writing is similarly androgynous.

(Vastly inferior, my “Mephisto’s Medicare: A Parable” was written many years ago when the muse struck. More “prosaic” versions thereof were published in the Calgary Herald and Vancouver Sun. I take consolation in knowing I’d do better today.)

Update (July 28): Please note “Mild Colonial Boy’s” comments hereunder. I missed the part of the broadcast to which he refers. My bad. Therefore, he is correct; I may have been hasty, but heck, 99 percent of the time my comments obtain. It is most unusual for the cable cohort to air, much less credit, original thinking.

HE VENTURED FORTH TO BRING LIGHT TO THE WORLD
By Gerard Baker

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth – for the first time – to bring the light unto all the world.

He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the

Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.

And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child’s very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares.

From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered “Hosanna” and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet.

In Jerusalem and in surrounding Palestine, the Child spake to the Hebrews and the Arabs, as the Scripture had foretold. And in an instant, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Israelites and Ishmaelites ended their long enmity and lived for ever after in peace.

As word spread throughout the land about the Child’s wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites.

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child’s journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.

And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again.

Black gold gushed from the ground at prices well below $140 per barrel. In hospitals across the land the sick were cured even though they were uninsured. And all because the Child had pronounced it.

And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times.

Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length.

But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him.

And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets.

Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not.

On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”