fingerlakeswanderer's Open Salon Blog

The Natural Year--Photos

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:12:02 -0500

Winter 2010-2011

Mud Season 2011

Out of Mud Comes Life: Spring 2011

Spring Gets Warmer and Merges Into Summer 2011

Summer Resplendent 2011

Hurricane Lee late Summer 2011

The endless summer fades into fall 2011

One day it's fall, and the next day it's winter, 2011

Solstice 2011

Peter Balakian on the Armenian Genocide

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:12:27 -0500

Peter Balakian and I communicated last night and this morning. He was kind enough to send me the following letters. The first has been sent to the Turkish government.

The second letter is addressed directly to the genocide deniers, some of whom chose to comment on my post yesterday.

Peter Balakian is the author of Black Dog of Fate, his personal history of the Armenian Genocide. He is a poet, professor, and human rights activist.

A link to an interview he did with NPR is here: Peter Balakian

Okay. Letter #1

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS
12 June 2006
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan TC Easbakanlik Bakanlikir Ankara, Turkey
FAX: 90 312 417 0476 Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:
We are sending again the letter we wrote to you on June 13, 2005 because we are dismayed that your government is still asking the Armenian government to establish a so- called objective commission to study the fate of the Armenian people in 1915. We are concerned that your request is a political ploy designed to deny the facts of the Armenian Genocide when, outside of your government, there is no doubt about the facts. Our previous letter follows:

We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an “impartial study by historians” concerning the fate of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming conclusion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:

On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.

The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.

The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:

1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide. 2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide. 4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the “incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide” and urging western democracies to acknowledge it. 5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.
6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas’s Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.

We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide—how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.

We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are not impartial. Such so-called “scholars” work to serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide.

We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as proud and equal participants in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.

Approved unanimously at the sixth biennial meeting of THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS (IAGS) June 7, 2005, Boca Raton, Florida
Israel Charny
Contacts: Israel Charny, IAGS President; Executive Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide, 011-972- 2-672-0424; encygeno@mail.com
Gregory H. Stanton
Gregory H. Stanton, IAGS Vice President; President, Genocide Watch, James Farmer Professor of Human Rights, University of Mary Washington; 703-448-0222; IAGSVP@aol.com

And letter #2, which addresses those who would deny that this crime against humanity took place:

An Open Letter Concerning Historians Who Deny the Armenian Genocide: October 1, 2006

As the major organization that studies genocide, we write this letter to address the issue of professional scholars who support the Turkish government’s position that what happened to the Armenians in 1915 was not planned by the Ottoman government and did not constitute genocide.
Scholars who deny the facts of genocide in the face of the overwhelming scholarly evidence are not engaging in historical debate, but have another agenda. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, the agenda is to absolve Turkey of responsibility for the planned extermination of the Armenians—an agenda consistent with every Turkish ruling party since the time of the Genocide in 1915.

Scholars who dispute that what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 constitutes genocide blatantly ignore the overwhelming historical and scholarly evidence. Most recently, this is the case with the works of Mr. Justin McCarthy and Mr. Guenter Lewy, whose books engage in severely selective scholarship that grossly distorts history. As noted genocide scholar Deborah Lipstadt has written: “Denial of genocide whether that of the Turks against the Armenians, or the Nazis against the Jews is not an act of historical reinterpretation . . . . The deniers aim at convincing innocent third parties that there is an other side of the story . . . when there is no other side.”

As scholars Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton noted in their article “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide” (Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Spring ’95), scholars who engage in denying genocide are motivated by various factors, including careerism. A Reuters report (3/24/05), “Turkey enlists US scholar to fight genocide claims,” underscores the degree to which Mr. McCarthy works with the Turkish government in its effort to undermine the truth about the Armenian Genocide.

We believe it is important to note that in serving the Turkish government, Mr. McCarthy and others like him bolster a government with a long-standing history of abusing minorities, intellectuals, and the principle of free expression. In the 1990s, according to Human Rights Watch and PEN International, Turkey had jailed or detained more writers than any other country in the world. Today Turkey has put on trial some of its most distinguished writers like Orhan Pamuk for mentioning the Armenian Genocide and hundreds of other writers are facing jail sentences for expressing their intellectual ideas. For scholars to support a state with a record of this kind raises profound questions about their professional ethics.

