Iz Ze Rite?

Academe has really become extreme.

News reports cascade about politically correct rulings of university administrators.  Admittedly most dispatches are carried by print, cable and some broadcast outlets often labeled conservative.  But one’s political leanings should not deter discernment of illogic.

George Will recently devoted an entire column to the growing wont of so-called educators to control speech.  One of his paragraphs begins: “The University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion, worried that gender-specific pronouns (‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘her’), suggests gender-neutral noises (‘ze,’ ‘hir,’ ‘xe,’ ‘xem,’ ‘xyr’).”  Will, without commenting on his sentence, immediately goes to another university and its example.

He and we might note that the Tennessee neologists have done nothing more than promote substitute “words” for the identical meanings of English pronouns.  These are not new words that avoid gender.  No, masculine and feminine are recognized still.  “Hir” might even sound like “her” and both obviously refer to feminine gender.  So how logical is that?

But “male” and “female” are examples of “‘derogatory/oppressive language,’”  according to a syllabus written by a Washington State University female teacher, also cited by Will.

One person Will refers to in his column teaches “advanced feminist studies.”  She resigned from the University of Missouri, but a safe bet is that she -- excuse, please -- xe would approve of the suggestions from the UT diversity/ inclusion people.  

By the bye, doesn’t “diversity” “include” by its very definition?  The third meaning of “diverse” in the dictionary on this computer reads: “including representatives from more than one social, cultural, or economic group, especially members of ethnic or religious minority groups.”  Its example: “a diverse student body.”

A liberal arts college is included in nearly every university.  In the middle ages, universities concentrated on what were called the seven liberal arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium) and grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium).  All of these studies trace their developments to the philosophers of ancient Greece.  Those “lovers of knowledge” or “philosophers” found truths that are -- well -- still true.  These truths are ignored by today’s tyro scholars to their intellectual peril.

“Higher education brought low” was the headline for Will’s column in The Washington Post.  He asked in his final sentence: “What, exactly, is it higher than?”

Real Debates Better?

Something has got to change if televised debates for presidential hopefuls are to help voters choose.

Political debaters usually are challenged by their interlocutors to be specific in proposing national policies.  Even five minutes instead of, say, ninety seconds to answer would be insufficient.  Tax plans can be outlined in a manner of a few flickers of a digital clock, but explaining how a 1040 can be manipulated to make filing easier and still protect mortgage interest and support for charities along with some consideration of medical expenses --- that takes a chunk of time and semantical skill.

Besides, will those offering their services for the highest office in the land actually calculate the revenue to be generated if their proposals were enacted?   Any plan would affect every person living in the country and every business.  Hired experts would make such calculations.  The task of the candidate is to select proposed policies on big issues from expert ideas hashed out with advisers and then presented in outline in campaign appearances.

And such outlines with varying degrees of illuminating rhetoric are presented to debate audiences.  

One of the nominees selected at party conventions will be elected president.  Probably his or her tax proposal will go to Congress, which will produce other plans.  Bills will be written that will include line after line stricken through to indicate repeal of current tax language, and more and more lines will be added citing chapter and section numbers.  Most debate moderators without law degrees would struggle to ask pithy questions in ordinary English if they had such detailed proposals available.  Might even be difficult for candidates without public accounting certification.

An unamended, major tax reform bill would be unlikely to clear even a Congress and a

White House held by the same party.  Changes to a president’s plan likely would be done piecemeal.

Let’s just yawn when specifics are demanded.  Let’s pay attention to the outlines as presented.  These can indicate who might be worthy of a primary vote.  

No president should be permitted to dictate a tax bill or any other policy.  Leadership requires persuasive skills to meld opposing viewpoints.  And, yes, the Congress is supposed to be of utmost importance, theoretically protecting the commonweal of a 320 million people with a tangle of wants and desires.  The president’s job is to consider the bills passed by Congress, and making most of them law with a signature. The president’s duty follows: Execute those laws as written.

