IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

I am intrigued that throughout history characters like the fictional Benzelius “Buzz” Windrip and the very real Adolph Hitler arise to disrupt and distract.

My post today is an excerpt from Richard Rorty”s book Achieving Our Country; Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America

In 1998 Richard Rorty, American philosopher and academic wrote of the emerging political and social divisions in America and predicted the emergence of a “strongman” in American politics. Whether readers agree or disagree with Rorty’s writings the fact that he wrote so directly about this phenomenon almost 20 years ago is intriguing and merits reflection.

“Sometime in the 70’s American middle class idealism went into a stall, under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution and moving into a sterile vacuum called the ‘center’. The party no longer has a visible noisy left wing–a wing with which the intellectuals can identify and on which the unions can rely for support.

” Union members in the United States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries and a very much worse standard of living for American workers. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the developing world than in the fate of our fellow citizens.

“Social scientist Edward Luttwak, suggested that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers, themselves desperately afraid of being downsized–are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for–someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernistic professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel ‘It Can’t Happen Here” may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen.

“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

“After my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly betray the expectations of his supporters, make his peace with the international super-rich. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Pat Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why would not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”

Why is History committed to repeating itself?

THIS IS NOT A PERIOD

THERE’S A WORD FOR THAT

“Bird Of Paradise” original watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

Did you ever stop to think how arbitrary the naming of things can be? For instance: has anyone ever really seen a bird of paradise? In the rich history of the English language a word has been invented for just about everything including things we have never seen.

Now and then words go missing when we need them and then unexpectedly pop up again in the night while in the middle of a good dream. Haven’t you wished you could think of a great word to apply to someone who does things which are particularly annoying or irritating–whether online, in person, outside your bedroom window or in tedious meetings at work?

It’s fascinating for instance, to learn there’s a word for people who use overly long pretentious-sounding words. There are several I’m sure, but we can avoid getting unnecessarily sesquipedalian. Do you see how useful it could be?

Girouettism is the practice of frequently altering personal opinion to follow popular trends. It comes from a girouette another name for a weather-cock. Just as a weather-cock changes its position according to the wind, so a figurative ‘girouette’ is a fair-weather sort who changes their metaphorical position according to what’s ‘in’ at the moment. The term dates from the 1820s.

Verbomania is abnormal talkativeness. There is, however, little more to say about this one–ironically.

Word-grubber was eighteenth-century slang for someone who used unnecessarily long and complicated words in conversation, unlike the words such a person is likely to use. Many years ago I was annoyed with my father and wrote him a long pedantic and complaining letter. He immediately dashed one off to me using words I never thought he knew. It is universal to believe that we are far more brilliant than our parent, until we are once again proven wrong.

A Buttinsky is a person who constantly interrupts or butts in; it was coined by George Ade in his 1902 novel The Girl Proposition. Ade, by the way was the one who provides us with the first recorded use of the word “bad” to mean “good”, in his 1897 book Pink Marsh. So you see, when someone says another person or musical group is “bad-ass” and means they’re good, it’s really “old-hat”.

Humdudgeon is an imaginary illness or pain, or a loud complaint about nothing. One of its root words is “humbug” or a hoax. You’re in high dudgeon about a humbug. So don’t complain too loudly or people may call you a “humdudgeon”.

One of the great words featured in Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth century Dictionary is bed-presser which Johnson defines as ‘a heavy lazy fellow’.

There must be other annoying words–or rather, perfectly nice words that describe things people do–or things which get your goat.

We borrow from other languages, invent new words, combine words, and still wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t understand us.

PHILAGELOS, THE WORLD’S OLDEST JOKE BOOK

Sculpture by KSR

Laughter is good for the soul, and it sometimes keeps you out of a lot of trouble. People have been laughing at one thing or another for centuries. Robert Frost wrote “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”

Philagelos, a composite collection of 260 or so gags in Greek probably put together in the 4th century, is the oldest existing collection of jokes, but not the oldest collection ever heard of. In the 2nd century Athenaeus wrote that Philip II of Macedon paid for a social club in Athens to write down its members’ jokes. Apparently the early jokes were similar to the jokes of today, which throws out any thought that we may have evolved to a higher standard.

Do we all laugh at the same jokes? I think not. Things that I find hilarious, frequently bring a shake of the head from Dr. Advice. Contrarily, his idea of funny usually leaves me a bit chilly and wondering if he needs his head examined. The fact that we all find something to laugh at is the more important.

