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Swine Flu: Deadly, and Politically Incorrect

We already know that the swine flu–RUN FOR THE HILLS!–has the potential to be a pandemic (just like Avian flu, Hong Kong flu, and Cindy Lu Flu before it). If that wasn’t bad enough, now we find out that it’s religiously offensive as well. From the AP:

Israeli official: Swine flu name offensive

JERUSALEM (AP) — The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday.

Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel.

Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.

Scientists are unsure where the new swine flu virus originally emerged, though it was identifed first in the United States. They say there is nothing about the virus that makes it “Mexican” and worry such a label would be stigmatizing.

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“Whatsis, a Dagger I See Before Me Here or Whaaat?”

Today was William Shakespeare’s birthday, and there were festivities throughout the cultural landscape. You might have had some thespians traipsing through your downtown spouting iambic pentameter while wearing baggy shirts and tight hose, all nonny and such. But here in Chicago, Da Mare (give Chuckie his due) went everyone one better: He made today in Chicago Talk Like Shakespeare Day. While many of you may have thought Chicagoans possess mellifluous speaking voices anyway–full, resonant, with nary an “A” held too long or nasally–the proclamation should put to rest any lingering doubts that The City That Works is also The City That Iambs, and the average cop on the street sounds like Sir Ralph Richardson.

But those cadences don’t satisfy me. I had the idea last week, after watching “The Ten Commandments”, that we need to talk more like Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner did in that movie. You know, full of metaphors, ominous portents, and ageless prophecies.

For example, when a waitress asks you if you’d like coffee, you’d respond, “It would take a river of coffee to rouse me from contemplation of your beauty.”

If a cop pulls you over and asks you if you knew how fast you were going, you’d answer, “Fast or slow, someday we must face our maker with the deeds of our existence.”

If your friends ask you out for a beer, you’d say, “I respect jollity and comradeship. The night is long that contains no laughter.”

Try it yourself, but I think it would be good to wait until next Passover/Easter season, or else no one’s going to get the joke. Unless you already shave your head but leave that goofy ponytail on the side, “like a true prince of Egypt.”

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Free of the Torture of Christopher Buckley

I’ve always tried to be generous with Christopher Buckley. Though I don’t know him, he apparently was insightful enough 15 years ago to assert that I was obviously a conservative if I wrote Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I cut him some slack, probably out of professional courtesy/envy. I can’t think of anyone else who gets paid to write satirical novels on a regular basis (though I’ve only managed to finish one of them), so slagging him might collapse the whole genre. And many of his articles are funny, though not as funny as he seems to think.

But something he wrote for The Daily Beast yesterday takes him off the protected list. On the subject of the released torture memos, he upbraids many commentators for getting “sanctimonious” about the fact that the US tortured its prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Gharaib. For those of us who are appalled that our government engages in torture, he takes pains to remind us that:

It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-lo?)

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not.

If he thinks the “captive bad guys” are fleshy repositories about Islamic doomsday plans (especially after being in custody for 6 years), then Buckley’s not as smart as he thinks. (The question of what to do with the men themselves is certainly thorny, now that they will either be tortured more in their home countries or set loose on the streets, living testimony that America is some kind of devil.) If he thinks it’s “sanctimonious” to want to hold people accountable for giving the order to torture, then he’s a suck-up to power.

And since elsewhere in the article he makes joking comparisons between the now-open torture techniques and his rough handling from the senior boys at boarding school, then he’s a turd, pure and simple.

In the days and weeks after 9/11, I remember telling people that we should take every one of those filthy desert barbarians and remove them to places where they could be tortured until they gave up every name in their rolodexes. And if they died in the meantime, small loss. And I bet a lot of other Americans were screaming the same thing. But I’m not a leader. This country would be in ridiculous shape if I were even given an honorary mayorship for the day. But there are smarter, saner heads than mine in Washington. Some were in leadership positions 7-8 years ago. We need to find out who overruled them and made torture our policy against our enemies.

I’m not being naive. I’m aware this country has engaged in secretive torture (and worse) during my lifetime. And at the risk of sounding cynical or paranoid, nothing will ever be done about that. But during this decade, torture has been used as an official tool in the “war on terror,” and I want it investigated, repudiated, degraded, eliminated. Not to have a witch hunt for lower-level ops, but to get to the highest levels, the ones who told the agents in the field, impressed with their machismo in the face of moral uncertainty, to “take the gloves off.” Because when the higher-ups sanctioned torture, they did it in my name as a citizen.

I was ecstatic on the day that Illinois set a moratorium on the death penalty because I didn’t want the state killing people in my name. Regardless of whether it was an effective deterrent for criminals (it isn’t), or whether victims’ families need “closure”, I don’t want Illinois as a policy killing people in my name. It’s too bad it wasn’t done legislatively, but I’ll take it anyway I can.

Sure, people will make political hay out of the torture memos, but such is life. You can get as realpolitik as you want here, but you’re still faced with the question: What’s the right thing to do? If you cast the whole struggle as a battle of civilization vs. barbarism, where did we land? Do you want to look your kid in the eye–or your mother, or John Wayne, or Abe Lincoln–and say, “Yes, some fanatic medievalists hate America, and blew up innocent citizens, so in response we gathered up a bunch of people on the battlefield in that part of the world and tortured them repeatedly over years until they told us some stuff that may or may not be accurate, just to stop the pain, though it wasn’t really torture, more like hazing, really–and it was the right thing to do. We’re all safer now. And they had it coming to them anyway. So let’s move on.”