Candidates’ proposals for various policies, including all-important foreign affairs, need to be examined for overall effect, not to be nitpicked to burnish egoes.  Unintended as well as intended consequences must be contemplated.

Elections are meant to choose presidents that can find workable solutions to widespread problems.   Elections are not meant to choose dictators.

Either TV debate moderators should change their methods, or the format should be changed to better reflect the reality of the presidential office.  Perhaps old-fashioned debates between two candidates chosen at random, followed by similar matchups till the field is covered would better the need to winnow the wanna-bes.  In case of an uneven number of candidates, the last in line would go against the winner of a previous matchup.  

Winners might be chosen by a large panel of citizens of varied backgrounds, blue collar to scientist.  Maybe as many as 101 leaders from business, retired military, professional organizations, news media, clergy, academia --- a modern, expanded version of the three estates --  could be selected by the party heads.  

A sizeable panel would tend to make fair choices between participants in further debates. Twelve-person juries generally render just verdicts.  A 52-vote majority or better would make the call.

All debates have been scheduled for this cycle.  Time permits a new system to be devised for 2020, an appropriate year for clear vision.

Not to be forgot is the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization established in 1987 by the Democratic and Republican parties for meetings between the two presidential candidates and separate ones for their running mates.  The commission does allow for other  candidates if their parties garner 15 percent support in five national polls.  The commission has bipartisan co-heads and a 13-member board.  This commission also could opt for the traditional debate format, obviously without the affirmative/negative sides.  Winners still would be selected at the polls on the first Tuesday in November.

Trying real debates could be no worse than the current “debates.”  

Bygone Tweets

A few newspaper readers can remember “ears” on the sides of a paper’s nameplate. One ear might summarize the weather forecast. The other across from The Daily Gossip could, in many newspapers, have a pithy news item, joke or wise saying. The writer, called a paragrapher, would use his or her skills to quickly wrap up a thought in a stylish way.

Nowadays newspaper nameplates usually have no ears. But that type of content is now, if one thinks about it, the kind of stuff found in 140 characters on Twitter.

How Long War?

How many years of peace have you lived through?

Probably not many, especially if you are a baby boomer or younger. Depends on how one looks at years with and without war.

A person born in 1926 (guess who) may have had one of the longer stretches of peace -- that is, time without U.S. military having been engaged in some operation or occupation. For that person the peacetime measures something like just eight years --- 1935-’39, 1971, 1977, and 1979.

Those years are unlisted in a Wikipedia article, “Timeline of United States and major domestic deployments.” The list covers a period from 1775 to the present and would print out at more than 30 pages.

For that 88-year-old, there was another peace-like period dated 1928-’31, but it fell in a period from 1912 to 1933 when U.S. troops occupied Nicaragua.

In addition to the 1775-present timeline, which covers most of the document, another few pages list other military involvement.  Headings are “Battles With the Native Americans,” “Relocation,” “Armed insurrections and slave revolts,” “Range wars,” “Bloody local feuds,” “Bloodless boundary disputes,” “Terrorists, paramilitary groups, guerilla warfare,” “Labor-management disputes,” “State and national session attempts,” “Riots and public disorder,” and “Miscellaneous.” (The American Revolution and the Civil War are in both the main category and that dealing with insurrection.)

Also on Wikipedia is a chart labeled “Timeline of United States at War” covering two pages. Counting up the gaps in rounded off years -- no months calculated -- 83 years were missing in the 240 years since 1775. That’s about 34 percent of American history in something close to peace.

Neither listing specifically notes American troops still in Europe, Japan and Korea. That started with occupations in 1945.

A third chart outlines the time spent by Americans in 14 major wars since the Revolution. The rounded  total is 67 years, 11 months. That’s roughly 28 percent of our history in warfare affecting the country as a whole. The longest was the Vietnam War at 17 years, 2 months; the shortest was the Kosovo War at 118 days. The War in Afghanistan is 14 years long and counting.

