The Citizen, 2011-08-11, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2011. PAGE 5.
I own 150 books, but I have no bookcase.
Because nobody will lend me a bookcase.
– Henny Youngman
Well, you can’t have mine, Henny. It’s
chockablock with books – fiction,
non-fiction; high class, middle
class, right down to no class at all. It pains
me to admit that I haven’t read many of
the books that fight for space on my shelves.
I’ll also confess that there’s one book up
there that I never intend to read – or get rid of.
I keep it because the words printed on
its spine never fail to make me smile. It
reads: The Leadership Genius of George W.
Bush.
It was published back in 2003, before
observers realized the full scale of the disaster
that profoundly mediocre man and his posse of
neocon know-nothings inflicted on the planet.
Even so, the fact that there existed a
publisher who actually put ‘genius’ and
‘George W.’ in the same sentence brings a
whole new dimension to the concept of
chutzpah.
The writer Richard Brautigan once mused “I
wonder if what we are publishing right now is
worth cutting down trees to make paper
for the stuff?” Brautigan was ‘Old School’.
He died before the phenomenon of e-books
came to dwell amongst us. No need to kill
trees anymore – just lasso a few hundred
thousand pixels and publish anything you
please.
Exhibit A: Jerome Corsi, who just put out a
book called Where’s the Birth Certificate?” –
referring to Barack Obama’s supposedly
missing paperwork. Trouble is, Obama
produced the certificate specifically to silence
yappers like Corsi. Now, people who favour
tin foil hats and believe Elvis is pumping gas
in Wyoming are the only ones who still think
Obama wasn’t American-born.
Also Mister Corsi, of course. Whose
book is available at finer remainder bins
everywhere.
Which is where you could also find Donald
Trump’s latest literary opus – if it existed. As
late as last month, trade publishing magazines
were a-flutter over the news that the buffoon
with the orange tsunami on his forehead was
hiring a ghostwriter to publish his “policy
book” – outlining the positions he would take
once he was elected President of the United
States.
Except that The Donald suddenly folded his
circus tent and disappeared. Fortunately, no
hack had been hired, so no trees were clear-cut
nor pixels corralled to record Trump’s (latest)
blunder.
At least the ‘short-fingered vulgarian’, as
Spy magazine so memorably dubbed him,
didn’t have to face the indignity of a rejection
slip – which is not something Richard
Wimmer can say.
Never heard of Dick Wimmer? That’s odd.
He was a world record-holding author.
For rejection slips. Wimmer’s first novel,
Irish Wine, was published in 1989 – but not
until it had been rejected by publishers 169
times.
Wimmer was no hack. He taught English
and creative writing, held master’s degrees in
English from Yale and Columbia, and wrote
award-winning screenplays for TV and the
movies.
“It’s probably harder,” observed Wimmer,
“to get a novel published than it is to make a
movie.”
And just to show you how perverse the
business is, when Irish Wine was finally
published (after being tossed back to Wimmer
for 25 years) it got rave reviews from the
critics.
“A taut, finely written, exhaustingly
exuberant first novel” burbled the New York
Times .
Ah, well. Publishers are nothing if not
adaptable. During the Second World War,
somebody at Random House got the bright
idea to publish an inspirational book for the
U.S. forces servicemen and women called The
Ten Commandments. When it came time to
print, however, company bean counters
predicted the page count was too high to make
money for the publisher.
Solution? Cut out 50 per cent of
the commandments. And that’s how A
Treasury of the World’s Best Commandments
came to be.
If I ever find a copy I’m going to add it to
my bookshelf. Right beside The Leadership
Genius of George. W. Bush.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Have B.S., will publish
In a recent interview with Walton’s Brandon
McGavin, he and I talked about his move to
Alberta this fall, where he’ll be attending
Olds College there. The move will, for all
intents and purposes, put his competitive
plowing career on hold for a few years.
After years of representing Ontario at the
Canadian Plowing Championship, he has been
welcomed to compete out west while he’s
there, perhaps earning his way to the Canadian
Plowing Championship to represent Alberta.
McGavin said it would be too tough for him
to represent another province and compete
against Ontario at the national championship.
Even more likely would be that he could even
compete against his cousin, Jacob McGavin,
who is one of the best young plowmen in the
country, there.
But when it was all said and done, McGavin
said he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t dump
his provincial flag for another, despite the fact
that he’s attending college there on a
scholarship he actually won for his best-in-
Canada performance at the 2009 Canadian
Plowing Championship.
Many of us possess the kind of love and
loyalty that McGavin does, we’ve all seen it
and we’ve all seen its bad side. It’s why fights
break out at soccer games and people fight
with one another on the internet. When you put
your heart and soul into something, it’s hard to
turn around and put everything into defeating
the same side you used to give your all for.
That kind of loyalty is the reason contracts
have no-competition clauses, but nowhere is
loyalty as strong as it is in sports. But like
many other things in sports, money can make
people do funny things and sometimes those
lines can be crossed.
One of the fiercest rivalries in sports is
between baseball’s New York Yankees and the
Boston Red Sox. So if a player starts with one,
he endures the wrath of God if he ever ends up
on the other side.
Of course it all goes back to Babe Ruth. Ruth
led the Red Sox to a few World Series titles,
was sent to the Yankees in 1919 where he
became perhaps the greatest baseball player of
all time. And in that time the Red Sox didn’t
feel thrill of victory again until 2004. That left
quite a few years for some bad blood to
develop.
