Fossils

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson famously called language "fossil poetry."

Like a seaside cliff, he said, language comprises fossilized images—out-of-date tropes that have "long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."

Some words are obsolete except when we use them in idioms. 

Linguists, too, call these words "fossils."

We'd never use them otherwise—and don't even know what the words mean.

A bumper

A few examples include:

Bumper. We're comfortable saying, "Farmers enjoyed a bumper crop last season," but we'd never say, "Everyone, raise your bumper!" A bumper was a 17th-century tavern glass, so called because a drinker would bump it down on the bar when offering a toast. First, however, the barkeep had to fill it to the brim with grog. The word eventually became synonymous with "voluminous."

A spiked horseshoe

Roughshod. We say, "The backfield ran roughshod over the defense," but we'd never say, "The players were roughshod in Adidas." In the 16th century, roughshod referred to spiked horseshoes. The spikes improved traction, but were brutal on fallen infantry when the cavalry overran them. With the addition of "run," the word came to mean to "clobber" or "punish."

A pinking

Pinking. We're comfortable saying, "My pinking shears have orange handles," but we'd never say, "I was pretty drunk when I got this pinking." A 17-century word, a pinking was a decoration on a body part—in other words, a tattoo (to pink someone meant to "pierce" him). To prevent bad luck, sailors in the British navy would cover themselves with "pinkings," but the word over time came to refer only to the tool we use to add decorative edges to cloth.

Wend. We say, "I'll wend my way home," but we'd never say, "I'll wend to the office on Monday." The verb wend, meaning to "go," dates to the 13th century, when people wended everywhere—the field, the barn, the privy, the square, the church, the market, the castle, the theater—but today we only "wend our way." We never just wend.

Full of sleight

Sleight. We'd readily say, "McConnell performed a sleight of hand this week," but we'd never say, "McConnell is full of sleight." Sleight is a 14th-century word that meant "cleverness," "nimbleness," "cunning," or "trickery." It was the latter sense from which we got the idiom sleight of hand.

Lots of words that grow obsolete never fossilize; they merely fade. A few examples are:

Sockdolager. We'd say an incomparable person was an "original," but in the 19th century she'd be a sockdolager. (Sockdolager was the last word Lincoln ever heard spoken.)

Pumblechook

Pumblechook. We'd call Bernie Madoff a "crook," but in the 19th century he'd be a pumblechook. The word came from Great Expectations, where Dickens described the despicable character Uncle Pumblechook as the "basest of swindlers."

Shoddyocracy. We'd say, "Champlain Towers is shoddy," but we'd never say, "Florida is home to the shoddyocracy." In the 19th century, an entire class of people enriched themselves by selling shoddy merchandise. Newspapers gave these pumblechooks a collective name: the shoddyocracy.

Shrift. Before they were executed, 14th-century felons were permitted a shrift—a confession to a priest. But it had to be brief, so the mob's entertainment wasn't delayed. We still know the word from the idiom short shrift, which means "little to no consideration." But the word has otherwise faded from use.

Morphiated. Cocaine and morphine abuse were common in the 19th century (think of Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes). A user who we'd say is "stoned" was in the 19th century morphiated. I would not feel so all alone: everybody must get morphiated.

Linguists used to believe words had a shelf-life of from 8,000 to 9,000 years; but, as they have recently discovered, 23 fossil words are truly ancient—more than 15,000 years old. One study calls these words, preserved for millennia with "remarkable fidelity," ultraconserved.

Deriving from "Proto-Eurasiatic"—humanity's first language—the ultraconserved words include mother, brother, man, fire, ashes, and worm.

That last word sounds fishy to me.

The Suspense is Killing Me

On a technical note, Google will suspend its Blogger email delivery service on Wednesday. (Blogger is the platform I use for Goodly.)

Beginning July, Goodly subscribers will receive emails from me weekly. 

Each will contain links to my newest posts.

Sadly, several great blogs that I read have decided to shutter due to Google's short-sighted move.

The lesson for content producers: don't build your house on "rented" land.

Why Google is suspending Blogger's email delivery service is a mystery, until you realize that shareholders are nervous about the company's profitability.

It's plowing billions into more servers and "moonshots" such as the driverless car—billions it may never earn back.

Will Blogger go on the cost-cutting block next?

Above: Paranoia by Gregory Guy. Acrylic on canvas. 24 x 18 inches.

