Archive for November, 2004
An Experience With Grammar
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 11/25/2004
Richard was talking about he would like to make comments, but he was often worried about getting his spelling and his grammar right.
Let me tell you a little story.
When I was doing press conferences for coal miners and Boston Southies and Louisville electrical workers and farmer’s strikes and stopped up the whole city of Washington with Independent Truckers, I was all they had.
Try to understand our position: We didn’t HAVE anybody but me. On one side was the entire journalistic and educational establishment.
Conservatives denied having anything to do with these anti-busing Southies, these wildcatting coal miners. To keep their place in the spotlight, to make their livings, respectables had to stay away from these “ignorant fanatical Catholics and backwoods fundamentalists.”
I was ALL they had.
I was country when country DEFINITELY wasn’t cool.
I am the single biggest reason why country in politics IS cool.
But back then there was only one person who called them up and said, “We have a professional journalist, a legal secretary and a professional political writer. We’re providing anything you need free. We’ll be where you need us to be. What do YOU, repeat YOU, want?”
The professional political writer was me. It was far more a matter of guts than credentials. I had written a big political book with a Foreword by the publisher of National Review. I was published in National Review. My book had been recommended for purchase by the Library Journal.
Publisher’s Weekly gave me rave reviews, so did Kirkus, so did the New York Times Review of Books.
All that sounded great, and I was right out there on the streets and in the fight.
I was a former professor. But a total rebel like me had no credentials to compare with anybody in the media or even the conservative elite.
But I was ready to tie up the whole city of Washington in a traffic jam. I was willing to knock a cop out cold who was beating women in a march in Louisville. The only reason I wasn’t officially arrested was because I would have held a press conference that would have embarrassed the Louisville police to death.
Back to the basic point: I was ALL we had. So we inflated my credentials to the sky. If you read what we wrote about this spokesman Robert Whitaker, you would think I had turned down a dozen Nobel Prizes because I was too brilliant to bother.
I was ALL we had, so we made me big stuff.
The problem is that some of our own people believed our propaganda.
Think about that a minute and then you will understand the experience I want to tell you about.
I was talking to an old hard-nosed coal miner who was a fighting leader in the battle against filthy textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia. He was trying to talk to me, but he had heard all of OUR propaganda about me. He couldn’t talk because he worried he would use bad grammar and sound ignorant.
It was HORRIBLY frustrating for me! I wanted to hear what he had to say. He was having a case of stage fright with this galvanized god we called Bob Whitaker we had created to deal with the other side.
This man was a hero. The last time I saw him afterwards we were taking him to get his hand fixed after he had thrown his fist out of joint knocking the hell out of a guy who had crossed his picket line.
This man had saved lives down in the mines.
The FBI tried to frame this man when somebody set off a bomb to knock in a school door one Sunday — I assume FBI plants had done this harmless thing. When the FBI picked him up for it, he laughed. He told them:
“I’ve been dealing with high explosives in mines all my life. If I had set off that much explosive, the hill that school was standing on wouldn’t be there, much less the school.”
He was a better man than I will ever be. He was what I lived to represent.
This was the man who was worried about his GRAMMAR talking to this demigod we had created against our enemies named Bob Whitaker.
I was looking him straight in the eye as he struggled trying to talk to me. I was thinking, “Don’t be a fool.” The whole point of pumping me up was so I could represent YOU. YOU are what I am about. I’m smarter than THEY are, and I can take that whole crowd on for YOU. To them, I am a guy who was taught by two Nobel-Prize-winning economists. To you I’m Bob from Pontiac, South Carolina.”
I was begging him to TALK to me.
Damn it, gang, TALK to me.
There is not a modest bone in my body. I AM a genius. I was born with one hell of a brain, and I scare our enemies because I am so smart I can laugh them to shame. I am at so high a level that a PhD or a big-time news anchor doesn’t mean a thing to me.
When I attacked William Buckley he was afraid to face me.
I’m GOOD.
I am one hell of a weapon for you.
The greatest compliments I have received were these:
1) At a joint march between West Virginia textbook protestors and Boston and Louisville anti-bussers I had organized, where thousands of working people came to Washington at their own expense, a West Virginia coal miner was talking to the Boston crowd. He was wondering why the Boston crowd had such a big fight about who would be their representative at the joint press conference I had arranged. As I walked up, I heard him say:
“Whitaker speaks for us, and he’s not even a hick.”
Coal miners don’t just say, “He speaks for us.” If you are from outside their territory, West Virginians don’t trust you, much less say you speak for them.
That made the whole thing worthwhile.
I am the only Honorary Boston Southie you will ever meet. Southie is NOT a trusting place. But he used my name because it carried a lot of weight in Southie.
