Open the Door for Mr. Muckle!

For us South Africans, and for many across the globe, it is impossible to watch Oscar Pistorius run without a stir of emotion, without wanting to break down and cry and shout with joy. Pistorius is no ordinary hero: he is that rare thing, a man with an almost-impossible narrative. (Justice Malala, The Guardian) 

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Google “Pistorius hero” and you’ll find what you would expect to find: words like “fallen” and “flawed.” In many newspaper and magazine articles Pistorius’ downfall is linked with those of other former sports legends—especially now, because of its chronological propinquity, with that of Lance Armstrong, recently stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping. All the time that the public celebrated the accomplishments of these athletes, asks Jeff MacGregor of ESPN.com, “How much did we really know?”

(Answer: "little.") How many questions went unasked? (Answer: "most.") How much of the "truth" do sportswriters and sports fans really want? (Answer: "Next question, please.")

But, strictly speaking, MacGregor isn’t quite right. The tarnish on the supposed golden crowns was there to be seen. As Malala himself reports,  

There have always been niggling, worrying features to Pistorius. At the London Olympics last year, when he behaved in an unsportsmanlike manner towards another athlete and shocked many, we were reminded of his flaws. . . .There was the drinking and the short temper.

And with Armstrong ("I wrote four books about the guy. All the evidence was out there since 2004 and people will still say there is no evidence”-- 
David Walsh, sportswriter on the Sunday Times), there was, above all, the intimidation and bribery, using his clout within the sport to keep the lid on his doping practices. According to the New York Daily News,

Armstrong was probably the most litigious athlete in the history of sports.
He set a precedent for other athletes who would go on to use guerilla tactics to attempt to intimidate the media or silence accusers.

(Before I go further, it should be noted that while Armstrong has limply admitted to some degree of drug cheating, Pistorius’ killing of his girlfriend has not yet been tried and so we must await his day in a South African court to learn if it was indeed a criminal act.)

But while the Pistorius and Armstrong stories emerged very closely together and became natural fodder for the continuation of the athlete-as-fallen-hero narrative, I prefer to focus on the aspect of their stories that made their athletic success even more striking and their status as celebrities even more elevated. That is, their battles against their misfortunes (Pistorius' disability--being without legs and Armstrong's illness--testicular cancer). I believe that those afflictions led the public to perceive in the two men something even greater than the heroism their athletic feats granted them, and thus made them more immune to critical assessment of their characters by most fans and journalists. The halo effect wasn’t just a product of heroism, but of heroism-cum-sentimentality. Like cute little children, the disabled and the ill are often viewed by us as being innocent of those endearing human qualities the rest of us have—avarice, malice, spite, viciousness, pride, and so on for the next ten pages. 

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As a reminder of what sweet little children can do, here is Baby LeRoy dunking W. C. Fields’ pocket watch in a tub of molasses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YvHn4_8n78. Fields rightly pays him back with a furtive boot on the backside.

Here from Fawlty Towers is a desentimentalizing view of the disabled--the self-centered deaf lady: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVDx-8kWZo

And here is what is probably the best demolishing of reflexive sentimentalizing of the disabled—the destructive Mr. Muckle from Fields’ It’s a Gift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y189-69cQPs.

Heart of Darkness

Like everybody else in the whole wide universe I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday. Well, I didn’t actually watch it—more like glanced at it. I had it streaming on my computer with the sound off while I really watched on TV the recap of the weekend games in the English Premier League, enjoying the sight of true footballers falling to the ground without being touched, trying to get a penalty called on their opponents. Now that’s sport!

I used to be an enthusiastic watcher of the games of the National Football League. Two things turned enthusiasm into indifference: the scabbing of players against their own union when a strike was called in 1987 and the increasing militaristic posturing and chauvinism associated with the sport. (It amused me to see on Sunday that the suits of the studio analysts were adorned with flag pins, assuring the viewers that the opinions being voiced were those of true Amurricans.)

Since I had no emotional baggage attached to either the Baltimore Ravens or the San Francisco 49’ers, my initial, rather muted, rooting preference for the latter team rested on the fact that I had visited the Bay City twice and Baltimore only once. However, soon after the game began, I noticed that the Frisco quarterback was covered with tattoos, so I resurrected my love for Maryland crab cakes and switched allegiance. (Do you have to be some kind of genius to give people money to inject ink into your body?)

