So there is no more Imus in the morning. Good, I’d say normally, I hate Imus. I hate him right up there with other no-talent sphincter centers who are rich and famous and don’t deserve to be like Paulie Shore and Howie Mandel and Paris Hilton and on and on. I call them no-talents because they have no talent. None. They are not smart, they are not funny, they don’t sing, dance or act, they are just there. Immovably, it would seem, unless they pull an Imus. So, as I said, Good. Now we know there IS a salt for these slugs. But, of course, not so fast. Nothing is ever easy when it comes to banishing demons and it turns out that we may have cast out a minor leaguer—Imusibub— only by conjuring the S-Man himself. Sissymodeus.

So, since such an obviously racist and prudish hair-critic has been vanquished for offending their delicate if selective sensibilities, the Sinster Set should be smugly elated, right? Not so fast. What we hear from the cynics is the typical: Imus wasn’t toppled by progressive enlightenment, he was done in by dollars. According to the Pol Potian vision of a People’s Paradise where Tolerance and Free Speech are not confused with tolerating it when people speak freely; if he had been removed because of his “wrong thought” and “incorrect talk” that would have been a great victory for the progressive forces. But really, say the depressed Bereted Brigades, Imus only got the bum’s rush when the Big Sponsors threatened to pull their Big Money. It wasn’t correctness, it was capitalism. Just another exercise in exploitive economics.

But wait….I don’t buy it (pun inevitable). What money? This conclusion is based entirely on the premise that the Big Sponsors were going to lose Big Money if they didn’t placate…whom, exactly? Black America? Female America? Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson? How, precisely, was this Great Retribution supposed to happen? Thirty million blacks stop buying GM cars? A hundred million Greatly Offended stop getting Ditech mortgages? All because Jesse and Al say so? Does anyone, anywhere really think that there would be any substantial “ramifications’ to any big company sponsoring Don Imus? The’ve all sponsored him with no problem throughout his history of stupid and offensive behavior. What really changed for them? Nothing. Nothing but Talking Heads talking about it, the same way they talked about an Electoral College deadlock the last time the Rev’n Jackson ran for president—another looming likelihood that warranted the airtime it received at the time. This decision was not about money. It was about cowardice and legless guilt among the poofy elites in boardrooms and PR offices. No great fortunes would have been lost in disregarding the Oafs of Offensery. We are now sure that money, at least to this particular tribe of Philistines, is NOT everything. Just as Hollywood’s refusal to recognize the big dollar achievements of The Passion of the Christ or the Fox News Channel shows, these folks really are just about fear. And the other side can smell it. Hence Jesse’s continual shakedowns of various businesses, and the agreement by educrats to keep dumbing down school curriculums on the home front, and the desperate cry for surrender to the terrorists in the bigger world. The fact is it is all puff and bluster. If one organization would call the bluff of these race hooligans, show that they really cannot produce any consequences from behind their wizard’s curtains, they would scurry away back under the wall molding and under the refrigerator like other harmless bugs who look kinda menacing until you realize that you can kill them with your sneaker. If Don Imus had stayed on the air, NOTHING would have happened to him, the network, or the sponsors. There is no indication otherwise.

So, don’t despair Sinister Cynics. The mindless terror you promote sometimes beats even the Not So Mighty Dollar, at least when it comes to crushing old white guys who have been on your side quite a bit. Hooray! And some think it’s just the Fundies who champ for the end of the world.

Artifacts

Ernie the Archeologist is so excited about his new uncovering, he can barely breathe. Digging for artifacts to support the proposition that a previously unknown civilization had existed in the digging vicinity, he and his crew had found exactly what they needed—if they played it right. What did Ernie and kind find? Ancient pottery shards? Black-aged bones? The ruins of prehistoric structures? No, they found an archeologist’s pickax. Early 21st century by most estimates. It was not embedded in a stratum of antediluvian sediment, but half-buried in some muck from the day or week before. So why does finding what is most likely a product of his own digging elate Ernie? Because it is something. Ernie went digging for something and indeed he found something. Never mind specifically what he was supposed to be looking for, the point is something was uncovered and that something is, in fact, related to human activity and civilization. Now, maybe finding a relic relevant to an ancient and unknown society, as originally hoped for, would have been better. But don’t underestimate the importance of what was indisputably found. Don’t try to minimize what the pickax may actually mean in the context of what it might insinuate or imply in some vague and illogical yet important way. Don’t you dare equate finding this something with finding nothing. This something says something loud and clear: We need more funding to continue digging.

