Cryptozoology: the gift that keeps on giving

This one’s for real, dudes. A fossil of a 42-foot snake, found in Colombia. That would be about the length of a London city bus.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Brian Beutler links to something that’s been bouncing around for a while, the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that what we want is brains.

Anyhow, this is a whole underappreciated subculture. My favorite, of course, is the diarrhea game. It’s easy, so you can play along at home. Take the title of a cultural work—usually, but not necessarily, a movie—take out one word, and substitute in the word “diarrhea.” For example:

• The Diarrhea of a Mad Black Woman
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Diarrhea
• No Diarrhea for Old Men
• Curb Your Diarrhea
• Diarrhea Runs Through It
• Kiss Kiss, Diarrhea Diarrhea
• Stop Making Diarrhea
• And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Diarrhea
• Diarrhea Pie

I judge you when you judge people for using bad grammar

MSNBC reports that grammar snobbery is getting more pronounced, thanks to the recession. It’s some sort of pseudo-conservative, “Permanent Things” type of elitism that’s on the upswing, apparently. This all seems like nonsense, but let’s indulge it for the moment so I can make a point.

Rather ironically, and quite incorrectly, grammar is often tossed together with spelling and punctuation, in the category of “Things that you learned in grade school about English, and often fuck up.” This is notable because it reveals why these things matter: they make communication comprehensible, and, when rendered well, eventually meaningful. But a writer need not follow them perfectly to be understood. It’s often, quite precisely, the bending and breaking of these rules that invests them with beauty. See, for example, Ulysses.

Grammar snobs see themselves civilization’s defenders against the unwashed masses. It’s a classic sort of middlebrow elitism; like middle managers convinced of their own sophistication because they read Tom Friedman and the Economist, grammar snobs are classic examples of people who know a little, but not enough to know how little they know. There’s an appropriate irony in the nom de guerre of the snob of the moment, the Grammar Vandal. She writes of herself,

This blog is a record of my campaign to eradicate grammar errors in public in Boston and elsewhere.

I carry a sheet of comma stickers and a Sharpie with me at all times, ready to fix each mistake. If an error glares at me, I’m there to destroy it.

I’m Kate McCulley, and I’m the Grammar Vandal.

A couple quick refreshers are in order:

1. The word “vandal” comes from the volkerwanderung-period German tribe named the “Vandals.” The word got its modern meaning because the Vandals, well, smashed the Roman Empire up pretty good. In other words, McCulley’s “vandalism,” while clearly meant to be a kind of snobby defense of order, inadvertently echoes the name of a bunch of burly warrior nomads who liked burning down libraries. Or maybe it’s a deliberate irony—in which case, well done, I suppose. But I’m inclined to guess not.
2. It may seem ironic that McCulley is accidentally echoing a bunch of guys who liked burning down libraries, but there’s actually something appropriate about it. While speakers of the tongue should of course be equipped with the skills to communicate clearly and professionally, increasing stricture is a recipe for stultifying, and ultimately killing, the language. There’s a reason we don’t all speak Vandalic (which would have been a distant cousin of old, old English, I believe). Languages change the way species do: by random mutation and adaptation. Grammar vandalism is an attack on English, whose many splendors make it what it is.

The urge to force everything to fit into grammar’s box is fundamentally a totalitarian one; it reveals horror at creativity, and even at culture and language themselves. McCulley would rather have the language be hers and dead than be a real, living language. Thinking the most important thing in language is the correct use of “their” is like thinking the most important thing to a good neighborhood is having right-angled street intersections. It becomes more about being able to see the scary guys around the corner than the vibrancy of the neighborhood. Before you know it, it’s Midtown rather than the Village. We’d all be better off if we stopped being scared.

UPDATE: I see that McCulley’s blog links to I Can Has Cheezburger; I can’t think of anything that makes my point so well as lolcats. If Grammar Vandal ran the country, lolcats would be rounded up and shipped off to camps.

UPDATE TWO: McCulley insists that her petite authoritarianism applies only to organizations and businesses, and not to actual people. I’m not sure why I should accept this distinction as relevant. She writes,

Do you seriously have no problem with a sign reading “WE HAVE WOMANS SHOES”? Is that just the evolution of language? Is that okay? If it is, why even check spelling at all?

I agree. Why check? My feeling is that correct spelling and grammar acts as a code between professionals. If I got a work email riddled with errors, I’ll guess that the sender has other shortcomings as well, and be less inclined to work with them. There’s nothing wrong with that—especially because I work in journalism. (That is, if I got significant emails of any kind, or had any power to discriminate in who I work with. In fact, I am 22. But that’s a story for another day.) But there is no moral content; the shoe-store has not wronged anybody, and there is no such thing as wronging the language. If we’re going to stick with the language-as-species analogy, McCulley is a eugenicist, who believes some mutations are better, rather than merely more common, than others.

