Neologisms

Writers like words, and speculative fiction writers in particular
like to make them up.

― Zara Poghosyan

Children of the '60s will be happy to learn The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, published this week, includes the word grok.

   

Grok—meaning "to perceive or understand fully"—was coined by sci-fi novelist Robert A. Heinlein. His Hugo-winning Stranger in a Strange Land was a staple among readers in the '60s—even among those who, like me, didn't much care for science fiction. 

Along with The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch-22, the Library of Congress has named Stranger in a Strange Land one of the "Books That Shaped America."

The novel recounts the adventures of Valentine Michael Smith, a super-cool Martian who can't comprehend why Earthlings act so desperately. 

Despite enjoying a psychic's abilities, Smith is a naïf—no match for the cunning creatures he meets during his brief visit to Earth. 

But Smith does manage to leave one lesson behind: he teaches Earthlings to grok, to know and love all beings, the way God does. Literally (in Martian) to "drink in" all creatures great and small.

Sci-fi writers like Heinlein seem gifted in their ability to mint neologisms. 

And while not all sci-fi writers' verbal concoctions come into vogue, plenty do.

Among the latter are these gems—all coined by sci-fi novelists, playwrights and screenwriters, and all in common use today: outer space, deep space, cyberspace, hyperspace, warp speed, zero gravity, blastoff, spacesuit, time machine, scanner, transporter, ray gun, robot, genetic engineer, alien, extraterrestrial, replicant, computer virus, computer worm, fanzine, flash mob, unperson, thought police, Big Brother and Frankenstein.

One Man's Trash

 

"The best ideas come as jokes," Mad Man David Ogilvy said. 

Better than most, Ogilvy understood humor's power in advertising.

So I wonder what he'd think of the postcard that arrived in our mailbox yesterday.

I've worked for and with a lot of creative directors and can't imagine a single one allowing this garbage to be seen by the client, much less the public.

But, hey, the proof's in the pudding. 

Maybe the response to this masterpiece will set records.

In that spirit, I offer the advertiser, EG, my tagline:

Because chocolate just goes to her hips

Serial Killer

There is no comma between the penultimate item in a list and "and"/"or," unless required to prevent ambiguity.

— Oxford University Style Guide

The serial comma—also known as the Oxford comma—is the comma often needed before the conjunction at the end of a list.

When you omit the serial comma—as Rudy has—you kill the meaning of your statement.

You might argue Rudy saved a stroke. 

But he induced a stroke among his followers, by pitting the party of Reagan, Trump and the traitors (whoever they are) against that of Lincoln.

A single comma would have been the life-saver.

While Rudy's sin of omission is exquisite, my all-time favorite remains this book-dedication by a fellow right-winger:

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Although you might think so, the book's author wasn't Mike Lindell. 

The author merely shared similar parentage.

Be Careful Who You Cancel

You are a den of vipers and thieves.

— Andrew Jackson

My high-school history teacher, Mr. Gray, dwelled for more than a month on the battle over banking between Jefferson and Hamilton. His point was to prove our nation was built on greed.

So I was troubled to learn yesterday that Joe Biden will rush to replace Andrew Jackson's portrait on the $20 bill with that of Harriett Tubman.

Don't misunderstand me: Tubman is one of our country's noblest heroes. Tribute to her is long overdue. But Tubman's portrait should replace Hamilton's on the $10 bill, not Jackson's on the $20.

If Tubman cancels anyone, it should be Hamilton.

Hamilton, after all, put us on the path to concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few. As the architect of our "rigged" banking system, Hamilton is the father of the 1%.

Jackson, on the other hand, went to the mat to take Hamilton's plutocratic system apart, calling its advocates "vipers and thieves." 

The champion of the little guy, Jackson was in fact so hostile toward the rigged system, Congress censured him in 1834 and eventually reinstated Hamilton's bank.

In my view, Jackson, friend of the forgotten, doesn't deserve to be removed from our money; Hamilton does.

If you don't think he was sleazy, consider just one of Hamilton's maneuvers.

In 1789, he helped spread the lie that the Treasury would default on the $44 million in war bonds held by veterans of the American Revolution. 

At the same time, Hamilton advised his rich cronies to follow his lead and scoop up the "worthless" paper for pennies on the dollar. 

Once he and his cronies owned all the bonds, Hamilton ordered the Treasury to pay off them in full. 

