Pronoun Trouble

I once taught a class at a career college in the city, the kind of place that has signs on the doors saying, “Check and correct your clothing to ensure that your naval, buttocks, chest or cleavage is not showing,” and, “Remove your hat, stocking cap, ‘do-rag’ or bandanna (this includes both men and women).” The students were dedicated, hard working, and so passionate that they would sometimes stand up during discussions.

Their attitude was infectious. One day, while telling them one of my favorite stories from history—the arrest of escaped slave Anthony Burns in 1854, and the massive protest by around 50,000 Bostonians—I said, “Don’t you wish you’d been there?” Out of the silence that followed came a single, quiet,

“Nope.”

I knew immediately what I’d done. By “you,” of course, I had meant “we,” while there was actually only an “I.” By projecting myself into an idealized past, enjoying the benefits of free expression and political agency, I had been indulging my political fantasies, reveling in the possibilities of my historical narrative, and the fact that the story had 50,000 characters meant nothing to the students in front of me; they couldn’t see themselves in a single one of those other faces.

It was my powdered-wig-and-tricorn-hat moment. Self indulgence by pronoun.

Here’s another example. It’s a book that was recently used during a unit called “Colonial Days,” at my son’s school:

Now, I’m sure the history in this book is sound, as far as it goes, although it is interesting to compare the cover art with this passage from the site, slavenorth.com:

In statutes enacted at various times between the 1720s and 1750s, slaves in Boston were forbidden to buy provisions in market; carry a stick or a cane; keep hogs or swine; or stroll about the streets, lanes, or Common at night or at all on Sunday. Punishments for violation of these laws ranged up to 20 lashes, depending on aggravating factors.

But the book does take certain liberties with its title. Who, as they say, are “you”? My own child isn’t a very good antecedent for that second person pronoun. (He once told me that his skin is brown, while mine is “silver.”) And, no, I’m not going to say a word to him about it. No doubt he’ll come to some kind of conclusions on his own, sooner or later.

There’s nothing wrong with historical narratives. Every nation has them: The Aeneid, Arminius, King Arthur, Colonial Days. Whether or not the stories correspond to actual history is not really the point. Like all living myths, they are maps of the present and the future, not the past, at once assuming and solidifying cultural unity. In a fractured and jittery society, though, they can get told with a kind of nervous energy, in either an unconscious or a deliberate attempt to uphold cultural hegemony. They have work to do, and pronouns do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Take, for example, this passage from Mike Huckabee’s book, Simple Government, which touches on Obama’s replacement of the bust of Winston Churchill with that of Abraham Lincoln (emphasis added):

Every president is the keeper of our American narrative, “our story.” He is the commander in chief, yes, but he is also our commemorator in chief. Our wartime partnership with Winston Churchill and the British people is part of our story; the Mau Mau rebellion is not. When we elect a president, we entrust to him not just our security but also our story. These two are inseparable because our security depends on the story we believe in, that inspires us, that we teach our children, and that we, as a nation, are willing to fight for…President Obama’s emphasis on his story rather than history has become symptomatic of his tenure.

This is a virtual pronoun tsunami. And what, exactly, is the antecedent? Huckabee says it’s “all Americans.” Really? I wasn’t insulted, and I’m an American, so that really ends the argument right there.

But lets keep going: when I brought the subject up in class, my American students weren’t insulted about the statue thing, either. In fact, many of them knew nothing about it. Winston Churchill? Our partnership with Britain? Sorry. World War II? World War I? The Boston Tea Party? Nothing much there, either. The Civil War sometimes gets a response, but it’s not the one Huckabee would probably expect, and it’s certainly not the usual narrative that culminates in the feel-good climax of the 13th Amendment.

Does this mean they’re clueless when it comes to American history? Nope. I’ve been given essays on Presidential Reconstruction, General Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15, the Pig Laws, and the Civil Rights Era. (Links are provided for those of us who are unfamiliar with these parts of our history.) My favorite so far was titled,

Here’s to John Wilkes Booth, the Bastard who Freed the Slaves.

And, of course, they’re interested in the President, and know a lot about him.

Huckabee, by so deftly switching from the collective to the singular pronoun, reinforces the story told by most conservatives that Obama stands alone, that he’s un-American, not one of “us,” and the story weaves a complex plot involving Kenya, Islam, urban activists, and basketball. I can see why they want to erase the other narrative, though: they’ve been terrified of it ever since the last election. First they brought in a D’Souza to dismiss it, to declare it dead, historically irrelevant. Then they tried to swallow it, to Disney-ize it, in a way, by quoting Martin Luther King, and pointing out that the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass (who actually makes Rev. Wright sound like Ronald Reagan). And they become enraged whenever anyone suggests that their motives are anything other than an allegiance to “our” history, and “our” country, like when Sean Hannity said, in response to questions about birtherism,

“Don’t bring up race. Do not bring up race. Do not bring up race. It is a constitutional requirement.”

Of course it’s about race. It’s part and parcel of the movement to portray Obama as the alien, the “other”–the singular pronoun, that lives outside the communal narrative. But the President is not alone; he’s more American than they realize. It’s a kind of blindness, really, a cultural ignorance just like I displayed in front of my class. And if they want to believe in their American narrative, become inspired by it, and teach it to their children, that’s fine.

However, whenever someone puts on the tricorner, metaphorically or otherwise, and says “we,” and “us,” and “our,” he is indulging in a narrative delusion. When he does so in a political attempt to erase the entire 20th Century, he becomes actively hostile to those Americans who have no part in that exclusive narrative—the Golden Age of “our” glorious freedoms—and for whom it is both meaningless and dangerous.

*****

Pamela Geller’s “Little Darlings”

DARLING: Old English deorling, “favorite minion.” —etymonline.com

All writers love their children, I suppose.

Lewis Carroll had his portmanteau words, like vorpal, manxome, and frabjous. Robert Frost used what he called “the sound of sense.” Truman Capote once said, “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” And both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King used rhythm, repetition, and other tropes to great effect in their speeches.

Even Pam Geller, of the blog Atlas Shrugs, has a kind of parental affection for some of her pet phrases. According to a recent article in The New York Times:

Like many writers, Ms. Geller is fond of what she calls her “little darlings”—rhetorical flourishes, such as accusing the imam behind Park51 of “totalitarian Khomeinism.”

