history

Although I’m usually reluctant to indulge in simple linkblogging, I would like to call your attention to a product that is, in more ways than one, exceptional. Via The Map Room and The Earth is Square:

Does your vehicle’s GPS navigation system confuse you more than it helps you? Do you glance at the screen to discover that you appear to be motoring over a golf course? When you pull out of your driveway on a quick run to the grocery store, does a disembodied female voice attempt to guide you to the Company Picnic you attended last August? Then you are among the millions of drivers today that just aren’t cut out for satellite technology.

Introducing the Analog GPS. It’s back to the navigational basics with this new (yet very old), state-of-the- Age of Enlightenment instrument. It’s just like the one great-great- great-great granddad used, with an attractive brass finish and its own wooden carrying case! As the vendor states, “Not included are the required declination charts (call for details) or the extremely accurate watch you are going to need to use this thing. Meets R.N. standard 3329-5 of 1787.”

So act now! You can be a Luddite on wheels for the extremely high price of $3,117 plus shipping - and by “shipping,” we mean six to eight months to the West Coast by way of Cape Horn.

I never would have believed that I’d live to see the day when the United States government legislated torture. Now that I have, it makes me want to scream. Or rather, it makes me want to screed - but no one wants to read a screed, so I’ll do my best to scrape together some restraint. Easier written than done. This is a flagrant transgression of the most basic principles of American democracy, and I take it very personally.

Before Mark Foley and his dirty IM’s with teenaged boys so captivated the nation, you’ll recall that the previous week the Senate approved Bush’s euphemistically-named Military Commissions Act by a 65-34 margin. The House then voted 250-170 to approve the senate version. So there it is, America: the latest return on the taxes you paid out for your representatives’ salaries, the “We Can Torture if We Want To, We Can Leave Your Friends Behind” Act of 2006.

What the hell has become of us? How is this possible? Have they lost their minds, are they MAD, are they absolutely batshit INSANE??? I thought that even members of Congress weren’t SO devoid of conscience as to wave this through. Senator John McCain, a victim of torture as a POW during the Vietnam War, the guy who pushed through the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to ensure that the U.S. would not itself perpetuate such atrocities, now has caved to the Bush Administration’s insistence on permitting the CIA to act as judge, jury and torturer for “unlawful enemy combatants.” Why? Because he wants to be President in 2008, so he can’t allow himself to become the guy who punted the midterm elections to the Democrats in ‘06. So what does he have to say for himself? Some mealymouthed crap about how he’s “confident” that the worst torture methods will probably not be used, or something like that. Pfft! If he still had the keys to his old “Straight Talk Express” bus, maybe he could just say, “Call me a hypocrite, call me a flip-flopper, call me a partisan douchebag - just don’t call me soft on terrorism!”

The central fallacy is that this measure is going to make us safer. We’ve all heard the approved Republican pro-torture talking points parroted into microphones up and down Capitol Hill: “these interrogation techniques have prevented further terrorist attacks,” “the war on terror is a totally different kind of war, so we have to do totally different things to win it,” “those opposing this legislation are against giving the President the tools he needs to win the war on terror,” and of course the Dick Cheney Fear-a-palooza Special, “these are terrorists, they’re coming to kill you and your family, they don’t care about your rights, so why do you care about theirs?”

Each of these are nothing but different shades of horseshit. First of all, from a purely practical standpoint there are many, many statements for the record by experienced military interrogators who state flatly that torture doesn’t work. The statements and information it produces are deeply unreliable, and it endangers American soldiers in the event of their capture. It’s very easy for the Bush administration to claim that they’d beaten information out of captives that had enabled them to foil planned terrorist attacks, since any specific details that would prove or disprove the claims are kept classified.

This is not a “totally different kind of war.” Terrorism is not new, and in fact it’s not even war - it’s crime. We’ve responded to these large-scale crimes by waging military war. The resulting condition of asymmetric war is attended by reams of historical precedent. I’ll give them credit for accuracy on one thing, though: the Bush administration is indeed using a completely, um, different set of tactics to conduct this war, to put it politely.