Time to Choose

If we're to avoid a fascistic America, Democrats have to choose.

The letter E or the letter U?

Will we defend or defund the police?

Yesterday, my wife and I drove through a dicey part of Wilmington at dusk.

It was Friday and summery, the sweet twilight air the proverbial "balm for the soul." 

All the neighbors were out of their rowhouses, gathered on the stoops and street corners and in front of the packaged goods stores.

On one empty corner, we saw a lone uniformed cop in a centurion-like pose.

He was keeping the peace as best he could.

He didn't look happy.

I wouldn't have his job for the world.

But I'd readily fund his salary—and the salaries of hundreds of more young centurions.

Armed gangs this week have turned Wilmington into Dodge City.

Yesterday, the mayor met with residents to condemn the killing of a 14-year-old on Tuesday and seek advice for ending gun violence.

Twenty other people have been shot in the past 25 days. 

If three more are shot next week, a new city record will be set for most shootings in a month.

And it's only June.

The mayor wants Delaware to repeal the state's open-carry law and plans to pump $55 million unto new streetlights and surveillance cameras.

Why not more cops?

Shootings across the country have become more lethal and brash.

Shooters no longer care if they're seen by witnesses; snitches are nonexistent; community organizers have taken to crouching in the hallways; and handguns have become as common as sneakers.

Why would we defund the police—worsening the bloodbath while we pave the road for Trump.

Democrats have to choose. Now.

They have to take a chance on a letter.

Up in Arms

Where there is power, there is resistance.

― Michel Foucault

On Easter 1680, Louis XIV visited Saint-Riquier, where he touched 1,600 of his subjects, certain his "royal touch" would protect them from scrofula (the disease we call TB).

The royal touch today is administered not by a king, but an underling; and not in a cathedral, but a convention center.

And it's a tad more likely to work.

But, as French philosopher Michel Foucault said, where there's power, there's resistance.

AP yesterday reported that vaccinated Americans accounted for only 0.1% of the 853,000 Americans hospitalized for Covid-19 last month.

That means 99.9% of the Americans hospitalized were not vaccinated—"a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been," AP concludes.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told AP that nearly every case of Covid-19 last month was "entirely preventable” and that the 18,000 deaths due to the virus were "particularly tragic."

But, even though 603,000 Americans have already died from Covid-19, as of today 37% of American adults remain unvaccinated. 

The vaccine-resistance movement comprises the nation's most bone-headed Republicans plus a creepy coalition of comparable nincompoops (including Nazis, New-Agers, New Black Panthers and Nation of Islamists).

Personally speaking, I have no problem with these folks' foolishness.

Thanks to them, the medical device stocks I own are on fire (up nearly 36%). 

If an epidemic breaks out, I'll laugh all the way to the bank.

But the sociologist in me wants to know why these fools resist the royal touch.

The answer, I believe, is obvious.

They think that they're they're victims of government overreach; that they live unrestrained by chemistry, physics, history, and the law; and that their non-compliant gestures should earn them a merit badge.

More to the point, they think they're important.

"The world is full of contention and contentious people," John D. MacDonald said.

"They will not tell you the time of day without their little display of hostility. It is more than a reflex. It is an affirmation of importance."

These self-important fools do not understand biopolitics.

Norms govern us today, not kings. That's biopolitics.

Norms restrict our freedoms for the sake of society.

Norms dictate we don't double dip; spit in the punchbowl; pee in the pool; poop on the sidewalk.

Norms mean we submit to hygiene control.

From the biopolitical point-of-view, the Covid-19 vaccine is merely an element of hygiene control. 

It's merely another norm.

Complying with norms isn't being servile; it's being normal. 

It isn't a surrender of civil rights; it's a surrender to civility. 

And if you consider our six-million-year barbarous past, civility is pretty goddamn non-conformist.

Maybe it's the civil people who deserve the merit badges.

So, if you want to flout the norms of hygiene control, act like an ape, and risk your family's and your Republican neighbors' lives, go ahead. Don't take the shot.

I say more power to you.

I'll use my dividends to buy more stock.

At My Earliest Convenience

I can neither pinpoint the origin nor attribute the first use of the expression "at my earliest convenience." 

But I can say with authority it makes me scream to hear it.

And I hear it all the time.

Sure, common expressions regularly creep into the nonsensical, and no one bats an eyelash.

People once said, "I couldn't care less," to express indifference. 

Now they say, "I could care less."