After a lot of falling down and getting up (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xus57BaY3hI) came halftime and the Super Bowl halftime show—which was basically a clone of a beer commercial without the beer. A stage miraculously appeared, along with a bunch of young stooges who surrounded it jumping up and down with their hands in the air—but empty of beer bottles with labels facing the camera. And on that stage was someone apparently named Bouncy, who did what she could to live up to her name. I cannot comment on the content of her songs (they may very well have matched Schubertian Lieder for all I know—sound was off, remember), but I can point out something that I have been aware of for a long time: the triteness of the clichéd wiggles and twitches that pass for rock choreography. Seen it once, seen it a hundred times.

The best part of the game was, of course, the blackout. Now I had something to root for: a hope that the lights would not go back on that evening and that the buttoned-up and anal National Football League would have to improvise. Could it marshall the troops and come back the next day (or evening)? God, I wanted to see the league have to scramble for a solution like after a loose fumble. Unfortunately, someone found some electrical tape and spliced together a few wires.

Ruined the rest of my evening.

Personal Annoyance Factor

There were only 37 minutes to go. Surely we could make it to the end? But having spent the last two hours hoping vainly that things must get better, I gave in. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. And so it was, on the film’s £8 million-grossing opening weekend, that I walked out of Les Misérables. 

Emma Gosnell
Deputy editor, Seven

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I, too, have recently been doing some walking out—figuratively speaking in my case.

Just before beginning to write this blog entry I stopped reading an article from New Scientist  magazine on the subject of the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. The article was well-written, but informative beyond my needs and, eventually, easy comprehension. I put down the text, unfinished but with admiration for the author.

Shortly before that, despite having read all but about the last forty pages of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller,The Black Swan, during my recent trip to Argentina, I found that upon my return to the normalvision hearth I could not abide reading a paragraph more. But not for the reason I stopped on the science article. Taleb’s book, for those who don’t know it, is about outlier events (“Black Swans” in his terminology) that unexpectedly pop-up out of nowhere and upset—for good or (more likely) bad—the established order of things. Although somewhat repetitious, the book is well-argued and worthy of one’s attention. So why did I stop reading it? Because it set off my Personal Annoyance Factor (PAF, hereafter). While there are numerous ways one can be put off by other people, I reserve the term PAF for those occasions when one is slowly afflicted Chinese water-torture style by the continual dribbling of another person’s off-putting mannerisms and/or affectations. In Taleb’s case it was his smugness and self-satisfaction that eventually broke through my PAF level. That and a snideness about those he disagreed with which raised a ha-ha in Chapter One but became petty and tiresome as Taleb kept it up. So, just as one deals with an ungracious—though perhaps intelligent and witty—fellow cocktail party guest, I excused myself and went in search of another drink.

I first came up with the term PAF about six months ago, as I was getting more and more annoyed while reading another well-acclaimed book, this one on a topic I had been compiling notes about for a blog entry—sincerity. It was a much shorter book than Swan, but I tossed it aside much sooner than I did the economics book. It aroused my PAF to the point that I was moved to write one of my rare Amazon reviews about it (I believe that I have submitted only three other product reviews all told—despite spending half my Social Security check there: one was in praise of a favorite author, David McKie; another to point out that the plot summary of a book was totally wrong; and the third was to warn potential buyers of a video that the movie was dubbed). As I read the book on sincerity, I realized that although the author had done a good deal of research, he was zipping through history at breakneck speed, with a look-at-me grin on his face and a look-at-all-the-authors-I-can-lump-together-in-one-sentence self-satisfaction oozing from the page (Oh, I’m soooo smart!). And I got more and more annoyed as I read. Finally, I quit and produced my two-star review. I had intended to award three stars, but the more I thought about the book as I wrote the review, the more my PAF pricked me and so I punched the two-star button.

A slap in the face (literal or figurative) may make one angry and desirous of revenge. But at least it’s sudden. It’s the insidious drip-drip-dripping into one’s life of another’s negative character traits that sets off my PAF.

Knife in the Back

Many moons ago I taught a class in modern drama as an adjunct at a nearby community college. After finishing our discussions of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, our first playwright, I required an essay paper from the class. Following the precedent of my own undergraduate English department, where we were allowed (or perhaps, forced) to devise a suitable topic for investigation, I had the students choose their own topics. Upon reading the submitted papers, I was dismayed to discover that two of them were dead-on plagiarisms (they were completely identical except for the first verb—one had “is,” the other “was”), while a few others had rather a smell about them.