Whatever the agendas or tactics are of the few non-Turkish historians who support the Turkish government’s version of history, their claims are the same: 1) all the documents that scholars have used for decades to write about the Armenian Genocide are forgeries or otherwise unreliable; 2) the Young Turk regime did not intend to destroy the Armenian population – the massive deaths were a result of war, not genocide; 3) these were hard times for the Ottoman Empire and many Turkish people, especially soldiers, died, as did Armenian civilians, from famine, disease, wartime chaos, not from systematic slaughter; 4) the Armenians are to blame for their fate because they were a Fifth Column allied with Turkey’s enemy, the Russians, who were fighting against the Ottoman Empire in World War I, somehow even justifying the massacre of Armenian women and children.

We believe it is important to underscore the scholarly record on the Armenian Genocide.

The documentation on the Armenian Genocide is abundant and overwhelming. The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria, and Hungary; by Ottoman court- martial records; by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats; by the testimony of survivors; and by decades of historical scholarship. There are over four thousand U. S. State Department reports in the National Archives, written by neutral American diplomats, confirming what U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau called “a campaign of race extermination.” Additional evidence is in the British Parliamentary Blue Book, “The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16,” compiled by Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee; in Austrian and German foreign office records (Turkey’s wartime allies), now available as books; and in the Ottoman Parliamentary Gazette which recorded the confessions of government and military officials during the Constantinople war-crimes tribunal held after World War I. Mr. Lewy claims the Gazette records are invalid, even though their authenticity has been validated by meticulous scholarship. Add to this overwhelming body of official evidence, thousands of pages of eyewitness accounts from relief workers, missionaries, and survivors, and it is indisputable that the Armenian Genocide is a proven history.
On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic, well-planned and organized genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:
1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.
2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the fact of the Armenian Genocide.
4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the “incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide” and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.
5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC), have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.
6) Every book on comparative genocide in the English language contains a segment on the Armenian Genocide. Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas’s Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.

Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton wrote in “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide” (Holocaust and Genocide Studies): “Where scholars deny genocide in the face of decisive evidence . . . they contribute to false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their message, in effect, is . . . mass murder requires no confrontation, but should be ignored, glossed over. In this way scholars lend their considerable authority to the acceptance of this ultimate crime.”

Sincerely,
Professor Israel Charny President International Association of Genocide Scholars
Professor Robert Melson Past President International Association of Genocide Scholars
Gregory Stanton Vice-President International Association of Genocide Scholars

Dundee Cake, or How I Learned to Love (a) Fruitcake

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:12:53 -0500

It's not pretty. No one is ever going to slather it with hairspray to make it look good for the cover of some glossy magazine. It's a fruitcake.

Wait.

Come back.

As my ex-husband's partner said to me yesterday. "I have always hated fruitcake, but I'd eat this any day of the week."

Dundee Cake has been a holiday tradition in my family since I was a small child. My poor mum had resigned herself to the fact that I would never learn to love to cook (I once set macaroni and cheese on fire), but she discovered that I loved to bake.

Dundee Cake came into our lives from a little English cookbook that my mum had brought back to the States with her after a visit back home. The cake itself is Scottish, having originated in the 19th century. It was first made commercially by Keiller's, but it was invented in many a Scottish kitchen prior to its commercialization.

After I had a family of my own, I would pine for my mum's Dundee cake, which she had changed by removing those horrible dyed fruit bits that make most fruitcakes inedible.

She passed the recipe on to me, and I began making it as a Christmas morning treat. Each Christmas morning, as we open our presents, we drink coffee (or milk) and eat Dundee Cake. At Christmastime, I am asked by friends to bring Dundee cake to various parties, and, as a consequence, I've learned to make the cakes in loaf pans (the eight-inch kind) rather than in the large cake tins that my mum uses.

I, too, have varied the recipe. I like the cake to have a bit of a lemon bite, so I've added lemon juice to the recipe.