They say "irregardless," when there's no such word.

They say "my kids' PJs are inflammable," unaware they're upsetting child protective services.

Those slips are innocuous.

But this bastardization of language is different.

It's tactless, malicious, officious and moronic. Obnoxious. Inhospitable. Boorish. Befuddling. And most of all, belligerent.

When did it creep into use? 

And why didn't somebody stop it?

When I hear "at my earliest convenience," I hear "me, me, me—it's all about me."

Screw you.

The blog Grammarly would excuse innocent users of the expression, claiming the phrase "sounds impolite" but hardly amounts to a "grievous business faux pas."

Wrong.

It's a grievous business faux pas. 

Use of the phrase should be punishable by imprisonment.

Recurring use, by hard labor.

 

Customer service in America has already tied for last place with customer service in Stalinist Russia. 

In the present environment, I don't need to hear that you'll get back to me at your earliest convenience. 

That says "never." 

As in, "Get lost. Take a hike. Go, and never darken my towels again."

Grammarly recommends business people who use the phrase "at my earliest convenience" alter it slightly to be more specific. 

"Please leave your name and number and I'll get back to you within 178 hours." 

I recommend they go jump in a lake.

Now. 

When it's convenient to me.

The customer.

POSTSCRIPT FOR EMPLOYERS: Create a document for your employees like the one found here. Threaten them with dismissal for any use of "at my earliest convenience."

Free Lunch

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

— Milton Friedman

Pioneers of the "loss leader," late-19th-century saloonkeepers offered thirsty customers "free lunch."

Economist Milton Friedman popularized the term a century later by propounding that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." (He didn't coin the expression. He swiped it from critics of the New Deal.)

But when it comes to tasty business clichés, Friedman was wrong. 

Below is a free smorgasboard of them.

We use them every day. 

Who'd have thought what these terms originally meant?

Across the board. In the 19th century, racehorses' odds were displayed on "tote boards" (huge calculators) at the track. When a gambler wanted to back a horse to win, place or show, he placed a bet "across the board."'

The Big Cheese himself,
William Howard Taft

Big cheese. In colonial India, Hindus used the word chiz to mean "thing." British soldiers simply added "big" when a thing was important. The term wasn't applied to people until 1911, when President William Howard Taft appeared at the National Dairy Show in Chicago, where he was invited to slice up and sample an enormous wheel of cheese. As a result, the 350-pound Taft became the world's first "big cheese."

Coach. In the 19th century, you took a coach when you wanted to get somewhere fast. Schools began to use the term to denote tutors, who accelerated students' learning.

Dead wood. Shipbuilders in the 16th century often placed loose timber blocks in the keel of a ship as ballast. Sailors called the excess cargo, which slowed the ship down, "dead wood."

Even steven. The first Afrikaners called an English penny a "steven." When they settled a debt, they would say they were "even steven."

Facilitate. In the 13th century, English speakers borrowed the French verb faciliter, which means to "ease," and turned it into a noun. Facility meant "gentleness." If you're gentle, you don't boss people around. You coax them.

Guinea pig. When a Brit volunteered for jury duty in the 18th century, he received the nominal sum of a guinea a day for his time. If he longed for better pay, he'd join the King's Navy, where a "Guinea pig" was a novice sailor.

Hard and fast. An 18th-century ship that was stuck was "hard." A ship in dry dock was "hard and fast."

Irons in the fire. To do the job right, a 14th-century plumber had to keep several hot irons at the ready all the time. How else can you connect lead pipes?

Draco

Kill with kindness. The Ancient Greek lawmaker Draco was beloved by Athenians. To prove their adoration, they showered him with their cloaks—too many cloaks—when he appeared at the Aeginetan theater in 590 BC. Poor Draco was smothered. What a way to go! (I almost said "What a way toga.")

Lame duck. An 18th-century member of the London stock exchange who couldn't meet his obligations on settlement day was said to "waddle" out of Exchange Alley, mortified.

Mentor. Before he left home for the Trojan War, Ulysses chose his friend Mentor as an advisor to his son Telemachus.

The naked truth. An ancient fable holds that Truth and Falsehood went for a swim. Falsehood stole Truth's clothes. Truth refused to take Falsehood's clothes, and so went naked.