I had recently taught at a college that had an institutional policy on plagiarism, but I didn’t know if the community college (or the English department thereof) had one, and was, therefore, at a loss at how to handle the issue. Having a friend who had been in the department for a short while, I sought his advice. No, there was no institutional or departmental policy that he knew of, and he advised me to handle the case as best I could.

Having decided that I didn’t want to get into the accusation business or a name-and-shame exposure, I announced at the beginning of the next class session that I had foolproof knowledge of plagiarism and since I could not trust the work of those students, I advised them (without naming them) to drop the class, which they do for at least one more week without academic penalty. It seemed the perfect solution. I could be rid of them without beating them over the head, and they could be thankful to escape punishment. Some hope!

At the end of the class, a very intelligent student (judging by the level of his class participation) came up to me to confess that because he had been pressed for time he had submitted a copied paper (ironically, it was one that I never suspected) and apologized and said he would drop the class. However, the blatant plagiarists went another route—to the office of the department chairman, who did not back me up, but who subsequently called me into his office and on the carpet for my allegedly draconian punishment. I tried—to no avail—to point out to him that, on the contrary, I was being quite lenient, as there was no failing or other punishment being meted out for the students’ deceitful acts. The chairman then mandated that I devise some other way of dealing with the issue.

What to do? I could give the plagiarized papers an “F” grade, but would that be fair to the dull student or two who sweated over an honestly-conceived “F” paper, one that was wrongheaded or foolish? I thought not. And so decided to give the plagiarized papers a double “F.” For some reason the guilty parties did not squeal loudly at that. I have no recollection of what grades the plagiarists ended up with at the completion of the course. But I can report that I never taught at that school again.

A decade or so later, I received a phone call from my friend in the English department to tell me of a letter found at the back of a file cabinet during a ritual clean-out of old papers. It was an unsolicited testamonial from a student (or a married couple, I don’t recall) in that modern drama class in praise of my teaching. I immediately perceived a universal truth: Complaint Goes Straight to the Top, While Praise Lies Buried at the Back of a File Cabinet!

In my last blog entry I offered three of my laws but did not include the above observation as my fourth, because someone else got there first—Marc Antony in Julius Caesar: 

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.  

(Act III, Scene 2)

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Still, a figurative knife in the back is better than a literal stab to stomach.

   

Three Laws

Gotthelf’s Law Number 1 (or, The Beginning of All Wisdom):

NEVER RUN FOR A BUS IN THE MORNING.

The rationale behind the law should be self-evident. But just in case it isn’t, remember that even if you catch it, you’re sweaty. And that’s no way to start the day.

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The Tonnele Avenue Law:

This was the result of an incident several years ago. I was driving north-bound on Tonnele Avenue in Jersey City, NJ. I was in the right-hand lane when a car going at speed suddenly cut in front of me from a side street. I had to brake hard to avoid a collision. The driver of the other car went speeding off but after several hundred yards suddenly, with a clear lane in front of him, hit the brakes, which I again had to do to avoid calamity. The upshot of all this was the formulation of the Tonnele Avenue Law:

IF THEY DO ONE THING, THEY’RE BOUND TO DO ANOTHER.

I have always thought of this law as the Lifesaver Law. And if it doesn’t save your life, at least it can help guide you in business, personal relationships, and so on. Craziness doesn’t occur just once.

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The third law doesn’t have a neat name. I formulated it years ago while contemplating the disastrous floods caused by the overflowing of the mighty rivers of the Middle West.

YOU PAY FOR THE CAUSES, OR YOU PAY FOR THE EFFECTS.

Money is going to have to be spent either building levees or dealing with the aftermath of the floods where there are no levees. The old adage has it that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Whether that ratio of expenditure is correct is irrelevant. What is relevant is that it is better to attempt to ward off disaster than to have to patch the world together again afterwards. I won’t go further with this myself, because in The New Yorker of December 3, 2012 (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2012/12/03/121203ta_talk_surowiecki) James Surowiecki discusses this issue with his usual intelligence and insight (and much better than I could). Just let me quote the closing lines of his essay:

In a time of austerity, there’s bound to be opposition to expensive infrastructure projects. But if the government—and, by extension, taxpayers—is already on the hook for all the damage caused when disasters strike, we owe it to ourselves to do something about how much those disasters cost.