Laughter was always a favorite device of ancient monarchs and tyrants, as well as being a weapon used against them. A good king, of course, knew how to take a joke. One of the most famous one-liners of the ancient world was a joking insinuation about the paternity of the Emperor Augustus. The story goes that spotting a man from the provinces who looked much like the himself, the emperor asked if the man’s mother had ever worked in the palace. ‘No’, came the reply, ‘but my father did’. Augustus found that quite humorous.

There were many well-known philagelos ‘laughter-lovers’ in the first century, some of whom enjoyed seating dinner guests on ancient ‘whoopi cushions’ and then laughing as the air was gradually let out, proving that schoolboy pranks existed even then

Democritus, 5th century philosopher and atomist

Democritus, renowned as antiquity’s most inveterate laugher, was a stumpy little thumb of a man, who not only loved laughing but making others laugh as well. From Democritus to Whoopi Goldberg, the laugh instigators who grace our world keep the serious stuff at bay, and enable the sick, the lazy and the lame to face the perils of daily living.

TIMELESS WORDS

JONAH AND THE WHALE” STONEWARE SCULPTURE BY KAYTI SWEEETLAND RASMUSSEN

A word is intangible. We can’t buy it in a store, hold it in our arms, or lock it in a safe. Yet, it’s infinitely shareable–we can send it to thousands and still use it ourselves.

A word is a link to history, a bridge to the future. The word ‘wisdom’, for instance, is the same word that was once spoken by the author of Beowulf, those same letters appeared in Shakespeare’s plays, Emerson wrote with the same syllables, and the reporter in today’s newspaper makes use of the very same word.

We might well wonder what words Jonah uttered as he was being slowly introduced to the interior of the whale. I’m sure the Bible has him sending up a plea to the Almighty to save him from almost certain familiarity with the digestive process soon to come. But what did he really say?

“Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills. William Hazlitt, essayist (1778-1830)”

There are so-called “good” words and “bad” words, and these sometimes change with the vernacular of the generations. Many of the words our parents thought of as bad words are in common use today. Bill Bryson says “More than 350 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to”. No other language has achieved such eminence, overcome such odds, inspired such majesty of thought, or caused such confusion as English.

New words come into existence every day, with the birth of new industries. Each profession and business has it’s own language peculiar to them. For instance the terms I might use as an artist would not be useful to a dog catcher or a Paramedic.

Scholars have divided the history of the English language into three periods. Old English (from the middle of the 5th to the beginning of the 12th century). Middle English (12th century through the 15th), and Modern English (16th century onwards.

To confuse things further, we have British English and American English, and we all fall under the designation as speaking the “Mother Tongue”. Erroneous words are sometimes introduced by respected users of the language who simply make a mistake. Shakespeare thought illustrious was the opposite of lustrous and for a time gave it a sense that wasn’t called for. More alarmingly, the poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes written in 1841 and now remembered for the line “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world”. But it also contains this disconcerting passage: Then owls and bats, Cowls and twats, Monks and nuns in a cloister’s moods, Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Browning had apparently come across the word twat —which meant precisely the same then as it does now—and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for the nuns. Though it caused much hilarity among generations of schoolboys, it was never called to Browning’s attention, because no one could think of a suitably delicate way to explain it to him.

NOTABLE AND QUOTABLE

From Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech to the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, Jan. 20:

Israel is the only country in the Middle East which has long anchored itself in the ideals of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.
And these are not mere notions.
They are the things that over time and against all odds, have proven to be over and over again the only ground in which human rights, political stability, and economic prosperity, may flourish.
These values are not proprietary,
They do not belong to one people or one nation.
Nor are they a finite resource.
On the contrary, the wider they are spread, the stronger they grow.
Likewise, when they are threatened anywhere, they are threatened everywhere.
And who threatens them, or more precisely, what today threatens the societies that embrace such values and the progress they nurture?
Those who often begin by hating the Jews.
But, history shows us, end up hating anyone who is not like them.
Those forces, which have threatened the State of Israel every single day of its existence, and which, as 9-11 graphically showed us today, threatens all of us.
And so, we either stand up for our values and our interests here in Israel, stand up for the existence of a free, democratic and distinctively Jewish state, or the retreat of our values and our interests in the world will begin.

CARTOONS AREN’T ALWAYS FUNNY

“TRIANGULATE” original sculpture by kayti sweetland Rasmussen

I have a method to reading the morning paper. Instead of ruining the day by railing at the political and world news until the cream sours in my morning coffee, I try to grab the funny papers from Dr. Advice and get a clearer perspective on the important things in life.

