Photo reference at the National Review

Liberals think the cover of the new National Review is racist, but as Rich Lowry explains, they’re simply oversensitive and humorless:

You gotta move fast when you’re competing with your fellow hair-trigger PC cops on the left! I take it the theory is that we don’t think Latinas can be wise so we had to make her look somewhat Asian. Or something like that. What these people don’t understand is the entire concept of caricature (or of a joke). Caricature always involves exaggerating someone’s distinctive features, which is all that our artist Roman Genn did with Sotomayor.

He even includes what is, presumably, one of the reference photos Genn used. When someone else points out that it’s odd that they depicted her as Asian, Lowry shot back:

An outraged Huffington Post says we “perplexingly” depict Sotomayor in an Asian manner—apparently not entirely getting the Buddha reference, or Buddha’s association with wisdom. Can they really be this clueless?

The painting in the Google link is, I think we can say with certainty, the one Genn referenced for his cover.  (Compare everything from the neck down.)  In visual terms, then, Lowry’s argument is thus:

Keeping in mind that “[c]aricature always involves exaggerating someone’s distinctive features, which is all that our artist Roman Genn did with Sotomayor,” I think it’s obvious that the National Review didn’t insult Sotomayor.  They merely exaggerated her distinctively slanted eyes—wait, can we compare the photo references for the cover again, only this time zoomed in on the eyes?

As I suspected, the “someone” whose features are being “exaggerated” on the cover is neither Sotomayor nor Buddha, but the man so grand they named a peril after him:

Ave Caesar, rescripturi te salutant!

I do not know whether Fronto should be known as the first nitpicker of language, but as tutor to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he has a good case for the most tenacious (p.129):

To my lord.

Have pity on me, and remove one word from your speech;  I entreat you never to use the word dictio (utterance) when you mean oration.

Farewell, my lord, my immortal glory.  Please give my greetings to your lady mother.

The moral of the story:  one can never escape one’s teachers.  I’m sure Fronto had a red pen.  Stylus.  Thingy.

Unless, perhaps one is Emperor.

To my master.

I shall tomorrow offer my defence of that word, if you remind me.

What’s the Latin for “pwned”?

Are announcers with degrees in broadcast journalism better in the booth than former players?

In the early days of radio and television, baseball announcers fell into their jobs. Mel Allen, “the Voice of the Yankees,” was a lawyer by trade; his partner, Red Barber, caught his break while working as a janitor at a college radio station. (A professor scheduled to read “Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstretics” never showed, so Barber picked up the microphone and read it himself.) Jimmy Dudley majored in chemistry, got drafted and, like Harry Kalas, began his broadcasting career calling intramural games in the South Pacific during WWII. Although all four of them belong to the Baseball Hall of Fame, they were amateurs.

The first great professional announcer, Vin Scully, studied broadcast journalism at Fordham. Following Scully’s success on both coasts, team owners and network executives decided that games were best called by people whose sober, understated delivery betrayed an intimate knowledge of the technical limitations of their equipment. No matter where in America you turned on your radio or television in the 1960s, you were listening to a college graduate whose vocal coach had taught him to speak the smooth, unaccented English of an imaginary Middle America.

With the exception of a few token athletes, like Joe Garagiola and Bob Uecker, by the early 1970s the voices that spoke for the game weren’t the voices of the game. Because the game on the field is so different from the one observed from the booth, I think it best that there be someone up there who, for example, understands in his bones that the depth of field required to keep both the pitcher and the batter (60 feet 6 inches away) in focus makes a 67 m.p.h. curveball look slow even though, were it a car, it would have exceeded the interstate speed limit in ninety-percent of the country.

I would hope that a wise former baseball player, with the richness of his playing experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion about a game situation than someone who hasn’t lived the life. But I’m not so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the game. Many are so capable. Gary Cohen could only play in Soviet Russia—when he picks up a bat, it swing hims—yet he is a tremendous announcer.

However, for someone who didn’t play the game to understand its nuances takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. Personal experiences influence the facts that announcers chooses to discuss. But this is not to say that only former players can understand the game. Sometimes they emphasize their own experience to the exclusion of others, as is the case with Tim McCarver, for whom baseball has not changed one iota since the day he retired in 1979, and Joe Morgan, whose greatness on the diamond is inversely proportional to his awfulness in the booth. For a former player to become a good announcer, he must extrapolate from his experiences into areas which with he is unfamiliar. Because what comes naturally to white, colleged-educated, broadcast journalism majors might not come easy to a poor kid from Oakland nicknamed “Mex.”

