An Ogden Nash poem

from the collection I'm a Stranger Here Myself  (1938).

How Now, Sirrah? Oh, Anyhow 

Oh, sometimes I sit around and think, what would you do if you were up a dark alley and there was Caesar Borgia,

And he was coming torgia,

And brandished a poisoned poniard,

And looked at you like an angry fox looking at the plumpest rooster in a boniard?

Why that would certainly be an adventure,

It would be much more exciting than writing a poem or selling a debenture,

But would you be fascinated,

Or just afraid of being assassinated?

Or suppose you went out dancing some place where you generally dance a lot,

And you jostled somebody accidentally and it turned out to be Sir Lancelot,

And he drew his sword,

Would you say Have at you! or would you say Oh Lord!?

Or what if you were held up by a bandit,

And he told you to hand over your money, would you try to disarm him and turn him over to the police, or would you over just meekly hand it?

What would you do if you were in a luxurious cosmopolitan hotel surrounded by Europeans and Frenchmen,

And a beautiful woman came up to you and asked you to rescue her from some mysterious master mind and his sinister henchmen?

Would you chivalrously make her rescue your personal objective,

Or would you refer her to the house detective?

Yes, and what if you were on trial for murdering somebody whom for the sake of argument we might call Kelly or O'Connor,

And you were innocent but were bound to be convicted unless you told the truth and the truth would tarnish a lady's honor,

Would you elect to die like a gentleman or live like a poltroon,

Or put the whole thing in the hands of an arbitration committee headed by Heywood Broun?

Yes, often as through life I wander,

This is the kind of question I ponder,

And what puzzles me most is why I even bother to ponder when I already know the answer,

Because anybody who won't cross the street till the lights are green would never get far as a Musketeer or a Bengal Lancer.

Political correctness, white chauvinism

Dorothy Healey, in California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (Google Books) (archive.org), (1990, U. of Illinois Press):

However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign—not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner.

(See the end of this post for a more recent watermelon incident.)

Healey was eventually accused of "white chauvinism" herself. She gave in to the charge because she thought the whole thing was a farce and this would end her involvement. But then she was ordered to sign a written public statement, which was used against her in her later dealings with the Party.

She writes:

Because it was almost impossible to criticize a Black leader, the Party suffered and I think the Black leaders themselves suffered […] When Blacks were spared this [criticism], it wasn't doing them any favor. [sic] […] when you have the notion that only Blacks can lead or that you must uncritically accept Black leadership without any standards, then you get reverse application of what you were fighting for. […] One of the great ironies of the white chauvinism campaign is that we lost a large number of Black members because of it. They were just contemptuous of the whole thing because it had so little to do with fighting racism in the real world outside the Party's ranks.

Joseph R. Starobin was the American foreign editor of The Daily Worker. In his book, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1947 (U. of California Press, 1975), he described the campaign against "white chauvinism" as a "witch hunt" and that it was used to "settle [personal] scores". Words like "whitewash" and "black sheep" were considered racist.

Doris Lessing, Language and the Lunatic Fringe (NY Times, June 26, 1992):

Yes, I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism—as Swift, for one, tells us—but the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had its root in German academia. And now it has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world. […]   

Raising Consciousness, like Commitment, like Political Correctness, is a continuation of that old bully, the Party Line. […] 

The demand that stories must be 'about' something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.  The phrase Political Correctness was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the Political Correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

Ron and Allis Radosh's Red Star Over Hollywood (archive.org, Amazon "search inside", Google Books) recounts how Dalton Trumbo was severely criticized for "white chauvinism". One of his sins was describing a Negro boy in one of his writings as "polished and dressed in his very best" because this implied he was "clean only on special occasions"! (update: more info in this post.)

Here's another excerpt from that book (archive.org). Herbert Biberman was a screenwriter, one of the Hollywood Ten. He had gone to New York to consult leading "Negro cultural workers" there about films the Communists were planning. Biberman wrote about this to Albert Maltz and Dalton Trumbo.

Biberman found, much to his surprise, that they "were too busy and occupied to spend an instant dealing with people who were so misinformed as to still consider that they were being 'broad-minded' in consulting Negro cultural leaders as 'experts' on Negro material" that was developed by "lily-white artists for the good of the Negro people." White artists could join with them, he reported, but they would have to admit that "they needed the Negro People more than the Negro people needed them." 

With each sentence, Biberman sounded more and more agitated. What he had learned from his experience in New York, he wrote, was "soul-shaking, land-shaking, country-shaking." He learned about "the poison of chauvinism" and how it was deeply embedded even in people like themselves. After all, they were only white middle-class artist, separated from the real struggles going on in America. After talking with the New York African-American cultural leaders, Biberman decided that all their films—including those they thought were favorable to the fight for civil rights—were in reality patronizing and racist.