In recent years there have also been a few
turncoats. Johnny Damon helped the Red Sox
win their first World Series in 86 years and
then went to the Yankees. His long hair and
beard led fans to bestow the nickname of
‘Jesus’ upon him, although it was quickly
changed to Judas when he wore the Yankee
pinstripes.
Roger Clemens was another big one. He won
three Cy Young Awards with the Red Sox
before going on a tour of the American League
East division, playing for both the New York
Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays. Red Sox
fans weren’t exactly thrilled when Clemens
went on to win two World Series rings with the
Yankees.
Just look at Stevie Williams, Tiger Woods’s
caddie. Williams asked to tend to Adam Scott’s
golf bag at the British Open while Tiger was
healing from injury. Shortly thereafter,
Williams was relieved of his duties.
Woods was the best man at Williams’s
wedding, but according to Woods, the split had
to happen. He said it was time for a change.
Growing up and playing baseball for the
Pickering Pirates, I could never imagine
donning the uniform of one of our blood rivals
like Whitby or Oshawa, but then again, no one
ever drove a dump truck full of money to my
Brand loyalty
I’m a pretty big literary buff, almost as big
a one as I am a movie buff, and I have to
say that I am scared of the way things are
looking.
One of the biggest jokes among my
similarly literal-minded friends was the idea of
Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984.
For those of you unfamiliar with the idea,
it’s primarily denoted (in my mind anyway) by
replacing a language with a paired down
version of itself to control the populace using
the language.
In 1984, the use of synonyms, for example,
was thought to be superfluous and garnered
more thought than the government considered
was necessary for its citizens.
To that end, the government created the
words plus and doubleplus as a means of
changing a base word.
Something better than good was no longer
excellent, or admirable, or superb or amazing,
it was simply plusGood. If it went beyond that,
it was doubleplusGood.
The idea was to create nothing but
dichotomies as a means of controlling the
population.
There were no longer any varying degrees,
no “shades” of language, there was simply a
positive and a negative.
The Party (the leading government in the
book) also tried to remove negative
connotations. Bad was no longer bad, it was
ungood.
The sunburn that I received at a recent
soccer tournament, under newspeak, would be
doubleplusUngood, or something similar. In
reality, I don’t think that came anywhere near
describing the agony having a tomato-red face
and burning eyebrows really felt like.
So, why am I scared?
Well, the idea behind Newspeak was to rob
the populace of thought, and, more than that,
to make the population only answer in the
affirmative.
They would answer “yes” to whatever was
asked of them because they didn’t have the
tools to say no.
Enter today’s social media.
Looking back, I can’t believe it took me so
long to put these two concepts together.
Perhaps I didn’t want to, perhaps I was
scared of the implications of it, perhaps my
mind was shielding me from the lunacy of the
fact that a good majority of the population was
not only beginning to use newspeak, but that
they had done so of their own will, and more
so than that, they have been trying to get into
programs that allow them to do so.
Maybe my mind was shielding me from the
fact that, in my zeal to become a user of the
newest technologies, I was simply ignoring the
rules learned from every book regarding
totalitarian regimes I had ever laid hands and
eyes on.
I’m speaking of Facebook, Twitter and,
recently, Google+.
All these systems, either by design or by
usage, have adopted a system in which people
are regulated to a positive response.
In Google+, you can hit the +1 button beside
anything you find through Google’s search
engine or Google’s other social services.
In Facebook you can “like” things.
In Twitter, you can ReTweet things, or
rebroadcast them to your friends, and many
people do so with a +1 ahead of it, indicating
their approval of the subject matter.
Why does this bother me? Well it seems that
these people are having their ability to dissent
suppressed by their desire for speed.
The question many are facing, in their day-
to-day lives, is should I take the time to write
an articulate response to what people are
saying, or simply repeat it or endorse it so my
friends can see how I feel about things?
I find that my friends and my younger
family members especially are often choosing
the latter, and, if they do take the time to
respond, their words are truncated or worse,
have been replaced with numbers to indicate
phonetic sounds.
Speed is definitely the order of the day and
while technology will always be developed to
make some process faster, I don’t believe it
should come at the cost of the rich tapestry of
the languages of the world.
Imagine Shakespeare’s sonnets shrunk down
to single word responses between two lovers.
Imagine Tolkien’s fantasy world one of
“LOLs” (Laugh out Loud), “IMHO” (In my
humble opinion) and +1s.
Imagine the greatest works you can
remember reading, now imagine them
replaced with the ridiculous language of the
internet.
This is what scares me. That the children my
generation is giving birth to right now is the
first that will not know proper English first.
They will know how to communicate online
before they know how to have meaningful
discussions in an intellectual forum.
They will know the short-hand of Twitter
and Facebook before they understand the
history of language and words.
They will be denied the opportunity to be
lost in great books and thought-provoking
novels like 1984 because they simply don’t
understand a tome without abbreviations and
+1s.
I fear that, by the time I’ve retired, I’ll be
some sort of antique to be marvelled at.
I’ll be an individual who enjoys writing,
who loves words and who would rather say
“That sounds hilarious” as opposed to a three-
letter shrinking that relates a similar notion,
but one lacking all the imagination of previous
generations.
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
An Orwellian nightmare