Vox populi

Victor Davis Hanson, whom I greatly admire, has a long piece on a variety of un-PC things and touches on the femmy change in the American male voice.

The other nine:

1. High school Latin would arrest the decline of American education.
2. Hollywood is going the way of Detroit.
3. The old media is old.
4. Wisdom about money will return after this panic.
5. California has become a touchstone example of what not to do.
6. The US male accent has become feminized.
7. Do not go into farming.
8. The shrill Left is worse than the hard right ever was.
9. K-12 education in the US is wrecked.

His paragraph on speech is way down the page, so I am gonna reprint it here, without permission. Hope he doesn't mind.

Unfortunately for me, I am quite aware of voices. How a man or woman sounds when they speak is something that I pay attention to. I wish I didn't. The increasing metastasis of the Rising Terminal Interrogative, where every sentence sounds like a request for permission, makes the intonation of a lot of people --especially a lot of gay men-- grating.

An opposite style is epitomized in ubiquitous TV adman Billy Mays, whose high-volume shouting about rags and soap and health insurance makes me want to put chopsticks in my ears.

I know I have blogged on this before and most people don't even notice (not only the blog, of course, but the issue), but this is my blog and I'll, like, post what I want to? Here's VDH.

Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions. All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience. In the old days, I remember only that I first heard a variant of this accent with the old Paul Lynde character actor in one of the Flubber movies; now young men sound closer to his camp than to a Jack Palance or Alan Ladd.

Mutual admiration, unexpected

With an HT to American Thinker, the mutual admiration
of American and French, yes French, soldiers in Afghanistan.

The French soldier on his American brothers-in-arms,
in English translation and the original pour vous autres
qui pouvez le lire en francais.

The American on his French counterparts.

Impressive.

Canuckistan Chronicles

I'm so glad that we have left behind the terrible theocratic past, where total strangers felt free to intervene in your discussions and accuse you of heresy, and were even paid by the Church to do it.

Can you imagine what a chilling effect that would have on freedom of speech, on open-minded inquiry? I'm glad that superstitious and dogmatic intolerance is over with.

Oh, wait. Sorry. I haven't had my coffee yet.

It's not the terrible theocratic past...whenever that was...it's now.

In Canada, home of caring pacifist evolved humans who are SO much better then vulgar greedy racist violent christianoid Americans . And it's not the old Church paying them, but the New Church, the University.



God, I would be so tempted to slug these PC Commisars right in the mouth, and utter some hateful epithet at the same time. Several times, actually.

It can be argued that the progressive masters we are now under got their start in the civil rights movement AND at the Berkeley....hold your breath for the irony...Free Speech Movement.

Enantiodromia. It's a bitch.

And while we're on the subject of Canada, my second country, the Stalinist "Human Rights Commissions" have finally turned in a not-guilty verdict or two, after a 100% conviction rate since inception. And irony of ironies, they have never heard a case against a Jew (until Ezra Levant took them on), a homo, a Muslim. Only Christians and conservatives. And it took a brave Jew like Levant to say it.

So glad stuff like this can't happen in America....

Coercive utopianism

I came across this phrase, "coercive utopianism", the other day and I don't recall where, so I can't credit the site. But googling it shows that it's been around a long time, at least a couple of decades.

The phrase encapsulates very nicely why I am no longer a liberal, because contemporary Western liberalism, with its deep drive to enforce egalitarianism in every sector of life, is a subset of this.

Certainly Marxism is the most visible and rankly evil form of CU but the seven-pillared liberalism I have come to reject is another and it is in fact more global in its reach and aspirations. Marxism was about economics, the rich classes vs the poor classes. But PC CU has wider goals. And rather than being overtly and violently revolutionary, it is a species of Gramscian gradualism and proceeds not through force of arms drive by obvious anger and submerged envy but through corporate regulation driven by obvious ethics and submerged guilt.

It is rare that anyone who is vulnerable to the siren song of highminded liberal ethics would not eventually be snared in the sevenfold embrace of this discourse, or would at least resist it.

