Sometimes the bureaucratic hoop jumping that comes with trying to fill a simple need becomes its own hurdle and curse. The result? The kind of egg-on-the-face reaction that produces the inevitable snickering sure to accompany this article: http://rss.thesmokinggun.com/documents/bizarre/justice-department-seeks-ebonics-experts.
Words mean something, however. And inflating terms to give them greater legitimacy comes with a price. A garbageman is now a sanitation engineer. A dog catcher is an animal control officer (apparently without even working up from private or corporal). And a contractor who must occasionally come up with a way to decipher urban street slang picked up via wiretap is now a "linguist" specializing in "Ebonics." Balderdash.
To say that Ebonics is its own language because it follows a predictable grammar is a deceptive half-truth. Every human utterance recognizable to some fellow human does the same. Descriptive linguistics taught this lesson long ago. But this does not make a slang variation of Standard American English any more a separate language that it would for the halting speech of two-year-olds or immigrants from one country who impart unrecognizable pronunciations to common English words that only their in-group readily comprehends. None of these variations is a separate language. They may qualify as a dialect or a creole or even a pidgin, if one wants to be precise. Nor are its decoders "linguists." They are translators or interpreters.
Somewhere, beneath the controversy, there's a poor DEA agent trying to get the resources to get a necessary job done, and none of this nonsense is helping her. Imagine a DEA field agent trying to get approval to spend, say, $50 to have a streetwise kid of a shopkeeper help interpret some undecipherable passages of a recorded plot. Her boss tells the agent, "No. Go through the system." She then finds herself caught up in red tape and a labor-intensive swirl of contracting processes that force putting out a competitive bid for language translation services that become artificially inflated to the point of being only vaguely connected to the original requirement. The system is validated. Someone makes money on the deal. Meanwhile, the DEA agent has probably dipped into her lunch money to pay for the kid to deliver the needed information in real time in order to thwart a drug deal and accompanying shootout. Somewhere in this process, there is a tail wagging the dog it is supposed to serve.
- Nick Catrantzos
Monday, August 23, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Filling Voids with Slogans
Just what slogan or mantra sustains the greatest traction within the ranks of our adversaries who crave our annihilation? Death to America must fall flat after a decade or so of chanting.
There was a time when a population such as Romans could be controlled through judicious delivery of bread and circus. Feed them. Amuse them. Expect them to then accept their lot without undue chafing. "Bread and circus" made a reasonable slogan. Yet all tribes and peoples grow restless, to the point that mere survival and sustenance are no longer enough. The French once observed that people need "flowers before bread." If material wealth is insufficient to placate or energize, what is? Contrast, perhaps? Just as gratitude is an antidote to misery, comparing one's lot to that of another, more fortunate contemporary is a surefire stimulator of animosity. The French Revolution had its sans culottes who found in the guillotine a drastic cure to the let-them-eat-cake condescension of the ruling class. What about today's jihobbyists, though, the ones who may not be full-fledged terrorists but may yet travel down that migration path?
We know that their leaders and role models tend to be educated, middle class or wealthier, and relatively better off than their average countryman. So why are they not content to use their brains and status to greater advantage with less risk? Perhaps the materialistic world where even our own economic progress now seems precarious has lost its allure. Their new mantra could well be, "Purpose before comforts."
Something is missing for jihobbyists. They don't quite fit in. They may have advantages, but real or inflated comparisons against those better off still ignite grievances. The shrewd adversary comes upon this situation and interjects resentments and courses of action to fill this vacuum.
There is always someone to resent and some way to declare oneself victimized. The only people who seem to lose their taste for professional victimhood are the ones who have weathered the greatest losses. This may account for why Israelis who have been the most historically exterminated over time do an impressive job of defending their small nation yet have avoided lobbing nuclear weapons at surrounding enemies sworn to their obliteration. Similarly, the Japanese who absorbed the first atomic bombs vary at times in their anti-Western sentiments but, for the most part, take more pride in acting like a modern productive nation than like an aggressive state with an axe to grind. Both nations also operate by popular rule that may be messy, flawed, and invariably contentious. Yet their rivals and detractors tend to be autocratic and more dangerous to their own people as well as their neighbors. North Korea comes to mind as an example.
For all the professionally self-styled victims of the modern world, why do they seem to operate principally by dictatorship and brutality? Where are their versions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King? Could it be that the reason they lack such visionaries is that their bile-generating propaganda is bereft of the kinds of ideas that lift their fellows to a level of civilizing influence that shames all opponents? If so, then this is a sign that the jihadists will never quite prevail on their own. If the only way of converting others to their way of thinking is brute force, then they will never win a battle of ideas. The only way they will even come close is if we shut down, withdraw, turn inward, and so enfeeble what is left of our own civilization that we mute our own narrative and history, refusing to engage in that battle of ideas. In this they cannot win. Only we can manage to lose. We lose by abdication, by prolonged absence, by taking no stands, and by fogging mirrors.
- Nick Catrantzos
There was a time when a population such as Romans could be controlled through judicious delivery of bread and circus. Feed them. Amuse them. Expect them to then accept their lot without undue chafing. "Bread and circus" made a reasonable slogan. Yet all tribes and peoples grow restless, to the point that mere survival and sustenance are no longer enough. The French once observed that people need "flowers before bread." If material wealth is insufficient to placate or energize, what is? Contrast, perhaps? Just as gratitude is an antidote to misery, comparing one's lot to that of another, more fortunate contemporary is a surefire stimulator of animosity. The French Revolution had its sans culottes who found in the guillotine a drastic cure to the let-them-eat-cake condescension of the ruling class. What about today's jihobbyists, though, the ones who may not be full-fledged terrorists but may yet travel down that migration path?
We know that their leaders and role models tend to be educated, middle class or wealthier, and relatively better off than their average countryman. So why are they not content to use their brains and status to greater advantage with less risk? Perhaps the materialistic world where even our own economic progress now seems precarious has lost its allure. Their new mantra could well be, "Purpose before comforts."
Something is missing for jihobbyists. They don't quite fit in. They may have advantages, but real or inflated comparisons against those better off still ignite grievances. The shrewd adversary comes upon this situation and interjects resentments and courses of action to fill this vacuum.
There is always someone to resent and some way to declare oneself victimized. The only people who seem to lose their taste for professional victimhood are the ones who have weathered the greatest losses. This may account for why Israelis who have been the most historically exterminated over time do an impressive job of defending their small nation yet have avoided lobbing nuclear weapons at surrounding enemies sworn to their obliteration. Similarly, the Japanese who absorbed the first atomic bombs vary at times in their anti-Western sentiments but, for the most part, take more pride in acting like a modern productive nation than like an aggressive state with an axe to grind. Both nations also operate by popular rule that may be messy, flawed, and invariably contentious. Yet their rivals and detractors tend to be autocratic and more dangerous to their own people as well as their neighbors. North Korea comes to mind as an example.
For all the professionally self-styled victims of the modern world, why do they seem to operate principally by dictatorship and brutality? Where are their versions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King? Could it be that the reason they lack such visionaries is that their bile-generating propaganda is bereft of the kinds of ideas that lift their fellows to a level of civilizing influence that shames all opponents? If so, then this is a sign that the jihadists will never quite prevail on their own. If the only way of converting others to their way of thinking is brute force, then they will never win a battle of ideas. The only way they will even come close is if we shut down, withdraw, turn inward, and so enfeeble what is left of our own civilization that we mute our own narrative and history, refusing to engage in that battle of ideas. In this they cannot win. Only we can manage to lose. We lose by abdication, by prolonged absence, by taking no stands, and by fogging mirrors.
- Nick Catrantzos
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