We in America HAVE all of the tools we need to win the war on terror. We have the capability to hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists that attacked us. Amidst the swell of international good will toward the United States in the wake of September 11, shoring up our foreign alliances could have served to isolate the terrorists and grease the springs of the imminent mousetrap operation (as it were). Instead, Bush and his ship of fools belittled the U.N., denigrated long-standing allies, and demonstrated all manner of reckless incompetence. I remember awhile back when the White House sound bites du jour included lines about “winning Iraqi hearts and minds.” Three years on, we’ve announced our intention to settle for kicking clueless Arab goatherders in the testicles. It might not win too many hearts or minds, but it plays well at election time and makes Bush, Dick and Rummy feel like tough guys. The Bush administration has often expressed a cavalier disregard for other nations’ opinions of the United States, including his hyperbolic straw man line from the 2004 election campaign about how he would “refuse to ask for a permission slip from foreign countries to protect America.” In fact, he should care what other countries think of us. He should care a lot. The world is smaller now than ever, more and more institutions are “global,” and no country is an island unto itself.

To defeat the people that perpetrated atrocities against us, I think it’s important for our nation to conduct ourselves non-atrociously. This may seem obvious to the point of being patronizing, but it bears pointing out in light of the “terrorists don’t respect our rights, so we don’t respect theirs” argument. Lowering ourselves to Al Qaida-standard of human rights practices is not only morally indefensible, but also self-defeating in the extreme. To prevail, we need to be better than they are: more just, more free, more beneficient. We need to demonstrate again why we are the world’s leading nation. We need to lead by example, relying upon the best qualities of our society.

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?

Never.

All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer that if it ever reach us, it must spring from amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be the authors and finishers.

As a nation of free men, we must live through our times or die by suicide.

- Abraham Lincoln

Today, the second in my ongoing series of posts laying claim to the relatively few things that I liked before they were in style:

Don’t worry, I won’t be using “smurf” as a
verb or an adjective. Ever.

Smurfs. They may not be on my mind much anymore, but in 1979 it was another story. My family spent that summer motoring around Europe in a Volkswagen Westfalia camper; how exactly my parents were able to tolerate sleeping in a VW bus (like this one, except in beige instead of pea green) with boys aged eight and ten for three months is a question I can’t answer.

Visiting some family friends in the seaside town of Lund, Sweden, the little blue guys caught my attention in the toy collection of the younger son. I was told that they were called “smølfs.” I had never seen anything like them, but apparently my Swedish counterpart already considered them passé. In fact, he quickly offered the handful of them that he had to me, declaring that he was “fed up with them” (or at least, that’s how his father translated what he said). I might have wondered why he was so eager to get rid of them, but I was too young to have developed that kind of cynicism. I felt like I had won the toy lottery.

I began collecting them as we continued traveling from country to country. The main obstacle was that each European language had its own translation of “smølf,” which made inquiring about them in different countries’ toy stores a tricky exercise in phonetic learning. To this day, one of the few phrases of German that I know is, “Haben sie schlümpfe?” I was ultmately faced with the choice of which language’s name for the stubby blue guys I would adopt for my own use. After careful consideration I decided that the original Swedish/Danish “smølf” seemed most correct. When I proclaimed my official decision to my parents, my Dad was silent for a moment before a mischeivous grin spread across his face. “So Derek,” he said to me, “what do you call it when a smølf paints a picture?” I said fed him the reqired “I don’t know,” and he delivered the punchline: “Smølfart.” He and my brother giggled gleefully, and I spent a rueful moment considering that “schlümpfe” might have been less vulnerable to punning.

