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Wire Hitch

Chris Hitchens is mighty bothered by the discovery that he was the subject of one of those warrantless wiretaps conducted by the NSA. It’s not just the intrusion privacy that seems to anger him, but the waste of resources:

We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration’s own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Read the whole thing. While you’re at it, you oughtta check out The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, James Bamford’s books about the NSA, in case you ever thought any phone conversation you had might have been private.

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Rhetorical Engine

I would’ve run this yesterday, but the guy who wrote it didn’t get back to me about it until today. So, here’s a post-MLK Day rhetorical analysis by John Castro (John went completely nuts a few years ago when some internet company tried using the speech in a commercial about how well they distributed broadband):

Friends,

I was listening to MLKs “I have a dream” speech today. Something struck me about it.

There are a few phrases he uses in concentrated bursts — I’m sure there’s a rhetorical term associated with it, but I’m too lazy to look it up (a cup of coffee, on me, for anyone who knows the name of this rhetorical device). Here’s one example:

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Of course, “I have a dream” itself is the most famous example.

If you take these phrases out, and line them up, they make a kind of poem that is the spine of the whole speech:

One hundred years later
Now is the time
We cannot be satisfied
I have a dream
With this faith
Let freedom ring
Free at last

Now, rhetorically, when he’s speaking, he does something interesting with these phrases. These phrases are the first half of a sentence, for instance:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

But the interesting thing about this is that gradually, over the course of a paragraph, he starts taking the natural pauses that you would take at the end of a sentence in the middle of the sentence, between the introductory phrase and the end.

So he actually reads the passage like this:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” [pause]

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream [pause]

that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream [pause]

that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

The effect is a wonderful reversal, where an innocuous phrase that kicks off a paragraph (“I have a dream”) becomes the final rhetorical focus of the whole passage. This transformation elevates what are really very simple, very plain phrases — and by that I mean no disrespect – into flourishes of great rhetorical power. These transformations — punctuating the speech with increasing frequency — elevate the text that follows each of them to a new level of intensity. They provide not just the spine and structure of the speech, but the rhetorical engine of the speech as well — constantly shifting it into higher gears. Until the famous climax of the last repeated phrase — “Free at last” — is followed, as we all know, by nothing less than the fanfare of the last forty years.

It’s a remarkable piece of work. Just some thoughts I wanted to share with you all – happy MLK day!

John

PS – Are you like me? Do you geek out about, and bore your people with stuff like this? If so, I’m sorry. But check out “Lincoln at Gettysburg“. Really cool book that will meet your fix.

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Lit Scrit

Official VM buddy Tina B. sends a neat article about the sheer messed-up-edness of contemporary academic writing about literature. Here’s a piece:

The problem is not just that literary scholarship has become disconnected from life. Something else more suspicious has happened to professional criticism in America over the past 30 years, and that is its love affair with reducing literature to ideas, to the author’s or reader’s intention or ideology — not at all the same thing as art. As a result, literary critics are devoted to saving the world, not to saving literature for the world, and to internecine battles that make little sense outside academe.

Have fun.

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High and Low

My brother got me a couple of birthday presents via Amazon: The Young Ones – Every Stoopid Episode & The Broken Estate : Essays on Literature and Belief, by James Wood.

This makes me feel even guiltier about not sending out his (and his family’s) Chanukkah presents yet. No way around it; I’m a heel.

On the plus side, Amy & I got our wedding invites out this week, and the RSVPs have started trickling in. Today’s wedding-related missions: she goes for a fitting/alteration session on the dress, and then we get sized up for our rings, back at the Little King.

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George Will is peeved

A few days ago, Radley Balko (aka The Agitator) quoted a recent George Will column excoriating the attempt at moralizing via tax breaks in the post-Katrina recovery package (I goofed on that subject in December.

With today’s column, it looks like Balko underestimated how pissed off Will is at the GOP.

Here’s a snippet:

Until the Bush administration, with its incontinent spending, unleashed an especially conscienceless Republican control of both political branches, conservatives pretended to believe in limited government. The past five years, during which the number of registered lobbyists more than doubled, have proved that, for some Republicans, conservative virtue was merely the absence of opportunity for vice.

I’m sure Will would characterize himself more as a “true conservative” than as a libertarian, but politics makes strange bedfellows.

Read more.

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The Redline Shoes

VM reader and former official VM bartenderess Bonnie Erickson purports to be close to launching her own blog. I’ll definitely link to that when it’s up.

Meanwhile, as a PSA, here’s a piece she recently wrote about the importance of the Broadway Dance Center, which is threatened by its new owner’s redevelopment plans.

The more I read of Jane Jacobs, et al., the more worried I get about the mall-ification of NYC.

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We Like Jewish People! (or, Psychosemitic)

In today’s Washington Post, there’s an article about evangelical Christians who are becoming “philo-semitic”. While some of the people demonstrate a straight-up belief that Jews are the chosen people, I’ve been a little nervous about this trend for years now.

I guess it derives from my feeling uncomfortable with any religious group that links paradise with apocalypse. There’s a manic evangelical woman in my office who used to put all sorts of “literature” in my mail slot. Since it was a pretty clean ergonomic movement from the mail slot to the trash can, it was never a huge problem.

Then she e-mailed me an excerpt from The Omega Letter, explaining how the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was God’s revenge for the U.S. support for Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. I flipped out on her, as I predicted would happen last August. All this apocalypso gives me the Heebie-Jewbies:

Julie Galambush, a former American Baptist minister who converted to Judaism 11 years ago, has seen both sides of the divide. She said many Jews suspect that evangelicals’ support for Israel is rooted in a belief that the return of Jews to the promised land will trigger the Second Coming of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and mass conversion.

