Why Show Their Faces?

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Colorado lost another law enforcement officer last weekend, a young husband and father, killed in an ambush perpetrated by a deranged cop-hater who staged a domestic disturbance and shot up the responders from behind his bedroom door.  To compound his unspeakable act, he live-streamed the entire atrocity on social media.

As shocking and disturbing as this cold-blooded act was, it was compounded by TV stations’  unfathomable decision to air parts of this evil bastard’s broadcast on the nightly news. Bad enough that the news media repeated his name and paraded his life history in front of the world, but to give him actual face time?  Exactly what purpose does that serve? The gunman died in the lethal exchange so outing him removed no threat to the community, in fact quite the opposite.  Showing his face and his sick manifesto  only serves to provoke and encourage other sick, angry individuals to seek media glory by imitating him. That, and adding to the misery of those closest to the people he hurt.

I am sick and angry, too.  Sick of seeing the names and faces of these killers plastered on the same screens as the grieving families and colleagues of their victims.  Angry that our mass media puts ratings above the feelings of violence victims.  Purveyors of “news” are fond of excusing such behavior by citing the public’s “right to know.”  What about our right to not know?

If one media outlet would have the spine to keep the names and faces of mass killers out of its stories I would be a viewer for life.  As for the rest of them I will wait, in vain I’m sure, for an explanation.

Running Out of Badjectives

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Michael Wolff’s latest literary offering, Fire and Fury, Inside the Trump White House, hits bookstores this week, and looks to be a best-seller.  Whether it should make the NYT list in the fiction or non-fiction category will probably depend on one’s political affiliation, but whatever the source of review the book will certainly carry the adjective “controversial” in front of it.  Nothing assures a book’s success like controversy, and coming from the pen (keyboard?) of Wolff, whose reputation for historical accuracy will never be confused with that of, say, David McCullough, this work is on pace to sell millions.  Which begs a question.

Ever since Donald Trump first appeared in the public eye, descriptions of his behavior have exhausted the list of synonyms for “bad”.  He is widely acknowledged to have exaggerated his business acumen, cheated on his wives, stiffed his contractors and suppliers, personally attacked every critic with vitriol and immediacy, bullied other men, verbally and physically harassed women, and pretty much lied about all of it.  And that was before he ran for President.  Since he has been in office, he has done nothing but double down on these character flaws.  He has tried to intimidate the press, bad-mouthed judges, embarrassed and emasculated (sorry, Betsy D and Ms. Chao, Nielsen and Haley) his cabinet, alienated our allies, provoked our enemies – I could go on, but you get the idea.

The question I would pose is:  How much more Trump dirt can possibly be found between the covers of Wolff’s exposé than what we have already had sprayed in our faces?  Does anyone think that Wolff, from his spot on the White House couch, has managed to gather any tidbits of scandalous gossip that Robert Mueller, with his hundreds of FBI agents and his bottomless subpoena power, has overlooked?  Or that anything he can offer his readers about Trump’s vindictiveness and immaturity can equal the revealing content of the President’s own Tweets?

Even if every sentence of Fire and Fury is absolutely true, It is not likely to tell us anything about Donald Trump that we haven’t already figured out.  I don’t need to pony up $29.95 to be privy to the knowledge that our President is narcissistic, ignorant, duplicitous, nefarious, cold-blooded, inarticulate, thin-skinned, juvenile, lascivious, add-your-own-badjective-here.  Unfortunately I, and pretty much every other citizen of the world, already have that information.

Michael Wolff will likely get rich from this book, wherever Barnes and Noble decides to shelve it.  But if Wolff wants to interest me in a tell-all Trump tome it had better reveal an impeachable offense by page 5.  Otherwise, no sale.  I have seen all the dirt on Trump I can stand.

Once in a Blue Moon

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From a musical in 1906

From a musical in 1906

If something happens once in a blue moon, it’s rare. Even rarer, in the expression, than an actual “blue moon,” which refers to a month with two full moons, the second one being “blue.”

Thought to be called “blue” after an old english term meaning “betrayer,” a Blue Moon is an extra full moon that occurs due to a quirk of the calendar…

… about once every 2.7 years, because the number of days in a lunation (new moon to new moon) is a bit less than the usual calendar month — 29.53 days as opposed to 31 or 30 days (except for February, which has 28 days, so a blue moon cannot occur). space.com

“Blue Moon” is widely used this way in the media, but only in the last 30 years. Phil Hiscock wrote the fascinating tale for skyandtelescope:

The term “blue Moon” has been around a long time, well over 400 years [as in]
“He would argue the Moon was blue” was taken by the average person of the 16th century as we take “He’d argue that black is white.”

So where did our current usage come from? In May 1988, when a second full Moon occurred, radio stations and newspapers everywhere carried an item on this bit of “old folklore,” as they called it…

In 1986, in the Trivial Pursuit Genus II edition, “blue moon” is a question, and their source was a children’s book, The Kids’ World Almanac of Records and Facts (New York, 1985: World Almanac Publications). Then, in the December 1990 edition of Astronomy, Deborah Byrd mentioned the term came from a March 1946 article in Sky & Telescope (page 3)

So while the phrase may not be old folklore, it’s folklore today.

Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

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Prancing_horse_outline.svg.medWith the holidays upon us, suspicious gifts may arrive at your door. You might inspect a horse’s teeth to estimate its age and value. To do this to a horse that is a gift is ungrateful – although, I know something about what it costs to keep a horse, so a sad old plug is a gift you might refuse!

Knowyourphrase says:

John Heywood, who is thought to have lived from the years 1497-1580 C.E., is said to have wrote the saying in a book of his called A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the englishe tongue, 1546:
“Where gifts be given freely—east, west, north or south— No man ought to look a given horse in the mouth.“

Phrase Finder says “As with most proverbs the origin is ancient and unknown,” but also notes that Heywood collected exprssions in common use at the time, and didn’t claim to have coined them.

Heywood obtained the phrase from a Latin text of St. Jerome, The Letter to the Ephesians, circa AD 400, which contains the text ‘Noli equi dentes inspicere donati’ (Never inspect the teeth of a given horse). Where St Jerome got it from we aren’t ever likely to know.

Message Undeliverable

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The special Senatorial election in Alabama is over, and the era of the political earthquake continues.  Voters in this reddest of red states, a year after elevating a clinically narcissistic, linguistically challenged, misogynistic Republican to the country’s highest office, decided for the first time in 25 years to send a Democrat to Washington.  Both parties were quick to get on message about the result.  Both messages are predictably laden with partisan spin, and are a sad indication that neither party has gotten the real message.

Republicans assured us that Doug Jones’s win was not a refutation of Donald Trump or his/their policies, and that Roy Moore would have won easily if not for a Democrat-orchestrated smear campaign.  A more reasonable assessment might be that Alabama voters couldn’t stomach being represented by Moore, an accused sexual predator who also happens to be Elmer Gantry on steroids.  His alleged mall-trolling aside, Moore is a disgusting anachronism even in the Deep South, and his loss was a gift to the Republican party at a time when its image is already layered in mud.  Making the best of President Donald J. Trump has put the GOP on shaky moral and ethical ground, and having to support and defend Moore any longer would have stripped Republicans of any pretense of decency that might be left to them.  They already seemed hellbent on stripping themselves of any vestige of fiscal conservatism by concocting a tax reform plan that drills a trillion-dollar hole in the concept of a balanced Federal budget.  Has the Party of Lincoln become the party of misogyny and hypocrisy?

At the other end of Dream Street, Democrats are telling us that Jones’s victory is a referendum on all things Republican and the first falling rock of a liberal landslide that will return Congress to Dem control no later than 2020.  To prepare for this glorious occasion, the party has initiated a Reform Convention the apparent goal of which is to codify more, not fewer, extreme planks in its platform.  The Dems’ bewildering takeaway from the presidential election continues to be that Hillary Clinton was not liberal enough, and their response will be to anoint an aging, blustering European Socialist the party’s de facto standard-bearer.  Even if Bernie Sanders doesn’t run in 2020, whoever the Democrats nominate will be mouthing his words.  At a time when most Americans want to see more cordiality in Congress, the Democrats seem prepared to declare a full-blown class war.  In a country that pollsters say is still moderately conservative, this approach may get headlines, but will it get votes?  In his victory address Jones, a former US Attorney, sounded like a moderate Democrat.  How will he fit into the Party of Bernie?

So as the world of politics as we thought we knew it provides yet another election night surprise, both Republicans and Democrats appear unable to see beyond their respective dogmas. As both camps retreat further from the political center, are voters to be stuck choosing between government by the Old Testament and take-no-prisoners Populism?

Hopefully not.  A Centrist movement is gaining momentum nationwide, and every time the American electorate is presented with a lesser-of-two-evils choice by the two-party system, that movement gets a little stronger.

How much longer are we going to allow the political extremes to pick our candidates?  I’ll bet that many Alabama Republicans are asking themselves that question right about now.  And if the Bernie Revolution comes to fruition, many Democrats will be asking it as well.

On The Fence

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To sit on the fence is to be undecided between two options. Wikipedia adds an implied motivation:

… inability to decide due to lack of courage. This is farm-fence-mddone either to remain on good terms with both sides, or due to apathy regarding the situation and not wanting to choose a position with which one doesn’t actually agree. As a result, someone who “sits on the fence” will maintain a neutral and non-committal view regarding any of the other parties involved.

I didn’t find many sites suggestingan origin.

Superbeefy listed an amusing story that combines the phrase with an American hero and a wise slave:

During the Revolutionary War, a prominent New Jersey jurist, Judge Imlay, hadn’t yet committed to either the revolutionaries or the loyalists. So when Washington encountered one of Imlay’s slaves he asked him which way the judge was leaning.
Washington was so amused by the response that he retold it enough times for it to become part of our language. He said, “Until my master knows which is the strongest group, he’s staying on the fence.”

The site offers no citation, but I like the story.