Comic strips take me back to a kinder and gentler time when I could climb onto my Grandpa or Great-Uncle’s knee while they patiently read the Sunday comics in the Los Angeles Times newspaper. Together we laughed at the antics of Blondie and Dagwood, Lil Abner, Katzenjammer Kids, and my favorite, Little Orphan Annie. Uncle Phil could pop his false teeth out at will, and Grandpa was able to wiggle his ears, which never failed to delight.

Starting in the late 1920’s, comic strips expanded to include adventure stories and then soap opera type serials. Prince Valiant was a serial strip drawn by Hal Foster and taking place in the time of King Arthur, when dragons were running rampant, and the handsome prince in his page boy bob, was the designated dragon slayer. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan was put into serial cartoon form by Foster as well. Tarzan showed us how easy it was to shinny up tall trees and make friends with monkeys, but the message brought forth in both of these strips was that good triumphed over evil, and all it took was a pure heart and a lot of muscle. I had a pure heart and though I lacked the muscle, I climbed, and promptly fell out of a neighbor’s cherry tree and drove a rusty nail through my leg. On another occasion, after dreaming I could fly, I jumped out of a second story bedroom window, and though I landed more or less upright, my ten year old teeth bit through my tongue. It was my only attempt at flying. Popeye the Sailor Man gave a boost to the canned spinach industry by showing Popeye scarfing down large cans of spinach and mothers tried to induce obstinate children to eat the terrible slimy green slop, so they could be like Popeye. Loyal Olive Oyl, his fair lady, was part of the love triangle between Popeye and Bluto. and later Swee’Pea appeared as either Popeye’s ward or son.

Story telling using a series of pictures has been around for centuries. Cartoons have been found in Egyptian tombs, as well as in ancient graffiti all over the world. One medieval European example in textile is the lovely Bayeux Tapestry. The entire tapestry, which is 230 ft. long, has fifty different scenes depicting the Norman invasion. Germany and England presented us with some of the first satirical or humorous sequential narrative drawings.

In America, the great popularity of comics was due to the newspaper business. Various newspapers ran different strips, encouraging readers to follow their favorite comics which often ran in serial form, ensuring regular readership. Newspaper comic strips come in two different types; daily strips and Sunday strips. Most are syndicated, and distributed to many newspapers for a fee. In the United States, a daily strip appears on Monday through Friday and is printed in black and white. Sunday strips are usually in color, and follow their own story pattern. The two conventional formats for newspaper comics are strips and single gag panels. Bizarro, Dennis The Menace, and The Family Circus are two examples of gag panels; Charles Schultz’s Peanuts is a strip. Strips usually consist of three or four squares carrying the narrative along. Who would want to miss seeing Lucy kick the football away from Charlie Brown, or watch Snoopy attach the Red Baron? For Better Or Worse, the creation of Lynn Johston, is a running strip about the daily life of a family. Cartoons frequently are somewhat autobiographical, similar to a blog, but with pictures illustrating the story line.

The funnies are not always funny; the decade of the 1960’s saw the rise of underground newspapers. Political strips such as Doonsbury and Mallard Fillmore, frequently began in college newspapers under different titles, and continue the daily commentary of current affairs. Dilbert is a parody of today’s tech industry, pointy heads and all.

As long as newspapers keep running the comic section, I will look forward to keeping the daily news in perspective by chuckling along with the antics of Hagar, the irascible Dane, and watching the evolving love affair of LuAnn and her handsome Aussie beau Quill. Cartoons tell a simple little story in a simple way.

NAVAJO CODE TALKERS

“How The Navajos Got The Blanket” watercolor painting by Kayti Sweetland Rasmussen
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The reservation is a private world, a world of beauty, of great silences, of contemplation. They are a people steeped in myth and mystery. In that beauty and silence one’s whole world and way of looking at the world would be changed.

Many miles from the peaceful reservation, World War II erupted in the Pacific with the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Along with young men all over America, Navajo boys rushed to the nearest recruiting office. I know of one underage boy who walked 25 miles from his remote home to enlist, only to be turned down because of a lack of a birth certificate. (Many babies born at home in those days did not have birth certificates.) This boy returned to the recruiting office the next day, and through the use of a forged cetificate of some sort, suddenly became 18.