Other Geller darlings have included the recent “stealth jihadist” and  “monster mosque,” and, my personal favorite, “Find the ho, give her a show,” about a crack whore whom Obama supposedly slept with several years ago. “I have an interesting play on words, sometimes,” Geller says. “If people like it, I think that’s great.”

And like it they do: Her darlings often get picked up by admiring media outlets, where they promptly start to burrow into the public rhetorical corpus. Take the furor over what she termed the “monster mosque” in New York. In the words of the NYT, “if many people have a general unease over the idea of a mosque downtown, Ms. Geller has provided a vocabulary to express it and a framework to understand it.” What writer wouldn’t want that kind of power for her creations?

One Geller admirer is Robert Spencer, of Jihad Watch:

Mr. Spencer worked with Ms. Geller on her book “The Post-American Presidency,” published this summer by Simon & Schuster for what she described as a six-figure advance. He helped her sober up her tone, she said, by removing those “little darlings,” in hopes of bolstering the credibility of her argument that Mr. Obama is “not only presiding over but actively promoting the decline of America.”

I hope the publisher knows about this. A Geller book without the darlings is a decidedly risky (and boring) proposition. If she ever were to “sober up her tone,” Simon & Schuster might be forced to ask for their money back, just as Random House once did to Joan Collins.

It’s tempting to think of Geller as a kind of Darth Vader of poetry, tapping into the Dark Side of connotation. But Vader respected The Force, and even loved it, in his way. I’d even like to be able to see her as a modern-day Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with enough power to start the broom walking, but not enough to control it.  Geller, however, has only a dim sense of where her darlings are coming from, and even less sense of the external world that they’re supposed to refer to. (Remember that darling, “jihad tool,” which was once hurled at Rachel Ray because she wore a kaffiyeh in a donut commercial?)

Being denotatively challenged often goes along with Libertarian politics, and really isn’t surprising coming from someone with a privileged past and a fairly work-free present. The NYT article describes Geller’s current home as a “full-floor unit in a high-rise on the East Side of Manhattan,” which was paid for by her husband, who “made certain that she had sufficient support to buy a co-op in the city and survive there without having to work.” And it ends with this head-slapper:

Just last week, Atlas called on readers to boycott Campbell’s soup after the company announced that it planned to certify some products as halal — the Muslim equivalent of kosher — with the supervision of a group that Ms. Geller considers a front for terrorists.

“Warhol,” she wrote, “is spinning in his grave.”

Warhol, of course, didn’t give a shit about what was inside Campbell’s soup, any more than he cared about what was inside a Brillo box, or inside Elvis. And if he is spinning in his grave, it’s because he’s happy to find that the endless duplication of meaningless sparkle, both visual and verbal, still hypnotizes much of America.

Appropriately enough, the article includes a graphic of Geller herself getting Warholed:

So if Geller’s not Lord Vader, and not sane, then what is she? I like to think of her as Nola Carveth, the charming female lead in David Cronenberg’s 1979 gorefest, The Brood. As played by Samantha Eggar, Carveth lives alone in a kind of high-end psychiatric office, where she spends the movie quietly and spontaneously producing an army of deadly offspring that ooze from her hate-infested body like flies. According to fandango.com, they’re “a progeny of sexless, dwarflike mutants who are born for the sole purpose of acting out her violent fantasies of revenge.”

Sure, they look like children, at least from a distance, but if their mommy hates you—which is probably a given—then you wind up like this guy.

Film critic Anton Betel says of The Brood, “Even those who can see the end coming will be unprepared for the triumphant grotesquery of its spectacle, in what is one mother of a climax.” Here’s what he means:

Hello, darling. Welcome to the world, a world where your mom’s entire persona is built on a 50-year-old work of fiction, where everyone who wears a scarf is a murderer, and where your sibling, “Find the ho, give her a show,” can grow big and strong if enough people chant its name in unison.  Now go wield your vorpal blade against the Jabberwock.

*****

Attention: Ugly People May Not Carry Signs

I’m always delighted to stumble across explicit directives designed to help certain groups get their message across. It’s like finding some secret orders left in a desk drawer: fun to read, not too far removed from what we English teachers do in the classroom, and a hell of a good way to sharpen your critical thinking skills.

The following trunkated text is from a document called Signs of Success, written by Morton C. Blackwell, and published by Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, which “identifies, recruits, trains, and places conservatives in government, politics, and the media.” I couldn’t help thinking of the signage and tactics of some recent conservative activists. Perhaps they need to read Blackwell’s playbook more than anyone.

The ellipses show where I left stuff out. The entire document, along with some nice photographs of attractive youngsters holding signs with such slogans as, “WEAKNESS KILLS,” can be read here.

GOOD SIGNS MUST BE:

…..

Carried by the right people

Signs carried by photogenic people get more favorable attention and more news coverage. You don’t have to be beautiful or handsome, although that can help.

If you’re a student, dress like a student but nicely enough that your grandmother would be happy to see you photographed looking like that. Signs carried by weird looking people can’t do their cause much good.

…..

Carried responsibly

When you carry a sign, even a strongly worded sign, be of good cheer. Keep a pleasant expression on your face. In some cases it helps to wave to passersby.

Your cause isn’t helped by news photos of an effectively worded sign carried by someone with a scowl or yelling angrily. If you decide to yell, yell as nobly as you can.

If your sign’s wording is cute, carry it with a constant, genuine smile. If your sign is seriously critical, you should keep a serious expression on your face, but don’t look like you’ve lost your temper and are irresponsible.

Demonstrators on the left often want to terrorize people. They sometimes deliberately use violence, a frightening appearance, and viciously or obscenely worded signs. Their obscenity and profanity don’t win them new friends.

The news media frequently let the left get away with really bad behavior.

…..

Even when your presence is greeted with belligerence, don’t respond rudely. A calm response such as “Thank you for your interest” can put an obnoxious leftist in his place, not inflame the situation, and show that your side is the responsible one.

…..

Carried prudently

Lefitsts often try to intimidate their opponents. Your good signs may cause them to target you.

…..

Of course, any violence is uncivilized and despicable. Remember, you are the responsible good guys.

…..