Eyes on the prize

Most of the time, being into the ancient music of America’s downtrodden feels self-indulgent and belittling all at once; it’s a way of orientalizing blackness, romanticizing poverty, and waxing nostalgic for the hard labor that I have no willingness to do myself. In addition to which, cultural preferences as political as my own are—arguably—irretrievably compromised aesthetically.

I am aware of all of this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I think Son House and Merle Haggard are amazing. Besides, every once in a while, something comes along to remind you that—whatever Bob Dylan thinks—folk music is politically meaningful. Not to say that a clutch of protesters helps their cause by singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” What came along for me recently, though, was Bruce Springsteen’s “Seeger Sessions” album, which I went and bought after their performance at the Lincoln Memorial. So, I want to offer a genealogy of sorts.

This is Dylan in 1962, only 20, singing “Gospel Plow:

It’s a song that obviously predates Dylan, but this is the earliest version I’ve got. It was first documented officially in 1941, but the title is from the Book of Luke, and it’s a safe bet that this goes back to the 19th century. It’s clearly a field song—”Keep your hand on that plow”—as well as a religious one, so it’s not a bad bet that it’s also a slave song.

Here’s Pete Seeger singing “Hold On,” in 1962.

It’s a little too earnest to be interesting musically, but notice that Seeger, of course, has explicit political content where Dylan had none—”Every link is freedom’s name.” “Sing it out now!” he shouts to the crowd, and here he’s echoing the original point of field songs like this one: they’re literally tools of social organizing.

Now, Bruce Springsteen:

“The only chain that a man can stand is the chain of hand in hand,” Bruce sings. That is, as far as I know, his line, but it harks back beautifully to the song’s origins in Southern fields. Despite the slightly embarrassing theatricality of the performance, music like this reminds us of the continuity of our politics, and the historical rootedness of our battles. It’s a living, throbbing ghost, our “usable past” returned to make itself available.

For a somewhat more rousing exercise in this same principle, see below. Remember the Sunday school song, “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep”?

Listening to this song, you realize all at once what’s going on. It’s not a solemn hymn, though of course its origin is as a slave spiritual. (It also shares with “Gospel Plow” the politically ominous line, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, but fire next time.”) Though it predates the conflict, its meaning is plain enough: it’s about the Civil War. “Pharoah’s army got drownded” might originate in slave Christianity, but it resonates because of abolition. Note, in Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet, this rather racist quote from General Sherman.

The negroes . . . flock to me old and young, they pray and shout and mix up my name with that of Moses and Simon and other Scriptural ones as well as Abum Linkum, the great Messiah of “Du Jubilee!”

To hear it performed by Springsteen, in conjunction with, say, “Eyes on the Prize,” tells us once again that it’s foolish to try to think that our history is ante- and postbellum, or that we retired our demons when Lee surrendered at Appomattox or Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Take it from a Jew: there was plenty more weeping to be done after Pharoah’s army got drownded.

Finally: despite some of the clumsier protest lines about Katrina (for a much better attempt, see Dylan’s “The Levee’s Gonna Break”), I’m not sure anything has quite captured the combination of fury and fear that characterizes the closing moments of the Bush administration the way this does. This 2006 cover is particularly amazing, and resonant, as it’s an update of a song written six weeks after the Great Crash of 1929. Note, especially, “Gonna be a judgment, that’s a fact, a righteous train rolling down the track.” Word up, Bruce. That’s some foresight.

Confusing

I wish I had a digital version of the picture of me, as a 15-year-old, with Daschle. What's funny is, I looked older than him.

Liberals can’t decide how to deal with the sordid Tom Daschle situation. It’s pushing in too many different directions at once, and causing equal leftish impulses to cut him loose (see Glenn Greenwald) or ram him through.

1. Obama still wants him. +1
2. He was supposed to be the guy who made health care reform happen. +2
3. Not only did he not pay his taxes, he didn’t pay taxes on a limo service given to him by a millionaire sugar daddy whose equity fund he worked for. -3
4. That millionaire sugar daddy? Actually kind of left of the Obama administration. +1
5. He cashed out on an otherwise decent Senate career to pimp influence. -3

Whatever.

O Positive

Hyper-meritocratic capitalism has weird results sometimes. Also see here.