He hadn’t seen me walking up. I LOVED that.
I am so smart I don’t have to take those guys with the credentials seriously. Give me a chance to face them and I’ll make them look like the fools they are. Not one of them is about to face me.
I scare Alan Colmes to death. I scare Hannity to death. I’ve talked to them both.
Bill O’Reilly is a moron compared to me. You can use me to take our enemies or our wimps apart and they KNOW it.
I take YOU seriously.
I was a professional interrogator. I will figure out what you are telling me.
I’m REAL smart, remember?
I am also 63 years old. I will not do you any good if you don’t TALK to me.
Dammit, gang, TALK to me!
Thanksgiving Schizophrenia
On Thanksgiving I am stuck between people who deny history and people who get history wrong.
According to the Thanksgiving theory, the Pilgrim Fathers founded America in November of 1620. Each November we celebrate that piece of pure unmitigated hunk of equine fecal output.
Then there are those who say Thanksgiving has nothing to do with thanking God.
These are two groups of driveling morons. It is exactly like today’s political “debate.” We have arguments between idiotic liberals and moronic respectable conservatives. How am I to choose between two groups of people who are not even within a country mile of anything resembling reality?
I Try to be God’s Fool
Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 11/24/2004
Jimbo tells me repeatedly, and probably correctly, that my ignorant comments on theology make me look foolish. He is kind enough to say that my comments on other matters are often brilliant, but my ignorant ramblings on theology undermine my authority.
Jimbo is worried because he thinks the points I do make on matters I know about are important. He does not want people to lose faith in them because I make stupid remarks in other areas. I appreciate his concern.
But the blog is precisely where my little clique gathers. This is the place I CAN make a clown of myself.
When I opened the Comments section of the blog, I dropped some responsibility on YOUR shoulders.
In the blog, my ignorance is as important as my knowledge. My ignorance is the ignorance of a lot of people. I don’t say anything that has not occurred to others. If I say things that need correcting, it is up to YOU to correct me.
When this blog started, I put this in caps:
DO NOT HOLD ME RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING I SAY IN MY BLOG.
Let me repeat that, since my putting this in shouting all-caps doesn’t seem to have sunk in:
DO NOT HOLD ME RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING I SAY IN MY BLOG.
The blog is not a class. The blog is a seminar. This is an old man meandering through his thoughts. You can learn from that. An intelligent person can get a lot out of what I say. But what you get out of it is up to you.
But this is where I learn, too.
I want to have a place where I can make a fool of myself.
This is what us Southerners call “porch talk.”
When I was in college, many people would say, “I got my real education in the bull sessions.”
This is the bull session.
This is the porch talk.
A man who thinks he knows everything will never learn anything. All my life I have found that the most important things I learned I discovered by making a fool of myself.
It is amazing. You can sit down with an Authority on any subject and ask respectful, diplomatically-worded questions and he will give you carefully worded almost-replies. You won’t learn a thing from him that he has not already written for publication.
But if you make a flat statement that hits his sore point, he will dump everything he knows on you. He will get back to basics. He considers you a fool, and he wants to prove it.
Many an Authority HAS made a fool of me.
But I don’t mind at all. I am not worried about how I look. I am listening carefully to the basics he is talking about that he would NEVER have gotten into if I had been respectful.
My strategy is to make it perfectly clear that he is dealing with an over-educated redneck from Pontiac, South Carolina. And when I make the flat statement that infuriates him, he realizes I am not just being modest.
He goes ballistic, and he tells me what I want to know.
I call this moral courage.
If you are afraid of being made a fool of by The Great Man, then you will get nothing out of talking to The Great Man. You should stop talking to him personally and just read what he wrote.
None of the Great Men I ever talked to ever got bored. They either really can’t give me the basic answers I wanted or they go away feeling satisfied that they showed that moron what a fool he was.
Meanwhile, said moron has gotten exactly what he wanted.
Unlike the Great Man, I know that I will always be a fool. But I hope to be the fool you need.
I want to be a good fool.
I want to be God’s Fool.
Playing Peek-a-Boo With Power
Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 11/24/2004
A little child thinks that since he can’t see you when he closes his eyes that means you can’t see him. That game is called peek-a-boo.
We were all raised with “don’ts.” We learned that morality consists of NOT doing things. So if we DON’T do things, we are guiltless.
Our legal system has gone nuts about this.
“I would rather let a hundred guilty men go than convict one innocent man.” All my life that was the motto of American justice.
Only lately have we begun to realize that if you let ninety-nine guilty men back out on the street, you will kill more than one inocent person.
You voted not to convict because you did not want to “play God.” If you give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, you did not give some innocent person whom that person will kill the benefit of the doubt.
You have played God.