At any rate, after our return from Europe it was at least another year or two before my little cerulean gnomes began appearing in U.S. toy emporiums under the anglicized name “smurfs.” The word in and of itself was fine with me. The problem was all of the peripheral details and backstory that came along with it. It was vastly different than the mythology I had set up for them on my own, which is to say that it was just plain wrong. The commercially-distributed story of Smurfs captured neither the facts nor the spirit of the delightlfully conceptualized Pan-European Smølfenhagen that I had created around them. First of all, there were the names: Papa Smurf? WTF?? Come on, the guy in the red pants and cap with the white beard is named George. George! That’s not such a stretch, is it? He looks like a George. And they call him Papa Smurf??? It’s just so… banal. So unimaginitive. Some adult got paid to come up with that? Come on. They all have regular names. Just first names, but unique names all the same. Kevin. Steve. Mitch. The ultimate insult was… Smurfette. Oh, man. So explain this one to me: there’s only one girl smurf, and the best name they can give her is Smurfette? Nice going. Of course, this assumes you can even get around the primary violation of having there be a girl smurf. Remember, I’m a kid in my late single-digit years. Know your audience, smurf-makers. Girls are gross.

If I’d have been in charge, smurfs would have been saved from this rampant lameness. The TV cartoon would have been something closer to Super Friends than the retch-inducing forerunner of Teletubbies that it was. No Papa Smurfs, no Mushroom houses, no “that’s smurfy!”, and NO girl smurf. And, whoever made up that gay-ass “la la la” song would face an international war crimes tribunal for crimes against humanity. Alas, it was not to be. There was money to be made in the dumbing down of smurf lore - apparently, three- and four-year-olds’ allowances by that time provided for more discretionary income than it had when I was that age six years prior. Who knew? It was fun while it lasted. My smurfs now reside in a plastic bag, bundled away with other memorabilia in the back of one of the closets at my parents’ house in Northern California. I guess my Mom figured that one day my own children (who are, ah… still in the pre-production stage) might want to play with them. Either that, or maybe something called eBay might one day exist, and I would become suddenly rich by selling them to a seven-old-kid in Sweden.

Now seems as good a time as any to introduce the first of my various geekeries (to coin a term) to the HoC&B. It is, in a word, words.

This may not come as a complete surprise to those who have read a decent amount of my writing, either here or elsewhere. Nevertheless, I might as well be upfront about it. I’m a word person. I love language. Gimme words, not numbers. I’m AP English/B-lane Math. Arts, not Sciences. You know how in Contact, Carl Sagan had the extraterrestrials make their presence known to us by broadcasting pulses of sound in an ascending prime-number pattern, because math is a universal, unchanging science recognizable to any sentient being? What I thought was, “Blech, whatever. If the aliens are so all-fired smart and advanced beyond our comprehension, they could figure out one of our languages and communicate in it without breaking a sweat. The fact that they’re not doing so proves that they are at the very least willful and obtuse, and quite possibly hostile.”

But I digress. My affection for words and language seems to be hereditary, given that my parents are both retired teachers of English language, literature and composition. I try not to emulate my Dad’s habit of correcting one’s conversational grammar or usage, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Thus far I have escaped any serious beatings, but I know that I may be tempting fate. I’ll surely write more of my views on the ever-shifting standards of Correct vs. Incorrect English later. Email all your friends - it’ll be an event that shakes the blogosphere to its very foundation. Or something.

Right now, I’d just like to share a few selections from Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English, the 2006 desktop calendar edition of which I received in my Christmas stocking from my wife, Sweetie Santa. The following are the words that I have liked enough to not discard once their day ended and they were torn off the deck by the inexorable march of time, or as some would call it, my hand.

• scurryfunge. Defined as the sudden tidying that occurs between the time when an occupant of a house sees a neighbor approaching and the time when she knocks on the door. It is not made clear whether the word is a verb, as in, “If you hear her mother’s voice outside, she’s gonna scurryfunge like Martha Stewart on amphetamines,” or a noun, as in “She’s got the place sparkling clean, but when they ring from the intercom downstairs you’re still going to see the scurryfunge of the century.”

• toesmithing. Kacirk: “Dancing; theatre slang.” I was surprised at my total unfamiliarity with this one, given my status as a theatre person, moreover a theatre person trained in dance, and (given the word’s Elizabethan origin) as a bardolator. For my wife, “toesmithing” initially evoked the image of an artisan of some kind hammering people’s toes into shape, or perhaps forging artifical toes out of something. Upon reflection, this makes good sense to me - in fact, I wonder if the word wasn’t at some point linked with classical ballet. Back in college I knew several ballerinas who’d trained long enough in the sadistic art known as “dancing en pointe” that they apparently could have benefitted from the replacement of several toes.

