Sometimes I think these modern folks could have never enjoyed the pleasures of maniac or tapioca since they would have not had the patience to detoxify the root before they put it out into the food chain. In my opinion, if the countries were as toxic, and the governments as efficient as these folks have implied through the first set of leaks, then these whistleblowers would have never survived to release the second group. I'm glad they released the Afghanistan papers because it put the military on alert that they are not above International law. I haven't read these papers but the description as diplomatic materials I find disturbing and suspect it will shut down rather than facilitate International cooperation. Admittedly I say this as a suspicion since I have not read the materials yet and probably won't.
The movie "Fair Game" showed the stupidity inherent in the human condition on all levels of society. The world is human. Humans are fallible. Valerie Plame imprinted on the system and would have lost her family had not her father intervened to short circuit the imprinting. Loyalty is important but it can be abused. Will people die for what is on these cables? The wrong people? The little people who took a chance and believed too easily? I believe the spirit is eternal. That the wheel of time and life turns. That spirits return and take revenge because the balance of the wheel must be assured if it is to exist. Demonic processes recycle in contemporary scientific jargon for ulterior purposes. These "new" ideas circulate and are like, the "latest immigrant snails clogging the release valves of the local nuclear cooling towers". Such rehashed principles are easily converted to the social pathologies of chauvinism and provinciality by adults who should know better. ANALOGIES: In the 1960s, music faced a similar dilemma as the musics of the world arrived in the International consciousness. They called into question all of the presuppositions of Western Music and for a while the universality of music itself. It seems everyone wanted THEIR national music to be THE music of the spheres. But, like languages, all musics are equal and all are a facet on the sphere of universal artistry found in every culture. But musics are not only national. When I was researching for the "American Masters Arts Festival" in New York I discovered that there were regional musics from each part of the country that were not just entertainment but (like the regional architecture), were serious aural explorations of the identity of that region. Northwest coast for example compared to the Northeast. Chicago compared to Santa Fe. America thinks generally as a "United Artistic State", but in reality the serious music is regional and is just beneath the surface unable to emerge because, as another list member pointed out to me privately, " the Art of America is commerce and not music." (Shades of the Euro?) The answer, (if your musical identity is to be unified and not suppressed), is articulation and acceptance of the entire sphere of identities. Then you teach each other and arrive at, as the Soviets did in Russia before their demise, a synergy of artistry that takes on a life of its own as a national identity. But even worse than the music, is the loss of linguistic identity, especially here in the U.S.. Just as the list had trouble with our Swiss colleague and the interpretations he put on issues (English language), how much more trouble will the rest of the world have on these cables with no context and English not as good as the multi-lingual Swiss? If they can't understand Gilbert and Sullivan or Stephen Sondheim, how will they really "get" governmentese? English is a contextually layered language. I can think of ten easy layers for almost any text that I work with in English. That problem gave the Master composer, George Friedrich Handel, a nightmare and caused him to invent the oratorio since his English wasn't so good either. You should observe ordinary non-Americans trying to contextualize a Ned Rorem song since Ned does understand layering and picks really hard poets for really hard layered music. CONTEXT: Almost every English word has three denotative and four connotative meanings. Every word! Such is the basis for the great English poets and their "heron priested shores." There are also general colloquial interpretations. Whether Canadian, British, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Australian, OED or American, definitions of some words are wildly out of sync with each other across borders. (Haven't we been here before on this list?) (Could someone give us a discussion on the meaning of Pig-malian?) The most recent example (before Pig-malian) was my use of "Bull Shit", which no one got, since Cherokees don't "swear" (don't see the use of it!) but we play with words including English for metaphorical purposes. The use of the word was not a curse but a poetic metaphor that had a virtual blossoming of meanings flowing up from the vulgar into the common and even into the pseudo polite. (Did any of you ever hear a Scandinavian model say bull shit in English, as a second language? It's strangely polite, sort of like hearing Pierre Bernac say merde or Joseph Heller call his character in Catch 22, "Lieutenant Scheisskopf.") I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot's favorite phrase when confronted with academic misunderstandings. My Cherokee Elder quoted him to me from a lecture she had heard at Vanderbilt University, after an English professor had delivered a talk on the "Wasteland." (No, not John Locke, T.S. Eliot!) Eliot said and I concur: "Bug Shit!" All that to a 1940s group of Southern under twenties in Nashville, Tennessee. My old French Dictionary has merde and my new American Heritage has "shit" but my 1986 OED has neither and neither does my 2nd edition Webster from my college days. My German dictionary doesn't have either Heller or the English. Could we make a rule that dictionaries, other than French and American, generally are only in the polite vernacular of the language since foreigners really don't know how to cuss properly? Flowing