* RADIO RANT: Glenn Beck, Francophobe

So there he was, a few days ago, slamming "LE CAR"--as an epitome of France, he claimed, and ergo his entry into the predictable stereotypes of hairy female armpits and effeminate men. (Yeh, Glenn's really got some cajones, I can tell, by his high-pitched squeal of a voice. I'm not claiming that said criterion is valid, but it's sure one that Glenn's conservative co-patriots like Michael Savage inveterately apply, when judging "man-ship.") First of all, no French person would pronounce le as "LAY"; second of all, no self-respecting French person would choose a name that combined a French article with a "vulgar" Germanic word: in sum, "Le Car" occurred on the AMC (American Motors Co.) side, and Beck is unwittingly railing against the very corporate-American-consumerist bastardization of anything non-U.S. that characterizes his own woe-begotten ignorance.

* My Bourgeois Palate

I grew up in north Rapid City, SoDak (informally, the largest Rez in the state, I swear) eating potted meat sandwiches and mayonnaise sandwiches and government commodity canned & boxed goods—including commodity powdered milk: could you EVER get the lumps out, however much you stirred?! And what WAS bulgar, anyway? And why did canned commodity beef always smell like dog food? I remember getting food poisoning at Garfield Elementary: the school nurse drove me home first, to drink some milk, but when I told her sheepishly, as we stopped at my mailbox, that I'd have to mix it up first, she drove me straight to Sioux San (the Indian hospital).

Well, my tastes have remained pretty simple through the years, still including an occasional Totino's "dollar" pizza—the staple of my college years. But the English Department has introduced me to (Asian) Indian food, and frankly, I'm a fanatic about it maintenant—thanks, in part, to my wife's further "enabling." I also have two home-eating "vices": brie (or camembert)—which I buy once every few months, to spread lasciviously on French bread—and NOW, olives stuffed w/ garlic! Yes, they're damned near $5 a jar, but OH, they're good. My excuse is that they're not quite as expensive—or "decadent," to use the wife's word—as many of the sweets that she covets. But then, I don't like sweets, anyway. (Did we ever get commodity "candy" as kids? Not that I remember.)

* Thinking Happy Thoughts

Quot. of the Day:

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.
    --Jean-Paul Sartre

* RADIO RANT: ProNOUNciation

As someone who grew up a poor breed introvert in the "sticks," I spent a lot of time reading the classics on my own—but never hearing anyone pronounce the names of the people I was reading. So through junior high and high school, I thought "Yeats" rhymed with "Keats," and I pronounced the German author of Faust as "GOHTH"—and never lived it down, in my own mind. So I'm particularly sensitive about pronunciation. The following, then, are really complaints about mes semblables et mes frères, to paraphrase Baudelaire:

1) Rush Limbaugh, for instance, had a running commercial blurb a few weeks ago in which he mocked those (of us) who have mocked his grandiloquence. But he pronounced the word "grandELoquent." There's irony for thee, good apothecary.

2) But Michael Savage is (again) my main target of complaint. Since his doctorate is in nutritional science (or nutritional ethnomedicine—there seems some controversy here), you'd think he'd know that the h in "herbal" is silent, but he continually aspirates it when he speaks of formerly being in the "herbal business." This may be some inside joke with himself and long-time listeners; if so, I don't get it. (Like Rush, he also seems to think that emphasizing one syllable of a word overly long is either very funny or otherwise incredibly rhetorically effective. Again, I don't get it.) . . . Also, instead of pronouncing homocide as "HAWMuhside," like most of us, he insists on saying "HOMOside." But this may again be an attempt at humor & political-moral commentary: "Look! I can attack gays even when I'm talking about something else completely!" . . . However, I'm certain that he doesn't know how to pronounce monolingual and proselytize; the first syllables, respectively, are not "MOH" and "PROH." . . . Finally (and this is grammar, not pronunciation), Savage has half-remembered some apocryphal Voltaire this last week or two, having at several points said to us liberals that he "will fight to the death your right to"—well, be stupidly, wackily liberal and wrong. But the original is "defend to the death," of course; Savage's version is syntactic gibberish. (Or the OPPOSITE of what he means: "fight your right"?!)