From October 2017, a watermelon incident similar to that reported by Dorothy Healey. Snopes: 

Detroit firefighter Robert Pattinson was fired for behavior deemed offensive and racially insensitive after bringing a watermelon to work on his first day on the job. 

Rating: TRUE.  

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/detroit-firefighter-watermelon-fired/  

https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/detroit-firefighter-fired-for-bringing-watermelon-to-station 

Black Detroit firefighters defend white recruit fired over watermelon:   

https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/black-detroit-firefighters-defend-white-recruit-fired-over-watermelon 

Information control and Communism

From "My Country, Vietnam", by Doan Van Toai, in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the 60s (1989), edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Madham Books, Lanham, Maryland (emphasis added). The author had been a student activist in favor of the N. Vietnam takeover, and in the interim he had become a bank branch manager.

[...] But my attitude changed when the new regime turned its back on the promises of a national reconciliation and, taking off its patriotic mask, revealed its Marxist face.

When I was suddenly ordered to work on a plan to confiscate all private property and create a Communist state, I refused. [...] I resigned from my post. A few days I was arrested as I was attending a public concert in the National Theater. I asked my captors, "Why have you arrested me, what have I done?" They replied: "That is for you to work out." [...] 

While I was in jail, Mai Chi Tho, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, addressed a selected group of political prisoners. He told us: ''Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man. The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer, and the Americans are the invaders.'' He concluded that ''the key factor is how to control people and their opinions. Only Marxism-Leninism can do that. None of you ever see resistance to the Communist regime, so don't think about it. Forget it. Between you - the bright intellectuals - and me, I tell you the truth.'' And he did tell us the truth. [...]

When I was still inside, I used to talk to one of the older prisoners who was a South Vietnamese Communist named Nguyen Van Tang. Tang had been imprisoned for 15 years by the French, for 8 years by Diem, for 6 years by Thieu, and now for 2 years already by his own comrades, the Marxist rulers of the New Vietnam. While we were in prison together this old Communist said to me, "My dream is not that I will be released. My dream is not that I will see my family. My dream is to be back in a French prison 30 years ago." 

(a version of this essay was published in the NY Times Magazine, 3/29/81, titled A Lament for Vietnam.) 

The media and totalitarianism

From Goldstein's book in Orwell's 1984, part 2, chapter 9

The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

Picture incorrectly identified

This picture is widely identified as an ancient bridge in Kolpino, Russia.

It's actually the Rakotzbrücke (Rakotz Bridge, also called Devil's Bridge) in the Azalea and Rhododendron Park in the district of Kromlau in Goblenz, Germany. It was built as part of the park development and completed in the 1860s. 

Here's what it looks like in Google Maps.

It's also apparent it isn't as huge as it looks in the first picture. It's a semicircular arch, and the stream is about 70 feet wide, so the arch is about 35 feet high.

"Orwell once wrote" quote in "Fahrenheit 9/11" - actual sources

From Wikiquote:

Michael Moore declares these lines in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 as something "Orwell once wrote". They are nearly identical to a block of narration in the 1984 Richard Burton/John Hurt movie version of 1984 when Winston (Hurt) is reading Goldstein's book. All of the lines are excerpts from various parts of Goldstein's book in part 2, chapter 9 of the novel with some paraphrasing.

I have made a detailed comparison between the "Orwell once wrote" quote, 1984 movie (Burton/Hurt version), and the novel 1984. Link to Google Docs document.

Chesterton re-uses the line.

“I’m rather sorry you take this so lightly,” said Fanshaw to the host; “for the truth is, I’ve brought these friends of mine with the idea of their helping you, as they know a good deal of these things. Don’t you really believe in the family story at all?”

“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”

The Perishing of the Pendragons, G.K. Chesterton

The media (3)

‘Do you believe in curses?’ asked Smaill curiously.

‘I don’t believe in anything; I’m a journalist,’ answered the melancholy being — ‘Boon, of the Daily Wire. ...'

G.K. Chesterton, The Curse of the Golden Cross

The media (2)

Here's the original of the newspaper motto "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Note how taking it out of context has changed the meaning.

Whin annything was wrote about a man 'twas put this way: "We undhershtand on good authority that M-l-chi H---y, Esquire, is on thrile before Judge G---n on an accusation iv l--c-ny. But we don't think it's true."... Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward. They ain't annything it don't turn its hand to fr'm explainin' th' docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin' saleratus biskit.

Newspaper Publicity in Observations by Mr. Dooley by Finley Peter Dunne (1902)

"1984": power and suffering

'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' [O'Brien] paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing...'

1984, part 3, chapter 3.

spoons (3)

The high value of spoons can be seen from the fact that along with cups they were frequently stolen. To guard against theft, many households had them collected and counted by the steward after the main course. Even at the papal court in Avignon it was customary to keep the doors locked after a meal and not let anyone leave until all dinnerware was accounted for.

Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, p. 169

true justice

link

In a just world, a terrorist like Kimberlin would be too ashamed to show his neckbearded, overbiting, felonious face on the street, much less associate it with a peaceful revolution against oppression. This is not a just world. But Google is just, and the association can be removed. We’re asking you to link to this blog. On your own blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, on the web forum where you discuss taxidermy with your fellow taxidermists.

honor and spoons (2)

Boswell: I added that the same person maintained that there was no distinction between virtue and vice. Johnson: "Why, Sir, if the fellow does not think as he speaks, he is lying; and I see not what honour he can propose to himself from having the character of a liar. But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons."

--Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

Credulity (2)

Philosophers and bookish people generally tend to live a life dominated by words, and even to forget that it is the essential function of words to have a connection of one sort or another with facts, which are in general non-linguistic. Some modern philosophers have gone so far as to say that words should never be confronted with facts but should live in a pure, autonomous world where they are compared only with other words. When you say, ‘the cat is a carnivorous animal,’ you do not mean that actual cats eat actual meat, but only that in zoology books the cat is classified among carnivora. These authors tell us that the attempt to confront language with fact is ‘metaphysics’ and is on this ground to be condemned. This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (1959)

cf. Orwell, Notes On Nationalism

Bertrand Russell on Hegel (3) - a similar joke

Hegel believed in a mystical entity called "Spirit", which causes human history to develop according to the stages of the dialectic as set forth in Hegel's Logic. Why Spirit has to go through these stages is not clear. One is tempted to suppose that Spirit is trying to understand Hegel, and at each stage rashly objectifies what it has been reading.

A History of Western Philosophy, "Modern Philosophy", "Karl Marx"

A bit of humor from Orwell

(emphasis added)

Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues.

The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.

Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

George Orwell, from a review of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, New English Weekly (21 March 1940)

Grammar in 1846

ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEWBURYPORT FEMALE HIGH SCHOOL, ON THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT, DECEMBER 19, 1846.

BY ANDREW P. PEABODY.

...I propose to give you a few hints on conversation...

...for some of the new grammars sanction these vulgarisms, and in looking over their tables of irregular verbs, I have sometimes half expected to have the book dashed from my hand by the indignant ghost of Lindley Murray.

Great care and discretion should be employed in the use of the common abbreviations of the negative forms of the substantive and auxiliary verbs. "Can't", "don't", and "havn't" [sic], are admissible in rapid conversation on trivial subjects. "Isn't" and "hasn't" are more harsh, yet tolerated by respectable usage. "Didn't", "couldn't", "wouldn't", and "shouldn't", make as unpleasant combinations of consonants as can well be uttered, and fall short but by one remove of those unutterable names of Polish gentlemen, which sometimes excite our wonder in the columns of a newspaper. "Won't" for "will not", and "aint" [sic] for "is not" or "are not", are absolutely vulgar; and "aint" [sic], for "has not" or "have not", is utterly intolerable...

the media

The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists.

Orwell, "Homage to Catalonia" (1938)

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy, Erwin Knoll, editor, "The Progressive" (Compare Thomas Jefferson: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day.")

But the man [Thomas Babington Macaulay] is a humbug—a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind: absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him.

C.S. Lewis, journal, July 1924

How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of discernment and judgment? It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I'd supposed it to be—a creative movement which would shape the future—but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutally and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded. I tell you, if ever you are looking for a good subject for a thesis, you could get a very fine one out of a study of the books that were written by people like the Dean of Canterbury, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs about the Soviet regime. In the process you would come upon a compendium of fatuity such as has seldom, if ever, existed on earth. And I would really recommend it; after all, the people who wrote these books were, and continue to be regarded as, pundits, whose words must be very, very seriously heeded and considered.

I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that's expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers—things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you'd score a point. One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still.

Malcom Muggeridge, The Great Liberal Death Wish

Lan astaslem - I will not submit - I will not surrender

Scuttle, scuttle, little roach

Nursery Rhymes for the Tender-Hearted (dedicated to Don Marquis)

Scuttle, scuttle, little roach—
How you run when I approach:
Up above the pantry shelf,
Hastening to secrete yourself.

Most adventurous of vermin,
How I wish I could determine
How you spend your hours of ease,
Perhaps reclining on the cheese.

Cook has gone, and all is dark—
Then the kitchen is your park:
In the garbage heap that she leaves
Do you browse among the tea leaves?

How delightful to suspect
All the places you have trekked:
Does your long antenna whisk its
Gentle tip across the biscuits?

Do you linger, little soul,
Drowsing in our sugar bowl?
Or, abandonment most utter,
Shake a shimmy on the butter?

Do you chant your simple tunes
Swimming in the baby's prunes?
Then, when dawn comes, do you slink
Homeward to the kitchen sink?

Timid roach, why be so shy?
We are brothers, thou and I.
In the midnight, like yourself,
I explore the pantry shelf!

—Christopher Morley