For D****d T***p

Pitkin Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn is hardly as exotic as the road to Damascus (though considering the civil unrest in the latter area, possibly quite a bit safer), but it is where I had the great epiphany in my life. I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age, walking west towards Crescent Street on the south side of the avenue across from my old elementary school, P.S. 159, when the thought suddenly popped into my head: “Nobody has the right to tell me that I can’t read something!”—which was quickly followed by the recognition that I, in turn, could not censor anyone else’s reading. And so I became a Civil Libertarian, a defender of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

It is as a believer in freedom of speech that I look askance at recent behavior of officialdom in the United Kingdom. Last March, during a football match against Tottenham Hotspur in London, Fabrice Muamba of Bolton Wanderers collapsed on the field. Luckily, the cardiac arrest did not claim his life, as emergency medical workers aided by a Spurs fan, a cardiologist who jumped from the stands, were able to revive him and see him off to hospital. Concern for Muamba was expressed throughout Britain, except most notably by a twenty-one-year-old student in Wales, Liam Stacey, who posted on Twitter: "LOL, Fuck Muamba. He's dead."  

Other Twitter users reported Stacey to the police, who quickly arrested him. Stacey pled guilty to  a charge of incitement to racial hatred and was later sentenced to a jail term of 56 days for a “racially aggravated public order offence.” Padraig Reidy writing on “free speech blog” (http://blog.indexoncensorship.org/2012/03/27/liam-stacey-sentence-a-perversion-of-notion-of-public-order-offence/) called the jail sentence “a perversion of justice”:

One can understand why public order laws exist. The police may need to be able to take people off the streets to prevent imminent violence, and be able to punish people for causing disruptions.

But was there actually any risk that Stacey was threatening public order? I don’t think there was. A row on Twitter is not the same thing as shouting abuse in the street, where there may be immediate physical consequences. 

This past Sunday, November 11, was Veterans Day in the US and Remembrance Day in the UK—a day marked by the wearing of a poppy and much more solemnity and dignity than in the US. On this past Remembrance Day police in Canterbury arrested a 19-year-old “on suspicion of posting a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook,” according to the Guardian.  

Kent police confirmed that a youth was in custody and being questioned under the Malicious Communications Act 1988. The act makes it a crime to send anything "indecent or grossly offensive, or which conveys a threat … [where] there is an intent to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient."

(It should be remembered that, despite the efforts of some enemies of free speech, it is not illegal in the US to burn the American flag.)

Besides the unnamed Kentish youth, another who protested against the poppy was Sunderland footballer James McClean, who was the only player in the English Premier League not to wear a poppy symbol on his jersey during this past weekend’s games. McClean, a twenty-three year-old player who is also in the Republic of Ireland national team, was rebuked by many, including his Sunderland club manager, Martin O’Neill, for his reaction this past September when he was an unused substitute during a ROI win over Kazakhstan. Resentful at being left on the bench, McClean immediately went the Twitter route: “Delighted as a fan we got the win. Personal level #fuming #fuckinjoke #embarrassing.” 

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The saying has been attributed to many, including Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain:

“It is better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Perhaps as an adaptation to the present world, the saying should be amended to read:

“It is better not to tweet and seem to have nothing intelligent to say, than to tweet and be proved a schmuck.”

The Queen's Speech

Halley's Comet appears approximately every three-quarters of a century.

Periodical cicadas (commonly known as the seventeen-year locusts) return, well, after seventeen years.

A more recently discovered (by yours truly) cyclical event is QEA (for Queen's English Anxiety), which seems to occur at intervals of a half-dozen years.

The first recorded occurrence of QEA was in the year 2000, upon the publication by J. Harrington, S. Palethorpe, and C. Watson of "Does the Queen Speak the Queen's English" in Nature magazine (the article itself being a popularization of the trio's findings originally published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association in an article entitled "Monophthongal vowel changes in received pronunciations: An acoustic analysis of the Queen's Christmas broadcasts." The following excerpt from the abstract of the Nature article explains what the trio did and what they discovered:

. . . we analyse[d] vowel sounds from the annual Christmas messages broadcast by HRH Queen Elizabeth II during the period between the 1950s and 1980s. Our analysis reveals that the Queen's pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern-British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy.

