July 03, 2014
Source: Shutterstock
Americans have no clue about race. For the umpety-umpth time, I got into an argument with some people (young people: si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait) who were trying to tell me that American slavery and Jim Crow were all about skin color.
Me Nonsense. It was nothing to do with skin color.
They: What? Boy, you really don”t know anything about our history!
Me: Have you read Pudd”nhead Wilson?
They: Uh …
Me: Never mind. Here’s a different story. Plantation owner in slavery times. One of his slaves gives birth to a boy”an albino. Owner goes bankrupt, sells off his slaves. Albino slave boy ends up on a different plantation where there’s an albino slave girl. They marry, have albino kids. All slaves, right? So tell me again what it has to do with skin color?
They: Uh …
Me: It’s race, you nitwits.
Memorizing the Constitution. I am, as I have mentioned before, a sucker for mnemonics. “All King Edward’s Horses Can Make Beautiful Foals”? That’s the lettered stations of a dressage arena. “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain”? Colors of the rainbow. “Two Zombies Buggered My Cat”? Major nerves of the face. “King Plays Chess On Fat Girl’s Stomach”? Linnaean classification of living things.
Senator Ted Cruz therefore got my attention in Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker profile. In a teenage study group, Cruz told Toobin, “We memorized a shortened mnemonic version of the Constitution.” Toobin asked for an example. Cruz obliged:
“TCCNCCPCC PAWN MOMMA RUN,” Cruz said. “Taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts, piracy, Army, war, Navy, militia, money for militia, Washington, D.C., rules, and necessary and proper.”
Not bad; although that’s just for Article I, Section 8″not even the document’s longest section. (It gets war and army in the wrong order, too.)
I think if I had to memorize the Constitution I”d throw mnemonics to the winds and just memorize it. It’s only 4400 words, well within the capacity of a normal person’s powers of memorization. Back during Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution, the more enthusiastic Red Guards used to memorize Mao’s Little Red Book backwards, and that sucker is nine times as long as our Constitution and makes less sense, backwards or forwards.
Three words for one. The phrase “piece of shit” seems to have settled into the language, or at least in the hipster vocabulary, as boilerplate abuse for anyone with heterodox opinions. It’s a particular favorite on angry-leftist websites and comment threads; so much so that it is routinely abbreviated to POS.
It’s quite respectable, too: the New York Post front-paged it back on May 12, in reference to Donald Sterling. (At least in the print edition that arrived in my driveway at 6 a.m. When I checked around midday, the online version had been bowdlerized. Some hipster subeditor is now looking for work.)
But here’s the thing: The English language has a perfectly good word for a piece of shit: “turd.” Why go to the trouble of dragging out a three-word phrase when there’s a good, old (very old”from about A.D. 1000, according to the OED) word for the thing?
The leftist mind is truly a strange contraption.