© Copyright 2005
The Leadership Institute Steven P.J. Wood Building 1101 N. Highland Street Arlington, Virginia 22201 800.827.5323 www.leadershipinstitute.org

*****

Sex.com: Still Up for a Little Slap & Tickle

It’s been called “the world’s most valuable domain asset,” yet the company that owns sex.com just can’t seem to get rid of it. According to Megan K. Scott, of The Associated Press,

“An auction for the much-sought-after domain name was canceled Wednesday after three creditors filed a petition forcing the owner into bankruptcy…

Escom LLC paid a reported $12 million to $14 million for the domain name in 2006, but the company was unable to repay the debt. The lender ordered (a) foreclosure sale…The opening bid: $1 million.”

PETA, bless their plucky, delusional little hearts, would like Escom to give them this unlikely albatross for free, calling it a “win-win situation,” since Escom “will enjoy an enormous tax write-off, and people will learn how to help spice up their love lives while helping animals.” (In a world where fish turn into “sea kittens,” I guess the idea of someone donating a multi-million dollar asset makes sense.) Sex.com, though, remains parked here, with a mildly erotic rotating banner and a nifty section called “love for sale.”

None of the other interested parties was named in the article, but I’d bet my bottomdollar.com (owned by pricegrabber) that Frank Schilling has been on the phone. Mr. Schilling is the founder of NAmedia.com, a domain name acquisition company that, since 2001, has been painstakingly gathering a stash of words which are “understood across cultures, which are simple to memorize and understand, which are short or poignant enough to be useful.” NAmedia then sells space to advertisers, offering a “Niagara Falls” of traffic from hapless rubes who will type the words, once they have flashed spontaneously into their generic, cross-cultural minds, directly into their address bars (although why they wouldn’t use Google remains a mystery).

NAmedia claims that its collection of words receives “organic browser type in traffic from people looking for information based on the keyword weight of the domain name…” One of their names that caught my eye is “atomicbombs,” so, to get more information, I typed it in, and got this (yellow highlighting is mine, btw):

Yes, that does say, “The Leading Terrorism Site on the Net” (and, yes, the name is flanked by the Taj Mahal and the American flag). So, I clicked on the first item under “Most Popular Links” (named, appropriately enough, “Atomic Bomb”), which got me here:

In a second experiment, I clicked on the word “Terrorism,” which was filed under “Other Relevant Links,” and got to the same place, i.e., terra incognita. Now, assuming the terrorists have actually managed to get hold of an atomic bomb and place it under my swing set, I have just wasted several valuable seconds reaching what amounts to a phalanx of grubby, outstretched palms.

Back on NAmedia.com, I found Frank Schilling saying, “I am very proud of the collection I’ve managed to cobble together. It is like nothing else on the Internet.” I’m sorry to burst his bubble.com (owned by UK astrologist Jonathan Cainer), but the only thing that sets NAmedia apart from every other domain company is its patina of personability, which portrays Mr. Schilling as either a wide-eyed child in the internet candy store, or a sort of eccentric, 19th Century botanist with an overly large butterfly net.

Look, I know the web is based on commerce. What isn’t. But it’s just a bit disheartening to find how tawdry the whole thing has become. Yet it’s still imagined to be a sacred space where the world is going to reinvent itself in some kind of post-capitalist utopia, where Google, for instance, will really pull out of China over something like censorship. “As a privately owned company,” Schilling says of NAmedia, “we have the luxury of putting our ideals ahead of profits.” What these non-commercial ideals actually are, though, he doesn’t find the words to say. Perhaps he should check his collection.

Bottom line is, this is the much-ballyhooed internet: A giant, flashing neon sign pointing the way into a desolate trailer park, where useless domain names rust quietly in back lots, and fly-specked piles of bread crumbs lead to unopenable back doors, the whole thing haunted by compulsive hoarders with stacks of dusty words and a few gullible backers.

Maybe, though, it’s just a new kind of democratization, where every groveling common noun—sex, bomb, bubble—can, like one of Dr. Seuss’s plain-bellied Sneetches, jump into the machine and become a strutting Proper Noun, and where, if it can’t manage to work its way up to having a capital letter, can at least lure in a capital investor.

I have ideals, too, so if Escom is still interested in a tax write-off, I’ll be happy to take sex.com off its sweaty hands. Maybe I can turn it into savethelanguage.com, or something.

*****

The Connotation of “Texas”

During the first week of my EN102 class, a student from Tokyo happened to say that an athlete in the room has “a great body.” What she meant was obvious: he’s in great shape. What her fellow students heard, though, was another matter entirely. They laughed. She was mortified, and has since become very interested with the idea of “connotation” in language. So should we all. Why? Because the Texas Board of Education is in the process of making changes to its curriculum, especially in History, and, since Texas takes up such a large percentage of space in this country, the textbook industry is watching.

Now, I have to say that I am not a historian. I do love to read the stuff, but I’m as ignorant of its true discipline as I am of the controls for the Space Shuttle. So, unlike some of the dentists, engineers, and real estate agents who sit on the Texas SBOE, I don’t claim to be an expert on things like the importance of The Alamo to the state of Maine, or whether or not one’s personal opinion of hip-hop should be used as a reason to deny its cultural influence elsewhere in the nation.

I have, however, studied language, and still do, which is why it’s so much fun to read quotes like this one, from SBOE Secretary Terry Leo, on why the word “capitalism” should be dropped from future textbooks:

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation. You know, ‘capitalist pig!’”

Let’s face it, she’s right: connotation matters. In fact, it’s the life blood of language. There is no such thing as poetry, or any kind of writing, without it, and pure denotation is not only boring, but impossible. Even the word “tree,” for instance, is not without its emotional foliage, as SBOE member Don McLery proved when he took umbrage at being related to one:

“I don’t think I share a common ancestor with a tree. However, most of the books we are considering adopting, claim as a fact that we all share a common ancestor with a tree.”

Although the idea of sharing kinship with a tree is (for me, at least) more charming than that of sharing it with certain humans, the point is that there is no escape from connotation when we use words.

This can found in the strategies of Terry Leo’s political friends, comrades, cohorts, or soulmates (depending on which word best connotes your viewpoint). Dr. Frank I. Luntz, for example, operates The Word Doctors, a “message creation company” that offers advising services in effective framing strategies for ideological arguers. (As their slogan says, “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.”) And his recently-released article, The Language of Financial Reform, is a veritable Process Essay on how to use connotation to one’s political advantage. It ends with a handy list of “Words to Use,” which glows with enough para-linguistic force to make even the purest lexical Jedi feel the lure of the Dark Side.