Cha-ching 1%! Cha-ching.

The Cure

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country—and we haven't seen them since.

— Gore Vidal

History—and Americans' ignorance thereof—keeps coming up in post-January 6 discussions. For good reason. Research by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni finds Americans know little about the subject. To wit:

• 33% of adult Americans do not know when the American Revolution took place
  
  
• 50% believe the Civil War occurred before the Revolution
  
  
• 78% cannot name the source of the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people”
  
  
• 80% cannot describe the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation
  
  
• 71% do not know what the Reconstruction was
  
  
• 33% do not know FDR introduced the New Deal
  
  
• 58% do not know when the Battle of the Bulge took place
  
  
• 41% cannot identify the name Auschwitz
  
  
• 29% do not know the title of the national anthem

"The knowledge of all American history has become a wasteland," the researchers said. "The reason is that we are no longer teaching it."

Ordinarily I complain about society's problems, without offering solutions; but today you're in for a treat. I know the way to restore our national knowledge deficit, and it isn't some billon-dollar program. Teachers merely have to assign their students the seven novels composing Gore Vidal's "Empire Chronicles."

Vidal liked to call our country, aptly, the "United States of Amnesia." We can cure that disease for only $25 per person—the cost of a farting Donald Trump doll. Call it the $25 cure for amnesia.

The novels composing Vidal's series are Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. and The Golden Age. 

I've read each one more more than once and would best describe the novels as suspenseful, tapestry-like, and deliciously lurid.

• Burr recounts the life of the roguish Aaron Burr as he's caught up in the struggle between the power-hungry planter Thomas Jefferson and the craven financier Alexander Hamilton.

• Lincoln follows our greatest president through his entire time in the White House as he battles ruthlessly to preserve the Union and curtail the damage wrought by a crazy wife.

• 1876 recounts "America's worst year," when the winner of the popular vote in the presidential election—Democrat Samuel Tilden—loses the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

• Empire takes you through the era of the egomaniacal expansionists William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

• Hollywood provides a behind-the-scenes look at Woodrow Wilson's time in office, with walk-on appearances by Charlie Chaplin, James Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Fatty Arbuckle.

• Washington, D.C. portrays real-world politics during the Great Depression and World War II through the eyes of a political family not unlike the novelist's own.

• The Golden Age delves even deeper into the era, providing an inside look at the political machinations of FDR and the dawning of the Cold War.

Should you doubt the importance of my inexpensive cure for amnesia—and many of the nation's other ills—consider the words of JFK:

“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country. Without such knowledge, he stands uncertain and defenseless before the world."

Humiliation

You mustn't humiliate the opposition. 
No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated.

— Nelson Mandela

Humiliate is a 16th century word borrowed from the Latin humiliare‎, meaning "to abase." Humiliare, in turn, came from humus, meaning "dirt."

When hate flairs, we love to shame each other, to grind each other into the dirt.

In England in the 1660s, journalists who offended any gentleman would be publicly shamed in the coffeehouses and doused with boiling-hot coffee.

In Germany in the 1930s, Nazis would force Jews to kneel on the sidewalks and scrub anti-Nazi graffiti off storefronts, to the merriment of the goyish passersby.

In France in the 1940s, women who'd had sex with German soldiers during the occupation had their heads shaved in public, before being paraded through their home towns and villages.

In America in the 1950s, Blacks were regularly barred from entering restaurants, stores, and hotels. Attempting to do so risked public threats, insults, and beatings.

On social media right now, anyone who voices support for Joe Biden is hounded by "trolls," whose favorite tactics are to name-call and conspire to get the poster "cancelled" by the platform. (It happens to me routinely.)

Conservatives love to weaponize humiliation. While they'd deny that browbeating their opponents is a source of sadistic pleasure, their proud pronouncements say otherwise; for example (this statement from a proponent of caning children):

"Once we realize that a world of only positive reinforcements is wondrous but not within human reach, we must reluctantly turn to disincentives, sanctions, and other forms of punishment."

To understand why conservatives relish humiliation would require a battalion of psychoanalysts. Freud believed we all shared memories of prehistoric cannibalism that, under the sway of the "death instinct," we channel in the modern era into aggression.

I'm content simply to say conservatives as a lot are sick puppies.

