Working Draft-----------------
When did the Civil War begin? Was it that morning when the South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumpter in 1861, or were the seeds planted three centuries earlier, when the first Africans were commoditized into chattel to be used as "it's" new world owner directed. When we put America's civil war in this historic long view, a different perspective emerges from that of today's headlines.
We live in the moment that has been created by forces that most of us are barely aware of. The choices of the moment, as they were during those months after Lincolns election, secession of Southern States and the spark that drove the country into war, forced those who had been brothers at West Point and fought together in previous wars to choose sides. One of these was Robert E.Lee, descendant of the wife of our first President and who, like Thomas Jefferson, considered himself first a citizen of his state, and secondarily of the entity of the government of those states.
This essay is written in during a time that will be known as either an aberration, a short presidency of an individual who broke with the existing political structures, or of a man who set this most powerful country in the world on a new course.
This comment section is an important historical document, as it is a
poll of responses selected by NYTimesPicks, not of the general public,
but of this paper's participating readership. This also represents the
Democratic voting public.
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Example 1:The president is protecting Nazis and white supremacists. He's
in violation of his oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
Congress, it's time to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
5411 recommends
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Ex2: The President asked a very important question today. Where does it
stop? Once the statues of Lee and Jackson have been torn down. When
will the social justice warriors ask to tear down every statue of former
slave owners named Washington and Jefferson?
235 recommends
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How many of this 20 to 1 N.Y.T. consensus know that the Jewish liberal
Mayor of Charlottesville voted to retain the Confederate statues and
park names in question, and that this position is far from exclusively
the province of white supremacists or the KKK.
I love and respect The New York Times, but right now on this issue, with
this President, whom I deplore on many levels, it and its readership
have lost the quality of reasoned analysis, that has been our hallmark.
20 to 1 for using the 25th Amendment, one devised to remove a President
disabled by physical or mental inability to function, compared to the
impeachment procedure part of our constitution to remove one whose
policies or behavior is politically abhorrent.
The dark side of language - and it's function
July 31, 2017
Language is what makes us human.
Language is what makes us human.
Most
species, from our cousins Hominidae or great apes to primitive beings
communicate with sounds, postures, scents or baring teeth in threat, an
action quite close to expressions of rage among we homo sapiens. It is
language evolving in unknown ways, first as ephemeral speech, and then
in written form that allowed words to have meaning, eventually to
define cultures, codes of behavior and laws.
This
multifaceted human artifact, beyond the thousands of distinct languages
associated with nationalities, has been studied under the rubric of
linguistics, but also within specialized areas such as legal terminology
or cellular bio-chemistry as new discoveries open up a need for writing
over existing concepts to define what is an ever changing “state of the
art.” As language expands exponentially along with knowledge itself,
more people who are not within a discipline must accept conclusions that
they don’t have the ability to verify ourselves.
We
are left with trusting those who can evaluate the research and do the
math, and then either go along with them; or by rejecting the concept as
oppressive deem it “political correctness, the potency of this shown
in the Presidential election of 2016. While deconstructing the concept
of acceptable language in our culture should be an ongoing project,
over the last few days there has been a culmination of the de facto
attack on the formality of one specialized area of communication,
federal interaction with the citizens of this country.
“Trump
Talk” is an appropriate term, since nothing like this has ever been
done before Donald J. Trump, first as a candidate and continued as
President with spontaneous tweets, and then by Anthony Scaramucci who
was rewarded by this President for his language with one of the highest
positions in the administration, one word used being “fucking.” (Then fired within days of his outburst) The
bowdlerization of this word is now rather archaic, since we are mature
enough to accept that it denotes human behavior that can be an
expression of love or of debasement; and to routinely censor it for its obceneness is to
ignore the last half century of social revolution. Scarmucci was using
it not literally, or even figuratively, but as a “fighting word” in the phrase that his
personal political enemy was a “Fucking Paranoid schizophrenic.
“Fucking” was the adjectival part of a phrase of infantile incoherent
contempt that combined the profane with disdain for a tragic incurable
mental illness.
It
would be a lost opportunity to focus on how this one mean-spirited
marginally literate individual used this word in deciding, as the N.Y.
Times did in a subsequent article, to take “fuck” out of linguistic
purgatory. A communication event can not be understood by evaluating
the words out of context, as his usage, personal reward for it, and the
broader effect should be carefully evaluated.
The
“Day of Infamy” speech delivered by President Roosevelt was crafted to
show contempt for the action of the Japanese government, yet was devoid
of hatred of the people. It was powerful enough to rally Americans to
unselfish sacrifice of lives and fortune to prevail in the war that was
thrust upon them, yet it was absent words of hatred that prevented the
reconciliation after this war with a steadfast ally. In the midst of
four years of carnage, ending with the destruction of a city by a weapon
that still threatens the world, this President, and those who came
after him knew the value of language carefully crafted to avoid the
descent into deep and permanent hatred, even of enemies.
The
expletives that Scarmucci uttered were not so much an assault on
sensibilities, but a fraudulent imitation of a visceral signal that
should be reserved as a primal warning to another that they are in
danger of a violent assault. Such language is a vital buffer against
mayhem that must be preserved for its specific use, rather than a trope
for political advantage. It is a survival mechanism that evolved
because it prevented actual lethal violence among us, to be released
from the depths of our being only when the next step would be
catastrophic.
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