Rousseau and Dumb Donald

The latest New Yorker contains a quote from Rousseau about the British parliament. “The English people think it is free. It greatly deceives itself; it is free only during the election of members of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, the people are enslaved and count for nothing.”

I haven’t studied Rousseau—I’ve read he liked to expose his genitalia to passing women, who were, in his view, “specially made to please man.” But don’t some of us believe that, once an election ends, we count for nothing? Certainly the followers of Dumb Donald Trump feel that. I suspect that many Latinos and Black Lives Matters activists might agree. Even Henry Adams, directly descended from two Presidents and one Speaker of the House, wrote that a friend in power is a friend lost. Rousseau thought that the situation was an inevitable result of how our capitalist representative democracies work. And here we are. 

Dumb Donald with his fists up

Yesterday Dumb Donald Trump, a hulking, old, unhinged geezer, told the world on TV that he wanted badly to punch former Mayor Bloomberg in the head. Bloomberg is twice as smart as Dumb Donald and half as big. I suspect in a fist fight he'd stomp on Dumb Donald's foot and make him run home screaming for momma. But what kind of Presidential candidate is this? Dumb Donald has the attention span of a bucket of fat. He can't sit still. He can't read three sentences in a row. If he hadn't been born in a silver bed, he'd be sleeping under a tree along a rails-to-trails conversion. We have never seen his like get nominated before. The sorry thing is that he did not invent the voters who support him. They have always been there, waiting for someone with cracks in his mind to lead them. 

Media Matters

You may recall that after the first Nixon/Kennedy debate, people who watched on TV thought Kennedy had won and people who listened on the radio thought Nixon had won. Nixon had been ill, and he looked it. Something a little like that happened to me this week. I was on the road when Hillary gave her speech. I heard it on the radio, and I thought it was excellent. Later I saw parts of it on TV, and it seemed routine. The difference was marked, and I don't know why.

The Best Prepared Candidate for President

I think that the best prepared candidate in our history was James Madison, the father of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He served as the leader of the House of Representatives and later, for eight years, as Secretary of state for Thomas Jefferson.  

Number two was probably John Quincy Adams. His father had been President. John Quincy Adams served in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and as Secretary of State. In that capacity he and Great Britain settled the border with Canada. He negotiated with Spain for the annexation of Florida and drafted the Monroe Doctrine. He also negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. 

Dancing Backwards

The claim that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards in heels is an old one. It's been traced to a Neanderthal  village 30,000 years ago, found on the wall of a large cave in France, and it has remained  popular since. This week alone, I have heard it 174 times, once in a Presidential address. Of course, strictly speaking, it's not true. Astaire created the dances. Rogers did not. Astaire did all sorts of acrobatic leaps and flips. Rogers did not. 

I know that Hillary, not Donald, must be our next President. But let's retire the old Ginger story and find a new way to express the superiority of women. 

The Obamas and the Clintons

In the last week we've heard from many Democratic speakers. I haven't listened to any of the speeches from start to finish--I have things to do--but I've been considering who speaks well and why. I refer to Michelle, Barack, Bill and Hillary. 

The Obamas are--to my way to thinking-- conventional thinkers, and you never get a new idea from them. But they are the real thing, authentically conventional, authentically Christian in the best sense, genuinely and earnestly centrist.  They speak with brilliant conviction; they mean what they say. 

Bill Clinton is excellent at faking authenticity and empathy, so skilled that he's on his way to a half-billion dollars. A Snopes-like figure, he has occasional moments of authenticity--that's when people cringe. The real Bill is not a pretty sight. Hillary Clinton confines herself, with great discipline, to intelligent talking points. She's not an interesting speaker, but compared to the typical pro, she's less apt to lie. At worst she may exaggerate or take something out of context. On the rare occasions when she allows herself to be herself, she becomes more likable. 

(Also on FB)

The Naked Chomsky

When I was young, academic friends told me that Noam Chomsky was the man. He had, they told me, an answer  to a central question: What made humans the masters of language? Before Chomsky, that had been a mystery. Chomsky had figured it out. Chomsky, they said, might well be the greatest thinker the world had yet produced. 

Chomsky’s argument was that language was not something you learned. Instead, you were born with a built-in “language organ” that thumped away in your brain the way your heart thumped in your chest. This physical organ conveyed  “deep structure”   and “universal grammar” and had a “language acquisition device.” The organ was physical and biological. 

In short, Chomsky offered a physical explanation for how humans generate languages. He was turning linguistics into a real science. 

What struck me immediately was that the organ Chomsky had discovered was imaginary.  

Despite this minor flaw in his argument, Chomsky dominated American linguistics for the next 50 years. If you wanted to be a professor of linguistics in the United States, you were trained in Chomsky, you upheld Chomsky's imaginary organ and you wrote for publication variations on Chomsky.  

Chomsky was a brilliant spokesperson, and when he came out against the Vietnam War he became doubly famous. His opposition to the war made his imaginary organ more central  in linguistics departments, and his fame in the Untied States  as the greatest linguist in history made his antiwar message more compelling. Chomsky became—for Americans—as illustrious as Plato and Tolstoy combined. (On other continents, other thinkers led linguistics.)

Eventually Chomsky dropped his big theory, the one my friends had sworn by, and came up with a second big theory, which was, unfortunately, soon refuted by people looking at actual facts. Today Chomsky’s official position is that the physical basis for how we acquire language is a mystery.

That's 50 years of American linguistics we won't get back. The question I ask is why can't we see nudity when the emperor has no clothes? 

Gary Goss
http://www.garygossblog.blogspot.com/

Recess Appointments

According to some radical right blogs, if the Senate is not in session, the President can make recess appointments without the Senate's consent. That's why the Republicans have kept the Senate continually in session for years. But the Senate is not now in session. Many senators went to a convention; others, to visit hookers. 

 I don't know if the nutters are right about this. Why would they be? Or is something interesting  about to happen? 

Another Chump

The Republican candidate for Vice-President recently stated that he was a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order. He was, of course, mistaken.. Religion, political philosophy and party platforms are three examples of wordage. The candidate is actually a husband, a father and a friend, in that order, or I hope he is. I hope he values his wife more than party loyalty (and he probably does). He’s kidding himself. He has no idea what his real priorities are. 

I’ve already forgotten this chump’s name—who remembers the names of losing Vice-Presidential candidates?