“That hope is felt and expressed by Christians as a kind, benevolent hope,” said Galambush, author of “The Reluctant Parting,” a new book on the Jewish roots of Christianity. “But believing that someday Jews will stop being Jews and become Christians is still a form of hoping that someday there will be no more Jews.”

Anyway, what I’m saying is, some evangelicals consider support of Jews just a necessary step in the Second Coming. I’m not saying they all feel this way, because it’d be unfair to characterize everydarnbody based solely on religion. But I’m glad that some — like the profiled Rev. Mooneyham — appear to have different motives for their “charity” for the Jews.

Still, the idea of bringing Russian Jews “home” ties into this idea of prophecy and Armageddon (for me), and this centering of the Jews with history and its end:

Jacques Berlinerblau, a visiting professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University, said the rise of philo-Semitism in the United States has led Jewish scholars to look back at previous periods of philo-Semitism, such as in Amsterdam in the mid-17th century. He said revisionists are increasingly challenging the standard “lachrymose version” of Jewish history, questioning whether persecution has been the norm and tolerance the exception, or vice versa.

Still, some Jews think that philo-Semitism is just the flip side of anti-Semitism.

“Both are Semitisms: That is, both install the Jews at the center of history. One regards this centrality positively, the other regards it negatively. But both are forms of obsession about the Jews,” said Leon Wieseltier, a Jewish scholar and literary editor of the New Republic.

Which, of course, brings me back to basketball. Last century, people joked about the eschatological evangelical beliefs of Sacramento’s power forward, Lawrence Funderburke. See, Lawrence had been making comments about how the world was going to end after 1999, but he’d also been holding out for a long-term contract, so the sportswriters had a pretty easy time goofing on him.

So ESPN writer Frank Hughes decided to interview Funderburke about it two days before this projected apocalypse:

Why not sign a one-year deal, or a half-year deal, get everything up front, live it up like a drunken banshee for the remainder of his days and just go nuts in that final game of games, the Kings-Seattle SuperSonics tilt on Dec. 29?

Hey, I realize the globe is about to blow a gasket, and in the larger scheme basketball does not really mean a whole lot since all life on this planet is about to end, but regardless, we’ve still got a job to do. Tip-off at 7:30.

So I go in to talk with Larry after a game the other day, completely prepared to listen to his prediction of Almighty destruction with a smirk on my face.

And guess what? The guy is very well spoken, very intelligent and makes some solid arguments. And after writing the column last week about what a farce some of the aspects of religion are in this league, it was actually refreshing to listen to a man who is so devoted to his beliefs and so willing to shamelessly stand up for them in the face of ridicule and adversity.

Most of Funderburke’s comments were prophecies about Israel weakening, imminent mega-destruction, and the Jews coming to accept that Jesus is the messiah, but he also said something that I found pretty touching:

“I don’t get caught up in the millennium, and I know that it is not going to happen around then. And I think a lot of people will point at Christians and say, ‘If it doesn’t happen, then they are all false prophecies and they are predicting all these things.’ [. . .]

“I live day to day, my life. If you look at Payne Stewart, if you look at John Kennedy, no one knows when The Lord is going to come for your individual life. The main thing is to be ready, make sure you have a personal relationship with Him. I don’t worry about that. I’ve always lived my life day by day. I can’t control the future. No man can. What I try to do is give to the Church, help people out, do all I can to follow Christ’s example. A lot of people kid me, a lot of people ask me questions about Y2K . . . but I tell them I don’t know.”

Apart from the passages about impending nuclear war, his sentiments were pretty close to the those of the Dalai Lama, who contended that the true cataclysm is within the human heart, and that every day can be the millennium for someone.

Have a happy agnostic valentine.

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The Mean Streets?

Here’s a lengthy article about the “Red Light District” of northern NJ, South Hackensack. It’s about 25 miles from where I live, and one of our close family friends used to be a night-manager at the main motel that’s profiled.

The writer seems a little conflicted about what to make of the area. Sure, it’s a haven for sex and drug use, but it’s not like there’s any actual drug dealing going on there (that goes on in Paterson and Newark), just consumption. In fact, the more blatant aspects have been cleaned up, and crime rates are dropping each year:

The hookers who once trolled the highway were cleared out some years ago, but dozens of prostitution arrests in the past two years show the world’s oldest profession continues to be a moneymaker – behind closed doors.

Still, that hasn’t stopped officials from talking about redevelopment. The idea is, because the town is connected to Teterboro, a small airport used by Big Money, there should be high-end facilities to get a piece of the money. The problem with that is that Big Money doesn’t care about Teterboro’s amenities (the Plaza 46 Diner notwithstanding). The airport brings in traffic because it’s hassle-free and close to NYC. I can guarantee that P. Diddy doesn’t look at South Hackensack as a place to open a new club; he just likes being able to get his jet off the ground without the delays of Newark, Laguardia or JFK.

It all seems to come off as a non-story: some go-go waitresses are turning tricks; some people are cheating on their spouses; there’s a porno store; one of the 9/11 hijackers stayed at one of the motels the week before the attack (but there was no warrant for the guy, so the FBI & CIA remained uninformed). Probably the most objectionable part of the story for me is this:

Although the strip has been trouble for the town, in some ways it’s also been a blessing. Seizures have brought needed money to the Police Department, which has used the money to purchase four patrol cars, a communications system, new handguns and rifles, and new bicycles the past few years.

Because it implies that the police department busts some “behind closed doors” small-scale crimes to keep funding itself.

Ah, well. As the owner of the local car dealership put it:

“It’s a vibrant area that employs many, many people,” said [Eddie] Goldberg, the former head of the Business Alliance of South Hackensack. “There are no vacancies in any of the stores and there is no blight.”

Read the whole shebang.