This is why the best Supreme Court broadcast team working today consists of Gary, Keith, and Ron.

“this tipping automatically — it’s for the birds”

Warren Harding: Waffle Man

Oh, the things you’ll learn from Google Books:

The Stag Cook Book Written for Men by Men. By Carroll Mac Sheridan, Robert H. Davis [1922]

You know, for a man who apprently knew his way around a kitchen — having once been discovered making sweet, sweet love to Carrie Fulton Phillips on the kitchen table of his Marion, Ohio home — Warren Harding had some pretty unadventurous taste in waffles.  Though I suppose we can grant him some courage (albeit anachronistically) for admitting he liked waffles in the first place.  He’d never hear the end of it if he made the same mistake today.

…Also, Smoot!

…and a recipe for corn bread, from the last bearded man to run for US President on a major party ticket.

Clearly, this is the most excellent cookbook ever.

Deliverance

Churchill in 1940

On this day in 1940, Winston Churchill stepped to the Speaker’s Box in the House of Commons and–his premiership still only weeks old–began telling the House of Commons of the defeat and deliverance of Dunkirk. It was 3:40 pm in the afternoon.

In both 1914 and 1940, Germany’s assault into France and Belgium had met with enormous initial success, penetrating deep into France and sending the defenders back in disarray. In 1940, unlike 1914, there was no saving battle, no resilient resistance at the Marne to save the French capital and throw back the oncoming Germans. Instead, in 1940, the German scythe struck all the way to the English Channel, cutting the defensive lines in half. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, Lord Gort, did what British army commanders had done since time immemorial when threatened with military disaster: he headed for a saltwater port. In this case, it was Dunkirk, but it might as well have been Corunna, or Yorktown. The British believed that they might take off 30-50,000 soldiers before the Germans closed in, but to their surprise and delight, by early June, they had managed to pull off more than 338,000. This was nearly the entirety of the BEF and thousands of French soldiers as well. Dunkirk has become a legend, for the small ships who carried men from the beaches to the larger vessels off shore, to the desperate fight of the rearguard, to the strange two-day German pause in attacks. On June 4th, Churchill rose in the House to explain what had happened. It was to be one more in a series of spectacular speeches that the PM would give that year, speeches which have bequeathed to the English-speaking world a set of resonant phrases.

Further on Sotomayor’s opinion in the disfranchisement case.

I knew I’d written at some length about the disfranchisement case my brother argued, in which Sotomayor ultimately took his side (in dissent, alas), but I only just found it. It’s below the fold and originally appeared here, in 2005.

Now it’s personal familial.

Sotomayor unfit for the Court because she agrees with Rauchway.

“The Young Cons believe the Bible is relatively silent on issues relating to supply-side economics.”

Laughing at the “Young Con Anthem” because neither “Serious C” nor “Stiltz” have skillz is all well and good, but there’s more to their awfulness than the sort of schadenfreude you get watching the first two weeks of American Idol. For the uninitiated:

This breed of rap is all about establishing and maintaining identity, which you do by asserting your authenticity and questioning that of other rappers—either by attacking it whole cloth (coastal feuds) or its legitimacy (street credibility). The Young Cons talk up their own game like some white Wu-Tang. Ideally, these assertions of identity should be such that when they “manufacture poems to microphones, bones fracture.” (Let that play while you work and your dull life will turn into a Jim Jarmusch film.) What makes the Young Cons so tellingly awful is that they sat down to forge a statement of identity, produced something entirely incoherent, then looked upon their words and declared themselves ready for battle. Their awkward juxtapositions and clumsier delivery foreground conservative schizophrenia:

Bail out a business, but can’t protect an infant.

My conservative view is, drill baby drill,
You can say you hate me, but I’m praying for you still.

The Bible says, we’re a people under God,
AIG was hooked up by Chris Dodd.
A classy gift ain’t an Ipod.

Then there’s the lyric people have held up to the most mockery:

Three things taught me conservative love:
Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged.
Saving our nation from inflation devastation,
On my hands and my knees praying for salvation.

They’re not talking about coalitional politics here—the necessity of compromising with constiuency X despite their outlandish positions on Y in order to get disappointed by someone new—they’re claiming as their authentic identity the ideological incoherence of political coalitions. They haven’t put the cart before the horse so much as glued the horse to its side and demanded it be pulled down the mountain; then later, as they sift through the gore and gristle that had been their horse and cart, they turn to us and say, “We meant to do that.”