So, anyway, the SBOE is dropping “capitalism” from the Texas curriculum, and using, “free enterprise,” instead. The phrase is, to be sure, synonymous with “capitalism” in many ways (as long as we don’t over-analyze the various denotations of “free” and “enterprise”). But, whatever the economic system in question actually is, or may be, the important thing is that “capitalism” has to go, being too wrapped up in swine, and the gentler, softer phrase put in its place, because, while freedom is hard to argue against, and Free Bird is a popular song, you hardly ever hear someone say “free pig” in political discourse.

According to Princeton University’s WordNet,  the word “Texas” is a noun which means, “the second largest state; located in southwestern United States on the Gulf of Mexico.” This is the small, hard stone of denotation. Once thrown into the pond of human affairs, however, its ripples reach many distant shores. And even though political terms like “capitalism” have actual definitions, and a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, it’s not the flower that matters in this world—it’s the sweetness.

Which is why, thanks to the capitalism of the textbook industry, the particular scent of the Yellow Rose of Texas may soon be blowing into classrooms all across America.

*****

Sorry, Miracle Whip, But It’s Over

The Friend Request from Miracle Whip

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”
–Mary Shelley

I used to be Facebook friends with Miracle Whip. It was fun for a while, but then I started to suspect that some of my fellow 19,000+ Whippers were poseurs. This is just a hunch, of course, but there were a few clues that made me believe that the whiff of formaldehyde I got whenever I read their profiles was not merely the product of my conspiracy-fueled imagination, but quite possibly the act of some great, Kraftian Prometheus.

Consider, if you will:

1. The Names. The majority of the women have monikers that would make any poet proud.

Nyiajah Nyi Martinez-Pierce
Agnes Mary Prevost Warsaw
Jenel Faustin Kukla
Karen Burke Abbondanza
Rosebud Badour
Sara Dryzga Hougaboom
Josefina Josie Shanahan
Katie Wickstrom Stenglei
Court Greathead

These roll around on the tongue as liquidly as a Miracle Whip potato salad (although I might not use the last one in mixed company). And if they’re actually real, then Jenel Faustin Kukla is one lucky bug. But they could come from transcription software that combines various syllables into something resembling English, not unlike Frank Luntz’s language company, or the magnificent sentences at athop.com.

2. The Lo-li-tas. Start with whatever middle-aged huswife you will, one or two clicks brings you, Benjamin Button-like, back to your wedding day or first college party. Nor are you alone: you are with your soulmate, or at a bar, or with a baby. And there’s more than the average number of bikini and cleavage shots. We all know that “child” is America’s middle name, and that anyone over the age of 17 in this country is not allowed in a shopping mall, so it’s entirely possible that Kraft Foods wants Miracle Whip to be as tarted up as its sauce, and jump into a hip and zesty neotenous sandwich, where it might get touched by an iPod.

3. The Quotes. Miracle Whip friends say things like this:

“Egg Salad Sandwiches in the House! Don’t use that whimpy white bread either…got to be whole grain, dark bread…the kind that fights back when you bite it! Yummy! Mash the hard boiled eggs with a fork but leave some big chunks, add a splash of lemon and a little bit of chopped onion…but just a bit (dash of salt and pepper if you like), and then mix in MW to the consistancy you desire, spead it on the dark bread…add a lot of fresh lettuce leaves…smash the slices together and you will have some summer heaven to taste!” --Susan Mounts Duran

Now, some (or all) of these people might actually be alive out there, loosely speaking, and if they are, they should come forward and declare their humanity. Until that time, though, I am going to let cynicsm, a heretofore totally unknown concept to me, carry the day, and convince me that the recent Supreme Court decision that says a stitched-together mass of primal urges is, in any way, a person, was only the culmination of a long process of putrid personification.

“It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs…How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!–Great God!”

Great God, indeed.

(Note to Kraft Foods: I would be absolutely delighted to recant this entire post and be friends again if I am proven wrong. Really.)

Orcarotica: SeaWorld Bites Back

I was at SeaWorld with my kids a week before Dawn Brancheau was killed. We had done a lot of research to figure out which Orlando park we wanted to spend our small budget on, and I distinctly remember the language at SeaWorld’s web sites:

From Explorer’s Aviary©—“Feel your heart soar as a feathered friend glides in to meet you and nibble fruit from your hand…”

From the Dolphin Swim Experience©—”Make a friend that will live in your heart forever…”

And from the Main Page—”SeaWorld. Where Worlds Connect.”

Sounded good. Plus, I had been to SeaWorld before, and at least it wasn’t Disney, so we went. And, of course, we saw the Shamu show.  The theme was “Believe,” and it was a doozey, far more multi-media than the one I had seen ten years earlier. From a series of video screens came a kind of pseudo-Gaelic, mystical melody, and the voice of the ocean itself, in rich, warm, feminine tones (whatever happened to Poseidon?) beckoned everyone to “come and play beside me.” The audience clapped. The whales did what whales do, I suppose. The entertrainers danced.

And we saw her, along with the rest of the performers, skipping and clapping inside her life, a life that would be over in 9 days, and kissing a hulking mass of instincts that even then must have felt compelled to wrap her in the only embrace it knew. Now she is dead,  and will dance no more. May the God of All Things enfold her into the communion which knows no isolation, so that the love she felt for nature is repaid unto infinity.

What on earth are we doing? Did we learn nothing from the Haitian earthquake? Or from Katrina? Or Steve Irwin’s final stab to the heart? Are we now to follow little Bindi, the Jungle Girl? Are the atom and the bull elephant to be added onto our Friends List? Or should we never forget that, even though we may play beside, or in, or around, the ocean, it might still crush us in a moment of inhuman exuberance? However much we love nature, it does not, can not, love us back. It is not ourselves. Despite all the friends requests that SeaWorld urges us to send to the creatures of the deep, sometimes, when “Worlds Connect,” we are denied.

It’s funny, but during the Shamu show, a pesky white egret kept fluttering around, pigeon-like, determined to pick up whatever bits of fish the dancing whales did not manage to catch. It looked like a buffoonish part of the spectacle, but it was real, just being itself. And finally, despite all the music and videos and orcarotic love, the animal stole the show.