Other lengths: War of 1812 2 years, 6 months; World War I 1 year, 7 months; Korean War 3 years, 1 month; World War II 3 years, 7 months, and Civil War 4 years.

Peaceful years not listed before the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression, as the Civil War is known in the South, are 1819, 1826, 1828, 1834, 1845 and 1850.

The war timeline chart, the second mentioned earlier, marks our longest war, dated from 1851 to 1900. That’s listed as “Apache Wars.”  Another Wikipedia article says these armed conflicts with the tribe were fought with the U.S. Army between 1949 and 1886 with with the Confederate Army in Texas in the 1860s. It goes on to say that minor hostilities lasted until 1924.

Perhaps the longest period of seeming peace was between 1919 and 1941, which covers the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. With the end of “the war to end all wars” American forces were pretty much inactive except for some Marines being involved in incidents or skirmishes, mostly in China and Central America. U.S. involvement in World War II started in 1940 and 1941 with troops protecting Newfoundland, some British islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere, plus Greenland and Iceland.

Some of the listings attracting attention beg to be researched --- Italian-American internment of 1942-’43, Anti-Rent War 1839-’44, Sheep War involving Texas and New Mexico 1879-1900, Alaska boundary 1907, Republic of West Florida 1810, 1838 Mormon War.

Under the terrorist listing are included the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and another picked just for its name, the “Hamburg massacre.” A little research showed the latter occurred in July 1876 leading up to the last election of the Reconstruction period in South Carolina. In this civil disturbance, the Wikipedia account states, “Democrats planned in the majority-black/Republican Edgefield District, to disrupt Republican meetings and suppress black voting through actual and threatened violence.”  Red Shirts paramilitary groups attacked blacks in the National Guard at their armory leading to about a dozen deaths.

For American veterans and their families, war and being in the military have meanings those who have not served perhaps cannot know. For others, even wartime may and can seem peaceful.

For living Americans as a whole, there really has not been a lot of time without war of some description. Our current troop deployments . . . where will they lead?  

Peace, considered as the absence or war or a threat of war, has comforted Americans for more than 70 percent of our history. But for pessimists it may only be a third of that history.

Are answers ever easy?

One Nation Indivisible . . . er, Divided

We Americans accept being boxed in.  We’re put into packages and treated as commodities, divvied up in opinion-rated groupings.

Data describing us are manipulated in algorithms.  We are labeled sought for votes, to buy merchandise and services, to believe propaganda.  We lose our individuality and become cookies collected by clouds of servers.

We the people are now valuable only as party members or sympathizers, customers, churchgoers, secularists, welfare recipients, youths,  professionals, retirees, second-home buyers, pensioners, investors, gays, straights, African Americans, Hispanics, employed, unemployed, male, female, 47 percenters, one percenters, the elite, the hoi polloi, and on and on.   Maybe -- likely -- we are no longer a people, a nation.  We are lemmings of varying breeds.

But are we victims, or willing self-sorters?

Observe fellow human beings with eyes fixed on hand-held blinking electronics, texting, gaming, foisting on “friends” our every movement and thought. Some communicate electronically as they sit side-by-side.

Those coveting gain or profit for themselves just see factions or blocs.  Those seeking our attention, our money, our votes like it that way.  Our political parties aim to succor -- and sucker --  particular groups for selfish ends.

Such rips in our societal fabric are fundamental impediments to national as well as individual progress.

A certain cultural adhesion existed in American down through the early and mid-decades of the last century despite major problems. Manners, dress, entertainment, religious membership and other measures of life varied little across the country despite Prohibition, labor unrest, Depression.

A blight to that cohesion was bigotry.  Extremism in the form of lynchings, the Klu Klux Klan, Jim Crow, religious discrimination, and similar divisiveness were not condemned as those ought to have been condemned.  As is true now, those shameful attitudes were not shared by everyone.  Nonetheless, similar values were recognized across racial and religious lines.  Note current books and articles regarding changes in the black families.