Enemies foreign and domestic

There’s a fight a-brewin’ about the attitude of the American left toward religious extremists in the United States and the Middle East. TNR’s Jon Chait argued,

It’s kind of funny how, when it comes to domestic politics, many liberals employ assumptions about human naturethat are wildly at odds with the assumptions they use about human nature when it comes to foreign policy. When you read the liberal blogs on domestic politics, concessions to the enemy are always counterproductive, will must be met with will, etc. When you read them on foreign policy, all those asumptions are flipped on their head. I’m not saying that these two sets of assumptions are completely impossible to reconcile, but it is pretty odd how easily they sit together.

There have been various coherent responses, but here’s mine: liberals argue that force seems counterproductive as a method for reinventing other people’s societies, so we may as well try talking. In contrast, no one is arguing that we ought to raise up militias in Brooklyn and Burlington, VT and march them down to Georgia and Alabama to shut down the Christian Right; such an action would be counterproductive in precisely the way that marching an army into Iraq was.

Peretz-bloggin’

Ok, I know this gets old for everyone else, but one last one.

From Marty Peretz’s blog, the Spine:

It’s not quite a pattern. But it has the makings of one.

First, there was the tragicomedy of Caroline Kennedy that she wanted to have David Paterson make her succeed in taking over Hillary Clinton’s United States Senate from New York. I was Chuck Schumer’s teacher in Gov.1 and my first thought was: why won’t anyone permit him to make him the natural succession to his state’s senior senatorial seat. Then, instead of easing in to Paterson’s vacancy appointment, Caroline made a mess of everything. She made a mess of talking, thinking, reasoning, cajoling, a mess of even being a demure upper East Side housewife. Which is actually what she was. She ate at “eat” and bought her meat at that cute Madison Avenue butcher shop. Oh, yes, a demure upper East Side housewife, with altogether non-conventional charities, of whom there were plenty. Which, if you want to sum it up, is a mess even of her conventionalities, like dining with Al Sharpton at some noisy Harlem eatery.  And that is how John-John would have collapsed his own ambitions if he had them.

So I ask you: what the fuck does that mean? It is literally unintelligible. I have no idea what that paragraph says. And I haven’t taken it out of context or anything.

This man is in charge of a magazine? Tremble, fellow young would-be journalists, when you reflect that this is your desired vocation.

UPDATE:Uncharacteristically, I failed to mention that, while being incomprehensible, the paragraph does contain almost all of Peretz’s horrible written tics. Note,

• the embarrassing, purposeless name-dropping (“I was Chuck Schumer’s teacher”)
  
• the casual racism (“like dining with Al Sharpton at some noisy Harlem eatery”)

It was Peretz, of course, who once claimed to have been friends with Martin Luther King (can’t find the link, because TNR’s archives are effed up. Take my word for it.) In a fortuitous coincidence, Peretz isn’t the only pundit with some views about Sylvia’s, the “noisy Harlem eatery” in question. As a matter of fact, Al Sharpton took Bill O’Reilly there as well. Here’s what O’Reilly had to say,

I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship . . . There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.

Marty, really, you should know better than to echo this kind of crap, what with your history with Dr. King and all.

Tough love, that’s what this is.

Apologize to the Muslim world for our actions? How shameful! writes Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post.

Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years — the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world — America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved — and resulted in — the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yes, Muslims, don’t you see? You were too savage to solve your own problems, and we were magnanimous enough to do it for you. And you hate us for that?

Never mind the fact that these cases involved unwanted and deeply resented, counterproductive American intervention (Iraq), horrifying moral blitheness to massive suffering (what Krauthammer calls “Kuwait,” by which he actually means our 12-year dance of despair with Iraq), and prolonged dithering and inaction in the face of genocidal levels of catastrophe (Bosnia). As for Afghanistan, maybe anything’s better than the Taliban—I could buy that the people of Afghanistan feel that way—but that anything turns out to be not much government at all, and, in a lot of cases, still the Taliban. So not much cause for rejoicing there. Kosovo I’ll give him.

There is little identifiable difference between this attitude and, “I only hit you because I love you.” None of these are examples show that the United States hates Muslims; just that it treats them imperiously and refuses to recognize the Muslim world as more than a sandbox to play with as we please. “Don’t you know this is good for you?”

If You Like It Then You Should’ve Put a Ring on It

Another sign of Barack Obama’s ongoing sanity: he’s a fan of “All the Single Ladies.” Around minute 7:

And yeah, here you go:

Update: Apparently, embedding this isn’t permitted. Good thing it’s not that hard to find elsewhere.