Okay. Like President Trump, Andrew Jackson couldn't spell. On day he spelled "all correct" as "oll korrect." The misspelling became an acronym that political enemies seized on, in order to mock Jackson. The gag worked, because "OK" rhymed with the Scottish expression "Och aye," meaning "Oh, yes."

9th-century taxpayer

Pay through the nose. In the 9th century, Ireland was occuoied by Danish invaders. The invaders placed a much-hated real estate tax on the Irish that was known as the "Nose Tax." If you failed to pay the ounce of gold due, the Danes slit your nose.

Take a rain check. Baseball first became popular to watch in America in the late 19th century. You received a voucher, good for future admission, any time a game was called on account of rain.

Skin in the game. Australians called an English pound a "skin" in the early 20th century. Gamblers liked to "put skin in the game." In a so-called "skin game," innocent players were cheated by sharpers.

Tip. In the 17th century, English speakers borrowed the German verb tippen, meaning to "touch," to denote a "gift." Your could make a gift of money (a "tip") or a gift of information (also a "tip"). The story about signs over tip-jars reading "To Insure Promptness" is pure baloney, invented by cartoonist Robert Ripley.

Upper crust. Pies were symbols of society in the Middle Ages. The top crust represented the aristocracy.

Wild Alpine Burdock

Velcro. Swiss engineer George de Mestrel invented Velcro in 1941, after noticing that the burrs of the wild Alpine burdock stuck to his pants. He named his invention after velours crochet, French for "velvet hook."

Worth your salt. Ancient Roman soldiers were paid monthly, sometimes in money and sometimes in salt. Their allowance was called a salarium. Sal is Latin for "salt."

Yahoo. Before the search engine, Yahoo was the name of a race of louts, "the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced." The novelist Jonathan Swift dreamed them up when penning Gulliver's Travels in 1726. In 1995, the search engine's inventors borrowed the name, because they thought Swift's description of the Yahoos also described them.

Goodly. "Goodly" combines good with -ly. It was coined by yours truly in 2016 ("Bigly" was already taken). So now you know.

19th-century racetrack "tote board"

Death in the Afternoon

Anxiety is there. It's only sleeping.

— Martin Heidegger

I'm amazed people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July—or any time of year.

Psychologists agree these sappy romances release dopamine, but that doesn't wash for me as an explanation.

Psychologists also agree our pattern-seeking brains savor the movies' carbon-copy plots. That sounds better, but doesn't go far enough.

Why do people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July?

To keep death at bay.

As Sigmund Freud observed, death threatens us from three directions all the time: from our own bodies, doomed to dissolution; from the external world, rife with destruction; and from other people, prone to violence. 

On top of those things, we harbor an unconscious "death wish" that compels us to take foolish risks.

In the face of the threats, we're driven to escape, to experience Nirvana or what Freud calls the "oceanic sensation" of eternity.

And that, I believe, explains the appeal of Hallmark Christmas movies.

They all take place in a delusional fairytale land where no one suffers, no one dies, and nothing ever changes (except the casts, and they all look alike).

I recall from childhood devout Catholics who attended mass every day in hope of earning "life everlasting." 

In its unwavering consistency, the Catholic Order of Mass is like a Hallmark Christmas movie. But for the cast, nothing ever varies.

But old-fashioned exuberance for church-going has become quaint. 

In fact, church attendance in all denominations is cratering.

Now to keep death at bay we just turn on the Hallmark Channel. And we do so with urgency.

"If you think it through," Martin Heidegger said, "life can beautifully be called 'urgency.' But you must then agree that life's essence comprises desire, sorrow, and death—all at the same time."

When you acknowledge death is inevitable, your existence is torn in two, Heidegger believed. 

While you enjoy life's little pleasures, you can't help but be aware that time is finite and that your will has limits—even though your desires do not. 

So you waste time in flight from your awareness of death: you dissociate, daydream, drug, drink, overwork, overeat, overpost... or just dial up the Hallmark Channel. 

Then things aren't so dismal.

How Could They?

Have not other nations found great benefit from the use of slaves in repairing high roads, making rivers navigable, draining bogs, and erecting public buildings, bridges, and manufactures?

— George Berkeley

Happy Juneteenth! 

What better day than today to ask, how could White Christians have enslaved Blacks and still believe they were practicing Christians?

I think it's smart to look for answers in the writings of the most thoughtful Christians of the period.

One was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.

A brilliant and outspoken Anglican bishop (and a slave-owner, as well), Berkeley shared the belief with many of his White contemporaries that obedience to God demanded you support slavery, because it was good for the slaves.

