Time After Time

Still in crisis mode, Americans are needing to expand their vocabulary yet once more. The word for today is tick-tock. Obviously, the sound of a clock, but in the world of political journalism, a much bigger concept. While reading various blogs and reports here and there on the net on Wednesday, I ran into the word three times, and then on Thursday, Kevin Drum sent me to Joe Nocera’s tick-tock at the New York Times.

A tick-tock, it appears, is a minute by minute account of events. By analyzing the tick-tock, one can derive some greater meaning from or about the outcomes of those events. Now, it’s not entirely clear to me from jargon dictionary definitions whether the ‘tick-tock’ is the chronicling, the analysis, or the combination of the two, or whether anyone cares. It’s American journalism jargon, so those folks may have not carefully worked out a definition, but we can see how it works.

Thursday tick-tock.
7:45. My brain awakens and notes that a bird is calling, meaning that it is past 7:30, which is the time the computer randomly chooses a bird call to awaken me every morning. In theory, I would learn to identify the calls of birds from this, but ten years of experience has shown otherwise. I do not learn because the bird refuses to say its name.
8:00. My eyes open and see in the overhead skylight that the sky is gray and I consider changing my plans for the day not to include gardening because it is probably going to rain again.
8:15. I get to the computer to read the news headlines and the morning blogs, mostly political. I find myself reading the same analysis over and over, just written by different people.
9:00. With coffee, I settle down to read the most recent New Yorker. It is providing me with a long analysis of Lionel Trilling’s work by Louis Menand. I think about how, in 1960 when I was in graduate school, I read Trilling’s work and talked endlessly with my colleagues about the meaning of literary criticism, and now it is 48 years later and I am reading about it again, although I no longer have colleagues. Louis Menand is not my colleague.
9:45. I am finished with Lionel Trilling and move on to an article that questions the wisdom of pets inheriting millions of dollars. I think about how, also in the 1960’s, I audited many law school classes instead of writing my English Literature dissertation, and finally quit going to the law classes after I spent two hours listening to arguments about whether the law should allow people to leave millions of dollars in trust to their pet. In the particular case at hand, the pet was a turtle. And now, 45 years later, I am reading about it again.
10:30. Took a walk to the beach and found that the tide was in again. Very reliable, the tide.
12:00. Lunch, day after day.

Well, you get the idea. Reading the Thursday tick-tock suggests that the outcome of Thursday, for me, was largely influenced by repetitive events. Much like the failure of the financial system: deregulation leads to financial crisis; belief that there is a free lunch, leads to no lunch. I am reading about it again.

All Alone?

It is possible that by the end of this campaign season, I’ll be standing all alone: no friends left. I am trying to stay away from it, for the most part, noting only headlines and their sources. An acquaintance, a self-described independent, reports that he is watching the news carefully to determine where he stands in this race, which of the candidates he judges will be best for the country. I am stunned to think that there are people in this country who think that the TV, newspaper, and internet versions of the ‘campaign’ are being run by Emmanuel Kant (or even by Will and Ariel Durant), intellectual masters who are serving up a feast of ideas that we can all look over and consider carefully. The closest connection I get to the ‘pig in lipstick’ comment is that we are generally being served swill and, worse yet, are lining up to consume it.

Very mysterious.

The last day or so, I have received several opportunities to vent my spleen on a website called womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com. As a long-time reader of George Lakoff (Metaphors We Live By, Don’t Think about an Elephant, etc.), a former English/writing teacher, and a garden-variety over-educated elite member, I’d like to say a few words about why I find this language offensive. The website explains how the women in charge wrote to forty of their friends asking them to write about why they opposed Sarah Palin’s entry into the presidential campaign. Those forty then sent it out to their many friends, and now they have over 140,000 women writing about why they oppose Sarah Palin.

Fine. I’m cool with that. I didn’t join the fray, despite these invitations from long-time friends, because I am not a woman against Sarah Palin. I am a woman, and I would never vote for Sarah Palin for anything I can think of (animal control officer?), but I am not in any way, shape or form uninclined to vote for Sarah Palin because either she or I are women.

This group makes me embarrassed for the political left just as I have become profoundly embarrassed for the political right. I fear that the political left is just getting its sea legs in making the whirling descent down the hole to the bottom where we just grunt at one another, hurl insults, and brandish weapons, where language, ideas, and discussion is lost in the maelstrom; where, at the end, we ascend bloody and beaten all, pompously congratulating ourselves on “our democracy.”.