Lorraine's variation on Dundee Cake

¾ cup butter

¾ cup sugar

4 eggs

2 cups all purpose flour

1 ¼ tsp. baking powder

2 Tbsp. ground almonds

1 ¼ cup currants

1 cup golden raisins

zest of 1 lemon

juice of 1 lemon

split blanched almonds

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add 2 eggs, 1 at a time beating each of them well. Sift (or mix) flour and baking powder together. Beat in half the flour. Add remaining eggs and beat well. Gradually add remaining flour. Fold in ground almonds, currants, raisins and lemon zest. Squeeze the juice from the zested lemon into the batter. Mix until the fruit is well distributed. Scoop mixture into two buttered-and-floured loaf pans. Top the batter with the blanched almonds. As many as you want. That's it, go for it. (The toasted almonds are delicious)

Bake in 350 degree oven for approximately 50 minutes. (Depends on how deep the batter is in your loaf pan.) The cake is done when a toothpick or cake tester is clean after being inserted into centre of cake.

Cool five minutes before transfer to cake plate.

(I apologize for the baking time being vague--I've had the cakes bake in as little as 40 minutes, or up to 60 minutes. I suggest checking around 45 minutes--the cake will not fall.)

The Word Turkey Denies: Genocide

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:12:11 -0500

Ssssh. Can you hear us? The sounds we make are muffled. There is not much room for us here in these mass graves. We are stuffed together, face to face, arms strewn across one another, feet covering bellies. We are the dead of 1915. The smell of our rotting bodies has long ago dissipated; the flies have moved on. There is grass over the places where we were thrown into the earth.

It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting, with his legs crossed like a Turk, on the top of a high wall -- such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance -- and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure, after all.

`And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.

`It's very provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, `to be called an egg -- very!'

`I said you looked like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained. `And some eggs are very pretty, you know,' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of compliment.

But, if you listen closely, you can hear our murmurs. It is not so much justice we want. Justice is for the living. What does it benefit the dead to be granted justice after we are gone?

What we want is to be acknowledged. We are here. And we did not get here on our own.

So what would you have it be called?

Armenians claim that as many as 1.5 million of their ancestors were killed between 1915-1923 in an organized campaign to force them out of eastern Turkey and have pushed for recognition of the killings around the world as genocide.
Turkey acknowledges that large numbers of Armenians died, but says the overall figure is inflated and that the deaths occurred in the civil unrest during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Don't call it genocide, the Turks say, and if you do, you shall be jailed. It insults "Turkishness" to say that they were capable of killing us like that. You cannot even talk about it in your fiction:

The charges stemmed from remarks made by an Armenian character in Shafak's novel The Bastard of Istanbul, published in March. "I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915," Dikran Stamboulian says, referring to the controversial topic of the mass murder of Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.
"It was an absurd reason to start a trial and a very sensible way of ending it," said Shafak's husband, Eyup Can, outside the heavily guarded Istanbul courthouse.

Shafak was the latest public figure targeted by a group of nationalist lawyers using the notoriously vague article 301 of Turkey's penal code. Protesters linked to the group had attacked novelist Orhan Pamuk when he went on trial last December. Around 300 riot police were on hand yesterday to prevent violence, with dozens more plainclothes police inside. Joost Lagendijk, a Dutch MEP attacked at Pamuk's trial, was given eight bodyguards.

It is not allowed. It did not happen.

The irony of the latest development would kill us if we were not already dead. The French have introduced a bill that would punish those who deny that it was genocide.

On Dec. 22, the lower house of French Parliament will debate a proposal that would make denying that the massacre was genocide punishable by up to a year in prison and €45,000 ($58,500) in fines, putting it on par with Holocaust denial, which was banned in the country in 1990.

Erdogan lashed out at France during a joint news conference with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil -- the chairman of Libya's National Transitional Council -- saying there were reports that France was responsible for the deaths of 45,000 people in Algeria in 1945 and for the massacre of up to 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994.

"No historian, no politician can see genocide in our history," Erdogan said. "Those who do want to see genocide should turn around and look at their own dirty and bloody history."

"The French National Assembly should shed light on Algeria, it should shed light on Rwanda," he said, in his first news conference since recovering from surgery three weeks ago.

France had troops in Rwanda, and Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused the country of doing little to stop the country's genocide.

Do you not see why that is so funny? Call it genocide in Turkey and go to jail. Deny it was genocide in France and go to jail.

In the meantime, we are still dead. Still here. Still waiting.