Berkeley was as conservative as they come, and not much different from today's conservatives in believing some people are bums. 

Skin color didn't much matter to Berkeley: bums in the 18th century were all the same. God made them that way.

Berkeley worried a lot about poverty and unrest in his native Ireland and in 1735 wrote The Querist, a book in which he asked, who's to blame for the fact that Ireland is poor?

His answer was clear: the bums are to blame.

Bums represented to Berkeley a dissolute, drunken, cynical, lazy and antisocial form of life. 

Forcing bums to participate in infrastructure projects was better than leaving them at liberty to wallow in their own filth. 

Forcing them to work would, in fact, give them dignity and guarantee their personal development.

If compulsory labor made them slaves, so be it. Slaves, as the Bible made clear, are just servants. Turning bums into servants served the public good, stimulated the economy, and was the "best cure for idleness and beggary." Forced labor, in fact, was a bum's way of demonstrating his or her "Christian charity."

Berkeley could justify an institution we find repugnant, because he valued an orderly Christian society—one that curbed some individuals' liberty, when that liberty hampered self-improvement.

We might call it charity under the lash, or self-help at the barrel of a gun. Whatever you call it, you know Berkeley's argument is weird and deeply flawed.

But it sounds hauntingly familiar.

One Job

Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than ambition?

― Doris Kearns Goodwin

When my last manager drove me to quit a great company, little did I know I was in the majority.

Only six months later, Gallup asked a million employees why they'd quit their jobs and found the Number 1 reason to be the manager.

Seventy-five percent of employees who quit did so from sheer contempt for bossypants.

My manager was pretentious, narcissistic and bewitched by her own—and her betters'—power. She was a vestige from an acquisition and completely unlike her home-grown, more admirable, peers. I was unlucky enough to work for her—until I quit. It was a hard choice, but unavoidable.

A manager has one job. One. That's to, as Jean-Luc Picard always said, Engage!

The managers who shouldn't be managers don't get that. They can't. They only get blind ambition.

But ambition has nothing to do with being a manager.

Manager, meaning "one charged with conducting a house of business," came into English from the Italian maneggiare in the 14th century. Maneggiare means "to handle," especially with regard to teams of horses (maneggiare came the Latin manus, meaning "hand").

A manager acts as the "hand" that guides the business. 

She's there to direct work, neither "hands on" nor "hands off."

Her handiwork should be to engage, not to command, demand, or reprimand; and certainly not to manipulate, mandate, or manacle. More like to emancipate—in Latin, "to take someone by the hand."

"People leave managers, not companies," Gallup concluded from its million-person study.

When will companies come to grips with that?

Defying Gravity

If a bridge collapses, a Mercedes drops as fast as a Hyundai.

— Al Franken

Republican dogma notwithstanding, wealth never trickles down. 

Never.

Yet, despite the fact William Jennings Bryan exposed trickle down's fallaciousness 125 years ago, Republicans insist it does.

Wearing wearisome disguises, this idiotic article of faith resurfaces every time a Republican opens his or her fatuous mouth.

But money isn't subject to the law of gravity.

When it goes up, it never comes down. 

Unless forced to.

Last week we learned the super-rich pay no taxes, reconfirming the fact that wealth never trickles down; at least, not through our tax system.

Republicans' reaction to the news: good for them! They're smart cookies!

Why anyone but a trust-fund baby would vote Republican escapes me. 

They must be brainwashed by their betters. 

As Lenin observed, "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."

The good news is: we're on the brink of another New Deal, courtesy President Biden.

Naturally, Republicans are incensed. 

It puts the Trump tax cut at risk.

"Republicans say tax cuts pay for themselves," writes Al Franken in Rolling Stone. "They never do. How about we try something that actually does work?"

Franken, like Biden, proposes taxing the rich to pay for Biden's new deal.

"Perhaps you’ve noticed that the rich have been getting a lot richer for quite a few decades now," Franken writes. "And as the rich get richer, our country seems to be falling apart."

Which, if you've been outdoors lately, you know is true.

Since Reagan's presidency, the federal government has neglected the country's infrastructure, targeting tax dollars instead to weapons and Wall Street bailouts.

As a result, dynasties—a source of power never foreseen by our Founders—have blossomed.

Biden's new deal would tax those dynasties in order to update our dilapidated bridges, roads, water mains, power plants, parks, schools, railways, and seaports—a diabolical plan, if there ever was one.