3) Finally, it's no great shock that the French language has never had a chance in the good ol' USA. Close to home—in South Dakota—French-Indian names that end in -eaux often end up being pronounced as "-ooh" (e.g., Roubideaux; Flandreaux). A vowel shift of sorts, really. But my big gripe in this category involves media pronunciations of Moulin Rouge, especially in the song "Lady Marmalade" from the recent movie about said French placename. Why someone has insisted that they sing "moohLAW(n)" is beyond me, especially since there are also many mainstream media examples of its correct pronunciation. (This includes the actors in the movie itself, one web site claims, although I don't remember myself if this is true. It's another of those movies that my wife made me watch. While that damned bird of hers bit the hell out of me!)

* Western Bird Notes—and a New Poem

My recent trip out "west" was a reminder of how a mere 500-mile difference in habitat changes the very birds. Well, sort of, since the old French saying, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" still rings true, as similar niches are taken over by different, but closely related, birds. Mountain Bluebirds rather than Eastern Bluebirds, for instance. The Bullock's replaces the Baltimore Oriole; the Spotted becomes surrogate for the Eastern Towhee; the Violet-Green Swallow zips over the lake instead of the Tree Swallow. In the place of (mostly) White-Breasted Nuthatches, I see/hear (more of) the Red-breasted species. No more Eastern Meadowlarks at all—only Western. Lazuli instead of Indigo Buntings. (One notable exception: Eastern Kingbirds are still more common than the Western variety, here in Western SoDak: they are the true "tyrant flycatchers" in that sibling rivalry!—as the many pecks to the head they've given me in one lifetime prove.)

Two other western/Black Hills species reminded me of something else (besides the fact that I used to write poems)—the ornithological names of birds are often themselves acts of Western imperialism:

    TWO BIRDS MEET LEWIS & CLARK (1805-1806)
                                                                --TCG, 6/23/07

            I: Lewis's Woodpecker  

They call me Lewis's Woodpecker.
I didn't choose that name, but after millennia of me
hammering at the dead wood of these pine hills . . .
they came: with maps, and a native woman, and a
whole mind's-load of old world naturalist terms & knowledge.

In fact, I guess my real name is Latin now, but I can't even
begin to pronounce it—so just call me "Lewie," after that
guy who kept looking around and writing things down, in a
fine script, as if he were capturing my feathered soul.
I heard that he killed himself, only a few years later.
Why he did is beyond my understanding, but then,
I am only a bird.

            II: Clark's Nutcracker  

Well, this Lewis fellow's sidekick was named Clark, and so
here I am, or how you know me. The only thing else you
need to know, apparently, is that I crack open
pine cones for a living.

But did you also know that my nickname is "camp robber"?
Yes, tourists, I'll steal your picnic table blind. But hey, that's
nothing, compared to what Lewis &
Clark started here, halfway on the
way to stealing a continent.

* RADIO RANT: Fox Sports Flag-Wavers

I have nothing against Memorial Day in principle. (Well, maybe I do: are "we" supposed to be honoring U.S. troops who died in the 19th-c. "Indian Wars," too?) But I consciously had sports talk radio on in the background today to escape all the flag-waving on the cable news networks. However, Fox Sports Radio's segues today are little more than an extension of the Republican-P.R. arm of Fox News. Besides these constant reminders to remember our troops (including quots. from G. W.), how many sports-talk people have I heard in the last few days say something like—"Without our men in uniform, we wouldn't have the freedom to even be talking here." Ah, and what a freedom that is—to deliberate on whether the Yankees can make up a 12-and-a-half-game deficit in the American League East. John Fricke–whom I usually consider one of the more intelligent & articulate personalities on FSR—even said today that, without the troops, we wouldn't be able to enjoy "our braughts and beer"! And we wouldn't be able to surf for internet porn, and droolingly follow the tabloid reports on Lindsay Lohan, and freely & bravely choose—between Coke and Pepsi.