• dish up the spurs. Verb phrase said to originate in the English-Scots border region of the 17th-18th centuries; refers to the manner in which a host would inform guests that provisions for consumption at the gathering were running short and a bit of horse-mounted pillaging was necessary for the festivities to continue. Apparently these folks were not yet to the point in party etiquette where guests’ original invitations could include an instruction to Bring Your Own Plunder. Like some others have, this archaic phrase gave me a practical idea to use in the present day: when you’re hosting a party and need to wrap things up, don’t bother serving coffee - it’ll just mean more dishes for you to do. Instead, bring around a lovely platter with everyone’s keys on it. They’re easy to come by - they’ll be on the bed, with all the bags and coats.

• erubescency. Personal shame or abashment at one’s own actions, for fear of loss of reputation. This was the designated word for March 10, indicated as the former “Day of Public Humiliation,” briefly observed during the 1653-1658 reign of the puritan Oliver Cromwell. Exactly what kind of observances took place is not indicated, but Kacirk gives some space to the Puritans’ practice of naming their children after biblical virtues, even in whole-phrase form, e.g. “Trust-in-the-Savior Stephens,” etc. As a genealogy geek (which will be expanded upon in future posts) I can identify with that naming practice, having as I do ancestors with names like Rememberance Lippincott and Silence Hand. I am not making those up. Also, this word’s presenting itself to me last Friday, March 10, the date of my second car wreck in a three-month period, was too big an irony supplement to swallow.

So I’m talking to this guy I know the other day; I’ll call him John Callahan.

“D’ja hear?” John asks me. “Lockdown. All the jails are on lockdown again.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s really bad. All this racial violence is happening. What was it, only a few months ago when all of the mass brawls were happening at High Schools in L.A.? Those were the same thing - Latinos fighting Blacks. It’s escalating.”

John shrugged diffidently. “Ignorance!” he declared. “That’s all it is.”

“Whaddya mean?” I asked him.

“Well, you know,” he ventured, looking for affirmation. No, I didn’t know. “It’s like, people immigrate here, but they don’t bother to learn the language. Then they complain about not having anything, or being poor, or whatever. They get all pissed off and have riots. It’s because of ignorance. They don’t want to assimilate to how things are in this country, how we do things, or speak our language.”

“Mmm… aaaaahIIIdon’t think I agree with you there,” I responded.

“What? Why not?”

“It’s just…” I hesitated, being careful not to go off. “It’s not that simple. There’s always been conflict in America between different ethnic groups. We’re all immigrants, or we all were at some point… unless you’re a full-blooded American Indian.” Which he was clearly not.

“No,” John replied, “like, you and me - when our forefathers came here, they spoke English. You know? They started the country. So if you’re going to come here, you learn to speak English, that’s all.”

I couldn’t resist. “Your and my ancestors - your last name is Callahan, you’re at least part Irish, like me. My Irish immigrant ancestor came to New York during the Potato Famine, which is a pretty typical Irish American background. Yours too, about that time?”

“Yeah, like 1850, they came to Boston, I think,” he confirmed.

“OK, right. The thing is, when those ancestors of ours came over, they didn’t speak English. I mean, maybe a few phrases, but in general, they didn’t. Irish peasants spoke Irish Gaelic. And they didn’t just all of a sudden start speaking English, either - they mostly lived in ethnic ghettos and just talked to other Irish immigrants.”

John didn’t say anything.

“I’m just saying, is all. Things don’t change that much.”

I’m not kidding myself that I changed his mind or anything. Hopefully I at least said something he’ll think about. And, I held off pointing out that the whole thing was a case of the pot calling the kettle ignorant.

That might sound pompous, but I don’t think I am. I try to hold people to the same standard I hold myself with regard to wisdom, i.e., I’m wise enough to realize that there are a hell of a lot of things that I don’t know.