During the early months in the Pacific, Japanese intelligence experts broke every code the United States devised for combat messages. In any war situation, the rapid and accurate transmission of messages is essential. Japan was learning in advance, the time, place and direction the American attack forces would be deployed. Something had to be done to enable the American forces to communicate freely and secretly in the Pacific.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a group of twenty-nine volunteers left the tranquil canyons and mesas of their Navajo homeland. Little did they know of the crucial role they were about to play in the U.S. war effort.

These twenty-nine volunteers were the direct result of an idea presented to the Marines by Philip Johnston. His idea, born from his childhood days as a missionary’s son living on the Navajo Reservation, was ingenious.

The idea was to devise a code utilizing the complex unwritten language of the Navajo. Knowing the complicated syntax and intricate tonal qualities of the language, he convinced the Marines it would baffle the best of cryptographers. This language sounds different to the Anglo ear. Through the years I used to hear it, I called it “twisted tongue”; impossible for an Anglo to pronounce unless he had been raised around it. Johnston said the language could be used as the basis for a code to transmit vital information and battle plans.

With the help of the twenty-nine Navajo volunteers the task of creating code terms was underway. Words from their native tongue were selected to describe complex military equipment and operations. Instead of changing at a scheduled period of time, the code was changed constantly, often several times a day.

At full strength there were about 400 Navajos who were “Code Talkers”. These men were considered so valuable each had been assigned a personal body guard. The Navajo Code Talkers were so effective the Japanese were completely baffled and their master cryptographers never broke the code. In the words of Major Howard Conner, signal officer of the Fifth Marine Division at Iwo Jima, “during the irst 48 hours, while we were landing and consolidating our shore position s, I had six Navajo radio networks operating around the clock. In that period alone, they sent and received over 800 messages without an error”. Conner went on to say that “were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima”.

SLEEPING BEAUTIES

Sleep has never been the one long block of dreamland that we think it ought to be. Historian Roger Ekirch began doing research for a history of the night, perhaps hoping he would actually spot a ghost. He kept seeing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in “The Squire’s Tale, wakes up in the early morning following her “first sleep” and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth century medical book advised readers to spend their “first sleep” on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity.

Historically, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep referred to in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning—the so-called second sleep. The time in between sleeps was an expected and natural part of the night, and was spent praying, reading, contemplatig your dreams, or having sex. The last one was perhaps the most popular. (i’m not saying which I do, but bear in mind that “Sleepig Beauty” stayed asleep until wakened with a kiss by her Prince Charming.)

Pschiatrist Thomas Wehr, working for the National Institute For Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that perhaps the artificial light we are subjected to each day could have some effect on our sleep patterns.

On a whim, he deprived subjects in his study of any artificial light to try to recreate conditions such as were common to early humans. At first, all they did was sleep, making up for all the lost sleep they had accumulated. After a few weeks, they were better rested than at any other time in their lives. However, the experiment soon took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life.

Numerous other studies have proven that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. Yet two decades after Wehr’s study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers–not to mention your average physician, have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time every night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years.

My advice is to take a lesson from those early ancestors and get up, read a book, contemplate your dreams, study, have sex, or maybe even write a blog.

SHADOWS OF OUR ANCESTORS

“Large porcelain raku pot”

“Shadows of Our Ancestors” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

I’m not sure how I feel about so-called “ancient memory”; the qualities, gifts or understanding we may inherit from a forebear, though it is true that we certainly can inherit appearance, and certain other characteristics and mannerisms from those who have gone before.

To say that we do believe in ‘ancient memory” it would follow that if we happened to have a talent for singing, dancing, art or whatever, that it came from Great-Aunt Harriet, and not from the hours of hard work we put in every day. We could possibly just sit on our duffs and “let it come”. But I have a friend who believes implicitely that somewhere buried deep in our psyche, resides “learned memory” which can emerge with a little deep thought. Personally, I am not that deep a thinker.

The only concession I will grant however, is that the first time I plunged my hands into a pile of nice, gooey clay, I felt right at home. I was in the place I was meant to be.

Two hundred years ago, my ancestors operated a large production pottery in Devonshire, England, where along with everyday tableware, they manufactured the glaze used by the Doulton Company, which with a Royal grant, soon became “Royal Doulton.” Upon their emigration to Canada, they continued in the pottery business for many years.

Now I would never presume to believe that that is where my love of pottery came from, but then again—who knows?

It would be nice to think that through the years, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren may somehow “know us” as people just like themselves, people who stayed out too late, ran along the beach with a friend, snuggled with a lover, were funny and silly and made mistakes, and were nice to old ladies and dogs.

The door to the past opens creakingly, but I hope they peek through to the other side now and then.