Then the lion shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox. The baby shall play by the cobra's den, and the child lay his hand on the adder's lair. There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD, as water covers the sea. Isaiah 11

Let's take the Holy Trinity of evil for liberals: racism, sexism and classism. The oppression of nonwhites by whites, the oppression of females by males and the oppression of the poor by the rich. What more obvious examples of evil could there be?

A rich white male is just wrong. He has a lot of repenting to do as he breathlessly but humbly and selfrighteously supports a new world of multicultural harmony, feminist liberation and economic justice. Hello George Soros, John Kerry, etc.

The four other pillars of the ideology unfold from the first three. The evils of the rich white male unfold in his nation-state based colonialism, his dogmatic Christianity, his violently militarist armies and police forces, and his greedy earth-reaping consumerism. Transnational cooperation, openminded secularism, visionary pacifism, and post-speciesist green environmentalism are the cures for those evils.

Trouble is, none of these panaceas happen without coercion. Old style crusading liberals tried education and persuasion. New style liberals make rules, using the power of the state, both legislative and judicial (the latter where the former fails to cooperate) and of corporate entities like the university to force us all into a wonderful world of peace and justice.

For our own good, of course. And The One, now that he is going to be President, will show us how.

I wonder: is the strange sympathetic affinity that liberals have for Islam, despite its gross contradiction of liberalism's feminism, pacifism, secularism, etc. is that it too is a totalizing form of regulatory justice?

Post-racial America....not

In a video interview on the very worthwhile
Uncommon Knowledge series with Peter Robinson,
Shelby Steele points out the irony of President-Elect Obama:
it is precisely because of race that he was elected.

Whites voted for him to absolve themselves from the burden
of white guilt and blacks voted for him to release themselves from
the stigma of black inferiority.

BTW, funny how he is always the First Black President
rather than what he really is, the First Mixed Race President.

On a symbolic level, that is just as powerful as his appearance
because the sexual union of black and white represents the
great fear of BOTH sides...something I learned a little bit
about in my nine-year relationship with a man who is black.

It's a shame both his parents aren't alive. It would be quite
something to have them standing next to each other
at his side on Inauguration Day.

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Something worth considering

My neighborhood is full of signs about Proposition "H8ate."

Sigh.

Chris Crain, with whom I agree on occasion, talks about leaving behind the current LGBT...did I get that alfabet soup right?...leadership and instead trying to achieve something that most Americans say they would be ok with, a federal civil unions law.

David Horowitz, considered Evil Incarnate because he is so firmly hostile to Islamization and the Left's support of it, tacit or overt, offered to start such a project with an unwilling Andrew Sullivan in 1996!

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Vagaries, continued

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The vagaries of desire

Impressive does not always equal attractive.

There's a guy at my gym, a trainer, who has a really fine physique, muscular and proportionate. Most any man would count himself happy to look like he does. And I look. I do. He's impressive.

But I have no desire to do more than look.

It's not that I find muscularity off-putting. I don't, usually. It's more idiosyncratic than that. He has a manner that I don't like, but even that is not all. Here are two images of muscular men. The first one I find very, very much a draw, the other one could be a new car (and it has nothing to do with his politics).

There's another guy at the gym with whom I have a very friendly, playful and flirty relationship. Totally different style from the first man I have mentioned. Very "alternative". But I find him wonderfully handsome, as well as powerfully built. And he is a very nice fella, bright, masculine, thoughtful and related. I like looking at him, too. And we once even considered having sex with each other, and would have, had external circumstances not intervened.

But even though his visuals and his personality are great, when he occasionally gives me a hug in the locker room, usually only clad in a towel, the tactile event is pretty, well, uneventful. Who knows what that's about?

On the other hand, a guy can be in shape but not coverboy material at all, but with the right chemistry, a certain combo of tactile and aural, for example, he can be teeth-grindingly attractive, even if not, on the surface, as impressive as the others.

Who knows?