Okay, so what’s wrong with ‘women against Sarah Palin’? Let me pose this. If you ran into a group titled ‘Progressives Against Sarah Palin’ or ‘Liberals Against Sarah Palin’ or ‘Pro-Choice Advocates Against Sarah Palin,’ or ‘Pacificists Against Sarah Palin’ or even ‘Moose Against Sarah Palin,’ you wouldn’t bat an eye, nor would I. The meaning and message of all of those groups is clear: Sarah Palin does not share the values of those who are opposed to her, she is being excluded from those groups. ‘Woman Against Sarah Palin’ is absolutely different: exactly what are the values of ‘WOMEN’ as a group that Sarah Palin doesn’t share? How can she be excluded from the group 'women'? It is clear in the letters posted to the website what values THESE women don’t share with Sarah Palin, but THESE WOMEN do not, now or ever, constitute the group WOMEN. Just how arrogant is that? The group, the category ‘WOMEN’ IS a vastly larger group. By trying to appropriate the larger group as their own identifier, these particular women are simply gutting the language further as well as indulging a colossal degree of narcissism.

I’m sorry to see these women doing this. If all of this seems tiresomely fine-pointed, consider the fact that you have never heard of the following groups: Men Against McCain, Men Against Obama, Black People Against Clarence Thomas. Or, how about ‘Tall People Against Bill Bradley,’ to reach back to an earlier and simpler time. And that’s because there are no such groups, even though lots of men don’t like McCain for President and lots of other men don’t like Obama for President. I’m pretty sure that Jesse Jackson was no fan of Clarence Thomas but Jesse Jackson knew better than to name a group ostensibly speaking for Blacks against a Black candidate for office, a suggestion that Clarence Thomas wasn’t really a Black man. Anybody can attack Sarah Palin’s ideas all they want. That is what freedom of speech is all about, of course. But nobody gets to say that WOMEN reject Sarah Palin because she does not share the values of women, or even that WOMEN is a category that contains specific values. And also, those tall people who were against Bill Bradley: what was their story?

Signs of the Times

Signs are getting ever more peculiar, as if we were quickly losing touch with the English language and slowly moving into some other related language with a very different grammar. Today, at the super market here on the Sunshine Coast, I am told via a professionally-made sign at the entrance: “Please Use a Basket for Your Convenience.” Now, it seems to me that they may have provided baskets for my convenience, in which case the sign would say ‘Baskets provided for your convenience’ or even ‘Baskets happily provided for your convenience.’ Alternatively, perhaps they think I should be so considerate as to use a basket for their convenience (presumably to keep my purchases from falling out of my hands and onto their floor). Then the sign would say, ' Please use a basket for our convenience.' But in no case could I reasonably be thought to be pleasing them by using a basket which serves my convenience. I just have a hard time thinking of a bunch of grocery executives sitting around talking about how to get customers to recognize that using a basket serves the customers’ own convenience. ‘Maybe,’ says one well-mannered executive, ‘we just need to say, Please!?’


Not a mile away, I was greeted on the highway by a sign that said ‘Skilled Carpenter, Large or Small,” followed by a phone number. I’m thinking about the jobs that I would need a small skilled carpenter for as opposed to jobs that definitely require a large one. Or the jobs that really need a medium skilled carpenter, but then would a ‘medium skilled’ carpenter be medium sized or medium skilled? Hard to know. Although it may not matter, because they do not appear to have medium carpenters. In any case, too many choices are required to hire those carpenters, regardless of their size or degree of skill.

My favorite sign on the road home from the supermarket, however, is not ambiguous in anyway. Nevertheless, I have spent a good deal of time thinking about what it implies, if not what it specifically means. There is a modest house with a small, hand-painted sign mounted on a post next to the driveway. The sign says nothing more than ‘BISCOTTI.’ I think I can safely say that the sign means that someone in the house is making and selling biscotti to highway passersby. But what kind of business can this be that sells nothing more than biscotti to drivers?

Biscotti, it seems to me, is a pretty specialized baked item, largely associated with Starbucks and similar coffee places. You buy them WITH a cup of coffee. I like them, but on their own, they don’t seem like that much of a treat, at least not one that would merit the least bit of inconvenience. Would I be driving down the road on a cool morning or a hot one, a rainy day or a sunny day, and say, ‘Wow, I think I’ll just pull off the highway so I can pick up a biscotti to go with the cup of coffee that I just pulled off the highway to buy at Tim Horton's'? It just doesn’t seem likely.