Science provides a method for inquiry and that method uses reason, logic, empirical observations, and such as tools. You have to use those tools to make sure that what you find is really some independent something and not just something you created by looking, like Ernie’s pickax. This is a lesson that members of Congress and the political Mudia desperately need pounded into the sediment of their oh-so-soft heads. Recently we have had a multi-million dollar “independent” counselor and a who-knows-how-much-it’ll-cost Congressional committee in the role of Ernie searching to great sizzle and no steak.

First, Patrick Fitzgerald spends a gajillion dollars “investigating” the accusation that some Blue Meany in the Bush Administration—probably Dick Cheney, the Meany in Chief—revealed the identity of a CIA operator in order to embarrass her husband who was an Iraq War critic. Far fetched already. A pretty long-armed, Rube Goldberg, and ultimately lame way of “getting” someone when you are as ruthless and powerful as these suspects. Why no mickied drink at some prominent watering hole that would make him behave in an asinine manner in front of all assembled? Granted it would have to be an unusual type of this behavior in order to get noticed in DC—like ranting about the good chances of John Edwards’s presidential bid. Or, in the case of this man in particular, why not just follow him around with a clandestine taping device? He seems to say things that anyone outside the Beltway area would find discreditable every few minutes. Or just kill him. We are talking about Darth Cheney, after all.

So a fortune later, Mr. Fitz has absolutely nothing along the lines of what was sought. In fact, he finds that there was no crime to be investigated to begin with. The victim in question was a former, not a current, CIA official and she wasn’t even covered during her career by the identity-protection law. There was no “outing” to be done. That was easily discernable—and in fact was discerned—very early on and rather inexpensively. But he kept digging, and digging—no one stopped to ask why—until he found something. It seems that even though there was no crime to investigate, during the investigation of nothing Cheney’s top lieutenant, “Scooter” Libby, kind-of-sort-of lied, or misremembered, or misled the non-investigators. That is a crime. That is also a day-old pickax. This is not obstruction of justice, mind you, but obstruction of the investigation into nothing. It is the investigation itself that obstructed justice by continuing after it was known there was no reason to continue, because the diggers still needed to find “something”. So now we pay even more for a trial and punishment over the nothing.

Similarly, we have a group of gentlemen, very bluntly spearheaded by Chuck Schumer and Pat Leahy, investigating the Administration’s non-crime of firing US attorneys. Now this is even worse than the first case, because in this instance there is not even a hint or an allegation of a crime. The very worst thing that has happened is that Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales fired US attorneys. And since there is no illegal reason to do that, what exactly is being investigated? Impropriety, that’s what. So here, Ernie is digging not because there is any possibility of things to find, but because it is a pretty and convenient spot to dig. So, in this non-inquiry, the esteemed senators find that the AG may have initially misstated, misled, or obfuscated about his reasons for the walking papers. And such mis-answers were of course to questions that did not have any purpose in their asking to begin with, save making a nothing into a something. Or at least a political something, which is like a nothing but much more expensive. And what is being called misinformation? Here’s the gist of a question by Senator Schumer to a Gonzales aide:

You say you spoke to the Attorney-General about these matters, but he says he wasn’t very informed about them. So the Attorney-General is lying, then?

