CSotD: Process is our most important product
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Perspective in art is important and there's no better way to start today's posting than with a bit of perspective from Matt Wuerker.
There's an awful lot of looney out there, but the underlying problem is probably not so much the guns in Georgia or historically-challenged redneck anarchists who don't realize that nearly all the land out west was once in the federal land bank and that some of it still is.
It's the fundamental belief that America is better than anyone else because it is America. And, like the belief that the universe was created from nothing about 6,000 years ago by a big man with a white beard, it's not a belief that is subject to logic or that can be converted to metaphor.
If you point out that another country has some advantage in lifestyle, longevity or anything else, the response is that they're cheating, they're commies or else it's simply a lie.
Or that the only reason they can live so well is that they're sponging off us, which is perhaps the silliest explanation of all, because it not only concedes we don't live well but suggests that we are suckers into the bargain.
Wuerker's got it right. We're freakin' exceptional.
And it's not just the conservatives
Speaking of self-satisfied self-delusion, I don't often agree with Jerry Holbert, but he's got this nailed. The obsession with how people pronounce "nuclear" is ridiculous and not simply elitist but wrong-headedly so.
I am not going into the whole goose/geese/moose/meese rant about the inconsistencies of the mongrel English language because anybody with a lick of sense already knows that part.
But this call for a lockstep language seems like an odd obsession for normally inclusive-leaning liberals.
I was a bit dismayed a few years ago when I was in Charleston, South Carolina, and I put on the local news and realized that nobody in the studio sounded in the least as if they were from Charleston, South Carolina.
When they'd cut to video, everyone involved in all the stories had southern accents, but not the reporter interviewing them.
I would think a TV station in South Carolina would consider "sounding like us" one of the desired attributes in hiring, but apparently, cultural homogenization is the goal and the entire broadcast industry has bought into Northeastern Narcissism.
Eisenhower, Carter, Clinton and Bush all said "noo-kew-ler" and respect for them is otherwise fairly widely divided. I couldn't get a definitive answer about Edward Teller's pronunciation of the word, but the Father of the Atomic Bomb is reportedly in the "noo-kew-ler" camp.
Hearing the T in "often" used to be grating to my ear until I spent a dozen years on the Canadian border, where they not only sound that T but say things like "shedule" and "al-you-min-ee-um."
And don't those linguistic "noo-clee-er" snobs listen to "the BBC Noozahw," where the letter R is all but banned and they speak of "vittamins" and — gasp — pronounce the H in "herbs"?
I'm not going to vote for someone based on whether he or she says "noo-clee-er" or "noo-kew-ler."
But they'd better not say "ma-toor." The word is "ma-chure," goddammit.
And another thing
I can't find a lot of support for Toby Buckets' historical theory, but I don't much care. The history is less importance than the hoocarestory.
Cursive has a long history, but, like English grammar, at some point the Organizers of How The World Should Be got hold of it and decided to use it as yet another way to puff up their own importance and make everyone else miserable.
As a person who was in elementary school a half century ago when the world was perfect, let me enter this into the record: We didn't spend very much time on cursive.
I guess we learned it in first or second grade, and I remember the big green card arrays over the top of the blackboard with the alphabet in cursive that followed us for several years thereafter.
However, what I particularly remember was that, once in a great long while, some teacher would get a wild hair and give us a session on handwriting and make us make loops. She might even keep this up for a couple of days.
But eventually, she'd regain her senses and we'd move on to things that mattered. I think my parents' generation spent a great deal more time on this than we ever did, but, whatever the case, it's just plain wrong to declare this a new crisis.
Or a crisis at all, really. Yes, it's important to be able to read historical documents. But my brother had to supplement his grasp of Spanish with some Catalan in order to complete his doctorate in Spanish medieval history, and I know many people who learned classic Athenian Greek because they wanted to be able to read old, interesting things.
Compared to either of which I'd suggest that figuring out how to read cursive is pretty simple if it's written in your own language. We'd be better off inspiring the necessary level of interest than in spending instructional time going over mere mechanics.
Articles on the decline of cursive say that it helps train the brain. Yes, I'm sure it does. So does learning to play chess, or, for that matter, playing computer games.
As for signatures, I'm rarely called upon to sign things on paper, and those stupid electronic pads and pencils — never mind the pads that want you to sign with your index finger — make such a dog's breakfast of your signature that you might as well be marking your X.
I'm not thrilled with the rise of biometrics, but signing things in lieu of entering a PIN hardly seems worth adding another classroom mandate.
Anyway, I've got to be particular what I sign
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