Pure socialism! scream brain-dead Republicans.

Maybe it is. But the fact remains, wealth never trickles down. 

Never.

Like gold, wealth has to be extracted.

And why not?

"The fact is that every bit of what President Biden proposes is in everyone’s best interest," Franken writes.

"If a bridge collapses, a Mercedes drops as fast as a Hyundai."

But is It Scalable?

There are no accidents in life.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I'm sick of algorithm-writers trying to manipulate me.

They suggest who I should follow (like Tomi Lahren, someone I loathe); what I should say (they autocorrect "You're my honey" to "You're my hiney"); when I should shop ("It's time to add more data"); and where I should go ("Belize awaits you!" So does Hell.).

It seems no matter where I turn, an anonymous algorithm-writer—likely to be wrong about my wants—has his grubby finger on the scale.

Even book-writers—some, anyway—are trying to manipulate me, by "click-farming" their way onto Amazon's best-seller lists.

Book-writers hire Chinese click-farms to fake Kindle downloads of their books, which Amazon counts as "sales."

A couple thousand Kindle downloads, which today would cost about $400, can put a book—even one with no previous real sales—on the top of Amazon's Top 10 charts.

The fake Kindle downloads also feed Amazon's "Books you may like," suggested purchases served by—what else?—algorithms.

Whatever became of scrupulous writers? Writers who trusted to the originality and incisiveness of their books to boost sales?

Writers of books like Being and Nothingness.

Written by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, 722-page book examines the experiences of individuals from the standpoint of radical subjectivity.

Weighing precisely one kilo when published in Paris in 1943, Being and Nothingness sprang to the top of the best-seller list, to the author's surprise.

Who were all these Parisians in the midst of the Occupation so eager to read a philosophical investigation of human existence?

They were grocers, it turned out. 

Grocers were using the book on their scales to replace the one-kilo lead weights that had been confiscated by the Nazis, to be melted down for bullets.

America's Most Hated Man

We were fighting for an idea, and somebody who realized that had to say it and keep on saying it until it was believed.

— George Creel

Before there was foxification, there was creeling.

Named for adman George Creel, the flack who ran White House communications during World War I, creeling means to repeat a lie incessantly, expecting listeners to buy it—which they usually do. 

Propaganda experts also call Creel's trick the ad nauseam tactic.

Creel made no effort to disguise his creeling, which he defined as "propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the propagation of faith.”

Lacking the broadcast technology Fox exploits, Creel relied largely on an early form of brand advocacy to weaponize his palaver.

He dispatched a 75,000-man army of public speakers he called "Four-Minute Men" to "meet customers where they are"—or were, in 1917.

The Four-Minute Men would stand up in the nation's movie theaters between reel-changes—which took four minutes in the day—and mouth the White House's lies.

They lied about German atrocities, the fairness of the draft, the urgency for rationing, and the value of US savings bonds, over and over and over.

Creel supplemented his army of brand advocates by distributing millions of garish posters, booklets and films that demonized the enemy and glorified us, insisting, "America must be thrilled into unity."

To do any less, Creel believed, was to let the Germans win.

"The printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, the telegraph, the wireless, cables, posters, signboards, and every possible media should be used to drive home the justice of America’s cause," he said. 

"Not to combat disaffection at home was to weaken the firing line.”

Historians haven't been kind to George Creel, calling him, among other things, a "warmonger," "petty tyrant," and "irredeemable villain"—even though his intentions might have been patriotic.

But, well intentioned though he be, Creel perfected the propaganda tool that bears his name—creeling—and handed it to the dybbuks at Fox.

For that, we can hate him.

Wind's Rising

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.”

― Raymond Chandler

One of the grimmest recurring images in literature is a hot wind.

A harbinger of mayhem and violence, it blows in summers across cities like Los Angeles, turning the streets pitiless. 

As tempers and the red stuff in thermometers rise, beatings, stabbings and shootings spike.

As cops and criminologists know, a hot wind does things to people.

America's cities are in for a hot wind this summer. 

Last year, the homicide rates in large cities rose, on average, 30%. 

In some cities, the increase was far worse. In Minneapolis, homicides rose 72%; in Portland, 82%.

This summer will be even more violent.

"Unless the American people speak out," the Miami chief of police told CNN this week, "it’s gonna be a long, hot, bloody summer."