As a political weapon, humiliation works only when its target has the temerity to think he, she or they is better than dirt. 

But self-worth among groundlings is a virtue conservatives despise, and so turn their hatred into efforts to humiliate their opponents—to grind them back into the dirt from whence they came.

Although it's hard, I for one hope to refrain from humiliating outspoken conservatives in the future, because it's the humane course of action. 

As Biden said yesterday, "We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we show a little tolerance and humility."

But I also hope to refrain from using humiliation as as weapon because it's prudent.

For as Mandela warned, "No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated."

Helter Skelter 2.0

Fifty years ago, we recoiled in horror at the mesmeric abilities of a devious, two-bit con who'd concocted a fable about an impending civil war—a fable so powerful, it incited mass murder. 

The fabulist was named Charles Manson; his fable, "Helter Skelter." On the strength of the fable, a California judge condemned Manson to death, although he'd steered clear of the killings.

Another con is at large today. The fable he spins is as crazy as "Helter Skelter" and—to suggestible followers—just as compelling.

Will the law allow him to remain at large?

An Inauguration Memory

Memories keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. 

— Saul Bellow

A vivid personal memory: K Street on a bitter-cold January evening; a driving snowstorm dims the streetlights; no sounds but the wind and the murmuring pinkish sky; a column of long black limousines silently snakes by, bound for the White House or some nearby hotel. I was working late at a video studio, editing a show my client needed in the morning; I had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. It was 1985.

Ronald Reagan's second inauguration was history's coldest. The temperature that morning was 4° below zero, the wind-chill, 20° below. Reagan delivered his speech inside the Capitol Rotunda, before an audience of Congressmen; no crowds gathered outside, for fear of getting frostbite. 

The parade down Pennsylvania Avenue was also cancelled, the president saying, "the health and safety of those attending and working at the event must come before any celebration;" but in truth it was Reagan's health and safety that were in jeopardy.

His advisors had reminded the 74-year-old Reagan—America's oldest president—of William Henry Harrison's 1841 inauguration. On that day, Harrison spent five hours standing on the Capitol steps in a freezing rain. The event left Harrison with a nasty head cold; and 30 days later, he died of pneumonia.

Reagan's inaugural committee had given away 140,000 tickets to the swearing-in and sold 25,000 tickets to the parade. None of them was used.

When asked by reporters at a photo shoot what would be different about his second term, Reagan replied, “Well, I hope it will be warmer.”

Beware the Devil's Bargain

What fools these mortals be.

— William Shakespeare

Five years ago, I spent three lovely winter weeks in Cape May, New Jersey, helping to care for my then-preschool-age granddaughter Lucy, while her dad was on an extended business trip.

Every morning while Lucy was in school, I'd grab a joe and a buttered bagel at a café near the county courthouse, and sit and read another front-page story in the local paper, The Press of Atlantic City, about the ruin wrought upon the region by a bankrupt casino developer named Donald Trump.

As story after story told, Trump had systematically cheated small-time building and hotel-service contractors throughout South Jersey, leaving them with nothing for their efforts but unpaid bills, insurmountable debts, and suicidal wishes.

Trump's biography as a businessman, we've since learned, is the tale of a consummate chiseler and all-time loser. Atlantic City was just one brief chapter of the tale.

The chiseler-in-chief has just added a fresh chapter to his biography, as he stiffs the fools who stormed the Capitol on his behalf.

Like those South Jersey contractors, they'll lose everything, while Donald remains safely ensconced on his golden throne.

Beware the devil's bargain!

UPDATE FEBRUARY 4, 2021: Trump is so despised in Atlantic City, the mayor successfully auctioned off ringside seats for the implosion of his abandoned casino later this month.

Comeuppance

An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum.

— George Bernard Shaw

That momentous sound you hear is history's escapement as the pendulum swings back toward economic justice. I didn't think I'd live long enough to hear it. I'm glad I did.

Ninety years ago, the GOP—the party of the rich—handed FDR an economy in ruins. But by restraining the rich, FDR turned that economy around, rebuilding it on the basis of the New Deal and the nation's mobilization against fascism.

The New Deal epoch endured through seven more administrations—those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter—until Reagan reversed the pendulum. 

Reagan and the GOP ultimately ruined the economy again, in the process awarding trillions of dollars to one of every ten Americans, while driving two of every ten into poverty. 

