There are more examples of dissimilation than just the word colonel, although it is one of the most striking.
Dissimilation is a phonological process that involves one of two similar or identical sounds within a word becoming less like the other or even disappearing entirely. Because r’s in successive syllables are particularly difficult to pronounce, they frequently dissimilate. An obvious example is marble which is derived from the French word marbre where the second r has dissimilated to an l in order to prevent a repetition of the second r sound.
The word pilgrim comes from the Latin peregrinus where, in this case, the first r has dissimilated into an l. The Latin word for purple is purpura and, as in the case of marble, the second r also becomes an l.
Other examples of dissimilation include such words as enterprise, governor, impropriety, prerogative, surprise, and thermometer in which there is a tendency for the first r to drop out of the pronunciation. Before people who make it a point of pride by insisting they use the ‘correct’ pronunciation and adopt the attitude of superiority, or even haughty condescension towards those who do indeed follow the dissimilation route, even if unconsciously, in their pronunciations; those people would do well to heed the following words of Alexander Pope in his An Essay on Criticism:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain;
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
An understanding of the historical and continuing predilection of people to simplify speech is to drink more deeply of the cup of knowledge.
Still this does not mean that anything goes in language anymore than it does in mathematics. Two plus two equals four – not three or five no matter how much some confused soul might insist. There are areas of correct, incorrect, and occasionally indeterminate usage in language. The stratagem to follow should be to ferret out what is acceptable, concise, and persuasive without relying completely on formulary doctrine.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
MISUSED OR ABUSED WORDS AND PHRASES 17
In reading for the nth time (where ‘n’ is an exceedingly large number) the misuse of common phrases – one example is the expression “begs the question”, I decided to take arms against a sea of errors and by opposing, if not to end, at least to attempt to mitigate the misinterpretations (with apologies to both William Shakespeare and for the crime of mixing metaphors). How well I have succeeded I leave to the judgment of the reader.
The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial using the expression “begs the question”, where their meaning clearly was ‘raises’ or ‘implies’ the question. But no, that is not what it means. What it means is to assume as fact what is in dispute. It is the petitio principii of logicians. For example if one is arguing that the Bible is divinely inspired and uses statements in the Bible to support that argument, then one is begging the question. My correction, sent to the Dallas Morning News, was met with ….. The Sound of Silence. After all, who wants to have their shortcomings exposed? Certainly not I and demonstrably not the DMN.
The words sour grapes leave a sour taste in my mouth – not literally in a gustatory sense of course, but with the figurative ill-tasting sensation of misconstruing what it means. Inevitably this expression is used to mean someone who whines or complains when they do not receive or achieve something they feel they are entitled to.
The expression comes from one of Aesop’s fables where a fox sees some delicious appearing grapes which are out of his reach and try as he might he can not get them. In frustration and resignation he allows as how they are probably sour. The expression really means that the claimant, unable to achieve his objective, declares that the prize was not worth his time and effort.
Aftermath is commonly and erroneously used to simply mean the period following an event, usually a disaster such as a fire, hurricane, or tornado: “In the aftermath of the tornado, many people in the neighborhood are still homeless.” Television and newspaper reporters are especially guilty of misusing this word. ‘After’ means second and ‘math’ is a mowing or harvest. So an ‘aftermath’ is a second happening, usually a disaster, following and caused by the first event. The San Francisco fire was an aftermath as it was a disaster following and caused by the earthquake of 1906.
At one fell swoop means all at once, as everyone realizes. As pointed out by Bergen Evans, what is not as well understood is that the word “fell” in this phrase is derived not from the past tense of “fall”, but from the noun “felon.”
In Macbeth (Act IV, scene III) when news of the murder of his wife and children by Macbeth is brought to Macduff, he exclaims, “Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?” A kite is a fierce but ignoble hawk or falcon that preys on small quarry and Macduff sees the tragedy in the metaphor of a hawk striking defenseless prey.
Kudos from the Greek word kydos means praise or renown. Interestingly and singularly there never seems to be one kudo. To paraphrase Mark Twain, one could start building a very expressive vocabulary just by leaving kudos out. Enough said.
Careen and career - these words are a bit tricky. One reads about vehicles careening around street corners, but seemingly never about careering cars. What is the difference? To careen comes from a Latin word for ‘keel’ and means to keel over, to cause a ship to lie on its side and by extension now means to lean, sway, or tip to one side. The verb to career comes from a Latin word meaning ‘chariot’ and means to move at full speed. Therefore the proper description of a moving object would depend upon whether it is speeding or tilting. Both could occur. British journalist, columnist, and author Honor Tracy (1913-1987) wrote about men careering from one bar to another, but it might not be long before they would be careening.
The expression “to tell you the truth…” is in its own way as objectionable as such annoying speech fillers as “you know?”, “ah”, and “okay?”
The listener gets the impression that the speaker is going to do the unexpected and tell the truth: “I usually lie, but I will make an exception this one time only and tell you the truth.” Quite apart from the decidedly questionable effectiveness of a politician, lawyer, or used car (sorry, pre-owned car) dealer telling anyone they are not going to be mendacious, it is somehow unseemly to have to say you are going to be truthful. Much better in my opinion to say you are going to be candid. Nobody should be under a moral or ethical obligation to always be candid – except when one’s word is given, and then there is a moral imperative to do so.
Matinee – now that is a contradictory word if there ever was one; and there certainly are such genre. Matinees of movies, plays, and other performances are usually given in the afternoon, yet the word is derived from French meaning morning. So what gives? It is tied into the equally strange word ‘noon.’ Noon comes from the Latin nona meaning nine (nove is Italian for nine). The day used to be computed from sunup, so noon, nine hours later, occurred around 3:00 P.M. Anything before that, when matinees were performed, was considered morning. At some point the start of day was shifted backwards in time to midnight (12:00 A.M.) and noon extended 12 hours later to midday (12:00P.M.), which left matinees generally being performed in the afternoon. When so explained, the mystery of matinee becomes, like the Egg of Columbus, as clear as the sun at mid-day (noon).
As long as we are on the subject of numbers let’s consider some of the names of the months. September is the 9th month, October the 10th, November the 11th, and December the 12th, yet the names come from Latin septem, octo, novem, and decem meaning seven, eight, nine, and ten, respectively. What happened? Simple really. In the old calendar the year began with March which makes more sense that starting in winter. Still, we are stuck with a January 1st yearly starting date.
Is there a word more universally misused, at least in the United States, than unique? Even many trained journalists, authors, and public speakers merrily go along using such modifiers as very, almost, quite, extremely, etc. with unique. There may come a time when it is entirely proper to use modifiers with unique as has happened when other words and constructions which once were considered wrong then are eventually accepted. If that happens, language and logic will both be losers. In the meantime if something is unique it is one- of-a-kind and therefore no modification allowed.
The word very is even more sinned against than the word unique. It is likely the most overused word in the American language. No matter how hard I try to emphasize the importance of not over using this word I can not over do it. Think back, if you can, to the time when you did not hear either a public or private speaker preface a descriptive adjective with the adverb very – very enthusiastic, very interesting, very exciting, very strange, very difficult, very committed, and on and on. It has progressed to such an extreme that very has practically become a compound word with those adjectives. And it is now necessary to double or triple the word very when added emphasis is intended. Clearly the ubiquitous use of very has become a habit with many people – and an exasperating habit at that.
Dallas Morning News assistant managing editor, writing coach emeritus, and now book author, Paula LaRocque believes that such intensifiers as very are overused in an attempt to get closer to the right meaning when the perfect word does not come to mind. It is a poor substitute for not coming up with the right word. Mark Twain expressed it thusly: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
Currently/presently are often used as synonyms, incorrectly as it turns out. This mistake appears to be an especial bane of television weathermen. They will often say the temperature is presently X degrees even when the graphic on the screen is written ‘currently.’ Perhaps, in addition to other problems, they can not read.
Currently means right at this moment; presently means in a little while, shortly. What could be simpler and more straightforward?
My answer to the exclamatory “My, how time flies!” is to quote Austin Dobson’s The Paradox of Time: “Time goes you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go.”
Profane/obscene are another pair of words which cause a hell of a lot of confusion to some people, but shouldn’t. Obscene means offensive to accepted standards of modesty or decency. Profane is derived from ‘fane’ (Latin fanum) which is a temple and therefore profane refers irreverently to sacred things that belong in the temple and hence by extension limited to insults or irreverent words or actions directed against God.
Breathes there a person with curiosity so dead that he has not to himself hath said: “What is this strange dichotomy between the orthography and pronunciation of colonel?” It is an olla-podrida (Spanish: rotten pot) of confusion. The spelling of colonel is derived from the Italian colonnello, an officer who led a small column (Latin collonna) of soldiers.
We are half way there. The pronunciation is due to something called dissimilation in Spanish of the word into coronel (Spanish for colonel). Dissimilation is the process by which a speech sound becomes different from or less like a neighboring sound. For example the word purple (pur’ pal) devolved from the Old English word purpure (poor’ poo re) to keep from repeating the same sound. Actually it is not so much that we dislike repeating the same sound – we enjoy repeating vowels (“choo-choo”, “hopscotch”, “slam-bang”), but we do not like to enunciate consonants and then immediately do it again. Call it laziness or efficiency; this is what we seem hard-wired to do.
If the story about colonel seemed complicated then the following story about playing cards seems as complicated as the description of Russia by Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast in 1939: “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
The suits of a standard deck of playing cards are: clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. While it is true that diamonds and hearts match their symbols, spades only slightly resemble their symbol and clubs do not even remotely look like a club. What is going on? It is another of those wonderful mysteries (and riddles and enigmas) of language following a circuitous route.
In early Spain the four suits of their playing cards were espados (swords), bastos (clubs), dineros (pieces of money), and copas (chalices).
In France their four suits were pique (a soldier’s pike), trefle (trefoil), carreaux (diamond shape), and coeur (heart).
What has happened is that we have used all of the French symbols and translated two of their names (hearts & diamonds) and inexplicably used two of the translated Spanish names (spades & clubs) applied to French symbols.
Why on earth would we have done that? It is a riddle why we would have chosen the symbols from a deck of French playing cards in the first place; a mystery why we would use only two of their symbol names; and an enigma why we would apply two Spanish names for French symbols. It is a singular lesson in never making the mistake of confusing logic with language or necessarily with any other human activity.
Curmudgeon is not a word which is often misused – it is not used much at all in fact. Nonetheless, its coinage is beyond interesting; it is downright fascinating. Dr. Samuel Johnson decided to write his dictionary of the English language because he thought the language was being ‘corrupted’ (after delving deeply into the subject and being astute and intellectually honest, he rejected his original conviction and came to the conclusion that language is a living, breathing, evolving entity).
As related by Bergen Evans, while Johnson was compiling material for his dictionary he received a letter suggesting that the word curmudgeon was derived from the French coeur (heart) and méchant (evil). Either the letter was unsigned or he lost it and forgot who wrote it. The suggestion, though unsupported, was plausible and in his dictionary (1755) Johnson set it down for what it was worth: “a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur méchant, Fr. an unknown correspondent.” In his New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775), Dr John Ash, cribbing from Johnson, but, unfortunately for him, knowing no French, entered it as “from the French coeur unknown, méchant correspondent.” This is one of history’s most amusing and notorious instances of plagiarism. The antics of authors Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin were drab and colorless by comparison.
The word guys has become androgynously unisex. Boys and girls, men and women – young and old and in between - are now all referred to as guys. Anything wrong with that? Well, that does not mean a modern day Gibbon will chronicle a societal decline and fall in imitation of the old Roman Empire because of it, but perhaps there are some distinctions and differences that are worth preserving. It would be disconcerting, at least to me, to see female Olympic gymnasts straining on the rings and males pirouetting on the balance beam. Guys hieing down the street touting Prada handbags would also be incongruous.
I would even go so far as to punish anyone who refers to girls as guys by making them read the 1932 Damon Runyon novel, Guys and Dolls, and watch the movie of the same name once for each offence. My guess is that this would be similar to being placed on the rack – at first the sensation is not unpleasant, but in short order it becomes excruciatingly painful. On the other hand the fault, as with Cassius’ admonition to Brutus, may not lie in the stars or with society, but with me. Just call me an old curmudgeon.
Are data and none singular or plural words? Does water run uphill? Yes, sometimes. The word data is now widely used as either a singular or plural noun. One caveat is that its use should be consistent. It should be many data, data are, themselves, have; or much data, data is, itself, has. No less a figure than William F. Buckley would rather embrace socialism as a political philosophy than do anything other than use data as plural and datum as its corresponding singular. He is not a bad literary apotheosis to emulate.
Although none means no one; not one, which implies it is a singular word, contrarily however, since it is usually used with plural nouns (None of the passengers……), this would make it more natural to treat it as a plural word. But take your pick – your choice would be unimpeachable.
The word myriad can be used as a noun or an adjective, however there is a difference in meaning whether it is used an a noun or adjective. As a noun it means exactly 10,000 and as an adjective it means many, but an unspecified number. Careful writers follow this distinction - careless writers do not.
What could be more sacrosanct or inviolable than the imperative that a singular subject requires a singular verb and likewise a plural subject a plural verb? What indeed? Consider the following sentence: “More than one woman has changed her mind.” Because the subject ‘More than one’ is by definition plural the statement should be “More than one woman have changed their minds.” if the plural subject – plural verb requirement is followed. Yet anyone with an ear attuned to English knows that the second construction is grating and seems unnatural and forced.
How bad and how prevalent is the use of mixed metaphors? If I said their use is as non-euphonious to the ear as bamboo sticks pushed under one’s fingernails I would plead guilty to using one. But I won’t say it (denying you are going to say something even as you have just said it is called paralipsis).
A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one object or idea is compared or identified with another in order to suggest a similarity between the two. A mixed metaphor is where two or more metaphors are combined in an illogical or incongruous manner. “He was a thorn in my side, but now he has bitten the
dust.” or “The president will put the ship of state on its feet as he rolls up his sleeves.” Even Shakespeare was guilty when in Hamlet he wrote: “to take arms against a sea of troubles….” Leave the mixing to drinks or concrete – you could get light headed as you try to extricate yourself from the linguistic morass of mixed metaphors.
Whether to use the adjectives less or fewer, that is the question; and a simple question with a simple answer it is. If the noun is singular then use less; if it is a plural noun use fewer. Why then do so many even educated people use less when the correct word is fewer (“There are ten less people who…” or “The risk factors have been reduced by less than a dozen.”)? The converse of mistakenly using fewer instead of less is seldom made. The answer to this question seems to be what lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson said when asked by a patron why he defined pastern as the knee of a horse in his dictionary: “Ignorance madam, pure ignorance.”
How important is the proper use of language? Not important if we do not care whether we communicate well with style, grace, and flair but, (not very, very, very……important) overridingly important if we want to speak and write eloquently with clarity and purpose.
No one should get the idea that speaking and writing well comes without exertion. As with anything worthwhile it takes deliberate effort and labor. In An Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope wrote: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”
The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial using the expression “begs the question”, where their meaning clearly was ‘raises’ or ‘implies’ the question. But no, that is not what it means. What it means is to assume as fact what is in dispute. It is the petitio principii of logicians. For example if one is arguing that the Bible is divinely inspired and uses statements in the Bible to support that argument, then one is begging the question. My correction, sent to the Dallas Morning News, was met with ….. The Sound of Silence. After all, who wants to have their shortcomings exposed? Certainly not I and demonstrably not the DMN.
The words sour grapes leave a sour taste in my mouth – not literally in a gustatory sense of course, but with the figurative ill-tasting sensation of misconstruing what it means. Inevitably this expression is used to mean someone who whines or complains when they do not receive or achieve something they feel they are entitled to.
The expression comes from one of Aesop’s fables where a fox sees some delicious appearing grapes which are out of his reach and try as he might he can not get them. In frustration and resignation he allows as how they are probably sour. The expression really means that the claimant, unable to achieve his objective, declares that the prize was not worth his time and effort.
Aftermath is commonly and erroneously used to simply mean the period following an event, usually a disaster such as a fire, hurricane, or tornado: “In the aftermath of the tornado, many people in the neighborhood are still homeless.” Television and newspaper reporters are especially guilty of misusing this word. ‘After’ means second and ‘math’ is a mowing or harvest. So an ‘aftermath’ is a second happening, usually a disaster, following and caused by the first event. The San Francisco fire was an aftermath as it was a disaster following and caused by the earthquake of 1906.
At one fell swoop means all at once, as everyone realizes. As pointed out by Bergen Evans, what is not as well understood is that the word “fell” in this phrase is derived not from the past tense of “fall”, but from the noun “felon.”
In Macbeth (Act IV, scene III) when news of the murder of his wife and children by Macbeth is brought to Macduff, he exclaims, “Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?” A kite is a fierce but ignoble hawk or falcon that preys on small quarry and Macduff sees the tragedy in the metaphor of a hawk striking defenseless prey.
Kudos from the Greek word kydos means praise or renown. Interestingly and singularly there never seems to be one kudo. To paraphrase Mark Twain, one could start building a very expressive vocabulary just by leaving kudos out. Enough said.
Careen and career - these words are a bit tricky. One reads about vehicles careening around street corners, but seemingly never about careering cars. What is the difference? To careen comes from a Latin word for ‘keel’ and means to keel over, to cause a ship to lie on its side and by extension now means to lean, sway, or tip to one side. The verb to career comes from a Latin word meaning ‘chariot’ and means to move at full speed. Therefore the proper description of a moving object would depend upon whether it is speeding or tilting. Both could occur. British journalist, columnist, and author Honor Tracy (1913-1987) wrote about men careering from one bar to another, but it might not be long before they would be careening.
The expression “to tell you the truth…” is in its own way as objectionable as such annoying speech fillers as “you know?”, “ah”, and “okay?”
The listener gets the impression that the speaker is going to do the unexpected and tell the truth: “I usually lie, but I will make an exception this one time only and tell you the truth.” Quite apart from the decidedly questionable effectiveness of a politician, lawyer, or used car (sorry, pre-owned car) dealer telling anyone they are not going to be mendacious, it is somehow unseemly to have to say you are going to be truthful. Much better in my opinion to say you are going to be candid. Nobody should be under a moral or ethical obligation to always be candid – except when one’s word is given, and then there is a moral imperative to do so.
Matinee – now that is a contradictory word if there ever was one; and there certainly are such genre. Matinees of movies, plays, and other performances are usually given in the afternoon, yet the word is derived from French meaning morning. So what gives? It is tied into the equally strange word ‘noon.’ Noon comes from the Latin nona meaning nine (nove is Italian for nine). The day used to be computed from sunup, so noon, nine hours later, occurred around 3:00 P.M. Anything before that, when matinees were performed, was considered morning. At some point the start of day was shifted backwards in time to midnight (12:00 A.M.) and noon extended 12 hours later to midday (12:00P.M.), which left matinees generally being performed in the afternoon. When so explained, the mystery of matinee becomes, like the Egg of Columbus, as clear as the sun at mid-day (noon).
As long as we are on the subject of numbers let’s consider some of the names of the months. September is the 9th month, October the 10th, November the 11th, and December the 12th, yet the names come from Latin septem, octo, novem, and decem meaning seven, eight, nine, and ten, respectively. What happened? Simple really. In the old calendar the year began with March which makes more sense that starting in winter. Still, we are stuck with a January 1st yearly starting date.
Is there a word more universally misused, at least in the United States, than unique? Even many trained journalists, authors, and public speakers merrily go along using such modifiers as very, almost, quite, extremely, etc. with unique. There may come a time when it is entirely proper to use modifiers with unique as has happened when other words and constructions which once were considered wrong then are eventually accepted. If that happens, language and logic will both be losers. In the meantime if something is unique it is one- of-a-kind and therefore no modification allowed.
The word very is even more sinned against than the word unique. It is likely the most overused word in the American language. No matter how hard I try to emphasize the importance of not over using this word I can not over do it. Think back, if you can, to the time when you did not hear either a public or private speaker preface a descriptive adjective with the adverb very – very enthusiastic, very interesting, very exciting, very strange, very difficult, very committed, and on and on. It has progressed to such an extreme that very has practically become a compound word with those adjectives. And it is now necessary to double or triple the word very when added emphasis is intended. Clearly the ubiquitous use of very has become a habit with many people – and an exasperating habit at that.
Dallas Morning News assistant managing editor, writing coach emeritus, and now book author, Paula LaRocque believes that such intensifiers as very are overused in an attempt to get closer to the right meaning when the perfect word does not come to mind. It is a poor substitute for not coming up with the right word. Mark Twain expressed it thusly: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
Currently/presently are often used as synonyms, incorrectly as it turns out. This mistake appears to be an especial bane of television weathermen. They will often say the temperature is presently X degrees even when the graphic on the screen is written ‘currently.’ Perhaps, in addition to other problems, they can not read.
Currently means right at this moment; presently means in a little while, shortly. What could be simpler and more straightforward?
My answer to the exclamatory “My, how time flies!” is to quote Austin Dobson’s The Paradox of Time: “Time goes you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go.”
Profane/obscene are another pair of words which cause a hell of a lot of confusion to some people, but shouldn’t. Obscene means offensive to accepted standards of modesty or decency. Profane is derived from ‘fane’ (Latin fanum) which is a temple and therefore profane refers irreverently to sacred things that belong in the temple and hence by extension limited to insults or irreverent words or actions directed against God.
Breathes there a person with curiosity so dead that he has not to himself hath said: “What is this strange dichotomy between the orthography and pronunciation of colonel?” It is an olla-podrida (Spanish: rotten pot) of confusion. The spelling of colonel is derived from the Italian colonnello, an officer who led a small column (Latin collonna) of soldiers.
We are half way there. The pronunciation is due to something called dissimilation in Spanish of the word into coronel (Spanish for colonel). Dissimilation is the process by which a speech sound becomes different from or less like a neighboring sound. For example the word purple (pur’ pal) devolved from the Old English word purpure (poor’ poo re) to keep from repeating the same sound. Actually it is not so much that we dislike repeating the same sound – we enjoy repeating vowels (“choo-choo”, “hopscotch”, “slam-bang”), but we do not like to enunciate consonants and then immediately do it again. Call it laziness or efficiency; this is what we seem hard-wired to do.
If the story about colonel seemed complicated then the following story about playing cards seems as complicated as the description of Russia by Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast in 1939: “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
The suits of a standard deck of playing cards are: clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. While it is true that diamonds and hearts match their symbols, spades only slightly resemble their symbol and clubs do not even remotely look like a club. What is going on? It is another of those wonderful mysteries (and riddles and enigmas) of language following a circuitous route.
In early Spain the four suits of their playing cards were espados (swords), bastos (clubs), dineros (pieces of money), and copas (chalices).
In France their four suits were pique (a soldier’s pike), trefle (trefoil), carreaux (diamond shape), and coeur (heart).
What has happened is that we have used all of the French symbols and translated two of their names (hearts & diamonds) and inexplicably used two of the translated Spanish names (spades & clubs) applied to French symbols.
Why on earth would we have done that? It is a riddle why we would have chosen the symbols from a deck of French playing cards in the first place; a mystery why we would use only two of their symbol names; and an enigma why we would apply two Spanish names for French symbols. It is a singular lesson in never making the mistake of confusing logic with language or necessarily with any other human activity.
Curmudgeon is not a word which is often misused – it is not used much at all in fact. Nonetheless, its coinage is beyond interesting; it is downright fascinating. Dr. Samuel Johnson decided to write his dictionary of the English language because he thought the language was being ‘corrupted’ (after delving deeply into the subject and being astute and intellectually honest, he rejected his original conviction and came to the conclusion that language is a living, breathing, evolving entity).
As related by Bergen Evans, while Johnson was compiling material for his dictionary he received a letter suggesting that the word curmudgeon was derived from the French coeur (heart) and méchant (evil). Either the letter was unsigned or he lost it and forgot who wrote it. The suggestion, though unsupported, was plausible and in his dictionary (1755) Johnson set it down for what it was worth: “a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur méchant, Fr. an unknown correspondent.” In his New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775), Dr John Ash, cribbing from Johnson, but, unfortunately for him, knowing no French, entered it as “from the French coeur unknown, méchant correspondent.” This is one of history’s most amusing and notorious instances of plagiarism. The antics of authors Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin were drab and colorless by comparison.
The word guys has become androgynously unisex. Boys and girls, men and women – young and old and in between - are now all referred to as guys. Anything wrong with that? Well, that does not mean a modern day Gibbon will chronicle a societal decline and fall in imitation of the old Roman Empire because of it, but perhaps there are some distinctions and differences that are worth preserving. It would be disconcerting, at least to me, to see female Olympic gymnasts straining on the rings and males pirouetting on the balance beam. Guys hieing down the street touting Prada handbags would also be incongruous.
I would even go so far as to punish anyone who refers to girls as guys by making them read the 1932 Damon Runyon novel, Guys and Dolls, and watch the movie of the same name once for each offence. My guess is that this would be similar to being placed on the rack – at first the sensation is not unpleasant, but in short order it becomes excruciatingly painful. On the other hand the fault, as with Cassius’ admonition to Brutus, may not lie in the stars or with society, but with me. Just call me an old curmudgeon.
Are data and none singular or plural words? Does water run uphill? Yes, sometimes. The word data is now widely used as either a singular or plural noun. One caveat is that its use should be consistent. It should be many data, data are, themselves, have; or much data, data is, itself, has. No less a figure than William F. Buckley would rather embrace socialism as a political philosophy than do anything other than use data as plural and datum as its corresponding singular. He is not a bad literary apotheosis to emulate.
Although none means no one; not one, which implies it is a singular word, contrarily however, since it is usually used with plural nouns (None of the passengers……), this would make it more natural to treat it as a plural word. But take your pick – your choice would be unimpeachable.
The word myriad can be used as a noun or an adjective, however there is a difference in meaning whether it is used an a noun or adjective. As a noun it means exactly 10,000 and as an adjective it means many, but an unspecified number. Careful writers follow this distinction - careless writers do not.
What could be more sacrosanct or inviolable than the imperative that a singular subject requires a singular verb and likewise a plural subject a plural verb? What indeed? Consider the following sentence: “More than one woman has changed her mind.” Because the subject ‘More than one’ is by definition plural the statement should be “More than one woman have changed their minds.” if the plural subject – plural verb requirement is followed. Yet anyone with an ear attuned to English knows that the second construction is grating and seems unnatural and forced.
How bad and how prevalent is the use of mixed metaphors? If I said their use is as non-euphonious to the ear as bamboo sticks pushed under one’s fingernails I would plead guilty to using one. But I won’t say it (denying you are going to say something even as you have just said it is called paralipsis).
A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one object or idea is compared or identified with another in order to suggest a similarity between the two. A mixed metaphor is where two or more metaphors are combined in an illogical or incongruous manner. “He was a thorn in my side, but now he has bitten the
dust.” or “The president will put the ship of state on its feet as he rolls up his sleeves.” Even Shakespeare was guilty when in Hamlet he wrote: “to take arms against a sea of troubles….” Leave the mixing to drinks or concrete – you could get light headed as you try to extricate yourself from the linguistic morass of mixed metaphors.
Whether to use the adjectives less or fewer, that is the question; and a simple question with a simple answer it is. If the noun is singular then use less; if it is a plural noun use fewer. Why then do so many even educated people use less when the correct word is fewer (“There are ten less people who…” or “The risk factors have been reduced by less than a dozen.”)? The converse of mistakenly using fewer instead of less is seldom made. The answer to this question seems to be what lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson said when asked by a patron why he defined pastern as the knee of a horse in his dictionary: “Ignorance madam, pure ignorance.”
How important is the proper use of language? Not important if we do not care whether we communicate well with style, grace, and flair but, (not very, very, very……important) overridingly important if we want to speak and write eloquently with clarity and purpose.
No one should get the idea that speaking and writing well comes without exertion. As with anything worthwhile it takes deliberate effort and labor. In An Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope wrote: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”
Friday, May 11, 2007
ERIC HOFFER 16
Not only is the following thumbnail biography of Eric Hoffer an interesting yarn in itself, but his theories of fanaticism and mass movements are as relevant today as when he wrote them in the 1950’s & 60’s.
Except for the quotes from his books; a quote from a column about Hoffer written in 2003 by Thomas Sowell on the 20th anniversary of his death; and a few facts from the biography of Hoffer written in 1982 by James Thomas Baker from a now out of print book I purchased from the used book market, the rest I have pulled from my memory banks of the interviews and statements made by commentators in the 1960’s & 70’s (It is what happened yesterday that I can’t recall).
Eric Hoffer was a most improbable author. Yes, there have been many of that genre in literary history such as the blind poet Milton, multiple deserter from whaling crews Melville, and the jailbird O. Henry (aka William Porter) to name only a few, yet when his story is told you will realize Hoffer was indeed one of the unlikeliest.
Hoffer was born of German immigrant parents on July 26, 1902 in New York City. At the age of seven he suddenly and mysteriously lost his sight. No definitive medical reason could be found for his condition, nor could the just as sudden and mysterious recovery of his vision at age of 15 be explained. One possible explanation for his loss of sight could be psychological and associated with the death of his mother when Hoffer was seven years old. He lost his sight shortly thereafter. When his father died at the age of 50 Hoffer was obsessed with two things. He was convinced that he would not live past the age of 50 and he lived with dread that he would again lose his sight. For the rest of his life he would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night afraid that he had lost his sight. As it turned out neither of these eventuated, but it certainly was not irrational for him to be concerned.
With practically no formal school education Hoffer left home at the age of 18 on the death of his father. The burial society asked Hoffer what he wanted to do and he replied that he want to live in California. From his father’s estate he was given $300 and a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles. At this point in his life he would rent rooms near a library so as to have ready access to books; especially important to him as he did not know how long his sight would be good enough for him to read. He spent the next ten years on skid row doing odds jobs in the Los Angles area.
In the winter in the 1936 he went to do some placer mining for gold in the mountains near Nevada City, California. The problem was that he thought he might be snowbound for several months and therefore deprived of the opportunity of reading books. He solved that problem by purchasing a book for one dollar from a second hand book store on Market Street in San Francisco. Hoffer was looking for a book with the most number of pages, smallest print (his sight was good at that time), and no pictures. Happily for Hoffer the book turned out to be the Florio translation of Essays by Montaigne.
Possessing a first rate, if yet undereducated, mind Hoffer read and reread that book, resolving to read other classical books in the expectation that if they were of the same caliber, then it would be time well spent. He was not disappointed and as was his omni-bibulous nature he devoured dozens of classics.
He next worked in the vegetable fields, vineyards, and orchards of California. Working along side other migrant laborers he came to realize that some of them were ambitious and talented. It was at this time that the idea of an eventual book germinated in his fecund mind.
In the late 1930’s Hoffer went to San Francisco. He started going to labor halls where day laborers were hired by various crew chiefs. Because the country was in an economic depression, in fact the “Great Depression”, there were more people who wanted jobs than jobs available. Day after day Hoffer went to the labor hall, but in vain as he was never selected. Instead of becoming embittered at the system and perhaps turning into a Socialist or even a Communist, Hoffer used his mind to analyze his predicament. He studied the men who were picked for jobs and discovered a pattern. They sat in certain places, dressed in similar ways, and had the same expressions on their faces. While it is likely their expressions were not of complete disinterest, neither did they appear overly eager. My own experience as a callow youth seeking summer jobs between college terms is that some of these job foremen are sadists who like nothing better than to disappoint expectant job seekers. After he figured this out Hoffer was picked every time.
In early 1942 Hoffer landed a job as a longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront joining the Longshoreman’s Union. He retired in the early 1960’s. During the longshoreman phase of his life Hoffer met a literary woman named Margaret Johnson. They held long conversations where Ms. Johnson recognized that Hoffer not only had a first rate mind, but that he had many original ideas. At first she urged him to write a book of his thoughts and opinions. Lacking confidence in his writing ability he resisted. Being as recalcitrant and stubborn as Hoffer she began to prod and nag him into getting started in his writing. The result was a book titled The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements first published in 1951. Hoffer said writing did not come easy so he painstakingly crafted each word and sentence. The book was a seminal work on fanaticism and mass movements and propelled Hoffer to the attention of the literary world. It is as relevant today in this era of Islamic extremism as it was during the totalitarianism and radicalism of the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 60’s.
In his book Hoffer defines the ‘True Believer’ as: “a 20th century fanatic, needing a Hitler or a Castro [or an Osama bin Laden] to worship or die for. He’s the mortal enemy of things-as-they-are, consumed with hatred of self and the ‘accepted’ institutions and people he sees about him [A description of Ward Churchill?].” There have been and doubtless will continue to be myrmidons who follow de jour messianic tin horn fanatics in their confuse quest to find meaning in hopeless and empty lives. The proper resolution is to identify, isolate, and excise these toxic, destructive, often murderous, hate mongering lunatics and their deluded, sycophantic followers.
From the same book Hoffer’s take on achievement vs. alibi is as follows: “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day. We have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have an alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement.” Insight like that is what puts Hoffer in the forefront of American philosophical thought.
In 1967 Hoffer came to the attention of CBS reporter Eric Sevareid who interviewed him on national television. As a result of that interview Hoffer exploded on the national scene doing a series of additional television interviews, all the while writing several more books. President Lyndon Johnson appointed Hoffer to a civil right commission. Hoffer’s philosophy was that every person deserved an equal chance to succeed in life, but not a more than equal chance. He had competed on an equal footing with everyone without any special help from anyone. This put him at odds with the black members of the commission. As recounted by Thomas Sowell in a column written in 2003 on the 20th anniversary of his death, Hoffer said to a black member of the commission who was in a rage in his perception of the treatment of black people, “Mister, it is easy for you to be full of rage. It is not easy to go to work and build something.” After that Hoffer resigned from the commission.
When it came to the rebellious youth of San Francisco in the 1960’s Hoffer approved and encourage them except in one area – he rejected the drug culture declaring that drugs were totally destructive without any redeeming merit. It is too bad some of the youth then and now did not and do not heed him.
In addition to The True Believer, Hoffer wrote The Passionate State of Mind; The Ordeal of Change; The Temper of Our Time; Working and Thinking on the Waterfront; First Things, Last Things; Reflections on the Human Conditions; In Our Time; and Before the Sabbath. The idea for The Ordeal of Change came to Hoffer during his time as a migrant farm laborer in California. Because he and many others farm workers were uneasy and apprehensive over the simple change of going from harvesting one crop to another he realized that was a microcosm of societies under sudden change. In fact he held that, “It is not so much that revolution causes change as it is that change causes revolution.” When change comes too quickly some people become unsettled and react unpredictably and violently.
Another aphorism of Hoffer’s is that the efficiency and dynamism of a society or country can be measured by its record of maintenance. In this Hoffer found favor with the United States, Europe, and especially Israel, but was highly critical of the Middle East and African countries. Such an expressed opinion hardly endeared Hoffer with the politically correct crowd of which he cared not a whit. Hoffer maintained that this country was built by ostensibly ordinary people he described as being “lumpy with talent.” The nobility and elitists in Europe were not the people who settled in this country in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. It was the unsatisfied and generally lower social and economic strata common folk who came to this country in droves and, taking advantage of the country’s opportunities, turned it into the greatest economic, social, and military power in the world.
Hoffer was particularly dismissive of what he called “pseudo-intellectuals“, believing that many of them were ivory tower pin heads who were clueless about what really motivates people and why these motivations make efficient and progressive societies. Likewise he was contemptuous of the putative elitists who worshipped nature in the raw from the inside and seemed to believe that all nature was better left “unspoiled” and therefore unexploited even if done responsibly. Hoffer worked in the natural environment in the fields of California and personally knew the pain and discomfort associated with hard outdoor work. He experienced what “nature in the raw” was really about.
Especially later in his life Hoffer’s eyes were bothered by the bright television camera lights so he essentially stopped doing interviews. He did agree in a telephone call with a young television producer from New York to do one last interview. When she arrived in San Francisco Hoffer told her he had changed his mind and would not do the interview. She accurately sized up the gruff old man and told him, “Listen, at great expense and inconvenience I flew a television crew out here from New York because you said you would do this interview and now you son-of-a-bitch you are going to do it!” And he did. Left unknown is what his response would have been had she meekly begged him to do the interview. I believe he agreed to do it because he admired her spunk and no nonsense directness – a reflection of his own personality.
Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Metal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. He died in May 1983 having lived to the age of 80 thereby exceeding his early expectation by a full 30 years.
Except for the quotes from his books; a quote from a column about Hoffer written in 2003 by Thomas Sowell on the 20th anniversary of his death; and a few facts from the biography of Hoffer written in 1982 by James Thomas Baker from a now out of print book I purchased from the used book market, the rest I have pulled from my memory banks of the interviews and statements made by commentators in the 1960’s & 70’s (It is what happened yesterday that I can’t recall).
Eric Hoffer was a most improbable author. Yes, there have been many of that genre in literary history such as the blind poet Milton, multiple deserter from whaling crews Melville, and the jailbird O. Henry (aka William Porter) to name only a few, yet when his story is told you will realize Hoffer was indeed one of the unlikeliest.
Hoffer was born of German immigrant parents on July 26, 1902 in New York City. At the age of seven he suddenly and mysteriously lost his sight. No definitive medical reason could be found for his condition, nor could the just as sudden and mysterious recovery of his vision at age of 15 be explained. One possible explanation for his loss of sight could be psychological and associated with the death of his mother when Hoffer was seven years old. He lost his sight shortly thereafter. When his father died at the age of 50 Hoffer was obsessed with two things. He was convinced that he would not live past the age of 50 and he lived with dread that he would again lose his sight. For the rest of his life he would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night afraid that he had lost his sight. As it turned out neither of these eventuated, but it certainly was not irrational for him to be concerned.
With practically no formal school education Hoffer left home at the age of 18 on the death of his father. The burial society asked Hoffer what he wanted to do and he replied that he want to live in California. From his father’s estate he was given $300 and a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles. At this point in his life he would rent rooms near a library so as to have ready access to books; especially important to him as he did not know how long his sight would be good enough for him to read. He spent the next ten years on skid row doing odds jobs in the Los Angles area.
In the winter in the 1936 he went to do some placer mining for gold in the mountains near Nevada City, California. The problem was that he thought he might be snowbound for several months and therefore deprived of the opportunity of reading books. He solved that problem by purchasing a book for one dollar from a second hand book store on Market Street in San Francisco. Hoffer was looking for a book with the most number of pages, smallest print (his sight was good at that time), and no pictures. Happily for Hoffer the book turned out to be the Florio translation of Essays by Montaigne.
Possessing a first rate, if yet undereducated, mind Hoffer read and reread that book, resolving to read other classical books in the expectation that if they were of the same caliber, then it would be time well spent. He was not disappointed and as was his omni-bibulous nature he devoured dozens of classics.
He next worked in the vegetable fields, vineyards, and orchards of California. Working along side other migrant laborers he came to realize that some of them were ambitious and talented. It was at this time that the idea of an eventual book germinated in his fecund mind.
In the late 1930’s Hoffer went to San Francisco. He started going to labor halls where day laborers were hired by various crew chiefs. Because the country was in an economic depression, in fact the “Great Depression”, there were more people who wanted jobs than jobs available. Day after day Hoffer went to the labor hall, but in vain as he was never selected. Instead of becoming embittered at the system and perhaps turning into a Socialist or even a Communist, Hoffer used his mind to analyze his predicament. He studied the men who were picked for jobs and discovered a pattern. They sat in certain places, dressed in similar ways, and had the same expressions on their faces. While it is likely their expressions were not of complete disinterest, neither did they appear overly eager. My own experience as a callow youth seeking summer jobs between college terms is that some of these job foremen are sadists who like nothing better than to disappoint expectant job seekers. After he figured this out Hoffer was picked every time.
In early 1942 Hoffer landed a job as a longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront joining the Longshoreman’s Union. He retired in the early 1960’s. During the longshoreman phase of his life Hoffer met a literary woman named Margaret Johnson. They held long conversations where Ms. Johnson recognized that Hoffer not only had a first rate mind, but that he had many original ideas. At first she urged him to write a book of his thoughts and opinions. Lacking confidence in his writing ability he resisted. Being as recalcitrant and stubborn as Hoffer she began to prod and nag him into getting started in his writing. The result was a book titled The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements first published in 1951. Hoffer said writing did not come easy so he painstakingly crafted each word and sentence. The book was a seminal work on fanaticism and mass movements and propelled Hoffer to the attention of the literary world. It is as relevant today in this era of Islamic extremism as it was during the totalitarianism and radicalism of the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 60’s.
In his book Hoffer defines the ‘True Believer’ as: “a 20th century fanatic, needing a Hitler or a Castro [or an Osama bin Laden] to worship or die for. He’s the mortal enemy of things-as-they-are, consumed with hatred of self and the ‘accepted’ institutions and people he sees about him [A description of Ward Churchill?].” There have been and doubtless will continue to be myrmidons who follow de jour messianic tin horn fanatics in their confuse quest to find meaning in hopeless and empty lives. The proper resolution is to identify, isolate, and excise these toxic, destructive, often murderous, hate mongering lunatics and their deluded, sycophantic followers.
From the same book Hoffer’s take on achievement vs. alibi is as follows: “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day. We have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have an alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement.” Insight like that is what puts Hoffer in the forefront of American philosophical thought.
In 1967 Hoffer came to the attention of CBS reporter Eric Sevareid who interviewed him on national television. As a result of that interview Hoffer exploded on the national scene doing a series of additional television interviews, all the while writing several more books. President Lyndon Johnson appointed Hoffer to a civil right commission. Hoffer’s philosophy was that every person deserved an equal chance to succeed in life, but not a more than equal chance. He had competed on an equal footing with everyone without any special help from anyone. This put him at odds with the black members of the commission. As recounted by Thomas Sowell in a column written in 2003 on the 20th anniversary of his death, Hoffer said to a black member of the commission who was in a rage in his perception of the treatment of black people, “Mister, it is easy for you to be full of rage. It is not easy to go to work and build something.” After that Hoffer resigned from the commission.
When it came to the rebellious youth of San Francisco in the 1960’s Hoffer approved and encourage them except in one area – he rejected the drug culture declaring that drugs were totally destructive without any redeeming merit. It is too bad some of the youth then and now did not and do not heed him.
In addition to The True Believer, Hoffer wrote The Passionate State of Mind; The Ordeal of Change; The Temper of Our Time; Working and Thinking on the Waterfront; First Things, Last Things; Reflections on the Human Conditions; In Our Time; and Before the Sabbath. The idea for The Ordeal of Change came to Hoffer during his time as a migrant farm laborer in California. Because he and many others farm workers were uneasy and apprehensive over the simple change of going from harvesting one crop to another he realized that was a microcosm of societies under sudden change. In fact he held that, “It is not so much that revolution causes change as it is that change causes revolution.” When change comes too quickly some people become unsettled and react unpredictably and violently.
Another aphorism of Hoffer’s is that the efficiency and dynamism of a society or country can be measured by its record of maintenance. In this Hoffer found favor with the United States, Europe, and especially Israel, but was highly critical of the Middle East and African countries. Such an expressed opinion hardly endeared Hoffer with the politically correct crowd of which he cared not a whit. Hoffer maintained that this country was built by ostensibly ordinary people he described as being “lumpy with talent.” The nobility and elitists in Europe were not the people who settled in this country in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. It was the unsatisfied and generally lower social and economic strata common folk who came to this country in droves and, taking advantage of the country’s opportunities, turned it into the greatest economic, social, and military power in the world.
Hoffer was particularly dismissive of what he called “pseudo-intellectuals“, believing that many of them were ivory tower pin heads who were clueless about what really motivates people and why these motivations make efficient and progressive societies. Likewise he was contemptuous of the putative elitists who worshipped nature in the raw from the inside and seemed to believe that all nature was better left “unspoiled” and therefore unexploited even if done responsibly. Hoffer worked in the natural environment in the fields of California and personally knew the pain and discomfort associated with hard outdoor work. He experienced what “nature in the raw” was really about.
Especially later in his life Hoffer’s eyes were bothered by the bright television camera lights so he essentially stopped doing interviews. He did agree in a telephone call with a young television producer from New York to do one last interview. When she arrived in San Francisco Hoffer told her he had changed his mind and would not do the interview. She accurately sized up the gruff old man and told him, “Listen, at great expense and inconvenience I flew a television crew out here from New York because you said you would do this interview and now you son-of-a-bitch you are going to do it!” And he did. Left unknown is what his response would have been had she meekly begged him to do the interview. I believe he agreed to do it because he admired her spunk and no nonsense directness – a reflection of his own personality.
Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Metal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. He died in May 1983 having lived to the age of 80 thereby exceeding his early expectation by a full 30 years.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Fools, Frauds & Fakes 15
Harsh terms I agree, but I think you will agree that these words are not too harsh and certainly deserved for the people described herein. Read on.
In the interest of full disclosure I will say that most, but by no means all, of what is contained in this essay is sourced by the 2005 book Hoodwinked :How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture by Jack Cashill. Except for quotations, the conclusions and apothegmatic observations are my own. The author of Hoodwinked is not a quidnunc, but a dedicated truth seeker who is an award winning (yet winning awards is not a guarantee of honest and respectable achievement as you shall see) writer and producer whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Fortune and The Weekly Standard magazines. His book is well worth the time and money.
Almost as big a problem as the miscreants who have perpetuated these frauds or just plain goofily wrong ideas are the compliant enablers and apologists on the left, especially in the mainstream media who are umbrageous in their outrage when their statements and motives are questioned. Incredibly, or maybe not, long after many of these ideas had been undisputedly exposed for what they are, the denials and excuses continued and some even to this day.
Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out
When Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.
King Lear, I, iv
Who was Walter Duranty? Why none other than a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent of the New York Times. And why did he win a Pulitzer? He was the New York Times Moscow bureau chief from 1921 to 1934 reporting on the conditions in the Soviet Union, calling Joseph Stalin the world’s “greatest living statesman”, and saying the famine in the Ukraine, North Caucasus, and elsewhere in 1932-33 “is mostly bunk.” In his seminal book, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest, Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, estimates 7 million people died in the 1932-33 famine, 6.5 million died as a result of ‘dekulakization’, and 1 million in the Kazakh catastrophe for a total of 14.5 million premature deaths between 1930 to 1937. Some bunk. Duranty was widely acclaimed by liberals as the authoritative voice of what went on in the USSR during his stay there, never mind that everything he said and wrote turned out to be a tissue of lies, distortions, and cover-ups. The formal recognition of the Soviet Union by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 was greatly facilitated by Duranty’s bogus reporting.
When Jayson Blair was canned by the New York Times for making up extensive, but fairly innocuous stuff he complained that Walter Duranty was enshrined in the NYT hallowed hall of Pulitzer winners on the 11th floor of their building with only a small asterisk beneath his picture and this disclaimer in fine print: “Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.” There was brief chatter during the Blair episode about pulling Duranty’s Pulitzer, but it quickly faded. Jayson Blair felt hard put by when he was fired for being a lying scoundrel while Duranty was largely not censured for being a much more destructive lying villain. I am not altogether unsympathetic towards the scoundrel.
Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers - now there are a pair you would not want to draw in a card game. Hiss was a Soviet spy who was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison in 1951. He was defended by practically all of the left in the United States at the time and some even now. President Harry Truman initially proclaimed him a victim of the rabidly anti-communist right until the FBI showed him evidence of Hiss’s culpability. Truman then said, why that SOB, except he didn’t use abbreviations, was guilty as sin. Truman was a plain speaking and honest man – one of the best presidents of the 20th century in my opinion. Anyway, Hiss spent the rest of his considerably long life (b. 1904 – d. 1996) insisting on his innocence. There was never much of a doubt at the time about his guilt and with the opening of the Soviet archives after the end of the cold war and the Venona papers, a vast collection of Soviet Union messages the US government had intercepted and decoded from 1942-46,being made public there was absolutely no doubt. Doubtless from whatever domain he now resides, Hiss is still claiming he was a close buddy of Hoover, Nixon, et al. and as innocent of spying as say, the Rosenbergs and Mata Hari. When Hiss died Peter Jennings said that Hiss had protested his innocence until the end of his life and implied there was still considerably doubt that Hiss was indeed guilty as charged. Perhaps the late Peter Jennings will add his voice to that of Hiss’s in the attempt for posthumous vindication.
Whitaker Chambers was a most unusual fellow. He joined the communist party in 1924 and remained a zealous and committed member until 1938. Along the way he was an editor for the communist newspaper in the USA, The Daily Worker, and a spy for the USSR, being the contact man for Alger Hiss. Chambers had an epiphany in 1938 when he quite the party. As related by Jack Cashill, in the Chambers book, Witness, Chambers tells the following chilling story: “A German diplomat abandoned his Soviet sympathies literally overnight. His daughter, not comprehending the change, told Chambers how it happened; ‘He was immensely pro-Soviet, she said, and then – you will laugh at me – but you must not laugh at my father – and then – one night – in Moscow – he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.’ Chambers did not laugh. He understood. Those screams just did not penetrate the mind. They penetrated the soul. The man who has not yet lost his humanity finally understands that those are the screams of another human ‘soul in agony’.” The eventual realization that under the Soviets, the “Evil Empire”, millions of people were murdered; terrorized; forcibly displaced from their homeland, with many parents being separated forever from their children; and literally countless innocent citizens starved and worked to death in the Gulags seemed to have escaped the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Noam Chomsky, Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, and many more who apparently had or have no humanity and no soul. Or they were or are simply incredibly blind, and willfully so, to reality. In any case these sorry excuses for humans clearly did not even hear a whisper, much less a scream.
Margaret Mead was one of the most famous anthropologists in the world. Her fame started when she published her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 at the age of 26. Over the years she became the grand dame of anthropology, writing many more books, receiving numerous awards, and serving on several anthropology and natural history boards. Is there a fly in this anointed status? Only one several orders of magnitude larger than a horse fly as it turns out. A dominant theme in Mead’s book on Samoan society and in later books is that in these relatively unsophisticated cultures the people honestly express uninhibited mores and therefore did not have the sexual and interpersonal relationship hang-ups characteristic of Western societies. That sounds charming and innocent. Mead was anything but. According to Jack Cashill, Mead claimed that in Samoan society, given the scarcity of taboos, homosexuality was common, illegitimate children welcome, prostitution harmless, and divorce simple and informal. The casual familiarity with sex led to a culture in which “there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity, and no impotence, except for the temporary result of severe illness.” Better still, Samoan-style openness dissolved the proprietary tensions – “monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity” – so problematic in a possessive American culture. Mead concluded that the difference between Americans and Samoans had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture. The social environment entirely differentiated Americans from Samoans. The anthropologists, the media, and the public bought her theory completely. At the time of her death 50 years after initial publication Coming of Age in Samoa was still selling 100,000 copies per year. Much of what Mead wrote and postulated was based on her interviews with two teen age Samoan girls.
A young New Zealand anthropologist named Derek Freeman was so entranced by Mead’s work (and why not?) that he went to Samoa as a school teacher in 1939. After Freeman had been in Samoa for several years and became fluent with the language little by little he saw that what Mead had written was seriously wrong. The dominant religion in Samoa had been Christian for a hundred years before Mead set foot there so with that overlay her descriptions should have been suspect, but were not, from the start. After returning to New Zealand and then to London for more studies, Freeland returned to Samoa, going to the very island where Mead had interviewed the two girls. They told Freeman they had made up all the stories they related to Mead because they thought that was what she wanted to hear and said if Mead had ever expressed doubt as to what they said they would have told her the truth. Freeman corresponding with Mead, pointed out many of Mead’s claims which Freeman believed could not possibly be true. Mead ignored him and went ahead with a new edition of her book in 1972 without any corrections. Freeman published his own book in 1983 Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth exposing how Margaret Mead had gotten it so wrong. Why did the labile Ms. Mead allow herself to be hoaxed and write such a book of fiction? She wanted to believe what she wrote even though she had to have known it was largely untrue. When Mead went to Samoa in 1926 she told her husband of three years she would not leave him unless she met someone she loved more. She met someone, in fact several some ones. Married and divorced three times she had numerous affairs during and between the times she was married. She even had a fling with the female assistant of her doctoral advisor. Quite simply she was a sexually frustrated debauchee rebelling against the moral strictures of a conventional upbringing in a middle class family so she constructed this society in the Pacific Islands to suit her own moral and sexual proclivities.
I am reluctant to include Alfred Charles Kinsey in this essay not because he was less culpable than the others, but because he was more. His story is unsettling and disgusting to the point that I will leave it to you to read the evidence of the gross details of his depravity in Jack Cashill’s book or in the authoritative biography of Kinsey by respected historian James H. Jones. If Margaret Mead was merely a libertine, then Kinsey was a pervert and child molester and Kinsey’s wife was not much better. Kinsey was raised a devout Methodist, but lost his faith while attending Harvard. Intelligence was not a deficiency with Kinsey - he was the valedictorian of his high school class – it was his complete lack of moral character. He eventually became every bit as hostile to God and religious people as Rachael Carson. With the exceptions of Martin Luther King and Alex Haley this godlessness is a common thread through the lives of the people described in this essay.
The 2004 movie Kinsey starring Liam Neeson was a paean to Kinsey and his “pioneering and important” work in human sexuality. While the movie at least obliquely references Kinsey’s weirdness, the issue of his undeniable depravity and criminal conduct was never even suggested. Kinsey has been and still is celebrated for his work in documenting the sexuality of the American male and female which was not even the Zeitgeist of the “liberated” late 1960’s and its anything goes “flower children”, say nothing of the later 1940’s - early 1950’s when his books came out. Far from being feted he should have been prosecuted and incarcerated as a pedophile. If you have doubts on that score then I challenge you to read the aforementioned references. The erroneous figure of the American population being 10% homosexual was perpetrated by Kinsey as a result of his interviewing a disproportionate number of homosexuals and other sexual deviants. The actual figure is between 1% and 2% as estimated by thorough and honest anthropologists - still far too many for comfort, but not as ridiculous as Kinsey and his acolytes would have it. I would have to conclude that Kinsey was the Primus inter Pares of all the malefactors written about in this exposé.
Ever wonder why some American icons are subjected to pejorative evaluation without undue censure redounding upon the critic and others are not? Of course that is a rhetorical question – we all know the answer. The two American presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who are widely recognized as our greatest presidents have had their critics who were not immediately drawn and quartered. It has been pointed out that Washington as general of the revolutionary army lost most of his battles with the British; as president, submitted inflated personal expense accounts to congress; and was standoffish and aloof with people, even with personal friends. Without any persuasive evidence at all, Lincoln has in recent years been portrayed as a homosexual and black historian, Lerone Bennett insists that Lincoln was a racist who absolutely who did not free a single slave or had any desire to help black people. In our now ‘enlightened’ age being a homosexual is often to claim morally superior status even to the point that a popular TV series was named Queer Eye for the Straight Guy when the use the term ‘queer’ was consider decidedly homophobic. Perhaps it is like the ‘n’ word which is verboten when used by whites, but acceptable when used by blacks. To me insulting and uncivil speech or actions are not to be condoned when used by anyone towards blameless people. Still I don’t believe there is any intent to compliment Lincoln.
Have you ever heard any criticism of Martin Luther King, especially after he was assassinated? When King graduated from the Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, given his humble test scores, he clearly was recommended for doctoral studies at Boston University based on race. On his doctoral dissertation King lifted whole passages from other people’s work without attribution, a practice he was to follow his entire career. King even swiped key passages from others for his famed “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Because King associated with shady characters who were either communists or communist sympathizers, J. Edgar Hoover, often illegally, tapped his telephone, discovering that King was not a communist, but was having extra marital affairs. Martin Luther King was a cynosure of the civil rights movement and a distinguished American who made positive contribution to this country and the world, but he also had character flaws. When proof of King’s extensive plagiarism came out in 1990 the mainstream media, including the Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Times, and New Republic sat on the story. Other liberals made excuses for King’s plagiarism, defining it, according to Jack Cashill with euphemisms such as: “mining, welding, quarrying, yoking, intertextualization, and voice merging.”
The 1976 book Roots: The saga of an American Family by Alex Haley was a huge success both commercially and artistically. Jack Cashill wrote: “The mini-series based on the book captured more viewers than any series before it. 130 million Americans watched the final episode alone. And Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for telling the true story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.” So far so good – the problem is that the rest of this story is not so good, in fact not good at all. Even more that M.L. King, Haley plagiarized great gobs of what he wrote and what he didn’t steal from others he simply made up. Haley’s story of his ancestors in Africa was pure fiction. Sorry folks, but there is no “Kunta Kinte” in Haley’s or the ancestry of anyone else. The author Haley plagiarized the most was Harold Courlander a white man who had written a novel titled The African. The Courlander book earned its author $1400. Alex Haley made $2.6 million in hard cover royalties alone. In 1978 Courlander sued Haley in a U.S. District Court in New York for copyright infringement. During the trial Haley denied he had even read Courlander’s book The African. When it became obvious that passage after passage of Haley’s book was taken from Courlander’s novel the federal judge, Robert Ward, stopped the trial and told Haley and his attorneys that they would have to settle out-of-court else the judge would have to pursue perjury charges against Haley. The case was settled for $650,000. It is rich that Haley purportedly wrote the true story of his ancestors much of which was based on a book of fiction! One would have to be decidedly silly to think the myrmidons of the news media published the results of the trial. Of course they did not. Still I have more of a feeling of pathos than contempt for Alex Haley and indeed respect for Martin Luther King in spite of his all too human peccadilloes.
Martin Luther King and Alex Haley were relatively benign fellows, who perpetrated a little fraud and lied a bit during their careers, compared to a person who did a great deal of harm to a great many people. That person is Rachael Carson. Yes, she is the author of the widely read 1962 book on the environment, Silent Spring. She could accurately be called one of the first and certainly one of most effective “eco-terrorists.” More so than some of the other rapscallions in this essay, the word ‘despicable’ fits Rachael Carson the best. What did she do to deserve such opprobrium? Let’s count her soul damning sins. First off Ms. Carson had no use for God or anyone who believed in Him. Nature was her god and damn everyone who deviated from her concept of what true nature was. To her the natural enemy of nature was man. Some of the titles of the chapters in her book, Silent Spring, are “The Elixir of Death, Rivers of Death, and Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias.” In the text she throws around terms such as, “toxins, contaminants, hazards, death-dealing materials”, and the inevitable “poison.” One gets the idea that she was death obsessed and comfortable with that philosophy. There are people who perversely seem to derive the most satisfaction in life when they are at their unhappiest faultfinding and blaming best.
The bane of human intervention with nature for Carson was the use of dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). DDT was invented by a German chemist, Othmar Zeidler in 1874 and perfected as a pesticide by Dr. Paul Muller in 1939 for which he received the Nobel Prize. In her book Carson claimed that DDT was originally tested as an “agent of death” for man. That was a blatant lie. She also quoted Albert Schweitzer when he said “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”; implying that Schweitzer was talking about insecticides when he was actually referring to nuclear war. In fact Schweitzer praised the use of DDT as a means of controlling disease carrying insects during his medical work in Africa.
Jack Cashill tells the story of J. Gordon Edwards who was an environmentalist, park ranger, esteemed entomologist, and legendary mountain climber. When Carson’s book came out in 1962 Edwards read it with great anticipation believing there was actual and potential damage being done to the environment, but he quickly realized that Carson was a liar and fraud. While on duty in Italy in 1944 the soldiers in his company were plagued by body lice which were spreading typhus, a disease which had killed an estimated 3 million people in Europe during and after WWI. After a shipment of DDT was flown from the USA to Italy, Edwards spent two weeks dusting every soldier in his company, breathing in the powder all the while. The DDT worked and an epidemic was prevented. The surgeon general estimated that the DDT had saved the lives of 5000 soldiers.
Edwards found Carson’s book filled with scores of “deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations.” The termagant Carson attempting to whip up a veritable Strum und Drang of controversy claimed there were more bird deaths during the DDT era than before. What she didn’t point out was there were more birds during this time so naturally there were more bird deaths. Edwards had his fill of the prevaricating and false alarmist Carson so he went on a lecture tour and had a fill of a different kind. He took to swallowing a tablespoon of DDT on stage before every lecture. An Esquire magazine article about Edwards in 1971 said he had ingested 200 times the normal intake of DDT. In 1959 unprotected workers had applied 60,000 tons of DDT to the inside walls of 100 million houses. Neither the 130,000 workers nor the 535 million people living in the homes experienced any adverse effects. Edwards cited the 500 million lives saved (Why not say 500 million deaths postpone?) that the National Academy of Sciences attributed to DDT and he echoed the World Health Organization’s affirmation that no substance had ever proved more beneficial to man.
Fate seems to have an ironic and droll sense of inevitability. Rachael Carson died at age 56 of cancer – one of the ills she ostensibly wanted to prevent with her crusade against chemical insecticides. Her bête noire, J. Gordon Edwards, who swallowed DDT like a tonic lived to the age of 84 – dying of a heart attack while pursuing his favorite avocation of mountain climbing.
Paul Ehrlich was not a fraud or a liar. He was a good old fashioned fool and fanatic who sincerely believed all of the nonsense he espoused. His exegetic antagonist would be a man named Julian Simon. Ehrlich wrote a number of best selling books – the two most famous were The Population Bomb in 1968 and The Population Explosion in 1991. Among the crack pot predictions he made were: “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people [this writer’s note: the current world population is circa 6.5 billion].” He predicted that by 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million. He envisioned the president of the USA dissolving congress during the food riots of the 1980’s, followed by the United States suffering a nuclear attack for its mass use of insecticides. Jack Cashill opined that Ehrlich was postulating that the United States would get nuked for killing bugs! In his 1968 book Ehrlich’s most optimistic outcome for the world in the next decade or so was that a new Pope would give his blessing for abortion and only half a billion people would die of starvation. The most pessimistic prediction was that worldwide famine would cause a nuclear war and the most intelligent survivers would be cockroaches. And you may have thought I was grossly exaggerating when I said this guy was a real nut case. But don’t think he was some obscure ‘mad as a hatter’ recluse writing out of his basement in his B.V.D.’s. His book The Population Bomb sold 3 million copies and he made 20 appearances on the Johnny Carson show alone. Ehrlich helped push the Sierra Club and Greenpeace to even more leftwing radical positions – which is like encouraging an alcoholic to belly up to the bar more often – and he was, surprise, a founding father of Earth Day. The left just loved him, tendentiously supporting him and his risible theories, ipse dixit. He was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel equivalent for environmentalists. Jack Cashill says about him, “In his naturalist faith, and rejection of God, Ehrlich hews to type. Giving Ehrlich the benefit of doubt, his is not the conscious fraud of the bunco artist, but rather the self-deception of the blowhard. He appears to have drunk often at the well of his own snake oil.” It would have been better for him if he had followed Edwards’ example and drank DDT instead.
Julian Simon became tired of hearing Ehrlich’s twin themes of population increase disasters and acute shortages of natural resources so he decided to challenge Ehrlich. Simon attended Harvard on a naval ROTC scholarship and served as a junior officer after graduation until the completion of his tour of duty. He received a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Chicago and then returned to New York to work in direct marketing. Not finding that line of work fulfilling, he went to the University of Maryland as a professor of business administration until he died in 1998. Simon made a famous bet with Ehrlich. He told Ehrlich to pick any five commodities and hold them for ten years. If scarcity caused the prices to rise at the end of ten years, then Simon would buy then from Ehrlich thereby giving Ehrlich the profit difference. However if the prices declined then Ehrlich would have to pay Simon the difference between the current price and what Ehrlich purchased them for. Ehrlich picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Not only did the prices decline on all five commodities, but of 35 standard metals 33 dropped in price as did oil and food. Ehrlich paid Simon $570.07 and he paid himself much more in lost reputation. Ehrlich allowed as how the bet might have been a mistake – he could have laid long odds that it was. Simon also had a thing or two to say about Al Gore’s book Earth in the Lurch (well, perhaps the actual title is Earth in the Balance). Simon said, “The book is as ignorant a collection of clichés as anything ever published on the subject.” And he exposed the clichés of vanishing farmland, poisonous DDT, deadly dioxin, and lethal Agent Orange with hard and undeniable data. Al Gore never tried to answer Simon anymore than he tried to justify calling the internal-combustion engine the most destructive invention of man in history.
Sometimes you just can not imagine something as bizarre and incomprehensible as what the loony left comes up with. There was a news story in 2005 which said Ted Turner (now you begin to understand) will join a group, possibly drafted from Comedy Central, to journey to North Korea to save the flora and fauna, especially in the demilitarized zone (I swear on the Bible or Das Kapital, take your pick, that I did not make this up). Coincidentally in the same week a North Korean was on a book tour in the USA. He had been sent to one of the Gulags set up by Kim Il Insane (Sung) when he was nine years old not because of what he did of course, but because his father and grandfather were less than excited about living in a country ruled by one of the most repressive regimes in recent times. The boy eventually escaped from the People’s Paradise of North Korea (he just couldn’t take all that happiness) and came to the West to write a book titled Aquariums of Pyongyang. The now young man told his and other ordinary North Korean’s story on the C-SPAN Book TV program. He retold, as if it needs retelling, the gruesome story of hundreds of thousands of people being sent to the Gulags to labor until they died of overwork, starvation, or disease. It sure is heart-warming to know the egregious Ted Turner and his lefty brummagem cohorts are visiting the People’s Paradise to save the birds and flowers. He follows a long line of fellow travelers who care more about nature than people. This is the same Ted Turner who called Christians “losers” and after the company he founded, CNN, was taken over by the Time Warner Company, but before he was kicked out of the organization, spotted a couple of female CNN staffers working on Ash Wednesday with smudges of ash on their foreheads. Good old tolerant Ted made the snide comment to another person, “Who are they, a couple of Jesus Freaks?” Likely if they had painted a hammer & sickle on their foreheads Ted would have been effusive in his praise for their good taste and support for the Communist International.
When these frauds and quacks are exposed, even if not admitted by the folks on the left, I must say I get a certain feeling of schadenfreude. Forgive me.
In the interest of full disclosure I will say that most, but by no means all, of what is contained in this essay is sourced by the 2005 book Hoodwinked :How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture by Jack Cashill. Except for quotations, the conclusions and apothegmatic observations are my own. The author of Hoodwinked is not a quidnunc, but a dedicated truth seeker who is an award winning (yet winning awards is not a guarantee of honest and respectable achievement as you shall see) writer and producer whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Fortune and The Weekly Standard magazines. His book is well worth the time and money.
Almost as big a problem as the miscreants who have perpetuated these frauds or just plain goofily wrong ideas are the compliant enablers and apologists on the left, especially in the mainstream media who are umbrageous in their outrage when their statements and motives are questioned. Incredibly, or maybe not, long after many of these ideas had been undisputedly exposed for what they are, the denials and excuses continued and some even to this day.
Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out
When Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.
King Lear, I, iv
Who was Walter Duranty? Why none other than a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent of the New York Times. And why did he win a Pulitzer? He was the New York Times Moscow bureau chief from 1921 to 1934 reporting on the conditions in the Soviet Union, calling Joseph Stalin the world’s “greatest living statesman”, and saying the famine in the Ukraine, North Caucasus, and elsewhere in 1932-33 “is mostly bunk.” In his seminal book, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest, Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, estimates 7 million people died in the 1932-33 famine, 6.5 million died as a result of ‘dekulakization’, and 1 million in the Kazakh catastrophe for a total of 14.5 million premature deaths between 1930 to 1937. Some bunk. Duranty was widely acclaimed by liberals as the authoritative voice of what went on in the USSR during his stay there, never mind that everything he said and wrote turned out to be a tissue of lies, distortions, and cover-ups. The formal recognition of the Soviet Union by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 was greatly facilitated by Duranty’s bogus reporting.
When Jayson Blair was canned by the New York Times for making up extensive, but fairly innocuous stuff he complained that Walter Duranty was enshrined in the NYT hallowed hall of Pulitzer winners on the 11th floor of their building with only a small asterisk beneath his picture and this disclaimer in fine print: “Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.” There was brief chatter during the Blair episode about pulling Duranty’s Pulitzer, but it quickly faded. Jayson Blair felt hard put by when he was fired for being a lying scoundrel while Duranty was largely not censured for being a much more destructive lying villain. I am not altogether unsympathetic towards the scoundrel.
Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers - now there are a pair you would not want to draw in a card game. Hiss was a Soviet spy who was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison in 1951. He was defended by practically all of the left in the United States at the time and some even now. President Harry Truman initially proclaimed him a victim of the rabidly anti-communist right until the FBI showed him evidence of Hiss’s culpability. Truman then said, why that SOB, except he didn’t use abbreviations, was guilty as sin. Truman was a plain speaking and honest man – one of the best presidents of the 20th century in my opinion. Anyway, Hiss spent the rest of his considerably long life (b. 1904 – d. 1996) insisting on his innocence. There was never much of a doubt at the time about his guilt and with the opening of the Soviet archives after the end of the cold war and the Venona papers, a vast collection of Soviet Union messages the US government had intercepted and decoded from 1942-46,being made public there was absolutely no doubt. Doubtless from whatever domain he now resides, Hiss is still claiming he was a close buddy of Hoover, Nixon, et al. and as innocent of spying as say, the Rosenbergs and Mata Hari. When Hiss died Peter Jennings said that Hiss had protested his innocence until the end of his life and implied there was still considerably doubt that Hiss was indeed guilty as charged. Perhaps the late Peter Jennings will add his voice to that of Hiss’s in the attempt for posthumous vindication.
Whitaker Chambers was a most unusual fellow. He joined the communist party in 1924 and remained a zealous and committed member until 1938. Along the way he was an editor for the communist newspaper in the USA, The Daily Worker, and a spy for the USSR, being the contact man for Alger Hiss. Chambers had an epiphany in 1938 when he quite the party. As related by Jack Cashill, in the Chambers book, Witness, Chambers tells the following chilling story: “A German diplomat abandoned his Soviet sympathies literally overnight. His daughter, not comprehending the change, told Chambers how it happened; ‘He was immensely pro-Soviet, she said, and then – you will laugh at me – but you must not laugh at my father – and then – one night – in Moscow – he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.’ Chambers did not laugh. He understood. Those screams just did not penetrate the mind. They penetrated the soul. The man who has not yet lost his humanity finally understands that those are the screams of another human ‘soul in agony’.” The eventual realization that under the Soviets, the “Evil Empire”, millions of people were murdered; terrorized; forcibly displaced from their homeland, with many parents being separated forever from their children; and literally countless innocent citizens starved and worked to death in the Gulags seemed to have escaped the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Noam Chomsky, Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, and many more who apparently had or have no humanity and no soul. Or they were or are simply incredibly blind, and willfully so, to reality. In any case these sorry excuses for humans clearly did not even hear a whisper, much less a scream.
Margaret Mead was one of the most famous anthropologists in the world. Her fame started when she published her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 at the age of 26. Over the years she became the grand dame of anthropology, writing many more books, receiving numerous awards, and serving on several anthropology and natural history boards. Is there a fly in this anointed status? Only one several orders of magnitude larger than a horse fly as it turns out. A dominant theme in Mead’s book on Samoan society and in later books is that in these relatively unsophisticated cultures the people honestly express uninhibited mores and therefore did not have the sexual and interpersonal relationship hang-ups characteristic of Western societies. That sounds charming and innocent. Mead was anything but. According to Jack Cashill, Mead claimed that in Samoan society, given the scarcity of taboos, homosexuality was common, illegitimate children welcome, prostitution harmless, and divorce simple and informal. The casual familiarity with sex led to a culture in which “there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity, and no impotence, except for the temporary result of severe illness.” Better still, Samoan-style openness dissolved the proprietary tensions – “monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity” – so problematic in a possessive American culture. Mead concluded that the difference between Americans and Samoans had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture. The social environment entirely differentiated Americans from Samoans. The anthropologists, the media, and the public bought her theory completely. At the time of her death 50 years after initial publication Coming of Age in Samoa was still selling 100,000 copies per year. Much of what Mead wrote and postulated was based on her interviews with two teen age Samoan girls.
A young New Zealand anthropologist named Derek Freeman was so entranced by Mead’s work (and why not?) that he went to Samoa as a school teacher in 1939. After Freeman had been in Samoa for several years and became fluent with the language little by little he saw that what Mead had written was seriously wrong. The dominant religion in Samoa had been Christian for a hundred years before Mead set foot there so with that overlay her descriptions should have been suspect, but were not, from the start. After returning to New Zealand and then to London for more studies, Freeland returned to Samoa, going to the very island where Mead had interviewed the two girls. They told Freeman they had made up all the stories they related to Mead because they thought that was what she wanted to hear and said if Mead had ever expressed doubt as to what they said they would have told her the truth. Freeman corresponding with Mead, pointed out many of Mead’s claims which Freeman believed could not possibly be true. Mead ignored him and went ahead with a new edition of her book in 1972 without any corrections. Freeman published his own book in 1983 Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth exposing how Margaret Mead had gotten it so wrong. Why did the labile Ms. Mead allow herself to be hoaxed and write such a book of fiction? She wanted to believe what she wrote even though she had to have known it was largely untrue. When Mead went to Samoa in 1926 she told her husband of three years she would not leave him unless she met someone she loved more. She met someone, in fact several some ones. Married and divorced three times she had numerous affairs during and between the times she was married. She even had a fling with the female assistant of her doctoral advisor. Quite simply she was a sexually frustrated debauchee rebelling against the moral strictures of a conventional upbringing in a middle class family so she constructed this society in the Pacific Islands to suit her own moral and sexual proclivities.
I am reluctant to include Alfred Charles Kinsey in this essay not because he was less culpable than the others, but because he was more. His story is unsettling and disgusting to the point that I will leave it to you to read the evidence of the gross details of his depravity in Jack Cashill’s book or in the authoritative biography of Kinsey by respected historian James H. Jones. If Margaret Mead was merely a libertine, then Kinsey was a pervert and child molester and Kinsey’s wife was not much better. Kinsey was raised a devout Methodist, but lost his faith while attending Harvard. Intelligence was not a deficiency with Kinsey - he was the valedictorian of his high school class – it was his complete lack of moral character. He eventually became every bit as hostile to God and religious people as Rachael Carson. With the exceptions of Martin Luther King and Alex Haley this godlessness is a common thread through the lives of the people described in this essay.
The 2004 movie Kinsey starring Liam Neeson was a paean to Kinsey and his “pioneering and important” work in human sexuality. While the movie at least obliquely references Kinsey’s weirdness, the issue of his undeniable depravity and criminal conduct was never even suggested. Kinsey has been and still is celebrated for his work in documenting the sexuality of the American male and female which was not even the Zeitgeist of the “liberated” late 1960’s and its anything goes “flower children”, say nothing of the later 1940’s - early 1950’s when his books came out. Far from being feted he should have been prosecuted and incarcerated as a pedophile. If you have doubts on that score then I challenge you to read the aforementioned references. The erroneous figure of the American population being 10% homosexual was perpetrated by Kinsey as a result of his interviewing a disproportionate number of homosexuals and other sexual deviants. The actual figure is between 1% and 2% as estimated by thorough and honest anthropologists - still far too many for comfort, but not as ridiculous as Kinsey and his acolytes would have it. I would have to conclude that Kinsey was the Primus inter Pares of all the malefactors written about in this exposé.
Ever wonder why some American icons are subjected to pejorative evaluation without undue censure redounding upon the critic and others are not? Of course that is a rhetorical question – we all know the answer. The two American presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who are widely recognized as our greatest presidents have had their critics who were not immediately drawn and quartered. It has been pointed out that Washington as general of the revolutionary army lost most of his battles with the British; as president, submitted inflated personal expense accounts to congress; and was standoffish and aloof with people, even with personal friends. Without any persuasive evidence at all, Lincoln has in recent years been portrayed as a homosexual and black historian, Lerone Bennett insists that Lincoln was a racist who absolutely who did not free a single slave or had any desire to help black people. In our now ‘enlightened’ age being a homosexual is often to claim morally superior status even to the point that a popular TV series was named Queer Eye for the Straight Guy when the use the term ‘queer’ was consider decidedly homophobic. Perhaps it is like the ‘n’ word which is verboten when used by whites, but acceptable when used by blacks. To me insulting and uncivil speech or actions are not to be condoned when used by anyone towards blameless people. Still I don’t believe there is any intent to compliment Lincoln.
Have you ever heard any criticism of Martin Luther King, especially after he was assassinated? When King graduated from the Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, given his humble test scores, he clearly was recommended for doctoral studies at Boston University based on race. On his doctoral dissertation King lifted whole passages from other people’s work without attribution, a practice he was to follow his entire career. King even swiped key passages from others for his famed “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Because King associated with shady characters who were either communists or communist sympathizers, J. Edgar Hoover, often illegally, tapped his telephone, discovering that King was not a communist, but was having extra marital affairs. Martin Luther King was a cynosure of the civil rights movement and a distinguished American who made positive contribution to this country and the world, but he also had character flaws. When proof of King’s extensive plagiarism came out in 1990 the mainstream media, including the Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Times, and New Republic sat on the story. Other liberals made excuses for King’s plagiarism, defining it, according to Jack Cashill with euphemisms such as: “mining, welding, quarrying, yoking, intertextualization, and voice merging.”
The 1976 book Roots: The saga of an American Family by Alex Haley was a huge success both commercially and artistically. Jack Cashill wrote: “The mini-series based on the book captured more viewers than any series before it. 130 million Americans watched the final episode alone. And Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for telling the true story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.” So far so good – the problem is that the rest of this story is not so good, in fact not good at all. Even more that M.L. King, Haley plagiarized great gobs of what he wrote and what he didn’t steal from others he simply made up. Haley’s story of his ancestors in Africa was pure fiction. Sorry folks, but there is no “Kunta Kinte” in Haley’s or the ancestry of anyone else. The author Haley plagiarized the most was Harold Courlander a white man who had written a novel titled The African. The Courlander book earned its author $1400. Alex Haley made $2.6 million in hard cover royalties alone. In 1978 Courlander sued Haley in a U.S. District Court in New York for copyright infringement. During the trial Haley denied he had even read Courlander’s book The African. When it became obvious that passage after passage of Haley’s book was taken from Courlander’s novel the federal judge, Robert Ward, stopped the trial and told Haley and his attorneys that they would have to settle out-of-court else the judge would have to pursue perjury charges against Haley. The case was settled for $650,000. It is rich that Haley purportedly wrote the true story of his ancestors much of which was based on a book of fiction! One would have to be decidedly silly to think the myrmidons of the news media published the results of the trial. Of course they did not. Still I have more of a feeling of pathos than contempt for Alex Haley and indeed respect for Martin Luther King in spite of his all too human peccadilloes.
Martin Luther King and Alex Haley were relatively benign fellows, who perpetrated a little fraud and lied a bit during their careers, compared to a person who did a great deal of harm to a great many people. That person is Rachael Carson. Yes, she is the author of the widely read 1962 book on the environment, Silent Spring. She could accurately be called one of the first and certainly one of most effective “eco-terrorists.” More so than some of the other rapscallions in this essay, the word ‘despicable’ fits Rachael Carson the best. What did she do to deserve such opprobrium? Let’s count her soul damning sins. First off Ms. Carson had no use for God or anyone who believed in Him. Nature was her god and damn everyone who deviated from her concept of what true nature was. To her the natural enemy of nature was man. Some of the titles of the chapters in her book, Silent Spring, are “The Elixir of Death, Rivers of Death, and Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias.” In the text she throws around terms such as, “toxins, contaminants, hazards, death-dealing materials”, and the inevitable “poison.” One gets the idea that she was death obsessed and comfortable with that philosophy. There are people who perversely seem to derive the most satisfaction in life when they are at their unhappiest faultfinding and blaming best.
The bane of human intervention with nature for Carson was the use of dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). DDT was invented by a German chemist, Othmar Zeidler in 1874 and perfected as a pesticide by Dr. Paul Muller in 1939 for which he received the Nobel Prize. In her book Carson claimed that DDT was originally tested as an “agent of death” for man. That was a blatant lie. She also quoted Albert Schweitzer when he said “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”; implying that Schweitzer was talking about insecticides when he was actually referring to nuclear war. In fact Schweitzer praised the use of DDT as a means of controlling disease carrying insects during his medical work in Africa.
Jack Cashill tells the story of J. Gordon Edwards who was an environmentalist, park ranger, esteemed entomologist, and legendary mountain climber. When Carson’s book came out in 1962 Edwards read it with great anticipation believing there was actual and potential damage being done to the environment, but he quickly realized that Carson was a liar and fraud. While on duty in Italy in 1944 the soldiers in his company were plagued by body lice which were spreading typhus, a disease which had killed an estimated 3 million people in Europe during and after WWI. After a shipment of DDT was flown from the USA to Italy, Edwards spent two weeks dusting every soldier in his company, breathing in the powder all the while. The DDT worked and an epidemic was prevented. The surgeon general estimated that the DDT had saved the lives of 5000 soldiers.
Edwards found Carson’s book filled with scores of “deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations.” The termagant Carson attempting to whip up a veritable Strum und Drang of controversy claimed there were more bird deaths during the DDT era than before. What she didn’t point out was there were more birds during this time so naturally there were more bird deaths. Edwards had his fill of the prevaricating and false alarmist Carson so he went on a lecture tour and had a fill of a different kind. He took to swallowing a tablespoon of DDT on stage before every lecture. An Esquire magazine article about Edwards in 1971 said he had ingested 200 times the normal intake of DDT. In 1959 unprotected workers had applied 60,000 tons of DDT to the inside walls of 100 million houses. Neither the 130,000 workers nor the 535 million people living in the homes experienced any adverse effects. Edwards cited the 500 million lives saved (Why not say 500 million deaths postpone?) that the National Academy of Sciences attributed to DDT and he echoed the World Health Organization’s affirmation that no substance had ever proved more beneficial to man.
Fate seems to have an ironic and droll sense of inevitability. Rachael Carson died at age 56 of cancer – one of the ills she ostensibly wanted to prevent with her crusade against chemical insecticides. Her bête noire, J. Gordon Edwards, who swallowed DDT like a tonic lived to the age of 84 – dying of a heart attack while pursuing his favorite avocation of mountain climbing.
Paul Ehrlich was not a fraud or a liar. He was a good old fashioned fool and fanatic who sincerely believed all of the nonsense he espoused. His exegetic antagonist would be a man named Julian Simon. Ehrlich wrote a number of best selling books – the two most famous were The Population Bomb in 1968 and The Population Explosion in 1991. Among the crack pot predictions he made were: “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people [this writer’s note: the current world population is circa 6.5 billion].” He predicted that by 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million. He envisioned the president of the USA dissolving congress during the food riots of the 1980’s, followed by the United States suffering a nuclear attack for its mass use of insecticides. Jack Cashill opined that Ehrlich was postulating that the United States would get nuked for killing bugs! In his 1968 book Ehrlich’s most optimistic outcome for the world in the next decade or so was that a new Pope would give his blessing for abortion and only half a billion people would die of starvation. The most pessimistic prediction was that worldwide famine would cause a nuclear war and the most intelligent survivers would be cockroaches. And you may have thought I was grossly exaggerating when I said this guy was a real nut case. But don’t think he was some obscure ‘mad as a hatter’ recluse writing out of his basement in his B.V.D.’s. His book The Population Bomb sold 3 million copies and he made 20 appearances on the Johnny Carson show alone. Ehrlich helped push the Sierra Club and Greenpeace to even more leftwing radical positions – which is like encouraging an alcoholic to belly up to the bar more often – and he was, surprise, a founding father of Earth Day. The left just loved him, tendentiously supporting him and his risible theories, ipse dixit. He was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel equivalent for environmentalists. Jack Cashill says about him, “In his naturalist faith, and rejection of God, Ehrlich hews to type. Giving Ehrlich the benefit of doubt, his is not the conscious fraud of the bunco artist, but rather the self-deception of the blowhard. He appears to have drunk often at the well of his own snake oil.” It would have been better for him if he had followed Edwards’ example and drank DDT instead.
Julian Simon became tired of hearing Ehrlich’s twin themes of population increase disasters and acute shortages of natural resources so he decided to challenge Ehrlich. Simon attended Harvard on a naval ROTC scholarship and served as a junior officer after graduation until the completion of his tour of duty. He received a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Chicago and then returned to New York to work in direct marketing. Not finding that line of work fulfilling, he went to the University of Maryland as a professor of business administration until he died in 1998. Simon made a famous bet with Ehrlich. He told Ehrlich to pick any five commodities and hold them for ten years. If scarcity caused the prices to rise at the end of ten years, then Simon would buy then from Ehrlich thereby giving Ehrlich the profit difference. However if the prices declined then Ehrlich would have to pay Simon the difference between the current price and what Ehrlich purchased them for. Ehrlich picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Not only did the prices decline on all five commodities, but of 35 standard metals 33 dropped in price as did oil and food. Ehrlich paid Simon $570.07 and he paid himself much more in lost reputation. Ehrlich allowed as how the bet might have been a mistake – he could have laid long odds that it was. Simon also had a thing or two to say about Al Gore’s book Earth in the Lurch (well, perhaps the actual title is Earth in the Balance). Simon said, “The book is as ignorant a collection of clichés as anything ever published on the subject.” And he exposed the clichés of vanishing farmland, poisonous DDT, deadly dioxin, and lethal Agent Orange with hard and undeniable data. Al Gore never tried to answer Simon anymore than he tried to justify calling the internal-combustion engine the most destructive invention of man in history.
Sometimes you just can not imagine something as bizarre and incomprehensible as what the loony left comes up with. There was a news story in 2005 which said Ted Turner (now you begin to understand) will join a group, possibly drafted from Comedy Central, to journey to North Korea to save the flora and fauna, especially in the demilitarized zone (I swear on the Bible or Das Kapital, take your pick, that I did not make this up). Coincidentally in the same week a North Korean was on a book tour in the USA. He had been sent to one of the Gulags set up by Kim Il Insane (Sung) when he was nine years old not because of what he did of course, but because his father and grandfather were less than excited about living in a country ruled by one of the most repressive regimes in recent times. The boy eventually escaped from the People’s Paradise of North Korea (he just couldn’t take all that happiness) and came to the West to write a book titled Aquariums of Pyongyang. The now young man told his and other ordinary North Korean’s story on the C-SPAN Book TV program. He retold, as if it needs retelling, the gruesome story of hundreds of thousands of people being sent to the Gulags to labor until they died of overwork, starvation, or disease. It sure is heart-warming to know the egregious Ted Turner and his lefty brummagem cohorts are visiting the People’s Paradise to save the birds and flowers. He follows a long line of fellow travelers who care more about nature than people. This is the same Ted Turner who called Christians “losers” and after the company he founded, CNN, was taken over by the Time Warner Company, but before he was kicked out of the organization, spotted a couple of female CNN staffers working on Ash Wednesday with smudges of ash on their foreheads. Good old tolerant Ted made the snide comment to another person, “Who are they, a couple of Jesus Freaks?” Likely if they had painted a hammer & sickle on their foreheads Ted would have been effusive in his praise for their good taste and support for the Communist International.
When these frauds and quacks are exposed, even if not admitted by the folks on the left, I must say I get a certain feeling of schadenfreude. Forgive me.
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