Wow. Got ‘im there. How informative is speaking? Don’t you lie now! This isn’t even a pickax. It’s a piece of metal that could be anything or one of its parts. That doesn’t even sound like a lie as much as a semantics mess. The senator is the one who sounds like he is trying to mislead here. But, it is clear that more funding, print space, and air time is needed to continue digging into these nothings. Not to do so would be such a waste,

Incivil Unions

Let us take on a light issue, like, say gay marriage. Too sensitive and delicate? No it is not. It is sensitive and delicate only to those for whom sensitivity and delicacy are misunderstood as sobbing and anemia; or moral cowardice and inverse prudishness. It is, after all, advocates of gay unions, most of them with personal stakes in the matter, who have put this farcical subject before the public quite rudely and with complete contempt for the sensitivity and sensibilities of traditional society and its values. In the day of genital herpes commercials in prime time, and everything barely short of literal bestiality on MTV, it is unavoidable. But the social and moral repugnance of pushing the issue isn’t really the danger. Such things come and go all the time and the public, for good or bad, is really not that scandalized by them. Like many thrusts from the Left, the real threat is not to Judeo-Christian religion or values but to democratic norms.

The advocates of gay marriage fight through court cases, not through electoral politics, likening themselves to the civil rights crusaders of the 1950s and 60s (much the anger of many veterans of that campaign). The idea is that the public is not sufficiently wise to see the great benefit and inevitable logic of equating of all things homosexual with those heterosexual; and not sophisticated enough to appreciate the great value of Constitutional rights and the judicial review which render such weighty matters of Inalienable Rights immune to public opinion. That is the same public opinion otherwise known as The Will of the People, or Popular Democracy, which in other contexts the Advocational Left is so deeply devoted to protecting from Republican election-theft and Bushist jingoism. But, the same-sex right-to-marriage claim, unlike some other assertions of protected rights, just does not pass the sniff test.

The most serious-seeming objections to maintaining the restriction (if you can call it that) of marriage to the norm are, as you expect from anti-democratic liberals, legalistic or “constitutional”. They are also easy to dispense with.

First, the right to marry means that you cannot in most cases be prohibited by law from getting married. In the context of the right to marry some one in particular, let alone whomever you want to, or are “in love with” such a right does not exist and never has existed for anyone. Marriage has always been a regulated privilege—that is why you need a license for it—and restrictions abound. You can’t marry a close relative, you can’t marry a minor, you can’t marry someone who is already married, or marry another someone if you are, etc; regardless how you feel about them. Likewise, you can’t marry someone of the same sex as you are. Maybe the law doesn’t actually say that everywhere. Law tends to make obvious assumptions. The law doesn’t specifically say you can’t marry a ham sandwich, either, but you can’t unless you are a good prosciuttor

What about equal protection? The protection is equal. No one, regardless of “sexual orientation” can marry someone of the same sex. Period. Not even if a privileged WASP straight male wanted to marry another privileged WASP straight male. Even it were unequal, the creative courts beloved by the sinister thieves of property rights have told us that equal protection, just like substantive due process, ain’t so important in regard to economic matters. Economic rights, you see, are not “fundamental” and the benefits of marriage are primarily, even entirely as far as the law is concerned, economic. Inheritance rights, tax privileges, benefits entitlements, engraved wedding silver, etc. If the State can override your right to be equally income-taxed at the same percentage as someone who makes less than you do, it can run flat over your right to select the other half of your personal economic team. The standard here is merely rational. It is not remotely difficult for any person who also happens to be merely rational that the state has an obvious interest in protecting the definition of a fundamental multi-thousand year-old cultural pillar. Unfortunately, mere rationality is a standard for the law itself to meet, not its practitioners or judges.

What about Loving v. Virginia? They say. Of course you want to say, “What about Liquormart v. Rhode Island?”.Loving, too, has absolutely nothing to do with gaiety as politico-matrimony. Just ask any black civil rights leader from the movement’s Heroic Age. That won’t suffice for the advocates, of course. But Loving specifically and emphatically stresses the racial aspects of “discrimination” in marriage, nothing else. Every enumeration is so:

To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications…
…[F]reedom of choice to marry [must] not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.
… the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual.

No implication at all is made that any bases of distinction other than race are unsupportable, must not be restricted, or hinder an individual-resident freedom. Change the words racial and race in the above to the words familial and family. Is that an acceptable analogy? Remember, the specter of banjo-playing mutants as the probable result of any two too close relations mating is extremely exaggerated. And legal prohibitions on such marriages extend to situations where the issue of issue of any kind is unlikely or impossible. So why are such unions barred by law? The answer and its recognition as far as the Left is concerned, are both taboo. Nothing more. Now that is an analogy. Conversely, to suggest that interracial marriage is akin to same-sex marriage is like saying that 2-room houses with different colored roofs are just like 4-room houses with no roofs at all. By anciently accepted and, to most, obvious standards a roof is a necessary component of a house. A roofless structure might even kind of look like a house to the casual, ground-level passerby. But it’s not a house. It’s an odd corral-type thing or somesuch, that there isn’t even a word for.

