Another July 4th

It's another July 4th.  I've written down some thoughts about this holiday here and also here. What I wrote in those posts still holds pretty much true, but I want to throw a little more fuel on the fire:

• While we have (finally) more or less pulled the troops out of the ongoing disaster that is Iraq, we have continued the certifiably insane policy of using drones in various places to take out people identified as enemies of the US.  While we're about this, we also routinely blow up random people who happen to be near the people we are targeting.  There is no way that this isn't a violation of at least a couple of international conventions.
  
• We continue to keep a number of people captured early in the "war on terror" at our offshore detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.  Some number (probably all) of these people should not be there. President Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to close this facility, and yet he does not appear to have the moral/political will to do it.  This, too, has to be a violation of something.
  
• Meanwhile, our own Supreme Court has decided that the the part of the Voting Rights Act that pertains to ensuring that states with a history of preventing people, especially non-white people, from voting have to clear any changes to their voting rules with the Justice Department is no longer necessary, apparently because systemic racism is a thing of the past.  Immediately after that decision was announced, Texas legislators began working on voting regulations that would make it harder for non-white people in Texas to vote.  Hmmm...   And at the same time, we have the spectacle of southern bad food purveyor Paula Dean going down for having used the "N-word," among other things.  And, we have an African American witness for the prosecution in the murder trial of George Zimmerman being publicly ridiculed for speaking one of the three languages she is fluent in: Black English.  She is also fluent in Spanish and Haitian Creole. Despite this intellectual advantage that she holds over most other 'Muricans, her testimony can't be trusted because of the language she expresses it in.
  
• And now we have this case of Edward Snowden, who made public for the American people documents showing that that their own National Security Agency has been building a vast database of "metadata" on their emails, phone calls, etc.  For this, Snowden has been labeled a "traitor" and "spy," and as I understand it he has been or is about to be formally charged with "espionage."  Can anyone explain to me how it's "espionage" when someone lets US citizens know what their own government is doing to them?  This seems pretty Orwellian to me.  Orwellian, but I guess understandable considering that we now live in a Police State.
  
• Rethuglicans in the House, meanwhile, have again, for the 37th time I believe, tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act popularly (and often derisively)  referred to as "Obamacare."  They appear to be completely uncaring about the positive effects the ACA has already had for many people.  In fact, they just don't care about non-elite folks at all; they holler "class warfare" whenever someone brings this up, but they are in fact the ones carrying out class warfare against everyone who does not belong to their class, and that's a lot of us.  Never mind that "Obamacare" is not what many of us wanted: the abolition of the health insurance industry and the institution of a single-payer health care access system. 

I've said it before and I'll repeat it here: The "American Revolution" was not a revolution.  In a revolution, the people on the bottom end up on top.  What happened in the British colonies that eventually became the United States was a beheading.  The level of rulers at the very top, the British Crown, was lopped off.  The people at the top in the colonies remained on top, while slaves remained slaves, women remained women, Native Americans remained pretty much nobody.

But we've been fed this unsatisfying meal of apple pie, ice cream, and hot dogs for so long that hardly anyone questions it.

"Old Mother Flanaghan"

A simple fiddle tune, played on banjo (me) and guitar (Nancy Levine).  It's a little slow, but I like these tunes a little on the slow side, as opposed to rushed.

Update: Boyne tow-path and castle, County Meath, Ireland; photo by Wade Tarzia.

The tyranny of One

Author Stephen King, in his book On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft (Scribner 2010), calls for, among other things, the reduced use of adverbs. But that's not what I want to focus on. I want to call your attention to this sentence from the book:

(1)  With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.

This is almost painfully clumsy to read. Of course, it is a reaction to the years of prescriptive "grammarians" telling us, untruthfully, that he is a generic pronoun referring to anybody, which in those bad old days would have made King's sentence look like this:

(2)  With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he is afraid he isn’t expressing himself clearly, that he is not getting the point or the picture across.