One last thing: is Scott Johnson “almost certain that this is the first time the word ‘inherently’ has made its appearance in hip-hop” because he can’t understand a word black people say or because he’s never even tried to?

(x-posted.)

Four months, three weeks, and two days of poor arguments.

I have little to say on the murder of Dr. Tiller than hasn’t been covered adequately elsewhere (e.g.).  But two persistent points have been getting on my nerves regarding late-term abortion in which Dr. Tiller had specialized.   So let’s have some data.

How and why Sonia Sotomayor’s parents are not immigrants.

The map below shows, to a considerable extent, why Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It appeared in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s essay, “The Strategic Features of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea,” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for October, 1897—just a little more than a year before Spain ceded the island to the United States.

As you can see Puerto Rico straddled one of the routes to the as-yet-unbuilt canal through the as-yet-nonexistent nation of Panama. It’s pretty prescient, as maps go.

As I say, the map shows why Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It’s another question, of course, as to how Puerto Rico is part of the United States. At the start, the United States let Elihu Root run it; Root thought the people there “have not yet been educated in the art of self-government, or any really honest government.” (It takes a nation of bosses to discourse on readiness for honest government.)

With the Foraker Act of April 12, 1900 (31 Stat. 77), the citizens of Puerto Rico were entitled to “the protection of the United States,” however far that went. They also got an elected legislative assembly, along with a governor and executive council appointed by the US president.

In the 1901 case of Downes v. Bidwell, the Supreme Court found that Puerto Rico was neither independent nor completely incorporated into the United States—which is to say, it ranked somewhere below the territories. It was, the dissenting Justice Melville Fuller protested, “a disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period”. Or, as Julio Henna said, “We are Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.”

Then in 1917, the indefinite period seemed to end. Whereas in the Jones Act of 1916 the US promised eventual independence to the Philippines, in the Jones Act of 1917 the US granted American citizenship to Puerto Ricans. Partly this was for racial reasons; the Filipinos were seen as Asiatics, while in Puerto Rico white people—or, “generally full-blooded white people, descendants of the Spaniards, possibly mixed with Indian blood, but none of them [of] negro extraction”, as Rep. Sereno Payne (R-NY) said—had a 2:1 advantage over blacks. Moreover, unlike the Filipinos, the Puerto Ricans appeared “a peaceable, tractable, intelligent people … [who since] their incorporation into our territory … have never given this country the least trouble”, as Rep. Horace Towner (R-IA) declared.¹

But as José Cabranes notes, though, there was never any idea that this would mean “giving … those people any rights that the American people do not want them to have”, as Sen. Joseph Foraker (R-OH) had declared at the start. Which is to say, for the first time the US had granted citizenship without the possibility of statehood. The indefinite period continued, and continues.

Should Sonia Sotomayor ascend to the Supreme Court, she will by her heritage represent not only the Hispanic experience, but to a degree the experience of being on the receiving end of American empire.

---

¹Not, of course, all of them all the time.

Payne, Towne, and Foraker quotations from José A. Cabranes, “Citizenship and the American Empire,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 127, no. 2 (December 1978): 391-492.

The Value of Grammar

What’s a comma worth? Apparently, in extreme cases, $2.13 million:

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal’s cancellation.

The controversial comma sent lawyers and telecommunications regulators scrambling for their English textbooks in a bitter 18-month dispute that serves as an expensive reminder of the importance of punctuation.

Now to convince my students…

via Tidbits

“It’s remarkable, what we’re unable to do as a country.”

That’s what David Simon of The Wire says on Radio 4′s Start the Week, talking about the need for New Deal programs for American inner cities, the impossibility of legalizing drugs, and—briefly—about Katrina’s effect on New Orleans.

This episode also has Antony Beevor on D-Day; it’s a good ’un.

Demons vs. definitions.

(After the Sullivanche of the past two days, I now do my best to drive away the traffic armed only with the PSR.  Part 1 of 2.)

The American Association of Philosophy Teachers recently sent around an e-mail inviting papers on how to teach early modern philosophy and suggested the following question:

Can one include Spinoza’s “Ethics” without creating the impression that his “Ethics” is mere metaphysics?

The AAPT wants experienced professors of many years to present so that younger professors may learn.  That rules me out from presenting,  but I still have an answer to that question, and, hmm, is this a blog I see before me?

The short answer:  Yes, but it takes a little bit of work.  Today I’ll describe the problem; later (probably next Monday) I’ll give my steps towards a solution.