It took five more administrations—those of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump—to end Reagan's epoch; but, clearly, it's over. Trump made that certain.

Americans need good government—and to again deal the rich their comeuppance.

Time to Abridge Bullshit

The people shall not be deprived of their right to speak, write or publish their sentiments.

— James Madison

Although the Senate rewrote Madison's draft of the First Amendment before its ratification, no one questioned that free speech is a natural right in 1789.

Six decades earlier, a young Philadelphia printer, Ben Franklin, had said as much. "When men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard," he wrote.

Franklin didn't worry that some opinions are wrong, because "when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."

Free speech is a bedrock principle, as American as apple pie. Or is it?

The Founding Fathers never watched reality TV, where falsehoods trump the truth. Had they, the First Amendment might read: 

Congress shall abridge the freedom to bullshit.

I hate to say it, but our reality TV-star president has forced America to abridge bullshit. As we've seen—like raw milk, angel dust, and flammable pajamas—bullshit is bad for you. It ought to be outlawed.

Liberals will flinch at this suggestion, I know; perhaps some conservatives, as well. Tough. We're neck deep in a national emergency, brought on Trump and his despotic stooges and abetted by the traditional and new media's addiction to fair play.

It's time Trump's league of bullshit artists were muzzled.

And not only muzzled. 

It's time—lest we forget—they were tarred for their chronic bullshit.

If they're not branded as liars and propagandists, they'll resort to "communicative silence" (kommunikatives Beschweigen)—the convenient path closet Nazis took after World War II, when these German "patriots" permitted Hitler's narrative to persist, albeit in the shadows.

To Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Navarro, McEnany, Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Graham, McConnell, Jordan, Cruz, Gaetz, Johnson, Hawley and the rest of your ruthless, insurrectionary gang: It's time to shut up, time to fade away. 

Before we're trampled by your herd of incels, we will repress you and tar you, because you pollute public discourse with your unrelenting bullshit.

Lost Lingo

If it works, it's obsolete.

— Marshall McLuhan

Books, newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets were the 18th century's social media platforms; and printers, the century's Zuckerbergs.

To operate a press, printers would first assemble blocks of type inside a wooden frame, known as a coffin. They'd then place the coffin on a stone bed, add a page of paper on top, and crank the lever beside the bed to slide it under the press. Lastly, they'd screw the press down onto the paper, imprinting an image on the page.

When not pressing pages, 18th-century printers set type, the labor-intensive process preparatory to printing. To save some of that labor, they borrowed the Ancient Roman practice of substituting a graphic for the word "and" in written documents. ("And" is the third most common word in the English language.) Printers called their graphic—&—the ampersand, a corruption of "per se and," which was teachers' name for the graphic. (Eighteenth-century teachers insisted students pronounce the one-letter words "a" and "I" as "per se a" and "per se I" and demanded all students pronounce "&" as "per se and." Per se, as it still does, meant "by itself.")

Used type in the 18th century was tossed into a wooden box called a hell, often by an apprentice called a devil. (The printer's art, three centuries earlier, was considered black magic, because the pages were uncannily uniform. Many demonic terms stuck.) 

Type was scarce and expensive at the time, so to return it to service quickly printers would cast metal plates of entire pages. They called the plates stereotypes. French printers, instead of preserving entire pages as plates, cast frequently used phrases. They called these money-saving casts clichés, from clicher, meaning "to click,” the sound the cast phrases made when they were assembled in the coffin.

Such thrift was common among 18th-century printers. So was piracy. The printer of James Granger's Biographical History of England included blank pages throughout, to encourage artists to "extra-illustrate" the 35-volume work. Artists would interleave original drawings and paintings alongside the parts of the text their patrons found intriguing, adding "extra illustrations" to otherwise plain books. Enterprising printers—smelling money to be made—soon began to swipe images from other books and add them to copies of Granger's Biographical History, a practice they named grangerizing.

74 Million Cop Killers

If you were blind, you wouldn't be guilty.

— Jesus Christ

If you're among the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump, you're not blind to what you've done.

You have aided and abetted the murder of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.

You claim you're for law and order, but you're really a bully, a lawbreaker, a cop killer.

You are a fascist.

You say you're a conservative, but you support a radical strongman. 

You're anti-establishment, anti-liberal, anti-socialist, exclusionary, and nationalistic. 