The Turkish Prime Minister, who apparently believes as your president does, that a lie repeated repeatedly eventually becomes the truth, and his minions, have reacted thusly:

Erdogan's criticism comes a day after an official said the Turkish leader had written to Sarkozy warning of grave consequences if the Armenian genocide bill is adopted. A Turkish diplomat said Turkey would withdraw its ambassador to France is the law is passed.

"I hope that the [French Parliament] steps back from the error of misrepresenting history and of punishing those who deny the historic lies," Erdogan said. "Turkey will stand against this intentional, malicious, unjust and illegal attempt through all kinds of diplomatic means."

Erdogan called the proposed bill a "populist" act, suggesting it was aimed at winning the votes of Armenian-French in elections in France next year.

And still, we are dead.

Hrant Dink, who has been prosecuted for talking about the genocide, has accused the French of hurting Armenians, of killing dialogue, by its insistence on trying to make it a crime to say that our deaths were not genocide.

Commenting on the "genocide denial bill," which is scheduled to come before the French Parliament October 12, Dink said "When this bill appeared first, we were fast to declare as a group that it would lead to bad results......As you know, I have been tried in Turkey for saying the Armenian genocide exists, and I have talked about how wrong this is. But at the same time, I cannot accept that in France you could possibly now be tried for denying the Armenian genocide. If this bill becomes law, I will be among the first to head for France and break the law. Then we can watch both the Turkish Republic and the French government race against eachother to condemn me. We can watch to see which will throw me into jail first.....I really think that France, if it makes this bill law, will be hurting not only the EU, but Armenians across the world. It will also damage the normalizing of relations between Armenia and Turkey. What the peoples of these two countries need is dialogue, and all these laws do is harm such dialogue."

But how can you have a dialogue with people who say your words are meaningless, that they are lies, that they are make-believe? How can their be dialogue when the other side has closed their ears to your truth?

Peter Balakian, who has written much about what happened to us, had this to say:

I think any true and meaningful dialogue can only happen if there is truth. We can't have debate without truth. Those who come to converse around a table must acknowledge the truth about the Armenian genocide and the moral nature of what genocide is, and then we can move forward.

Balakian told our stories in his book, Black Dog of Fate. It is not to be read by the faint of heart.

In the summer of 1915 in Diarbekir, every day you heard about Armenians disappearing. Shopkeepers disappearing from their shops in the middle of the day. Children not returning from school. Men not coming back from the melon fields. Women, especially young ones, disappearing as they returned from the bath. Shops had been looted by Turks more frequently that year. The pastry shop on Albak Street had been robbed and burned. The carpet store near the mosque had been broken into and cleaned out. Farms in the outlying valley had been stripped of their goats and sheep by Kurdish bandits, and everyone knew this had been sanctioned by the Vali. In the middle of the day a teacher at the Armenian school, Kanjian, was shot to death by the son of the mudir. No reasons given. No action taken. Mr. Kanjian's body was thrown in a wagon by the zaptieh and driven around the market square...
Whenever we passed near a eucalyptus tree I gathered some leaves so that at night I could suck on them to get water in my mouth. I lay on the desert ground at night, sucking a eucalyptus leaf and staring at the moon. The moon is terribly bright in August in the desert around the Euphrates. All that month it grew each night. It followed us. It was a wolf's eye. It was the opal charm of a Turkish sorceress. Some nights it was a damask seal and some it was a Persian charger stripped of its blue. It was scouring and harsh on the weeds and rocks, and the few animals that darted through looked like unreal silvery creatures. I lay on my back and felt the grooves of my cuts made by the Turkish whips ease onto the hard ground, and I stared at the moon. Often I unfolded the piece of the kilim. It was the piece I used under the lamp on my nightstand in my bedroom. I held it up to the moonlight and looked at the colors and thought of my bedroom windows, one looking out to the street and the other into the fruit trees of our courtyard. It was just a simple kilim of aubergine and saffron medallions. In one latch-hook medallion there was a green scorpion, in the other a red scarab. In the moonlight the colors were eerie, and after a while they seemed to float in the black air and then drip like roman candles.

