January 15, 2015
Source: Shutterstock
Feeling I have to keep up my end of the joke for the sake of cordial neighborly relations, I wearily reply: “Yes, she’s gone to stay with relatives in China. She won”t be back for quite a while.”
Is it even true, that criminals dispose of corpses like that? Wouldn”t it leave a lot of DNA evidence in the mechanism? Do they strip it down and clean it afterward, or what? Uh … Next topic.
Animal crackers. The Thai word for “cat” is meow. The Cantonese word for “duck” is ngaap, in a high rising tone. “Goose” in Cantonese is ngo, same tone.
I just thought I”d throw those out here.
Who are we? I”d never heard of blogger John Agnew until last week, but I totally agree with this piece he wrote in mid-December, title: “We need to bury the phrase “that’s not who we are.”“
It’s self-serving, pious and doesn’t require an offer of proof.
Right. “That’s not who we are” drips with sanctimony.
It is a great favorite with our sanctimonialist-in-chief, who imagines that it expresses a lofty exceptionalism. He used it most recently when commenting on Sen. Feinstein’s report on CIA interrogation techniques, then again when scolding Sony Pictures for backing off The Interview. His BFF Eric Holder also likes to remind us of who we”presumably not just his people, but all those other people too”are not.
“Not who we are” was sitting in the public forum oozing treacle way before Obama showed up, though. Google’s Ngram viewer shows it going into sudden sharp ascent around 1983, the frequency sextupling by 2007, the latest date they show. It had a little frequency peak around the Civil War, I notice.
That latter date is three years after Samuel Huntington brought out his book Who Are We? Says the late Prof. Huntington, in a passage that scandalized Alan Colmes when I quoted it in We Are Doomed:
The [American philosophical-constitutional] Creed is unlikely to retain its salience if Americans abandon the Anglo-Protestant culture in which it has been rooted. A multicultural America will, in time, become a multicreedal America, with groups with different cultures espousing distinctive political values and principles rooted in their particular cultures.
That’s who we are: a nation with a philosophical-constitutional Creed rooted in Anglo-Protestant culture. Like it or not.