And since the clientele levels seem small, how many biscotti would you have to have on hand as a responsible biscotti proprietor to ensure that the need was met? What would you do with the stale ones that didn’t sell? And would you have to have multiple kinds of biscotti for this small number of customers to choose from? And, although biscotti tend to be pricey, they’re not luxury items, so it’s not like you could make any kind of living from selling the occasional biscotti to the occasional driver who suddenly felt the need. It would seem that one might do much better selling fresh eggs.

But maybe the householder associated with the sign isn’t in it for the money; is instead a dedicated biscotti maker who just likes to make biscotti and doesn’t care whether anybody buys them or not but is willing to sell to the random customer since he/she is going to be making more biscotti than he/she can really use him/herself, anyway. I don’t know; it just seems an inexplicable business. It could be a narrower business: the sign could say ‘Almond Biscotti’, of course. But either way, I’m baffled by that sign.

It’s been there for several years. However, on my last couple of trips by, I didn’t spot the sign (although I was driving rather than riding so I might have missed it because I was actually looking at the road). But if it’s gone, I’ve missed my chance to buy a biscotti, of course, from the former proprietor and get all my questions answered. Maybe these biscotti were incredible. Maybe I’ve missed the best biscotti ever made. Maybe not. Most small businesses don’t turn out well because they’re under-capitalized. But I doubt if that would be true of the roadside biscotti business. If very little gained, at least very little ventured.

When Canadians Say 'Eh?'

Before I moved up here, I didn’t know all that much about Canada: the standard stuff: hockey, ‘Eh?,’ maple leaves. ‘Tukes’ had not penetrated my consciousness, even though I went to college on the U.S. side of the Canadian border just south of the Saint Lawrence River. Maybe they hadn’t taken to wearing them in the 50’s: I don’t know. One of our early trips across the border from Point Roberts to Canada (and indeed the only even mildly unpleasant border experience I’ve ever had going into Canada) involved my stopping first at the Point Roberts post office where there was an unexpected package for me from a friend, and which I picked up and put in the back seat of the car. Then I proceeded to cross the border to do some mild shopping. ‘What’s in the package?’ inquired the Canadian border agent. “Got me,” I replied. “I just picked it up at the post office.” “Do you think you can bring a sealed package across the border when you don’t even know what is in it? Take that package home before you cross the border. Do you not understand that Canada is a different country?”

Of course I did, in a sense. I mean Canada had already refused to let me live there permanently, so it apparently wasn’t the U.S. where I do get to live permanently. But in a larger sense, he was probably right. Canadians were just us, but they said ‘Eh?’

Yet another of life’s truths that I had wrong. Canadians are really quite different from Americans but they don’t, at least as far as I have heard, say ‘Eh?’. Maybe you hear it on Canadian TV, radio, or movies, when it’s used quite self-consciously; and maybe you hear it in Eastern Canada, about which I know nothing. But you pretty much don’t hear it in B.C. Hockey? Yes, all the time, everywhere. Maple leaves? Plenty of those, too, whether the real ones or iconic ones. But no ‘Eh?’ What you do hear, though, is a flat a in all Latinate words that, pretty much, Americans pronounce with a broad a. So, you go to dinner and they serve you pasta, the first syllable of which rhymes with ‘fast.’ Or you join them at a concert where a cantata is being performed. And the second syllable of cantata rhymes with ‘fat.’ Across the board, they use that flat a instead of the broad a that Americans would use. Only after 16 years, do I find myself asking for a little more pasta, rhymes with fast-uh. But it still sounds weird to me, even when I say it spontaneously.

Another thing about Canadians that is very different from Americans is that they know the relative and actual value of the U.S. and Canadian dollars. Of course, knowing what it is—and right now, for the first time in decades, the Canadian dollar is worth more than the U.S. dollar: i.e., one U.S. dollar will buy you only 95-98 Canadian cents—doesn’t make it possible for you to do much about it. But it significantly affects where you buy what you buy. A few years ago, before the Bush Administration destroyed the U.S. economy, the U.S. dollar was very strong: one U.S. dollar could buy $1.50 Canadian. If I deposited a $1,000 U.S. check each month, say, to cover my expenses in Canada, my bank account would get $1,500 Canadian dollars. Now, it gets about $960 Canadian dollars. So everything in Canada has become much more expensive for me and I buy as little there as I can, but everything in the U.S. has become much less expensive for Canadians, and they are pouring over the main U.S. border to enliven the shopping malls. This is a zero sum game, I suppose, but now I am on the down side of the curve; before, they were. They're vacationing in California; Americans are not vacationing in Vancouver.

But it is one thing that makes Canadians different and, now, I am different like them: I’m acutely aware of the value of the U.S. dollar and how it affects my every day life. That’s something, eh?