*****

I’m a Word: The Short, Happy Life of “NEEN”

“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”
~Charles Peguy

My local supermarket has this nifty machine that spits out a kind of large rice cake. A worker puts some grains, sea salt, and magic into a bin, and after a minute of hot pressure there’s a satisfying pop, pop, pop, and out fly these bumpy discs of blandness that are then stacked, put into transparent bags, and tied up with silver twisties. I actually bought some of the things once, but they’re really not very good, and certainly not filling. In fact, if it weren’t for the pneumatic thrill that draws the crowds, they probably wouldn’t sell.

Words are sometimes created in the same way. Certain new concepts can become salient enough, for whatever reason, to start demanding a word or phrase to come along and make them human, and when this nameless idea reaches a certain critical mass, something generally does rush in. It’s like Shakespeare’s Henry V, yelling, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead.” Or, in our case, with English syllables and stock metaphors. And a fine, rustic job they usually make of it:

Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not…

It’s a kind of linguistic vacuum, which we know that nature abhors.

Some people, though, just can’t wait for nature to get down to work. Fitzgerald, for instance, was compelled to coin a new word for his exquisite ending to The Great Gatsby:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . .

He was later to defend his word against editors who thought it was a typo, claiming that “it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy.” And Lewis Carroll stitched together his portmanteau words for Jabberwocky to such great effect that one of them—”chortle”—is now in the Merriam Webster Dictionary, which guesses that it is “probably” a combination of “chuckle” and “snort,” but they’re not quite sure. Carroll knew that it’s not that simple, that consciousness simply cannot shrinkwrap words like “vorpal,” “mimsy,” and “slithy” into a bundle of utilitarian consciousness.

Ecstacic, frabjous days were probably not on the mind of the artist Miltos Manetas when he came up with the word “neen.” Well, actually, a computer at Lexicon Branding came up with it, back in 2000. Manetas had decided there was an artistic concept dangling out there in the cultural void somewhere without a safety net, and he had hired Lexicon to devise an appropriate name, either because he could not think of one himself (being a digital artist), or because he knew that Lexicon was one of the premier branding companies in the world, having completed “more than 2,500 projects in categories as diverse as high technology to beverages,” which admittedly spans quite a chasm.

Lexicon, in other words, is in the business of inventing brands that will burn into the cultural skin. They are behind such “billion dollar brands” as Intel, Febreze, BlackBerry, PowerBook, Dasani, Centrino, Evista, Embassy Suites, and the feisty little Swiffer:

Ready Mop announces, “I’m a mop.”

Swiffer responds, “I’m a new floor-cleaning technology.”

Even among their few fans, mops lack glamour. Swiffer rejects mop-hood in favor of a more exciting identity.

The name uses uniqueness to point to its inventive technology and peppy sounds to suggest that it cleans quicker than anything that came before. At the same time, it expresses allegiance to traditional mop values by sounding similar to the term “sweeper.”

Rejecting mop-hood while still saluting traditional mop values is a tough balancing act, as any entrenched politician would tell you, so Lexicon uses consumer research and teams of experts—including “a global team of 77 in-country Ph.D. linguists”—to make sure they generate a collection of sounds that leave the factory floor dressed to impress.

So “neen” was rolled out during an event at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Having been conceived by a computer, it was announced by a lone Sony Vaio (not, as far as I know, a Lexicon brand), to a specially invited group of media elites, including the New York Times, which titled its story, And Now, a Word From Outer Space.

There was also a panel of intellectual celebrities on hand, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who wrote about “neen” in his book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Pinker predicted the word would fail to catch on, since “most conspicuous coinages fail no matter what,” and because all of neen’s N’s and E’s made for pretty annoying phonesthetics.

And the word is rather unpleasant, at least when said out loud. Visually, it’s not bad, nice and compact in a techno-replicative sort of way. Manetos himself says it’s “a palindrome (like Dada),” which, of course, is not a palindrome, unless you write it over and over again, ad infinitum. “Neen” might simply be riding on the coattails of both “Dada” and Dada, a kind of gilt by association.

“Neen” is also a portmanteau of nano, screen, and several other hardware-related words that have arisen during the past few years. And the subtle aroma of more recent internet jargon rises from it, words like “lede,” “meme,” and “moot” (which makes me suspect that language had been Rickrolled about 3 years before 4chan was ever unleashed).

The problem with “neen,” though, is not that the emperor has ugly clothes, but that there was never much of an emperor to begin with. What does the word mean? Well, it’s difficult to say, but there are some clues. According to its Manifesto (yes, it was born with one of those, like a trust fund),

NEEN stands for NEENSTERS: a still undefined generation of visual artists. Some of them may belong to the contemporary art world; others are software creators, web designers and videogame directors or animators.

And in an interview with John Glassie at Salon, Manetos said neen is “not exclusively about technology in art, but more about the style, about the psychological landscape…We have two kind of lives now—a real life and a simulated one. I wanted to give a name to this psychology.” Neen deals with the playful nature of digital creation, work done for its own sake and because the artist just likes doing it: “There is a simple factor for somebody to be Neen: He should not have a job. It’s not enough, but it’s a beginning. But he should not live a miserable life either.” Figure that one out.

It is also transitory. In fact, “neen” happens to be an old Greek word meaning, “new,” and Manetas likes to contrast it with another Greed idea—Telic—which refers to the purpose-driven aspect of work, to things and actions that are tools that achieve a goal, such as the act of driving to someplace as supposed to just, well, driving. Telic is what society considers serious and valuable; neen is play in the immediate present. Telic is the pan; neen is the flash. At the end of the Neen Manifeso, it says, “to be continued,” and, of course, it never was.

A neat concept, and one that appeals to my own sense of beauty and value. (Some cool Neenster work can be found at www.superneen.com.) Unfortunately, though, it never appealed to a sufficiently large segment of the language community, and it only turns up 2 results when Googled. “The defining of the Zeitgeist,” writes artnet’s Max Henry, “requires a powerful and resonant word, one that jibes with the frequency of its epoch. Neen is not the finding of the intellectual Holy Grail…” What Manetas found was a boutique idea, with a mosquito-ish name and a cesarean birth.

Lexicon’s web site, oddly enough, says it best:

The single most important value of a name is its storytelling ability. And to tell a good story, you must do three things; Get their attention. Make it interesting. Tell them something new.

You must also watch your syntax and punctuation, but that’s not Lexicon’s job. And the site offers up an old chestnut from American Literature:

Mark Twain once wrote that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” We agree.

