George Orwell on totalitarian history

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

George Orwell, in "The Prevention of Literature" (1946)

That Bridge to Nowhere? Thanks but no thanks. That ethics report? No abuse of power there at all.

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Scholastic poll results

In the Scholastic Presidential Election Poll, open to voters in grades 1–12, Barack Obama has defeated John McCain, 57 percent to 39 percent. I like these details, from an article by Scholastic Kids Press Corps member Jack Greenberg:

Obama and McCain weren't the only vote getters. Four percent of the students voted for other people like comedian Stephen Colbert, and entertainers Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers. It was the highest percent of write-in votes in the history of the poll. Some even voted for themselves.

Little Baby Turtle

And that's the end of the story.

My family spent some time going through The Archives this weekend. This illustrated story is one item (among many!) that charmed us all.

[Pencil and crayon, by Rachel Leddy. Used with permission.]

Indian American English

In India, interest in speaking English with an American accent is growing:

The phenomenon has spread from the Indian offshore operations boom in the late 1990s to a wider cross-section of society, whether to help them get on in business, communicate with family State-side or just show off.

In Mumbai, arguably India's most cosmopolitan city, a number of language schools have sprung up offering accent coaching. Mumbaikars are also trawling the Internet looking for tutors to teach them to talk like Uncle Sam.

"About 50 percent of our students want American accents," Raj Oberoi, who runs the Just Talk Institute in the south of the city, told AFP.

Most of his students come from India's middle class, whose numbers have swelled on the back of the country's economic boom, and range in age from seven to 65, he added.

"People want to learn an American accent because they want to study abroad, perhaps they're going on a business trip or they think they'll be able to impress people if they talk with an American accent," he said.

The phenomenon marks a shift in attitude towards English, which was brought to India by its former British rulers and remains an official language, spoken by 90 million people.

Indians look to America for a new accent on English (Agence France-Presse)

Dream with a typo in it

I dreamed last night of walking down a supermarket aisle and seeing shelves stocked with cans of "Columbain coffee." Where did that come from?

The supermarket aisle: I was shopping in my local supermarket last night. More relevant perhaps: I just taught Allen Ginsberg's poem "A Supermarket in California" and talked a bit in class about the rise of the supermarket in American culture.

The typo: I chanced last night upon a high-resolution photograph of Mitt Romney's hair. Romney is the former CEO of Bain & Company (a consulting firm whose "management tools" include Downsizing, yes, with a capital D). The typo might also carry some echo of Columbine. It's reasonable, I think, to fear that the hatred now evident at McCain–Palin rallies may find its release not only in violent words but in violent action.

Summer nostalgia

Gail Collins wants to get back to the summer:

I miss August. August was neat. The Dow was over 10,000 and nobody had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

Dear Old Golden Dog Days (New York Times)

From the Evergreen Review

Start reading, and you'll see the joke.


[Page 128, Evergreen Review 19 (July–August 1961).]

Related reading
Evergreen Review (now online)
Evergreen Review (Wikipedia article)

Cindy McCain on PTSD

Cindy McCain, from an interview with Marie Claire:

MC: You met your husband after his POW days. To what extent is that still with you — or is it a part of history?

CMcC: My husband will be the first one to tell you that that's in the past. Certainly it's a part of who he is, but he doesn't dwell on it. It's not part of a daily experience that we experience or anything like that. But it has shaped him. It has made him the leader that he is.

MC: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night?

CMcC: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he'd be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing.

If what Mrs. McCain says is true, she has inadvertently raised the question of what responsibility the United States government bears for the damage to those draftees who weren't "trained" and thus immunized against post-traumatic stress disorder. But her breezy theorizing about PTSD is of course contradicted by reality. As psychiatrist Jonathan Shay suggests in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994), anyone can incur the bad moral luck (as Shay calls it) that culminates in PTSD. To say, as Mrs. McCain does, that PTSD comes only to those who don't know what they're doing, is callous (or feigned?) ignorance. Shay knows better:

The most ancient traditions of Western culture instruct us to base our self-respect on firmness of character. Many popular melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. A permanent challenge of working with those injured by combat trauma is facing the painful awareness that in all likelihood one's own character would not have stood firm. . . . We have powerful motives not to listen to the veteran's story, or to deny its truth.

As Achilles in Vietnam shows us, in Homer's Iliad and in the narratives of the veterans with whom Shay works, good character can be undone by the traumas of war.

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Hôtel (Apollinaire–Poulenc)

The poet Kenward Elmslie says somewhere in an interview that he has enough French to know that "Hôtel" is the most beautiful song ever written. That remark got me started listening to Francis Poulenc's music some years ago.

"Hôtel" is Poulenc's setting of a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, from the five-song sequence Banalités (1940):

Hôtel

Ma chambre a la forme d'une cage
Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre
Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages
J'allume a feu du jour ma cigarette
Je ne veux pas travailler je veux fumer

Hotel

My room is shaped like a cage
The sun puts its arm through the window
But I who want to smoke and make smoke dreams
I light my cigarette with daylight
I don't want to work I want to smoke

[My translation.]

Poulenc wrote "Hôtel" for the male voice (baritone), but women now sing it too. Here's a beautiful performance, alas anonymous: "Hôtel" (YouTube). Bernard Kruysen's recording (with Jean Charles Richard, piano, on an old LP) is my favorite.

Nineteen years after I stopped smoking, I have cigarettes on my mind. Mais je ne veux pas fumer.

Nineteen years later

You must be hard up for material if you're making yet another post about quitting smoking.

Not really. The day I smoked my last cigarette — October 8, 1989 — still sticks in my head. October 8 has become an anniversary of sorts.

Ah. So do you remember the day you began smoking?

No, but I remember my first cigarette. It was a Viceroy, smoked in a friend's backyard during a lull in a wiffleball or soccer game in said backyard. My friend had taken up smoking under the influence of his sister's boyfriend, an older guy who smoked, yes, Viceroys. The cigarette was horrible, but I was determined to master this strange ritual of what I thought was adultdom.

It's interesting that you remember not the game that was taking place but the brand of cigarette.

I suppose it is. I've always been brand-conscious. As a cigarette smoker, I developed strong associations with my favorite brands: Camels, Lucky Strikes, and Pall Malls; and Drum and Old Holborn, tobaccos for rolling one's own.

Rolling your own? Isn't that likely to look suspicious?

Maybe, but I never had any problems. I think I probably appreciated whatever clouds of suspicion the practice gathered around me, as I did almost nothing to attract such clouds otherwise.

So nineteen years later, are you sorry that you ever started?

I would be lying if I said that I am. I loved smoking, and many of the cigarettes I smoked were deeply satisfying experiences — ritualized moments of introspective selfhood. In other words, Here I am, sitting with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, thinking, thinking, alone.

Hey, those are my italics.

Sorry.

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