HOW LONG SHOULD YOU CARRY A GRUDGE?

If you hit me with a brick I’ll still be angry about it five minutes from now. On the other hand, I don’t care that  your Cro-Magnon ancestor stole a bone from my Neanderthal forbear. Somewhere in between those extremes of time lies the point at which a sensible person will say “There’s no point in obsessing about this any further. I am more than the sum of my ancestors’ resentments.”

Some examples are worth preserving for the amusement they provide. The fanatical Protestants of Northern Ireland who make such a cult of their hatred for the Bishop of Rome need to be aware that England only invaded Ireland in the first place because Pope  Adrian IV said it was OK. I always get a chuckle out of that one.

Unfortunately a whole industry has grown up to encourage people to carry historical grudges past the point of common sense. A related phenomenon is the habit of identifying ourselves and others by one strand of our mongrel heritage as if it were the only one. In a country like Australia people  choose to say that we’re Irish or Greek or Spanish or Tongan or whatever. But the truth is that even if my ancestors had all been Irish back to the Dark Ages I would still be a mongrel, just like you.

My great-grandfather was a convict. He and his brother were transported to Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century for giving a bloke a hiding in a dispute over the ownership of some potatoes. By our standards the laws under which he was sentenced were monstrously unjust. That doesn’t mean that I automatically take the side of any opponent of the British Government (then or now). It doesn’t incline me to favour the IRA ( I despise it). I don’t think of Ireland as “the old country” (sorry: I mean “ould”). I don’t know all the words to “Mother Machree” and if I did I wouldn’t admit it. I’m not Irish. In fact if you count percentages I’m more Pommy than Irish and I’m not proud of that, either.

When I was young people with convict ancestors used to keep quiet about it but now it’s  regarded as something to boast about. Both positions are absurd. When it was a disgrace it wasn’t my fault. Now that it’s fashionable it reflects no credit on me.

At the turn of the eighteenth century Daniel Defoe highlighted the dubious ancestry of the English in “The True Born Englishman”. What he wrote then is still true. It is equally true of everybody else. To classify people by nationality is ridiculous.

The wonder which remains is at our pride,

To value that which all wise men deride.

For Englishmen to boast of generation,

Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

A banter made to be a test of fools,

Which those that use it justly ridicules.

NOTHING ELSE BUT WORDS

"So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with."

- John Locke

Certain words or phrases  induce in me an instantaneous apocalyptic rage.  Partly this is because I’m a choleric old bastard but it is also the case that words are important. Kipling said: “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” and he was dead right. He went on to  say “Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyze, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain. . . “ So it seems uncontroversial to say that the correct use of words ought to be a matter of public concern, though whether this is still the case in a world where pharmacists’ shelves are overflowing with quack remedies might be debated. There are fashionable linguistic quackeries as well and here are a few examples.

It is what it is.  What sort of conversation includes such nonsense? How can one respond to it? “Oh, really? I thought it was something else.”

…...gate (referring to a scandal).  Like so many of these abominations this has its origins in the United States of America. It’s a good example of how slavishly non-Americans imitate the worst aspects of that unhappy country. In the 1970s one of its previous criminal presidents hired some fifth-rate stooges  to burglarize an office building named Watergate. Since then every scandal has been named “xgate” by newspapers and broadcasters. Journalists, when they are being more than usually pretentious, boast that they speak truth to power. In fact they are more likely to be speaking cliches to mediocrity, as in this example. Of course you can understand why they do it. It’s a signal, common to author and reader,  which enables them to communicate information without either of them having to know what they’re talking about.

Gift as a verb. Quite inexcusable. I can only guess at the motivation behind it. Probably “give” sounds a bit too commonplace when the speaker has delusions of literacy. Incidentally I’d like a beer for every time I’ve tried to explain this to someone only to elicit the response “What’s a verb?”

Alternate  when you mean alternative.  Two things are alternate if they happen one after the other. Night and day are alternate. Two things are alternative if the occurrence of one excludes the other. You can call either heads or tails - they are alternatives.

Quantum does not mean “amount”. It just doesn’t. Stop using it in that sense unless you want everybody to know you’re a wanker.