The problem with this last sentence is that while the Noun Phrase the writer carries no gender, he does: it's masculine.  We know that he has never been a true generic, and we also know that the idea that it should be used as generic originated in England as Rule 21 in John Kirkby's 1746 treatise Eighty-eight Grammatical Rules.  Rule 21 states that male is "more comprehensive" than female and therefore he should be taken to include both feminine and masculine gender.

It was reaction to this rule that got us he/she-ing and himself/herself-ing all over the place.  The result is clumsy language; if you don't believe me read sentence (1) again.  Fortunately, there is a more elegant way: Make the sentence plural.  In English, the third-plural pronouns carry no gender at all, and King's unhappy screed against adverbs would look like (3):

(3)  With adverbs, writers usually tell us they are afraid they aren’t expressing themselves clearly, that they are not getting the point or the picture across.

Why don't we just do this all the time?  I think there's another aspect of our culture at work against us, and that is the tyrrany of the number one, or singularity.  One is one of our magical numbers: we like one Right Answer, one Most Valuable Player, one Winner, and so on.  We prefer singular when we can get it, and our default form for talking about generic entities is singular (the writer, the whatever).  

By the way, King also recommends that writers have at hand a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style.  This is bad advice, unless accompanied by the caution not to take anything they say about grammar too seriously. But do start putting sentences in plural form, to avoid both Kirkby's wrongheaded gender prescriptivism as well as the awkwardness of those double pronouns.

Memorial Day, again...

OK, once again it's Memorial Day, the day when we "honor" and "thank" those who have lost their lives in our many military adventures over the years.  And, as usual, I post a photo of my Mom and Dad, getting married during World War II.

WWII may or may not have been a war that we entered for good reasons.  After all, the event that put us in the game, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was an attack on an American colonial outpost in the Pacific, not on America itself.  But I'll leave that discussion, if I may, for another time.

If we grant ourselves WWII, that still leaves numerous activities that are far more easily labeled "wars of choice": Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq...  In every case, many many lives and much resources could have been saved if our involvements in these places had been carried out differently. In some cases, if not all or at least most, we are looking at war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Do we really want to keep sending people to be maimed or die while committing such crimes, crimes ordered by people who who are taking no risk themselves since they don't recognize the jurisdiction of the relevant international judicial bodies?

It just seems to me that rather than "honoring" and "thanking" our fallen, we should be apologizing to them and their families and friends, telling them we are sorry that we have done this to them.  And then we should stop doing it.

A simple (?) question

I just gave the students in my summer Introduction to Anthropology class a "practice test" to make sure they are familiar with Blackboard, which I use for online testing, communicating, and discussing things with students between our class sessions.  One of the questions was:

Which is the most valid statement regarding human evolution?

1. Humans evolved from chimpanzees.
2.  Humans evolved from theropod dinosaurs.
3. Humans evolved from lobe-finned fishes.
4. Humans evolved from bats.

Interestingly, 100% of the students answered (1), chimpanzees.  The correct answer is (3), lobe-finned fishes.  Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees, humans and chimpanzees both evolved from a common ancestor that was neither a human nor a chimpanzee.  And this common ancestor, like all tetrapods, evolved from lobe-finned fishes.

Students didn't lose any points over this, but it is instructive. This is a sort of snapshot of the level of general awareness and understanding of evolution that people have, if they are forced to think about it.  I wonder what would have been the result if I had included a choice like "Humans evolved from Adam and Eve, who were created in the Garden of Eden some 6,000 years ago."

Happy Mother's Day!

I found this photo of my Mom and me, taken in August 1950.  We were living in a little cottage in the pass over South Mountain, Washington County, Maryland, just off US 40.  Now, Interstate 70 also goes over the same pass. The house was less than half a mile from the Appalachian Trail.

Pete Seeger's birthday!

A clip from a 1994 interview with Bill Moyers: