Category Archives: Politics

God, Sex, and Race: how swearing has changed

Americana, Current Affairs, Evolution, Politics, Religion

From everything that I have read on the life and times around 1600 – which is not very much, excluding the 1632verse – using God’s name in vain was a big deal. I mean, a really big deal. People didn’t do it. When I read that, it seems so strange that I adjust the words to mean that it was probably like saying fuck today.

But, now that I have really thought about it, I am convinced that people didn’t do it. It was taboo.

By the middle of the 19th, century, people did take the Lord’s name in vain, people might say damn you, but sex was taboo. Even indirect words like bastard or son of a bitch were considered heavy duty. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was considered a great book for it’s accurate depiction of Civil War combat and it does not have any sexual swearing in it – I have not read it in more than 50 years so it is possible I might have forgot them, but I don’t think so. I don’t think fuck – or, to push the limit, cunt –  is to be found in Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because they were effete – they were anything but – but because those words really were taboo.

Now, we use sex words. Michele and I are watching HBO’s Pacific and they use fuck all the time. But we don’t use disparaging words about race. As close as a white person gets to using the N word is to say the N word. It has become taboo.

The vice-president says This is a big fucking deal!  and nobody really notices. Senator George Allen, during his 2006 re-election campaign, calls somebody a Macaca, and he is political history. No reprieve.

Here is a test:

Imagine you have an eleven year old daughter; she comes home from school and says Jane, that fucker, lied about me to the teacher…. Depending on alot of things: you might tell her that If you say that again you will go to your room for a timeout; admonish her saying Nice people don’t talk that way; just laugh, knowing she wouldn’t say that in front of your mother and she was doing it for shock value for you only.

Now imagine she comes home and says Jane, that nigger, lied about me to the teacher… Among other things, you would probably consider pulling her out of school and putting her in a different school. I know I would and – I have to admit – I am sort of shocked about that.

General David Petraeus touting General U.S. Grant as an intro to a rant against “Confederate History Month”

Americana, Current Affairs, General U.S. Grant, Politics, War

Recently, Tom Ricks, who has an excellent blog called The Best Defense on the Foreign Policy website, in an interview of David Petraeus, asked this question:

BD:
We do a lot of reading lists on my blog. What is one book
you’ve read lately that you think should be better known?

General Petraeus: Bruce Catton’s Grant Takes Command (and
Jean Edward
Smith’s Grant). Both support historian Sean Wilentz’ recent
assertion that Grant was a truly great commander and president, vastly
better than historians assessed some years back. 

Grant 2

I am a big fan of General Ulysses S Grant and think that he is a greatly underappreciated  American hero  – in case, somehow, you didn’t know . I love that people are starting to relook at Grant and, in doing so, are seeing his humanity and greatness. But Grant being underappreciated is part of a bigger picture that includes Confederate History Month.

From – oh, say – the turn of the last century to  the 1950s, the southern revisionists rewrote both slavery and the Civil War. The novel, Gone With the Wind, with its defense of the Ku Klux Klan and depiction of happy slaves was an example of this. The crux of the revision was that the war was not about slavery and that the North, lead by the inept butcher, Grant, only won because they out numbered and out resourced the noble South and because Grant was willing to lose more men than the superior man and general, Robert E Lee.

That is hooey. The war was clearly about slavery, the abomination that had been tearing at the fabric of the United States since the 3/5’s clause was put in the Constitution. South Carolina was the first state to secede and, following its secession, South Carolina requested the other southern states to join them in forming a southern Confederacy. It said We . . . [are] dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates and seeking a confederation with slaveholding states.
Mississippi became the second state to secede, and it said Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. . . . [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
The other states that followed had similar statements. Fifty years later, these statements transmogrified into the so-called virtuous goals of states rights, independence, and the protection of traditional values. But those traditional values and states rights were slavery.

The North won the Civil War for lots of reasons including that it outnumbered and out resourced the South but the South had the advantage of being on the defensive. It knew the ground it was defending and always had shorter lines of communication and supply. It is much easier to defend a position than take it it.

But the North had better generals in Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas, among others. Especially Grant. The generals on the North were younger, they were more adaptive and more inventive, and they had a more compelling vision.    As always happens – given enough time – the future won over the past.

So now I come to Confederate History Month – which I don’t understand any more than I understand displaying the confederate battle flag. As an aside. Often people who display the confederate battle flag have the common decency to also display the swastika so, at least, we know that they are just pissed at everybody. End aside.