from the dictionaries we can say that all English falls under one of three categories. "Polite," "Generic (or "common") and "vulgar." Dictionaries are generally polite and generic since generic or obvious common meanings are the root of "denotative." The Latin base language originally had Classical Latin and Vulgar/common Latin. According to the Latin text books, "vulgar" and "common" were originally one and the same. Otherwise why call it the "Vulgate?" And what about Dante who wrote the "Divine Comedy" in Vulgar Latin (old Italian)? Dante is called, by our generic Wikipedia (vulgar?), "the Father of the Italian Language" because he used the vulgar for high art. (Medieval Rap?) Today, many European languages have a polite "high speech" an ordinary speech and a colorful or vulgar speech. As Dante proved, Latin works written in the Vulgar became a kind of linguistic fertilizer to feed and renew the creativity of the polite. In music: Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" was vulgar while Bizet's Carmen was both "vulgar" and "vul-ner-able." Both changed the music and opera of their day for the better. Both were vulnerable to the critics of the day. Vul, the morpheme meaning wound. The Latin Vul-gate on one level is a wound to the sacred language which bleeds into the common language spoken on the street. The wound of the mother is the name of a part of feminine anatomy. In fact most European languages have some version of this. That three part linguistic form is the basis for Martin Buber's great theological/artistic tract "Ich und du" or "I and Thou." On a more profane level you could draw a parallel to Bill Clinton's apology/non-apology for his "to be or not to be" sexual encounter with Monica Lewinsky. You can read your own dictionaries for the classical definition of whether sex happened or not. (All of the dictionaries I found agreed with Clinton.) Which makes my point. Remember dictionaries are almost 100% polite in English. But the Republican insistence that Clinton hadn't apologized is interesting linguistically. Here are Clinton's words: I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that... Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most -- my wife and our daughter -- and our God. I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so. This speech was a carefully crafted "polite English" apology. What the Republicans wanted from him was a "vulgar English apology" probably to show that he was a common hick from Arkansas. Sort of the reverse of George Bush who was extremely polite and appropriate, came from one of America's oldest families, but used vulgar generic hick colloquialisms even in major speeches. (Can you believe how these two parties reverse mirror each other?) Clinton spoke in the polite language of the American South but they wanted what his Illinois born wife called "the old hound dog." It couldn't have been better if they had asked for a hip-hop version of the speech. Vulgar is an interesting word. It comes from vul or wound. Vul-ner-able. We lose languages through abuse or through conquest as if human consciousness was unimportant and philosophical psycho-linguistic discovery of no utlity. This week a list member sent me a DVD of the Wampanoag people who had lost their language for seven generations but it had been a ghost that haunted and ruined their lives as they could not express who they were in the dead noun language of English. The language was out of sync with every movement of their perceptual apparatus formed over thousands of years. (Not a hierarchy Keith!, There are no higher or lower languages.) A young Wampanoag woman went to MIT and bonded with a psycho-linguistics professor who encouraged her to collect the shards. She found people who remembered this and that but it was the discovery that her ancestors had adapted the language to writing and had written bundles of materials defending themselves against the English theft and genocide, much as Sequoyah did for my people that gave her the door into retrieving the language. Unlike the Cherokees, the Wampanoags under the first wave immigrants were buried by the Catholic missionaries who beat the language out of their children because the nuns couldn't learn Wampanoag. This young woman dug up the bundles and translated the texts and took the shards and taught the children and the ghosts are ghosts no longer. They are not haunted but like the Jews speaking the dead language of Hebrew at the advent of Israel, they have arisen from the dead. Now that's a real miracle. What does this have to do with the release of diplomatic posts? I suspect all these will do is get a bunch of little people killed for cooperating with Americans and strengthen the recruiting for the enemies of America. I don't believe they will have the linguistic sophistication to accept what is normal everywhere and understand the principle of diplomatic immunity and how it relates to language. America has created this mess when they hung Rudolf Streicher for saying things that encouraged murder and then allowed Americans to do the same down to the present as "free speech." One should never forget that the Art of America is Commerce and Commerce is without morals far more than diplomacy. The world is filled with systems that have been at war with each other for thousands of years. The systems jockey with each other for the good of their own systems. I suspect that what we are on the way to here, is a total shutdown of information and the opening of trials for sedition and treason. It will make all of us less free and even lists, like this list, an area for suspicion. REH PS Gail, I'm working on your question. Thank you for your comments and the question. Ray From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 6:23 PM To: [email protected]; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] FW: [NetBehaviour] Download The Wikileaks U.S. Embassy Cable Data 220 / 251,287 (and growing) cables seem to be available here: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/ it should be an interesting few weeks/months M
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