When you say, “I would rather let ninety-nine guilty people go than convict one innocent person,” you are really saying, “I would rather let ninety-nine people I CAN SEE go than to convict one innocent person I CAN SEE.”
The reason? You can’t SEE the people those ninety-nine felons will kill.
That game is called peek-a-boo.
When you decide against stem cell research, you are not innocent. Embryonic stem stem cell research may be useless. But you can SEE the stem cell you destroy. If you don’t destroy it, it will either 1) die on its own or 2) not be created at all.
So, if You don’t do it, you are not responsible for the results, right?
Wrong.
The power comes with the territory.
As I have pointed out in WhitakerOnline, the Oriental version of the Golden Rule is totally different from ours. The Oriental version says, “Do NOT do unto others what you would NOT have them do unto you.”
My Golden Rule says, “DO unto others as you WOULD have them do unto you.”
My Golden Rule makes me fully responsible for all the power I have. This is what frustrates and infuriates many people about my refusal to simply condemn stem cell research and forget it. This is what frustrates and infuriates people about my refusal to simply condemn capital punishment.
“Bob,” they say, “just let it go.”
But I repeat what Martin Luther said, “Here I stand. I can do nothing else.”
Science is forcing power on us.
I, for myself, cannot play peek-a-boo with it.
Here I stand. I can do nothing else.
I AM the One!
Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 11/23/2004
Just a note.
I was watching someone talking about the punishment of the basketball players who ran up in the stands and beat fans. One of the fans involved was being interviewed. He was asked by Greta Sustern about whether a particular player was “punished enough.”
He went into the usual routine:
“I am not the commissioner. I don’t make decisions like that …”
And so on and so on. A lot of people quote the Bible or say, “I don’t play God.”
But what if you DO have to “play God?”
Think about it.
The Theology Student
All this talk about theology reminds me of one of my favorite jokes.
A brand new theology student started praying one night. He prayed about mankind, he prayed about each particular sin. Then he started praying for each country.
After about two hours, when he got to his thirty-third country, he hears a Voice from Above that said,
“You go to bed, son. I’ll take back over now.”
I Got Richard Wrong
I misstated Richard’s position on Jews being especially saved.
As Jimbo says, I am an idiot on theology.
We really do need a discussion on why Jesus didn’t speak Persian in Israel, though.
I wouldn’t touch theology if people stopped preaching at me. But if you reserve the right to preach creationism or on stem cells or Holy Israel, I am going to preach back.
If you don’t want me to talk religion at you, you don’t have a license to preach at me.
Period.
The NEXT “C” Word
Posted by Bob in Political Correctness on 11/23/2004
They are closing down the old mental hospital, the “State Hospital” as it was euphemistically called, in Columbia. So much for all those people who said I would end up there.
I’ll have to go to the new one. I hear they make house calls.
The State Hospital was opened around 1830, but this particular building was built around the turn of the century (for some reason, South Carolina had the first state-sponsored insane asylum in the United States).
And up there on the building, in concrete, is the word “Asylum.”
In 1900, the word “Asylum” was Politically Correct. Instead of the “madhouse,” where mad people were kept from harming the public, it was an “asylum,” a place of refuge, for insane people, which was the Politically Correct word for people who were not sane, instead of “madmen.” Today the term “insane asylum” is right up there with the N word, so seeing it in concrete on the old building was sort of nostalgic.
Today P0litical Correctness is trying to remove the words “Anno Domini” and “Before Christ.” As always with today’s Political Correctness, the problem with those words is not that they are factually incorrect, but because they state the exact truth.
Our New Year began with an attempt to date the birth of Christ. 2004 means, literally, The Year of Our Lord, “Anno Domini.” Years before AD were called Before Christ because that’s exactly what they were.
Political Correctness must change that. So they came up with two substitutes:
BCE = Before the Common Era and 2) CE = Common Era
We’ve been down this road before. In 1830 slaveholders in Augusta, Georgia were correcting an Englishman who referred to “blacks” and said the correct word was “negro,” which means black in Spanish.
In 1905 the correct word was “colored people,” as in The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” The first major indoctrination campaign of the NAACP was to force people to use the word “N” and above all to capitalize it. The term white, they said, was not to be capitalized because that is racist.
Then we went through black and African-American.
The term that is out of date this year labels you as anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.
But once the present campaign has beaten everybody into shape and made saying BC and AD as Nazi as saying C…mas, someone is going to start thinking about the term “Common Era.”
WHOSE “Common Era?” This is s not the JEWISH year 2004. This is not the CHINESE year 2004. This is not the MOSLEM year 2004.
As a matter of fact, BCE and CE are right back where we started. They just say that the white European year is now everybody’s common year. So a new campaign will begin.
People make a living with this nonsense.
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