So do I. But Twain also wrote, “Words realize nothing, verify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe.” And we must assume that when he wrote “suffer,” he meant it. I wonder how often that word comes up at a Lexicon brainstorming session?

All words are hardened puffs of air, emerging with a more or less meaningful pop, both when they are first born and each time they are used. Some come from the dark recesses of the machine, where they have had time to steep in both the sea salt and the native soil. But others, blowing in from the telic world of consciousness and over-obvious intention, simply sparkle and float around.

So maybe the definition of “neen” is simply the circus that surrounded its birth: an art installation involving linguistics, consumer branding, a lot of self-referential publicity, and a manifesto of individual control over the modes of communication. Then it went away.

Which is, I guess, very neen.

*****

Forty Inches and a Mule: The American Class War Goes HD

Part One: How Many Kids = 1 Vizio?

For Christmas last year, I wanted to buy my family a flat-screen television. Nothing too extravagant: a 40” LCD to replace the aging boulder we have now. But the bank that owns my house had recently readjusted my escrow to cover an assessment by the town where I live that reflected a rise in property taxes in the state of New York which resulted in my mortgage going up 20%. So my credit card payments had fallen behind, and I was denied.

Since then, I’ve been haunted by flat-screens. They show up at my house in the color supplements of the newspaper. They mock me in the store, as I saunter up the darkened aisles and they swell like my dreams, from the rustic 20” bumpkin gathering dust, to the magnificent Mitsubishi 82″ Class/1080p/120Hz/DLP HDTV, surely the Moby Dick of televisions, where, like that other whale, hosts of resentments and promises are “visibly personified and made practically assailable.” Or purchasable, anyway.

And now flat-screens are popping up in the Populist rhetoric, such as in Glenn Beck’s use of The Flat Screen Factor, an economic graphic designed to boil every economic issue down into how many 42″ plasmas can be bought with a corresponding amount of money. (The average family spends $1175 on gas each year, for instance, which would otherwise get them 1.203 plasmas.) They have also featured heavily in the fallout over the recent School Supplies Scandal here in New York. The state, in collaboration with George Soros’ Open Society Institute, a private organization, gave grants of $200 per child to families on welfare intended to help them get ready for school. The money went straight to the families. Soros was quoted as saying that his intention was to help people in need, as he had once been helped.

In execution, the program touched every nerve in the corpus populisti, like a bad game of Operation. The outcry was huge. In fact, the first I heard about it was on a news program focusing on Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks, who had just appeared on Fox Business News, citing “widespread, rampant abuse,” and whose office issued a press release which reads, in part:

Instead of providing necessary property tax relief to our hard-working middle class families, politicians in Albany have decided to write a blank check to public assistance and food stamp recipients without any assurances that it will be spent on the intended purpose of back-to-school supplies . . . In fact, a significant portion of the recipients are abusing this program and purchasing luxury items such as flat-screen TVs and video gaming systems.

Now, the press release does not define “in fact” and “significant portion,” nor does it explain how $200-per-child constitutes a “blank check” unless, like so many other people, Brooks believes welfare families will keep producing babies as withdrawal slips. But no matter — stock phrases are just rabble rousers, and these work fine. More importantly, it hammers on the wedge between “us” and “them” and, in what has turned out to be a masterful linguistic flourish, it even names names.

I went to my desk to look up the actual details of the program, and Googled “new york state” and “school supplies.” A wall of commentary blocked the way. I scrolled and trolled and browsed, and finally found what I wanted at http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/press_0811091.html. But by then I’d gone through some pretty nasty stuff.

“That’s why America is in the state it’s in… Sam pick pockets those of us who pursued the American dream (hard work) and hand out our cash to lazy slobs with a sense of entitlement.”

“I have students who recieve free lunches yet they have new clothes all the time and their parents drive escalades.”

“so paying for people who choose not to get healthcare in favor of big screens and SUV’s is my moral obligation?”

“In the early 1990s I worked for a local non-profit program which serves those with income below the poverty line. I was paid minimum wage with a B.S. degree and when I made home visits, they had more than I did in my home – and they always had their cable tv (which we were unable to afford at the time).”

“Now we are giving them $200 per child to buy TV’s, I-Pods, or any other luxury items not related to school supplies.”

“President Obama. What a joke we’ve elected to ‘rule’ our country… The hardworking Americans get shit on while everyone collecting welfare sit home w/their huge flatscreen tvs…while their ‘baby momma’ is sitting in the bedroom popping out another kid every 9 months…”

“I guess when you play by the rules, Drive a car that gets more than 18 mpg, pay your mortgage on time and don’t default on something you agreed to pay, You get no stimulus money. But have kids you can’t afford, buy cars that get bad gas mileage, and don’t pay your bills you get all kinds of Obama dollars.”

“It’s a CHOICE to “buy” an oversized flat screen TV at rent-a-center financed for 84 months at $12 per week. Its a CHOICE to go out and buy an new car, with FREE MONEY FROM OBAMA, financed with payments you can barely afford instead of getting buy with the car you have.”

This is ranting in earnest. People are furious, and understandably so: The job market is crumbling, and New York State has the highest property taxes in the nation, with Monroe County and two of its neighbors topping the list.

Still, most of this stuff is rote, as folksy as the Declaration of Independence. Familiar phrases are tossed around like baseballs on the 4th of July. Boot straps are pulled. Foxholes get dug or deepened. The American narrative continues to run its course, only now it has been freshened by some hot new consumer items and the shocking fact that the President is one of “them.” The undercurrent of hatred quickens.

All the comments made me curious about the number of flat-screens the Obamas have in the White House (which is, after all, the grandest taxpayer-supported pile in the nation). When I Googled “obama’ and “flat screen,” the very first hit was a Populist blog with the American flag making up its entire banner image and the name, just-a-regular-guy.com. Here is the reference:

After months of ragging about his constant use of teleprompters for everything Obama switched to a huge flat screen TV in order to stay on script because without something to tell him what to say he becomes a babbling baboon.

Next on the list, at the web site openleft.com, was an article about a group of nurses who accidentally ran into a health care rally held by Mark Phillips, ‘conservative activist and sometime Fox News commentator.’ Phillips said this to a group of senior citizens in Nevada:

“Barack Obama wants to steal your money through taxes, just like some guy off the street wants to steal my big-screen TV.”

