Sam Smith – Although your editor graduated from Harvard magna cum probation, I do feel compelled to say a word on behalf of that college’s president who is currently under attack for committing the current greatest liberal sin: saying something the wrong way. As the son of a man who worked for the Roosevelt administration and helped to end 69 years of GOP rule in Philadelphia back in the 1940s, I have a sense of how liberalism has changed as its forces have become better educated. Central to this change has been a decline in effective politics and a rising emphasis on the proper verbal perspective.
One of the ways I became aware of this was living most of my life in DC, about four decades of which in a city that was majority black. It was here I I learned that if you wanted to bring cultures together you didn’t just say things, you found things to work together on in common. In the case of DC that included home rule, statehood, and the most successful anti-freeway fight anywhere. In the latter example, an early protest meeting I covered included two speakers: one from the overwhelmingly white Georgetown neighborhood and a black guy who headed something called Niggers Incorporated. I early sensed we were going to win. And in my fifty year friendship with Marion Barry he called me everything from a “cynical cat” to a “son of a bitch” but we could still find common ground on which to act.
Now we find liberals arguing over whether four college presidents said the right things about Jews and Israel when testifying on Capitol Hill. One has already resigned. Yet their topic wasn’t Zionism or anti-Semitism but the actual things that were happening in and around Gaza. If you want, for example, to see how complex the word Zionism is check Wikipedia for it and for “Anti-Zionism.” But if you want to to deal with the current crisis, you won’t find the answer in the right definition.
If you’re the president of a university you have to deal with a lot of language junkies but if you want to create change you have to come up with actual actions and projects that appeal even to those who don’t have the right words. The current liberal crisis is due in no small part to being unable to speak to, and converse with, those who don’t share elite language. As my high school math teacher used to say, “Speaka United States."
1 comment:
An alternative explanation for E. Mcgill that I heard on the radio was that her comment came from a more ‘legal’ viewpoint, which does seem to have a whole language of its own.
OK, maybe we used to have an expression about lawyers… but in this day-in-age we can’t, and maybe we should never have used such expressions. And, for some reason, their vocabulary must meet their needs.
And this is where I might have my personal opinion:
It may be forgiven for your math teacher to ever say those words “Speaka United States" as:
1: He / She wasn’t an English teacher, and
2. This may have occurred before Jimmy Carter was President of the U.S., and
3. Because of both 1.) and 2.), your math teacher had not been impressed upon sufficiently about the importance for the United States to convert to the Metric System of measurement.
And, because of government and industry’s procrastination, the United States has lagged behind still using the U.S. Standard units of measurement, while the rest of the entire world uses the Metric system. Now, mechanics must have two sets of tools, one metric and one US Standard. And only a couple of bolt heads / nuts under ¾ inch (sorry about that, make it 19mm) are close enough to allow either wrench type to be used.
My point.
Math teachers should say “Speaka Metric”.
Orange County Choppers had a great skit where they were trying to subtract a couple of lengths in US Standard, like 9 5/8 inches minus 4 13/16 inches, of course without writing it down, and it was hilarious.
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