Okay then, what about this? Social values change. So not to allow same-sex marriage is like not allowing women to vote, or allowing slavery, or allowing domestic abuse. It’s just plain old fashioned. Well, true, social values do change for better and for worse. But in this case, the results of nearly every vote is that the values regarding this have not. By 2 or 3 to 1 in many cases. They may well change, and if it does, then the issue is valid. So far that is not the case. If it were, there would not be such squealing by proponents and they would not be mortally afraid of the ballot box.

Lastly, it is a matter of personal privacy, just like the sodomy and other conduct that is a new constitutional right. The answer to this is simply, No it is not. Marriage, unlike sexual conduct, is by definition not private or personal. It is a public institution. There is no right to commit sodomy either, of course, simply a right to the veiling of some personal space. To oppose gay marriage has no necessary relation to opposing any kind of personal conduct that is private. Privacy is, after all, an important traditional value too.

The bottom line is that this is a political question, not one of justice or constitutionality. And those of us who are citizens of democratic polities do have a right to be part of the democratic decision making process, rather than having policies shoved down our throats by authoritarian elites. The People have a right to be heard and to make these types of consequential decisions unless there is some colossal reason to bypass them. No such reason is here. Let people vote- they have every right to determine what kinds of formal, legal relationships the state endorses, even if that means the law has to acknowledge social taboos. I, for one, do not want my right to participate in such an important debate about my government and my society stolen by selfish radicals who have no interest in the commonweal, and every interest in not just tolerance, but validation of their own deviance. Democracy is a value to be defended, too.

Straight Talk Needed

Okay, forget politics for the moment and look at a broader cultural picture. Or pitcher. More on that momentarily. We get a lot of complaints from elites, parts of the masses who mistakenly think they are elites, and so-called “professionals” about the lack of basic reading, writing and math skills among the general population. That is the Great Unexceptional. I know the complaints are valid. I myself don’t know half the math I should given all my relevant variables, and that half is the majority of math so far as I can tell. Writing? In one day of paying attention I’ve seen two professional signs, one factory-made, warning me to EXPECT DALAYS and that there is NO TURNNING. Until recently my town had a Restaraunt—proclaimed in very large, multichromatic neon. Don’t even bother to count menu listings of expresso. I’ll bet that when ordering menus from a print shop you actually have to specify that you want it spelled with an “s”, like it’s an expecial request.

Anyways (sic), what has me going hoarse with exclamatory rage is how people talk. Of course talking is less formal than writing is, and fairly so. Talking is most often done in real time, without editing, reflection, or, being honest, a whole lotta thinking. But some of the most common mispeakings in everyday life are the products of nothing but laziness, slovenliness, and illiteracy.

For those who accuse me of being a Bushie, let me say that when it comes to this issue, W is the Clod in Chief. I don’t know if I have ever heard a public figure who disembowels the English language as does GWB. Not even his father, a Master Mot Mangler and Phrickaseer of Phrases, matches him. (The Rev’n Jackson is, of course, an anomaly. I’m not sure what language he is trying to speak. The violence against vowels makes me think Scots, but other evidence points to more of a speech pathological issue. Here I’m talking about plain old English badly saiden.)

This is the “nucular” problem. W, like many who did not go to Yale and Harvard, and many who did, doesn’t say nuclear correctly. Why? Anyone with second-grade literacy can look at the spelling of the word “nuclear” and see that to pronounce it “nucular” is simply as incorrect as would be incroect. But evidently, George and many, many others do not read. Or they read lazily. Okay, so the faux pas is identified. Either in person or, in the case of a president, by a sniggering press (ironically) and he corrects himself, right? Worng. He ignores the correction and continues, as if he’s proud of his verbal torpor, or as if it doesn’t matter; metathesizing on his merry way. What this shows is bad education, bad socialization, disregard for sharpness and a general disinterest in getting things right. Now that I think about it, I believe he did go to Harvard and Yale.