You think you've been victimized and, by dint of genes alone, that you're superior to everyone who's different from you.

You're a fascist.

In the 1940s, people like you threatened Western civilization. My parents and their families fought and suffered, to put an end to that threat.

Now it remains for the democracy-loving portion of my generation, and my children's, to put an end to the threat you represent.

Rest assured, we will.

NOTE: Fascism derives from the Italian fascio, meaning "bundle." In Ancient Rome, the fascio symbolized power. Mussolini borrowed the word to name the "Blackshirts," the militia he founded. The Blackshirts specialized in roaming the streets, beating and murdering political opponents.

Helpless

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed that fascism is the result of bad parenting.

Parental abuse, neglect and repression combine, Reich said, to produce fascists, deeply warped individuals who are "apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, and good and adjusted, in the authoritarian sense." 

Fascists are, in addition, incapable of finding love and sexual satisfaction. Today we call such frustrated people incels.

Donald Trump and his followers are proof of Reich's beliefs.

Sadly, there's little, if anything, we can do to change the minds of Trump's followers. Their parents shaped them years ago to fall into line behind authoritarians. They may deserve pity; but not tolerance. They're helpless, loveless, diabolical, and—for the most part—beyond our reach. Our best course it to cede them that bleak corner of the playground where the civilized rest of us never wish to tread. Alaska comes to mind.

"The more helpless the 'mass-individual' has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the Führer," Reich said. 

"The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the Führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the 'national heritage,' of the 'nation,' which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising 'the masses' and confronting them as an individual.

"The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant Führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance."

God help us, and grant us the serenity to accept what we cannot change.

Leg Up

We live in a world of unused knowledge and skill.

— H. G. Wells

I had surgery a week ago to repair my shattered leg. 

Moments before I was rolled into the operating room, the orthopedist pulled a purple Sharpie from his pocket and scribbled his initials—DMT—on my thigh.

The doctor's simple act gave him a leg up, by driving to zero the chance he'd operate on the wrong limb.

SharpieGate aside, we need more Sharpie-wielders in our lives. 

Simple signoffs like my surgeon's (which he would call a "wrong-site protocol") protect us from human error.

We especially need more Sharpie-wielders in government, where human error now runs rampant.

The past few weeks have proven—as if we needed proof—that conservative-run governments are derelict. A freshly minted example reveals how much so.

Boris Johnson's government this week issued a £2 coin to commemorate H.G. Wells, author of The War the Worlds.

 

Wells fans are in an uproar. 

They're demanding to know how the government could have added a leg to the writer's famous "monstrous tripods," depicted on the coin.

“Can I just note that the big walking machine on the coin has four legs?" one fan said. "Four legs. The man famous for creating the Martian tripod. How many people did this have to go through?”

“It’s nice to see Wells memorialized, but it would have been nicer for them to get things right,” another said. “A tripod with four legs is hard to comprehend."

To date, Johnson's government has failed to explain or apologize for the blunder. 

Clearly, it doesn't have a leg to stand on.

My Second Act

There are no second acts in American lives.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Second acts fascinate me. So it's pleasing to learn my own encore has been featured in Carl Landau's Pickelball Media.

Thanks, Carl.

And sorry, Scott.

You were wrong.

Above: Tangerines. Oil on canvas. 16 x 12 inches. Sold.

Follow the Money

A grifter scams people. 

Grifter is a 20th century Americanism that stems from the English word graft, meaning “the obtaining of profit by shady means, especially bribery, blackmail, or the abuse of power.”

Grifters abound, particularly on the right.

Trump's "Stop the Steal" is a scam, and it turns out Michael Flynn's endorsement of QAnon is, too. 

QAnon itself is a scam.

Before there was QAnon, there was Glenn Beck, another grifter. 

Beck monetized right-wing conspiracy theories, prying millions from the pockets of gullible followers. In a bold show of cynicism, Beck named his company Mercury Radio Arts after Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air, whose 1939 broadcast of War of the Worlds famously faked out gullible fans.

Beck was a grifter, and proud of it.

The next time you hear another crackpot claim about Dominion Voting or Lizard People, remember to follow the money.

That phrase came from the late William Goldman's script for the 1976 film "All The President’s Men," the political thriller about Watergate.

Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein that if they hoped ever to understand how Washington worked, they should "Follow the money."