In the twenties, Prohibition loosened moral standards.

In the thirties, economic woes hit every class in varying degrees.

In the forties, the war effort united the home front despite rationing and a few cheaters.  War plants brought women into the workforce to stay.

In the late forties and the fifties, the GI Bill broadened the educated class that gradually changed cultural appetites. Rock and Roll emerged.

In the sixties, the primitive political polling that began in the previous decade led to marketing surveys that found tastes differed in everything from clothing, to music, to reading, to movie and TV viewing, to business products and to services.  Vietnam brought political fractures.  Drugs were used openly.

In the seventies, the differences between age groups became more pronounced.  Language became less civil, more vulgar.  Drug abuse increased, marijuana use defended.

Since then, like Cole Porter wrote in the thirties, “Anything Goes.”  A glimpse of stocking hasn’t been shocking for many a decade, in fact, what ever happened to stockings?

What was once considered amoral, abnormal or immoral behavior is fodder for entertainment and for omnipresent video-phones and thus wide distribution.   The use of certain words and phrases has thrust political correctness into a fractured society.

Race and ethnic and religious differences are the most serious.

Just mentioning these divides can set off controversy.  So many American families have stories of  great-grandparents or grandparents facing discrimination before assimilating into the population.   Human nature takes its time in welcoming cultural integration, which is fundamental to the American way.

American may not be dead in the water, but  our stasis may stem from wilfully separating racial, ethnic, religious, and economic groups into splinters for gain.  Partisan gain.  Ego trips by certain leaders.  Turmoil for racial purposes.  Proselytization gains for religious groups.  Envy for many nefarious reasons.

No one, it should be hoped, actually wishes to squeeze the American population into a monolith.   If we were all alike, we would not be Americans.

“Can we all get along?”  Rodney King’s rhetorical question remains legitimate despite circumstances surrounding his 1991 arrest in Los Angeles.   No judgment here of his or similar cases.  Yet, getting along is at the heart of the American experiment.

Some leader needs to step up and attack disunity, a problem so obvious and yet so ignored.

Can discussion without bombast of our dysfunction be completely ineffective?  Is name-calling and sound-bite spouting the only way to drag the subject of disunity into the public square?

Countries with nearly solid ethnic identities experience internal disputes.  Our nation, with its panoply of races,  ethnic, and religious identities, and various cultural tastes, never has and never will find complete harmony.   Those seminal thinkers who wrote our founding documents knew problems would arise.  They relied on a built-in tension, no branch of government more dominant than another.   The hoped for equilibrium is teetering but standing.

We don’t have to give up our cultural proclivities.  Profit seekers will not give up merchandizing tools.  But we do have to pay a lot more attention to our duties as citizens.  It ts possible to make our country  the “more perfect union” the Preamble seeks.

Somehow our national motto can be fulfilled --- we can make one out of many.

How To Handles a News Anchor

Wolf Blitzer was huffing and puffing at Ben Carson’s door, trying to get the neurosurgeon to trip himself up on guns and murders in an Oregon school.

Blitzer ended the encounter asking something like this: so you don’t want any more gun laws. And Carson answered something this: we don’t need mindless people on two sides of a question, we need to sit down and find workable answers.

The presidential candidate seemed entirely reasonable. The news anchor seemed like a stereotypical questioner trying as hard as possible to get agreement or catch up the candidate in some sort of contradiction.

Throughout the interview, Blitzer did what professionals like him always do. Take some of a quotation and use the boilerplate that has emerged and use it to attempt catching the victim in a trap.

Carson will not bow to that. He goes back and recreates the circumstances -- usually an answer to a similar gotcha question -- and interprets what he said. Whether he can quote himself or not, may not be known because usually the full incident recorded on tape is not used.