If that’s how Buckley thinks, then I should be grateful he was honest. Now I don’t have to feel obliged to read any more of his dry satires of Washington. He always seemed too comfortable with the bullshit he was ostensibly making fun of, now we know why. (I’ve always been suspicious ever since I saw a blurb from him on someone’s novel–possibly one by Stephen Fry– praising it as “Trenchantly, tootingly funny.” For that, he deserves a punch in the kiwis and a week chained to Carlos Mencia.)

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Final Spelling Bee Vocab Words

zymurgy – a branch of applied chemistry that deals with fermentation processes (as in wine-making or brewing)

embosk – shroud or conceal, esp. with plants or greenery

dirhinic – affecting both nostrils alike

peroration – a flowery, highly rhetorical speech

pendeloque – a usually pear-shaped glass pendant used for ornamenting a lamp or chandelier

vitraillist – a maker or designer of work in stained glass

anastrophe – inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect

callidity – craftiness, cunning shrewdness

kakistocracy – a government by the worst individuals

meliority – the quality or state of being better

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More Spelling Bee Vocab Words

Work these into your conversations this weekend. IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER!!

turgescent – becoming swollen, distended or inflated

sesquipedalian – characterized by the use of long words

percipience – capacity to sense or come to know or recognize mentally, esp. something that is hidden or obscure

insurrecto – a person who rises in revolt against civil authority or an established government

pecksniffian – hypocritically devout; displaying high-mindedness with intent to impress

nugacious – trifling, trivial

sanguivorous – feeding on blood

exaugural – occuring at the close of a term of office

deglutition – the act or process of swallowing

ramage – the boughs or branches of a tree

(And out of all those words, the only one that was accepted by the WordPress spell checker was percipience. Go figure. If you have percipience, you probably already have.)

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Dept. of Cheap Irony

Was just listening to WXRT this morning when an ad came on for AmeriStar. It had something to do with money, and how knowing your “Mystery Points” will multiply your winnings for the day. Know your Mystery Points, and you’ll find out how to exponentially increase your money.

The name “Ameristar” sounded familiar, and will all the talk about points and money, I thought it was a bank. Sounds like a generic bank name, right?

It ain’t.

It’s really a chain of casinos.

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Saturday Morning “Watchmen”

For weeks, I’ve been promising to take Liam and some of his buddies to the opening weekend of “The Watchmen” for his 14th birthday. Had some reservations about it, especially as the reviews started coming in, mentioning the violence and nudity.

But then I saw this and feel much better about it all. Absolute genius.

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Of Lice and Men

At my daughter’s new school, people aren’t putting their heads together to learn, because of a stubborn outbreak of head lice. It started before Christmas, and since the beginning of the year, the kids have had periodic spot-checks by moms armed with combs and popsicle sticks.

Hats and coats have been occasionally packed in garbage bags for the day, to stop the louses from jumping from coat to coat. And while everyone keeps insisting that this outbreak is not a question of anyone’s hygiene, conversations still don’t proceed very far without a disgusted shake of the shoulders and a vocalized “Ewwww!”

Why do I mention this, besides getting a little shudder out of you? It’s to point out one method of eradicating lice that I hadn’t thought of: Call a professional. Hair Fairies is a nationwide string of kid-friendly hair salons that specializes in inspecting kids’ scalps and getting rid of lice and nits. The first couple times I heard about the service, I had to laugh, but parents have been hiring them because sometimes the lice are hard to recognize. Also, after the first three or four times, the glamour of inspecting a kid’s scalp begins to wear off. We’ve all got better things to do than groom each other like baboons.

All I’m sayin’s, That is a specialty that I never would’ve thought of.

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Upgrading My Job Status

Every time a recession hits, the media are filled with stories about the “New Thrift.” How everyone’s trying to do with less. Around the holidays, the People On the Street say either that everyone on their list is going to get a homemade gift, or that family members are picking names from a hat, or that the interviewee is going to charge up everything on his plastic because what would Christmas be like without a blizzard of expensive presents to fill the aching void in everyone’s lives?

Why is thrift such a difficult concept for so many people? Money spent is, well, money spent. Gone from your pocket, and into the pocket of someone else, someone who is not you. Avoiding that scenario gives life its flavor. As the Americans in the “Greatest Generation” continue to die off, our nation will soon have no one who’ll say things like, “Well, wear it til it wears out” or “Fix that, don’t throw it away” or “Why would ANYONE ever need $300 shoes?” And that will be a dark day.

I’ve been a tightwad my entire adult life, and I’m happy with that. Proud, even. Overcoats from Goodwill, garage sale finds, store-brand cereal (except for Cheerios–every knock-off of Cheerios is pretty horrible, and look like little brown hockey pucks with holes punched in the middle). That’s all fine with me. Writers make lousy money, and the paydays are very inconsistent, so pinching pennies is just part of the job description. Besides, you need to save for things that shouldn’t be skimped on, like education, theater, and good scotch.

But now that everyone’s back in the thrift mode for the foreseeable future, I think I need to upgrade my status, just to stay a step ahead of the herd. Tightwad? Penny-pincher? Not enough. I’ve got my sights set on “Miser”. Literature has given misers a bad name. If Scrooge hadn’t been a miser for the first part of his life, would he have been able to be lavish with Cratchett and his family? I don’t see how, unless he’d charge everything to his American Express. And then he’d get into bad straits when the economy went south, default on his properties, and end up being a drain on the government. So his miserliness saved a lot of people from trouble. At least, that’s my take on it.

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The Last Days Get Interesting

Thank you, President Bush.

I never thought I’d type those words, but this morning he allocated $17B to the domestic auto industry.

“It would worsen a weak job market and exacerbate the financial crisis,” Bush said. “It could send our suffering economy into a deeper and longer recession. And it would leave the next president to confront the demise of a major American industry in his first days of office.”

Sound like good reasons to me. When did he start listening to reason?