With our class structure suddenly turning as flat as our televisions, the president has become a mash-up between Jim Crow and John Brown. Instead of Harper’s Ferry, though, he’s raiding the superstores and trying to instigate a plasma-fueled race war.

Part Two: Rather Serious Embarrassment

America has a history of looking at certain people getting their hands on proprietary items with a mixture of alarm and scorn, an impulse easily manipulated by savvy politicians and journalists. Urban rioting is an ongoing example. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots that occurred after the Rodney King verdict, for instance, crowds quickly started looting stores. According to on-the-spot reports from the Emergency Response & Research Institute,

Much looting appeared to [be] “opportunistic” in scope and origin. Entire families were seen working together to steal from stores in their own neighborhoods. Often, what was being stolen was not of any necessity, but rather luxury items such as designer gym shoes, radios, and starter jackets. Frequently, it just appeared that it was those “without” were taking from those “with,” because they could.

This kind of looting is generally posited as the real driving force behind urban unrest. After all, it’s a much easier notion to get a grip on than an abstract set of grievances that may actually be the cause. (I hear an echo of this attitude in a comment by Michele Malkin in her recent book, Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies: “In the Chicago patronage culture that made Michelle Obama, the color that matters most is neither black nor white, it is green — the color of money.”)

Going back a bit, during the 1920’s, there was a huge migration of workers from the South to the North, causing worries in both areas of the country. At the same time, thanks to companies like Sears, houses were becoming available to almost everyone, and could even be ordered from a catalogue. In 1924, the New York Times ran a letter by F. A. Werthman, Secretary of a division of the New York State Association of Real Estate Boards, wondering how to combat a concern of some new home buyers:

As a result of the great influx of negroes…some of them are purchasing homes and home sites in the very heart of the residential sections of our cities, to the great detriment of values of neighborhood properties. We seem powerless to stem such encroachment, and you can readily appreciate what a property owner can do to his street and neighborhood in the way of depreciating property values.

Sam C. Starke, Secretary of the Birmingham, AL, Real Estate Board, replied that for them “no city ordinance or State law [was needed] to prevent” such a thing, since, “It would be distinctly prejudicial to a prominent white man” to sell a home is such a way. “I can only guess,” Starke concludes, “that the purchaser under these circumstances would be running the risk of rather serious embarrassment of some sort or other.” Neither man needed to worry, though — they were in the process of creating the suburbs.

Going back even further, in the early 20th Century and the latter part of the 19th, those too poor to own houses or land could at least share in the defense of their women. Most stories of lynching involve retribution for attacks on white women in poor communities. And in the months leading up to the Civil War, fear was used to persuade the working poor in the South to oppose the abolition of slavery. James McPherson, in his book Battle Cry of Freedom, quotes one Georgia secessionist as asking non-slaveholders, “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter?” And a Baptist clergyman from South Carolina warned that “abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” With no other real possessions to lose, the landless poor were stoked with fear and loathing using a fever dream straight out of Birth of a Nation.

It goes back even more, to 1858, when the economic and political climates were strikingly similar to our own. According to historian Allen C. Guelzo, in his book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debate that Defined America, that year brought a recession to the state of Illinois that deflated land values and reduced the money supply of banknotes. National imports fell, religious movements rose, and talk of abolition was shaking up the old order. The town of Freeport, IL, which hosted one of the debates, was a money town, embracing “principles of small business, finance, and markets.” It also had 5 carriage makers, and Stephen Douglas knew what he was doing when he told a Freeport crowd this story about abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass:

“The last time I came here to make a speech,” he said, recalling an incident from a speaking tour in northern Illinois in 1854, “I saw a carriage . . . drive up” in which “a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, whilst Fred. Douglas and her mother reclined inside, and the owner of the carriage acted as driver.’ Imagine: a white man and white woman playing the roles of servants, while a black abolitionist and a white woman “reclined inside.” If they liked this sort of arrangement, with “the nigger . . . on a social equality with your wives and daughters” or riding “in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team,” then they should vote for the “Black Republicans.” This drove the crown into a frenzy…

And with a lurch, we’re back in the Escalade, or in the TV room with Mark Phillips and Maggie Brooks.

Part Three: A Star is Born

Not every generation can be there at the birth of a Myth, but we seem to be lucky.

Of all the comments I read about the School Supply scandal, this one is my favorite:

“And didn’t I read somewhere that some of these parents were buying X boxes and other crap with their money and NOT spending it on school supplies????”

First of all, it’s comparatively humane, and despite the extra question marks, it doesn’t snap in my face like a whip. Also, it calls all the crap people are talking about, “crap,” instead of the incendiary default expression, “luxury items”. These are not luxuries, at all. They are basics, and fall squarely inside working class territory. (Some of the them are a tad outside, but that’s pretty much the point: they are something to work for.)  ”The standard of living is more than plenty of food,” wrote sociologist William T. Ogburn, in a New York Times article way back in 1929.

Most primitive people had plenty of food most of the time… The luxuries of yesterday are the necessities of today. It was not long ago that underwear was not in general use. And it has only been a few years that we have been wearing night gowns and pajamas. There was a time when the fork was unknown, and we have been using the match only about a century. Now we must all have tooth brushes.

Not to mention TVs and gaming systems. We call these things luxuries because we like to think they are, and the anger over welfare families having such “luxuries” as electronic toys and clothes not scavenged from a Goodwill box says more about our own frustrations than anything else.

The people who are buying yachts, Upper West Side addresses, and Bugatti Veyrons—i.e. the real luxury items—are strangely silent on this issue. To them, “$200″ is an abstraction. To the rest of us, it’s something we can almost smell, something to pay the electric bill and the car loan with, or toss to the bank when it calls about the mortgage. The thought of someone else getting their hands on those two crisp Franklins, or that modest 40″ LCD we can’t have, is maddening.

The above comment also starts with the tell-tale words, “Didn’t I read somewhere…” This vague anxiety, of “them” stealing “our” televisions and hanging them on the walls of Section 8 bedrooms, signals the birth of a Myth: an honest-to-goodness Urban Myth. (Never mind Sasquatch; this is the real deal.) Certainly, it’s based on a kernel of truth. All myths are. There is no doubt in my mind that some New Yorkers saw the school supply money in their bank accounts and immediately bought flat-screens. But it’s gone beyond that, deeper, somehow, into the place where fear, hope, freedom, and other such amorphous ideas take possession of things—electronics, greenbacks, human bodies—and turn them into metaphors, actors in the stories through which we live our lives.