Carson differs from most candidates in similar situations. Others may try to the Carson approach but end up accusing the questioners of unprofessionalism. Carson retains the same physician-to-patient tone when broaching the reality of mortality.

Whether Carson is nominated or not, it would be refreshing should his interviewee style become more common. Maybe then potential voters could really learn whether they believe or do not believe the politician. More important. questioners might become more interested in being more dutiful to the purpose of the free press and more unlike a personality trying to win an emmy.

There Must Be a Better Way

Why do American voters not have choices between obvious qualified presidential candidates?

Let’s stipulate that a few of the many candidates in both major parties are electable. And let’s not argue that some do not seem suited. And, further, this perceived problem of qualification is not new. It has been raised in past campaigns leading up to nominating conventions. Once elected and time has passed -- even a couple hundred years -- historians are wont to find warts and smudge the image of the long dead or long retired president. News people, pundits, and commentators do the same for the current crop.  It’s what they do.

Voters need to know all about possible candidates. Faults and character flaws can be deal closers. Praiseworthy traits are difficult to learn because who wants to be a sycophant (except for staffers hoping to boss cabinet secretaries). Other candidates with their opposition research staffs will scratch out plenty of raw dirt that might even be sifted in the sieves of public opinion.

No intention here to run through the current crop of presidential hopefuls. Rather, to resurrect an old cliche: Why in a country that could land a man on the moon with a population of more than 300 million souls cannot a handful of worthy candidates be found. “Found” because individuals believing in their great talents for national leadership are not bashful in volunteering for the most important and toughest job on earth.

To proceed. How would necessary talents and abilities be distilled for the presidential job description? How, that being accomplished, would the candidates be uncovered from the supply of ,successful people. And, most important, who would be performing these tasks?

A committee? We’ve all had it with committees sometime in the past. Besides, someone would have to appoint the committee. Where would such wisdom be found?

With such a scheme, the search is pretty much left up to the present system. If really good people do not volunteer to run the gauntlet of naysayers and political enemies, friends and colleagues of persons perceived to be qualified would need to persuade them to undertake the beating even the winner will have to take. Finding highly qualified candidates is a job with no one to perform it.  Only persons knowing themselves qualified and worthy can do that. Unfortunately, too many egos exist, so sorting will pretty much remain the same as now,

Presidential job description?   Academe probably considers itself as the only source. Just imagine the papers that would have to be written, and the peer review, the faculty lounge discussions, the debate on whether really  to choose two. Phew! Conjuring such a mental image would blow a frontal lobe. No one in his right mind would wish politicians to do it. The smoke-filled room is gone, and marijuana smoke won’t do. (Phantasm: Coloradans or Washingtonians gathering in district caucuses to pick nominees. Wait for phone videos to show up on YouTube.)

If someone or some group is capable of cataloguing what a president should be and do, no one would trust them anyway. “Who are you to decide?” would be the cry.

How about a poll? We’re up to our noses with those already. And do they lie?

Too many people either have cell phones that for now cannot be used for polling or have caller ID that permits the unlucky guy or gal disturbed by the ring to decide to fuhgeddaboudit.

Attack ads could separate the good from the bad hopefuls.  Can we really trust the guys who are trying to sell us sealer to make our screen doors into boats?

State governors used to be good choices, and some even won. They’re dropping like flies kamikazing into flypaper.

Outliers are doing pretty well, but how many remember Wendell Wilkie? Or George Romney, Mill’s ol’ man?

Other politicians and the press always find blame when an officeholder screws up. Only untainted excellence is the acceptable norm. (Well, okay, a few news media favorites do exist.) Knowledge about everything from the Big Bang to ganglia plus the ability to put that into a two-second sound bite containing a quotable pun is expected.  The hopeful nominee also better know and not mispronounce the name of the deposed parliamentary leader from Lower Silesia and Sudetenland.

Is there really another way?

We are stuck with what we got until someone on a white horse rides in. Kimosabe?

Or, maybe, Tonto on a pinto could get the Indian vote?