Grieving for Dummies

The stages of grief and mourning are now part of pop psych culture. There's even a book that gave this post its title.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross famously discerned five stages in how people deal with loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. "This can't be happening." "How could you do this to me?" "Maybe if I do this, then..." "I am so sad." "This is reality."

Of course, like most stage theories, it is too neat. It's a map, not the territory. My experience is that the five responses are real. But they are not linear. You don't go from a to b to c to d, leaving the prior stage behind. Grief is not a larva-pupa-butterfly kinda thing.

And if you are deep and sensitive, you can go through
more than one response at the same time,
sadness and anger both, for example.

But you mostly corkscrew around. And it is tiring and unpredictable. And duration is unpredictable. Trouble is, it's pretty mandatory when the loss has been real and significant, even though styles differ. Those who can short-cut through it are rare. And sometimes major unmourned losses come back to haunt us. As well, some people's griefs exceed the natural (which can itself, of course, be brutal) and become pathological.

The heart, the soul, the brain, even the body, have to digest loss.

The major benefit of this theory, as of many, is that it gives you a sense of normalcy at a time when you are likely to feel pretty crazy. The classic example is that it normalizes rage at a beloved person who has died, relieving the mourner of guilt.

I have a friend whose grieving style is unusual. After a major loss --the death of a beloved person or the death of a love-- there is three days of agony, which my friend describes as feeling like your skin is ripped off, over and over. But on the fourth day, a certain peace descends, and the original pain never returns. Sounds like a good deal to me.

The more usual is longer, less intense at every moment, but harder to shake. You can have moments of unhappy calm and then storms of rage or sadness that make your body itself feel damaged or attacked or sick.

And the best thing of all about grief --I am being ironic here-- is that the longer you live, the more of it you are likely to have. Especially in later life, more people die. And if you suffer, say, an emotional loss, even though you have the resilience of experience, you also know in your bones that you have way less time to make up for it.

Grief. Actually, it's not for dummies.

Musings of an ex-fag

At the gym today, where most of the clientele are gay, one of my acquaintances asked if I had been down to the demonstration yesterday in Union Square to protest the passage of Prop 8, defining marriage as between a man and a woman in the California constitution.

(The State constitution, btw, is over 110 pages long. Yes. And has been amended well over 500 times. So it's not at all like amending the US Constitution, a mere 4 pages long and only 27 amendments.)

I said no, that it was a waste of time.

He said, with a friendly laugh, "What kind of a card-carrying fag are you?" I replied, without thinking, "I resigned." "But you can't, ever," he came back. "Watch me," says I.

I really do feel as if I have resigned. My erotic and emotional direction is fundamental and remains utterly unchanged and unrepented of. But my sense of identification with the "community" is fading all the time.

So, here are a few musings of an ex-fag.

Just because most people find it hard to grasp that the gender of marriage partners is accidental to marriage, after many millennia of universal experience, and don't see how the idea of same-sex marriage, barely a few decades old, suddenly constitutes a fundamental civil right, does not mean they are hateful bigots.

Bigot is now as useless a term as racist. Saw a T-shirt yesterday, "Bigotry is unnatural and perverse." Dude, what planet have you been living on? It is a natural as genocide.

Because I have friends who are directly affected by the issue, I have great sympathy for the disappointment felt. But stamping your feet and name-calling voters who won a legal vote...how is that much more than a tantrum. To say nothing of counter-productive. It only solidifies the opinion of people who fear what you are up to.

A local theater director, a Mormon, has had to resign his job because his contribution to the Yes on 8 campaign was exposed and publicized. Most gays say he deserved it and what did he expect, given the high rate of gay involvment in theatre. And if anyone who worked for a business with a conservative demographic was found to have given money to No on 8 and made to resign for it, would the gays say they had only themselves to blame? The hypocrisy is stunning.

One argument I hear is that the Equal Protection clause of the 1868 14th Amendment means that the government cannot restrict marriage to male-female couples. Presumably this would also validate polygamy. And I can see no reason why I could not marry my brother. Or all three of them.

But it also occurs to me that this makes the progressive income tax unconstitutional, since it penalizes the wealthy by a higher percentage of levy. No?

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