conservatism

Comic Sans: in loving memory of Edith Evans

Letter to the editor, The Wall Street Journal 24 January 2014:


Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?

Usage note: the phrasal verb “get through to”

1. Get through to denotes communication, but its originating metaphor connotes forcing, piercing, penetrating. To get through to is one way of communicating; to be gotten through to is another. The difference is a bloody matter of the difference between prey and predator.

2. The communication channel of getting through to is fear. In fear of being gotten through to, some people calm their pounding hearts by remembering that they believe in their gun and their Bible. Others choose to mask their susceptibility to communication behind deflecting layers of irony. The warehouse full of Basquiats, check; the Russian passport, check.

3. Getting through to can also be thought of as a speech act like voting or naming: a way of doing things with words. Under the control of speech-act technologists like Frank Luntz and Roger Ailes, language is a symbol system used by the people with the Basquiats to get through to people whose symbols are at pre-ironic stages of development.

R. H. Beck, "Preparing for the trail," Galapagos Islands, 1903. Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/99472325/. Photoshopped.
R. H. Beck, “Preparing for the trail,” Galapagos Islands, 1903. Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/99472325/. Photoshopped.

Sforzando e tremolando

In the drugstore, somebody’s bar code set off an alarm. “We have activated our inventory control,” a recorded voice announced. “Please return to your cashier.”

“Inventory control? Sounds like mind control,” said a voice behind me. The man speaking was middle-aged, white, dressed in Hawaii casual (T-shirt, shorts) but wearing a perhaps age-inappropriate trucker cap and backpack. The neighborhood was Honolulu’s Hawaii Kai: a little bit of southern California transplanted to Polynesia in the 1950s by the visionary businessman Henry J. Kaiser, and as of 2013 the district of the only Republican in the Hawaii state senate. The man had asked his question and mused about its association accordingly: at the volume at which ordinary indoor conversation is conducted in a middle-class neighborhood.

But suddenly his voice went sforzando e tremolando, and in the vocal equivalent of a Tim Burton font he cried,

Near him no one could be seen.

But the spirit of Fox News must have been in the air, hovering over Hawaii Kai with an invisible smile.

Between “the” and “grand Pooh-Bahs,” a pause long enough to say “Fox News” on the inhale

John Stossel, Fox News, May 18, 2012. Click to play.

Stossel

I changed the channel, but the sound of that analysis was still affecting me. I picked up my copy of the Chronicle, held it to the mirror beside my face, and checked. No, there couldn’t be any doubt. Mr. Stossel was entirely right: I am grand.

So thanks for everything on Fox News, Roger Ailes! Have a Pooh-Bah song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfIwnehelT8

Conservative aesthetics: a constructive suggestion

Following an incident in late February and early March 2012 when the conservative intellectual Rush Limbaugh spent three successive days on AM radio calling the Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute, then suggesting she make a sex tape and post it online for him to watch, two apologies followed — one on Mr. Limbaugh’s web page, then another on the air.

Another conservative intellectual, Cal Thomas, found that heartwarming. In his March 7 column, he wrote:

Limbaugh might resist this next suggestion, but I speak from experience, having had to apologize for a recent misstatement of my own. Limbaugh should invite Sandra Fluke to lunch and get to know her as a person, not a label. At the very least, he would send an important message that civility and strong political speech do not have to be contradictory.

Who knows, he might even persuade her to become a conservative. From his perspective, and mine, that would be a win-win for everybody, except liberals.  http://www.calthomas.com/index.php?news=3505

About that, a suggestion: by way of breaking the ice, why doesn’t Mr. Limbaugh also invite Ms. Fluke to a nice movie? It would be a conservative thing to do. After all, there is a precedent, right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDKaiXRE9cw

My earlier post about Mr. Limbaugh and the language of conservatism is at

http://theartpart.jonathanmorse.net/2012/03/coed/