And that was the cue for the launching of QEA. Media from London to Los Angeles rose up to the full height of cutesy-sarkiness. A Guardian (UK) editorial:

The Queen's English is modulating.

“My husband and I have had, y'know, a bituva tricky year, one way and annuvva. I mean, what with Chiles getting in all that hot wa'er about GM food and that, and then the flippin' Guardian sticking it to us with its, su'ov, anti-discrimination, Act uv Se'ulment thing. Anyway, bottom line: have a wikkid Christmas - plenty of turkey on the old plates, a few jars with your mates, you know the drill. You should all be well sorted.”. . . we suspect calculation here as well as mere social change. All today's most popular figures . . . speak mockney. The Queen is simply trying to get in on the act. They are nothing if not adaptable, these royals. Ain't that the truth, yer madge?

A story in the Los Angeles Times began:

Ho, ho, ho, Henry Higgins, the queen's [sic] English ain't wot it used to be.

And there basically the matter stood, as QEA tiptoed away to wherever cycles go to rest when they can no longer be observed by human witnesses. Until six years later, when Jonathan Harrington, one of the original trio of researchers, roused the QEA beast to wakefulness with an article entitled “An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts” in the Journal of Phonetics. As Mark Liberman reported at the time (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003859.html):

The papers have been buzzing with news about the Queen's English. These reports vary in tone and content, but many of them bang the drum for the decline of civilization.

Liberman went on to list a number of periodicals from across the globe that contributed to the QEA:

Roger Dobson, “Speaking the Queen’s English: Me ‘ubby and I, innit”, The Independent, 12/3/2006; 

Mark Prissell, “One’s voice ain’t that posh”, The Sun, 12/4/2006; 

Neil Tweedie, “How the Queen’s English has grown more like ours”, Telegraph, 12/5/2006; 

Catherine Jones, “One thinks one has lorst one’s posh voice”, Western Mail, 12/5/2006. 

Sajeda Momin, “How the Queen’s English has changed with the times”, Daily News & Analysis (India), 12/5/2006; 

Justin Lees, “Royal Vowels crossing Jordan”, The Daily Telegraph (Canada), 12/5/2006. 

“My word—the queen’s English is slipping”, UPI (reprinted in the Daily Indian, 12/4/2006);  

“Study: Queen Sounds More Like Subjects”, AP (reprinted in the LA Times, 12/4/2006).  

But as it became yesterday’s news, QEA slipped away to its place of hibernation.

Until 2012, when, six years having passed, it was time for its cyclical return. Not an academic this time, but a thespian aroused it—Helen Mirren. On September 21,The Daily Telegraph, the canary warning of the decline of all things not Tory in the coal mine of British civilization, headlined its report of an interview the actress conducted with the Daily Mail  (the other renowned canary which warns of the decline of all things not Tory in the coal mine of British civilization) as follows:

Queen's English no longer spoken by Queen, says Helen Mirren
The Queen's English has long been deemed the correct way to speak but, according to Dame Helen Mirren, even her majesty is slipping

Now to be fair to Dame Helen (who I admire enormously—see if you can find a copy of the BBC version of As You Like It; she positively glows as Rosalind disguised as Ganymede), she is not quoted in the Daily Mail saying the words that theTelegraph has put into her mouth. But for the Telegraph, Mirren’s actual words were enough to call forth a first rate Queen’s English Alarm:

Her voice has changed, and I can use that –she had a terribly posh voice when she was young. But now even the Queen, while she isn't quite dropping the ends of her lines –though her grandsons do! – there's a tiny bit of estuary [English] creeping in there.

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It doesn’t take more than a few seconds’ thought for any intelligent being to recognize that the idea that the Queen’s (or King’s) English is the gold standard of the tongue is patently absurd. The Queen (or King) of England may be the head of state of the United Kingdom and the head of the Church of England (thanks to Henry VIII), but is not the head of the democracy of the English language. Can anyone argue that German-speaking George I was the determiner of “correct” English? Or the Dutchman William of Orange? And how about those Medieval centuries when first a Norman French clan and then a plain old French mob ruled the land? I suppose we can even toss in the Scotsman James I here. 

It is unfortunate, though, that so many people have been bamboozled by the belief that a catchphrase (the Queen’s English) is a rule of language.

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Note: The Queen's English Society ceased operations earlier this year.