One night as I sucked on a eucalyptus leaf and stared at my kilim in the moonlight, I felt the boot of a gendarme against the side of my neck. I rolled over so as to hide my face in the ground. But the boot continued to kick me and then to step on my head. As I buried my head more fiercely in the ground, the boot hooked me under the chin and pried me up, and the next thing I knew I was looking up at a man whose mustache looked silver in the moonlight. I watched him unbuckle his pants and I shut my eyes and the next thing I knew a stream of hot piss shot into my nose and over my face. The cuts on my neck and cheeks began to sting and my eyes burned. Soon my hair was like a sticky mess of rancid flax. When he finished he kicked some dirt onto my face, and I lay there squeezing my kilim, which was also wet, and I felt a small breeze blow over my face. For a long time I did not open my eyes.

When I did, I took a eucalyptus leaf I had saved and wiped my eyes. When I looked up, the moonlight had turned the sky white and I could see my mother's face as if it floated on the white lace of our dining table. She was saying to me: Let them take you, let them take you, we will bring you back at Easter. Then the moon turned red as my taffeta dress, and my love had come in green velvet gloves and the scarf that hung in the walnut tree.

Run, run run the little chicken said. Your cheeks are like apples, and the wind takes your golden hair and sends it to the mountains.

From seven stores, I gathered silver and made a ring and put it on pearl's finger.

The moon stared at me all night. In the morning I woke inside the piss-gummed web of my hair, and I sucked on the eucalyptus leaf to make some saliva to clean off my face. Later I found some weeds, and I ground them up and spread them in the wounds enflamed by the piss.

One night I was raped. I prayed every night to the Virgin Mary and to Jesus and to God. And they answered my prayers. After this I felt some mindless will to survive.

And still we lie. In the dirt. Our bones turned to dust. Many of us will never be found. And if you cannot find us, if you cannot find the evidence that we were the victims of genocide, well, then how can you say it was so? And even if you do find the evidence, even if you were to be confronted with thousands of our skeletons, scattered across the horizon, hanging from the trees, the bodies of mothers and children and old men and old women and young men and ... and ... everyone. What then would you call it?

The French and the Turks will slap economic sanctions on one another, they will rail and hiss and spit at one another, they will throw the word "genocide" back and forth, and they will hold a mirror to each other's face and say, "You did this. Look." Algeria rhymes with Armenia. But no one will look. And we will still, still be dead.

It is, after all, a word. Just like justice, which is not for us. But please, please, can we not be allowed to claim the word "genocide" so that the enormity of what was done to us can be comprehended?

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'...

`That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

`When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, `I always pay it extra.'

Tina Brown: A High School Debater's Worst Nightmare

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:12:50 -0500

Is there anything that Tina Brown has helmed that hasn't immediately turned to dross? Forgetting everything she has done in the past, let's just talk about what has happened to venerable Newsweek.

I'm old enough to remember when news analysis on a weekly basis meant three choices: Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek. The three of these news magazines was essential to me: I was a high school debater, and I competed in "expository" speaking. That particular category, and its hellacious companion, "improvisation," were based on the idea that, if given a category, a student could (in expos) use the 30 minutes of prep time to speak for five minutes. (And if you did improv, too, as I did, you got 30 seconds to give a two-minute speech.)

You could always tell those of us who did expository: we were the ones with the fifty-pound flour sacks full of news magazines. After we were given our topics, you'd find us on the floor, magazines petaled around us, as we looked for recent information about trade wars with China or the latest analysis of the Begin administration in Israel.

This was a time before Google--hell, it was a time before computers--and I just wasn't organized enough to have notecards with careful annotations telling me where to find, in which magazine, the articles I needed. My mnemonic device was the cover of the magazine, which I could vaguely remember contained the information about the newest Boeing deal.

It doesn't matter now that computers have made all of this obsolete. Newsweek is obsolete as a news magazine. After you plough through news about each of Tina's celebrity friends, you might find out what happened in the European Parliament--but only if it's going to have a direct impact on all that cocktail conversation Tina has while hobnobbing with people who are most definitely not the hoi polloi.

I occasionally watch Morning Joe. I do it because just once, I want to see Mika actually stand up for herself, tell Joe to STFU, and represent a point of view that doesn't smack of fratboy privileged hijinx.

The days that Tina comes on, I mute the sound. Her toff voice, her name dropping, and the very fact that she has given Niall Ferguson an American audience are enough to nominate her as a hack.

But what she has done to expository speaking--well, that's just plain unforgiveable.