Obviously, our "freedoms" are much more limited than we commonly think, by the sheer ideological force of the discourses in which we live, speak, and act. The founder of French surrealism, André, once wrote, [Quot. of the Day:]

The man who cannot imagine a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

But, au contraire, the person who does imagine such things today is deemed psychotic. Politically, the U.S. political spectrum from the most radical liberalism to the most reactionary conservatism is but an iceberg-tip of ideational possibilities. Musically, the same old chord progressions and clich$eacute; lyrical hooks are recycled over and over, as if the really new would blow open the "doors of perception" that corporate capitalism must keep closed, or else. . . . I'm going to take a nap now, to better consider the opportunities of pRuNe CiRcUsEs and SiLiCoN lIzArDs. . . .

Wait—there's Memorial Day, on TV right now: it's Pat Boone, dressed in an American-flag suit, hawking his new book. Hmmm. I think he just called me a communist.

* RADIO RANT: Francophobia

As an Irish-French-Indian, it pains me deeply every time some talking head on TV or radio plays the "French card," issuing some knee-jerk-thoughtless & stereotypical comment about the French—with the blithe self-assurance, obviously, that a vast majority of "Americans"{1} will laugh & scorn the "Frogs" (in just as knee-jerk & thoughtless sort of way). The immediate occasion for this blog entry is Glenn Beck's poo-poohing condescension of the French on his television show last night (4/3/07). The details of Beck's "satire" aren't worth rehearsing; but his smug tone?!—[bad pun alert:] oh, the "Gaul"! And again, it's the height of ethnocentrism that such commentators can assume a generally overwhelming positive regard from the masses for such inanity.

But the frequent francophobic utterances on ostensibly apolitical sports talk radio tells me that this is just not some specifically conservative attitude and audience at work. I'm sure that more people than Rush Limbaugh's ditto-heads laughed at the following joke that circulated a few years back: "Why don't they have fireworks at Disneyland Paris anymore? Because every time they shot them off, the French tried to surrender." In sum, besides women with hairy armpits, an untoward fascination with Jerry Lewis, and linguistic snobbery, the main francophobic stereotype is that the French are cowards. The valor of Napoleon's armies aside (and heck, the intellectual bravery of a Derrida or Foucault), I can't help but think that this is some projective/compensatory gesture on our part. We're macho, "land-of-the-brave" Americans, ready for any "righteous" fight. (And so we've become the world's "police" force, against some of our own better inclinations.) But all of "us" aren't just that, really; and so to reinforce our own militant identity, we may well have need of a shadow/scapegoat upon which we can project our more "pacifist" side. (And it's important in this geopolitical psychomachia that they be otherwise closely related to us, culturally and racially.) . . . On the most general geopolitical level, then, Western Civ. is "God's chosen," versus the "Satan" of Islamic fundamentalism. But it's interesting, too, that within "God's chosen," there is a subsidiary "us-versus-them" demonization going on.

{1} I'll try to refrain, henceforth and usually, from putting "Americans" (i.e., citizens of the U.S.) in quotation marks, however much I resent the ethnocentric/colonialist assumption implicit therein that the people of Central and South American countries are thus illogically but symptomatically excluded from the term.

* RADIO RANT: French Cuisine

There's some company selling language software on the radio called Rosetta Stone. The "testimonial" guy brags about going into a French restaurant and being able to say, "Je voudrais le poulet et le riz." Hey, if I ever get to Paris—or even to a "fine" French restaurant—why the hell would I order plain ol' chicken and rice!? (The dish had better have lots of garlic in it?) . . . Another person on the web hears it as "le poulet et le frit"—and points out the awful grammar, in that case: it should be "les frites" (fries, plural, not one "fry"). But even worse, then: I'm gonna fly to Paris or Nice or Marseilles and order—chicken and fries?! (Er, one fry, thank you—I'm watching my cholesterol.)

[Added 3/31/07:] Okay, so a third person on the web hears it as "le poulet rotî" (roasted chicken), a well-known French dish—in which case, "never mind!" But I'm gonna have to listen again. . . .

[Added 4/6/07:] No—I'm pretty positive now, upon hearing it again, that's it's "et le riz."