Friday, October 29, 2010

??!!

Back when I taught writing, I told my students to avoid nine out of ten of their rhetorical questions. They get annoying, don't they?

Also, give yourselves ten exclamation points for the rest of your life and use them wisely. Don't use them all up in your next paper! Never be wasteful and use two in the same sentence!!

So I don't know what's come over me. I need to take an oath. I need to get myself into rehab!

Lazy blogging

I try not to post too many links to other stuff on the Web. People can find their own stuff on the Web. My job--which I take on with the utmost seriousness--is to publish my own content and make it available to my fanbase in an easily accessible format. Letters to the editor, I can't even get one for ten into the
Oregonian.

But here's a particularly good piece on immigration, which I mentioned in my last post some eight minutes ago.

My comments to Shumacher-Matos, other than you really have to do something about your name:

"My god! a rational critique of immigration policies, complete with concrete suggestions for workable solutions? Are you mad?

And then what would you do about all the Martians? Amnesty for Martians, too?"

Decide for yourselves here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102803904.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

The blur

Mary and I thought Barack did a terrific job on John Stewart last night: assertive about his accomplishments without being strident. Confident. Relaxed. Engaging. I think he knocked the ball out of the park with one of his core constituencies that need to be knocked on the head: younger voters.

I'd read two reviews of the interview before I even saw it. One was critical, saying the president lowered himself by appearing on a comedy show and sneering that Stewart actually called him Dude at one point. The other said mostly what I said above, but took his alloted 500 words to say it. I'm guessing the reviews pretty much reflected the author's previous attitudes.

Mary and I were talking about how unable Republicans and conservatives in general are to say anything the least positive about Obama. I absolutely can't stand George Bush, but we both recalled that we thought he put forward a very good plan for immigration reform. If anybody had bothered to ask, we would have had no problem saying so at the time.

I also thought he was unusually good at clearing brush for a president, and I wasn't afraid to say so. For a Texan, though, he looked decidely uncomfortable on a horse.

A large majority of Democrats worked with him on getting immigration reforms passed, but they were defeated by his own party. These days, though, it's political suicide for a sitting Republican to say anything remotely in agreement with Obama. Even some Democrats are running on how much they opposed his initiatives. I can only hope people will grow out of this all-or-nothing politics and get back to an era when cooperation and comity were considered to be virtues, not vices.

In any case, as the blur of the last four days before the election gets more and more crazy, Mary and I are heading out for a few days in our new trailer. (Built in Oregon and bought in Klamath Falls: once again, we're doing our part for the recovery, but do we get a huge tax break? No. Damn you Top Two Percent!!)

I'm glad we'll be missing out on all the news and commentary, though I'll miss the ongoing coverage of the various Tea Party crazies: Christine O'Donnel! Who needs parody?

When we get back, it will all be over but the year or so of post-election parsing. Then we can start the campaigns for the next election, including the presidential. Sarah Palin says she's in unless someone else wants it. Hell, make that two of us.

Can't wait.

(Eugene Robinson is very good today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102805899.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

)

Friday, October 08, 2010

Why Dinesh D' Sousa is a neo-colonialist

Talk about irony: Dinesh D’Sousa accuses President Obama of being anti-colonialist, his evidence being that Obama’s father was an anti-colonialist from Kenya. Never mind that Obama’s father deserted the family when he was two. In his autobiographical Dreams from My Father, Obama writes, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself."

There you go.

Also, Obama's father wrote an article defending socialism.

We knew it all the time.

The result, says D’Sousa, is a president who evidences all the basic attitudes of the socialist anti-colonialst: “Do the views of the senior Obama help clarify what the junior Obama is doing in the Oval Office? Let's begin with President Obama, who routinely castigates investment banks and large corporations, accusing them of greed and exploitation. Obama's policies have established the heavy hand of government control over Wall Street and the health-care, auto and energy industries.”

Also, he wants to raise taxes on the rich.

Those of us not in the know might have confused these policies and attitudes with those of, say, a moderate Democrat coming to the presidency in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression—let’s call it the Pretty Good Recession—brought on in large part by the greed and lack of regulation on Wall Street. How this amounts to anti-colonialism, D’Sousa does not quite make clear.

I think the more interesting question is why, since he clearly opposes everything Obama believes and does, D’Sousa is such an advocate for colonialism, an –ism that pretty much died out in the mid-last-century when Britain and France lost the fight in places like Kenya and Algeria. The answer lies in the small italicized print at the bottom of his column in today’s Washington Post: “Dinesh D'Souza is president of King's College in New York City.”

King's College! Talk about a smoking scepter.

Also, let’s just ask ourselves how a native of India got the name “of Sousa” if he was not named for the famous composer of rousing pro-colonialist marches such as “The Stars and Stripes Forever”?

Coincidence? I think not. There's your irony.

If one of my students back in freshman comp had handed in an essay as logically weak-kneed as D’Sousa’s, I’d have required a rewrite that goes beyond Superman-scaled leaps of reason based on five or more of the logical fallacies covered in our textbook. In fact, I used to use D’Sousa himself as a good example of bad reasoning from a few crumbs of evidence found on the floor since his essay criticizing Rigoberta Menchu's’ book I, Rigoberta was the first selection in the anthology I used for the class.

Menchu, an indigenous Guatemalan, had written a book detailing some of the horrific crimes committed by the Guatemalan government during that county’s civil war from 1960-1996. American anthrolopoigist David Stoll discovered that a few of the claims in the book were dubious since, for example, Menchu said she never went to school when in fact she had finished 8th grade.

As it turned out, most of Stoll’s charges proved to be false, although Menchu did acknowledge that she fudged a little and included a few experiences of her brothers and sisters, a crime never equaled in the long tradition of “nothing but the facts, Mam” truthiness to be found in all previous autobiography.

D’Sousa regurgitated the claims of Stoll and wrote an essay claiming Menchu was a fraud and therefore none of the terrible things she said about the Guatemalan army were true. That’s why it were no crime that the U.S. trained and supported the Guatemalan army. The whole thing, D’Sousa said, was a cleverly constructed fantasy designed to discredit the U.S. and its wholly owned subsidiary, the United Fruit Company.

When the dispute was submitted to an independent fact-finding agency, it ruled in favor of Rigoberta and gave her the Nobel Peach Prize.

Wait. Typo. “Nobel Peace Prize.”

D’Sousa’s current essay first appeared as the cover story in Fortune magazine and was instantly trounced by just about everybody but Christine O’Donnell for its self-levitated reasoning, so apparently D’ thought he had to defend himself by saying the same thing all over again in a brief column that even the liberals over at the Post could understand.

Anyway, since I'm also named after my father, you’re probably wondering what clues can be discovered about my own anti-colonial bias. Here’s your answer:

"Ross

Gender: Male
Origin: Latin
Meaning: Red Rose"

Red rose!