Before anyone laughs media-like at the President’s misunderestimation (not really a pronunciation issue, but of diagnostic value) of the precision of English orthoepy, listen closely to what others who fancy themselves elite do everyday—sometimes on specific instructions from deaf and stupid broadcast producers:

Species—it is speeSHees. Plural and singular. That is a sh like in Be quiet, not an s like in Says who? Why? It is Simple, Simon: In the English language c’s in syllables followed by vowel combinations like ie, ia, ea, are pronounced like sh’s. Just think about it—it is not a speSSial case, the Pacific is not an oSSean and raSSial profiling is not soSSially acceptable.

“Professionals” – really just journalists—have told us that the rules of English spelling are so non-existent GHOTI could spell “fish”. Sure, they chuckle condescendingly, just take sounds made by GH in laugh, O in women, and TI in station. This is seemingly true to a reporter who has learned by wrote to write. GH never makes the F sound at the beginning of a word. Only after AU or OU combinations. The O in women is a spelling relic, and an isolate. TI never makes an SH sound at the end of a word. Only when leading a TIO, TIA-consonant construction. So, no, GHOTI could never spell fish in English. The rules of English spelling are quite clear on that. Journalistic idiuts say utherwise. Complex rules is not the same as no rules. And if you don’t know the rules, don’t complain that there are none. By their reasoning, if you take the B from dumb, the A from aegis, the N from autumn and the G from sign BANG makes no sound at all

Do not, however, make the assumption that a good speller a good teller makes. Not unless you you really know the rules about how spelling and pronunciation hook up, and when they don’t. Otherwise you run the risk of being semi-literate; which, while maybe better than being illiterate, is no better than being half-witted. Controllers are just that, coNtrollers, whether they spell it with a MP or not. It is troublesome that so many otherwise erudite individuals are just halfway there—proving simultaneously that they can spell, good for them, but they can’t be bothered to check a dictionary or be careful beyond that.

You grovel in your hovel with a shovel. They all rhyme in sight as well as sound as the rules say they should. Those who don’t rhyme them are in fact creating more of that notorious chaos in English than in fact exists. Gruvel, huvel, and shuvel are in fact the old and phonetic spellings. Problem was that early U’s and V’s looked the same. So “helpful” scribes started almost—not quite, closing the tops of their U’s before V’s. Well, paving the road to Hell, and whatnot. Making the U’s look too much like O’s just traded one problem for another. But all you have to do is think about it; O’s before V’s almost always make the U sound. That IS the rule, not an exception: love, above, oven, shove, glove.

Realtor—that is a REAL….TOR. That IS Just like it’s spelled. Not relator, unless you mean one who relates, presumably to a relatee. This is another nucular; one that the realtors themselves take badly. Even when the only reason they are the benefisheraries of this awareness is that it is related to them at realtor school. Likewise jew--el—ree and jew—el--er. Unless you are British in which case most of this is hopeless. Or maybe Canadian, in which case everything is hopeless. But you already knew that.

And speaking of the speaking of Canadians, don’t make the mistakes Michael Myers mocks placing the emPHASis on the wrong syLLABle. When words gain suffixes, emphasis, or stress, often changes. This is because the number of total syllables a word has affects its pronunciation somewhat and simply because some words are properly pronounced one way and improperly in another. When you compARE things, they are COMP’rable. Not comPAREable. ILLustrating something is iLLUSTritive. To push farther, someone can be DESpicable or HOSpitable. Not desPICable or hosPITable. Maybe these are the products of analogy to disGUSTing, which in fact is. But the analogy is false. The first two are emphasized on the first SYLLable, the last on the second. Just like it is correct, if aBERRant, to say so instead of ABerrant. You have to acCLIMate, yourself to hearing and saying things rightly (it is a matter of adjusting to the CLImate, after all, not the AC). And sadly, being clear and proper in your elocution can obFUScate what you are trying to say to the phonetically tone deaf.