But why Confederate History Month? What is it about a feudal society that supported itself by slavery that they find so compelling?  The Virginia proclamation, which seems to have received the most PR, starts out WHEREAS, April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse;
As Reagan once said There you go again…. Here we have the war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox. Concluded? As when Lee surrendered? So, I guess, it makes sense if the celebration is for a war of independence that was not lost, but just, you know, concluded. I think we should celebrate a North Kicked the South’s Ass Month to celebrate that the war concluded for Virginia when Bobbie Lee surrendered his sorry, whooped, ass to General Ulysses S Grant.

 

 

Obama 24/7

Americana, Obama, Politics, What's a man?

I want to start with a quote from last weekend by Michael Scherer of Time's Swampland 

About
20 hours ago, I was in Bagram Air Base, watching White House advance people
change the television station in a troop mess hall, so that NCAA basketball
would show in the background as President Obama shook hands, not motorcross,
which had been playing.

and then go on to the fact that Obama held a second – now annual – Whitehouse Seder last week. From the article in the NY Times, it seems like it was non-political act. Just a personal gesture that has become a tradition.

28seder_span-articleLarge

and finish with a reference to a story of one letter in an article in the Washington Post on the ten letters -that have been culled from hundreds – that Obama gets every day. The letter is tragic, touching, inspiring, you know – all that stuff.

If you haven't already, read these two articles. They are pretty short.

I am fascinated by Obama's attention to detail, the cautious consideration given to doing a good job, to doing things right – not just as president, but as a man, as a father, as a mensch. In Obama, it seems to be coming from the inside rather than from the outside to look good.

It’s the great Nancy Pelosi’s House

Americana, Current Affairs, Obama, Politics

As an aside: Try Goggling images of Nancy Pelosi. Most of them are pretty bad – they are either shot to make her look bad or doctored to make her look bad. I am not sure why; maybe it is because the right just takes up more space – in the same way that a Hummer takes up more space than a Honda Civic – but I could be convinced that we are even more of a sexist nation than we are a racist nation. Either way, or if something else is going on that hasn't occurred to me, Nancy Pelosi doesn't seem to get the same respect that the great Sam Rayburn got, or great Tip O'Neil or, even Thomas Reed. But there is a funny thing about racism or sexism, or homophobia for that matter, once we get to know somebody and they are no longer an archetype; it is much harder to remain a racist or sexist, or homophobe.  End aside.

With all the credit that should go to President Obama – and he has done an extraordinary job of getting the Health Care Bill pushed through – without Nancy Pelosi it wouldn't have happened. Period! 

To quote NEWSER,- a sort of web Reader's Digest for those of us that think three paragraphs is just too long  –

President
Obama may be the one history remembers for pulling off the biggest
domestic policy reform in decades, but Nancy Pelosi "emerges from this
battle as the real powerhouse in Washington," Julian Zelizer writes for CNN.
Wielding both a "clear ideological agenda" and the "pragmatic political
tactics" to round up votes, Pelosi is the clear heir to Ted Kennedy's
legacy, Zelizer writes.
After Scott Brown's election, with
Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel backing away from comprehensive health
reform, Pelosi "kept the steel in the president’s back," a Democratic
rep tells Politico.
"When Kennedy died, many Democrats wondered who would take his place as
the party's dealmaker," concludes Zelizer. "Now they have their
answer."


Speaker+Nancy+Pelosi

Obama as a Jedi master: Health Care Edition

Americana, Current Affairs, Obama, Politics

At the end of the day, Saturday, I got home after being at a event honoring women in the military – a post on that to follow – and sat down to check the news. In the New York Times, under the article on the Pope and the latest sex scandals, was an article saying Obama Rallies Democrats in Final Push for Health Care.

The article talked about exactly what the headline said but it didn't, in my opinion, really capture the moment. C-SPAN did with the meeting on video – I guess we can't really say video-tape any more – and it was truly extraordinary. Who ever called the meeting to order, first talked about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and how she was going to do something that no other House Speaker has been able to do.

About that time, Michele came in and said I am hungry. I said I am too, let's go out and get something to eat. But I want to watch this for a minute. We started watching the meeting again, at the beginning, and  and an hour later, we finally went out to dinner. Feeling much better about America. If you have an hour, watch the meeting here, you won't regret it.

To quote Michael Scherer in his article titled Without A Teleprompter, in Time's Swampland:

We knew president Obama would give a speech today to House Democrats.
We didn't know it would be this good of a speech. The video below is
just the last ten minutes of an address that lasted about 30 minutes.

I suggest you start watching at 2 minutes. The president takes his
caucus on the political equivalent of a guided meditation. Assuming the
bill passes, this is political rhetoric for the history books.