George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California, studies the way metaphors shape and express thought. In the book Whose Freedom?, he writes that they are used continuously and unconsciously, structuring our thinking into “deep frames,” which define how we see the world and “characterize moral and political principles that are so deep they are part of [our] very identity.” They are so systemic, that any “fact” or piece of evidence we take in either gets drawn into the frame or, if it contradicts the frame, it becomes a non-reality. There are also “surface frames,” particular words and images that are our normal modes of expression. We use them constantly in our language, at once revealing and reinforcing that which lies beneath. In an argument, whoever controls the surface frames, controls the ideas.

Flat-screens act as surface frames. As bits of plastic and metal, they are a new species—along with X Box’s, iPods, and cell phones—in the genus, trophidiae. They hang on the wall like antlers, or the way iron nails were driven into the front doors of 17th Century houses. As storytellers, they provide visual narratives that deliver our myths and provide us with communal identity. (The title sequence of Amazing Stories, Stephen Spielberg’s television series from the 1980’s, showed a tribe of Neanderthals telling stories around a fire, which gradually morphed into a TV set.)

In times of economic hardship and social change, they offer still more. “In the post-9/11 era,” writes Joe Abelson, vice president of displays for consumer electronics advisers, iSuppli,

a new phrase entered the lexicon: ‘cocooning,’ a trend among fear-struck citizens to avoid travel and remain in the safety of their homes. Amid the current economic downturn, a new wave of cocooning has hit, with recession-wary U.S. consumers eschewing travel, staying home and watching their televisions. However, they still are finding enough money to buy new flat-panel sets that offer superior pictures and larger sizes. (When Times Get Tough, the Tough Watch Television)

Holing up in a cave or going down a burrow is about as deep as framing gets. Combine that with ideas about freedom and success, and it’s easy to see why, as Lakoff says, “Deep framing is where the action is.”

Deep framing also helps to explain the persistence of stories like these:

Snapple features a slave ship on its lable and is owned by the KKK.

Maya Angelou wrote a poem saying Timberland is owned by the KKK, and the Timberland Tree represents lynching.

Tommy Hilfiger has said he does not want black people wearing his clothes. Liz Claiborne also said the same thing on Oprah.

Church’s Fried Chicken contains a chemical that makes black men sterile.

Frederic Rouzaud, the managing director of the winery that makes Cristal Champagne (a favorite of rap stars), said that he would be “delighted” if rappers bought another brand, instead.

When I brought these Myths up in one of my classes, most of the students laughed (a few merely nodded their heads). Their only response was that whoever believes these things must be “crazy.” The Urban Legends web site, Snopes.com, called the stories “slander,” and said, “These are common rumor types, and such tales should be dismissed as gossip not even worth the effort of repeating.” Yet a Legend is not a Myth, and it’s not so easy to dismiss the fact that these stories are indeed repeated over, and over, and over again.

A Youtube video that showed Geraldo Rivera interviewing people about these stories (since deleted) focused on a group of well-dressed professionals in an attempt to highlight their bizarre nature. When confronted with evidence that Liz Claiborne never said anything about black people wearing her clothes, and that Oprah had transcripts to prove it, one woman told Geraldo she still believed it had been said at one time or another. “You must understand,” she told him, simply, “We are used to the idea of other people owning things.” And is it so hard to believe that some deep frames have been built differently than others when, for over 150 years, ownership has been used as both a wall and a badge? Or when there were such things as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment? Or when the the story about Cristal Champagne is actually true?

Now, how do we explain the deep frames that shore up the nightmares of the Populists? Would the words “crazy” and “slanderous” apply? Every day at the college where I teach, I see people waiting patiently for the bus back to downtown. One of my students, who had to withdraw after the first semester, lived in a studio apartment and owned a small radio. The grandmother of a high schooler that I tutored struggled for funding in order to send him to a high school where he might actually graduate, and on his birthday she bought him a new cell phone. (Yikes.) What do these folks think about all the flat-screens they’re supposed to be finagling?

Hopefully, they’ll understand that a large segment of the American population is just used to the idea of certain people stealing things.

We are all more or less prisoners of our metaphors, and the impulses that pull us toward larger and larger screen sizes are the same ones that feed our hatred for real human beings. On the one hand, the crystallization of the popular ideal of freedom: self-sufficiency, hard work, limited government, and the right to acquire and keep property. On the other, the grotesque embodiment of its opposite: dependence, sloth, taxation and home invasions. It’s little wonder that sexy, mid-level consumer items drive the debates. Just slap words like “flat-screens” and “welfare cheats” onto the deep frames, plop them into a narrative of fear, and you have yourself a Myth. Do it consciously, and you have yourself a political party.

So was I angry when I couldn’t buy a flat-screen last year? You betcha. Also frustrated, embarrassed, and a little depressed. Watching my family open the package would have made me feel like a hunter bringing home a grizzly, and hanging that pelt on the wall would really be saying something — to them, to the world, and to someone who would gladly work several jobs to provide for his loved ones. If there were jobs. That’s a lot of weight to hang on a television, especially when measured diagonally.

Yet I try not to channel my anger into a shiny black frame, and bite-sized numbers like “40″ and “200″ don’t get me worked up. Here are some that do:

In 2008, the graduation rate in the Rochester City School District was 52%. This is considered a success, and when it’s compared to the 37% who graduated in 2006, I suppose it is. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)

872 Rochester students were arrested in school during the 2008-2009 school year, compared to 414 the year before. (City Newspaper)

Of the 15 adults I had at a class in the city last Spring, 6 were unable to open Microsoft Word, 2 weren’t sure how to turn on the computer, and 1 couldn’t find the space bar.

This is where the real crime lies, not with a “significant portion” of “them” buying toys with “my” money because they “won’t” get jobs, but with an ingrained, ongoing denial of the most basic requisites for enjoying the life of work in the first place. It’s a crime against the people involved, a crime against the future of America, and a crime against humanity.

I doubt, though, that these numbers will ever get the sustained attention that’s lavished on flat-screens. For one thing, they’re complicated, and have—de facto and de jure—been adding up for centuries. But at the end of the day they’re just vague and amorphous, and lack the mythic heft of the story about the Vizio, the Pair of Bootstraps, and the Welfare Queen with a Walmart gift card.