Likely as an adverb, as in “The Atlanta Falcons will likely win the Superbowl” or  “Kevin Rudd will likely be remembered for something other than eating his ear wax in Parliament.” This is one horror that I can actually remember encountering for the first time ( the usage, not  Kevin). I have a lot of respect for the mystery novels of Elizabeth George. They are well plotted and, most of the time, well written. I was reading one of them a few years ago and came across this abomination (“Something will likely happen”.) Fortunately the ambulance arrived within the day and I wasn’t on life support for long.  I would like to tell you which of her many novels was the offending one, but unfortunately all her books have complicated titles that I can never link to any aspect of the plot so I can’t  remember which ones I’ve read and which I have not. Many a weary minute have I spent looking at a row of them on a library shelf, scratching my head until forced to turn away from G for George and trudge back to the dependable S for Spillane.

There are several current idioms - again, mostly copied from US sources - which mean, as far as I can tell, exactly the opposite of what they say. Thus “I could care less” means “I couldn’t care less” and “double down” replaces the perfectly adequate locution “double up”.  “Entitled”apparently means “not entitled, but thinks he should be”.

The annoying expressions I have listed  here are merely stupid. There is another category that  are sinister and deliberately aim to deceive. They will be dealt with in a later post.

AN ANTIDEMOCRATIC RANT

The basic principle of our political system is that every idiot’s opinion is as valid as mine. We’ve all heard the condescending line that what we call democracy is “the worst system except for all the others”.  I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the people who mouth this cliche are always those who profit by the present arrangements.

Our present political system is not a democracy. It is an oligarchy chosen by  manipulation of the brainless majority.  John Reith, the first boss of the BBC was once asked what he thought was the ideal form of government. He replied “Dictatorship, tempered by assassination.”  I’m sometimes tempted to agree with him.

I have a recurring nightmare every time a general election is imminent. Having been exposed to too many political advertisements before retiring,  I wake screaming at a hellish vision of the  endless  queue of nitwits who, having fallen for one absurd political  slogan or another, rally to crush by weight of numbers whatever vestiges of scepticism and good sense survive in odd corners of the Commonwealth. Unlike most awakenings (in which the dreamer gradually realises that the dream was an illusion) in this case the accession of consciousness only brings:

1. the realisation that the dream was true and, in consequence:
2. despair.

And just look at the range of dingbats who are allowed to vote: Scientologists, archbishops, anti-whaling activists, child molesters, creationists, television celebrities, evangelical Christians, Manly-Warringah  supporters. They are all  incapable of carrying on an adult conversation yet their political views carry as much weight as  yours (or, more importantly, mine). As Philo Vance once remarked  “The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls, you produce intelligence”. It’s hard to believe that even the American electorate could be guilty of electing Donald Trump. Here we had a candidate so bad from every point of view that a vote for Hillary Clinton must have seemed almost rational by comparison. Astonishingly, not only did several people actually vote for him, but some of them have not yet done the decent thing and jumped off a cliff.

Naturally I don’t want to appear too negative. So I thought it only fair to present some concrete recommendations for how we could improve the political system.

• Every vote in Parliament should be secret (all the arguments in favour of a secret ballot at the polls apply with equal validity in Parliament). This measure would crush the party system at a stroke. I acknowledge that the new system would not be perfect but at least any member of parliament who possessed a vestigial conscience would be able to take it out for a bit of exercise occasionally.

• Any politician responsible for the provision of public services should be dependent on those services. So the Minister for Transport should not be provided with a car and a driver (never mind the chartered helicopters that are so popular these days). The Minister should be obliged under pain of dismissal and imprisonment to make all journeys by train, bus or tram. Similarly there should be a law forbidding the Minister for Health from receiving any medical treatment anywhere except in the Casualty Department of a public hospital. The children of the Minister for Education should all attend government schools.  You get the idea?

• All political advertising (newspapers, television, internet, billboards) should be limited to black letters of a specified size on a white background saying “The xxx Party’s candidate for the electorate of xxx, (name of candidate),  will hold a public meeting at (time, date and venue) to discuss the forthcoming election. This advertisement was paid for by a donation from xxx.”

• It should be forbidden to publish the results of public opinion polls for a period of six months before an election. If that means that longer notice of the election must be given, all well and good.

And, lest you think I have nothing good to say about politics, I will end by quoting HL Mencken:

“I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.”