Is Barack Obama ‘Black’?

From a February 20 story on Newsmax.com:

[A Reuters/Zogby poll]… showed [Barack] Obama, who would be the first black president, with a 14-point edge over [Hillary] Clinton, 52 percent to 38 percent, after being in a statistical tie with the New York senator last month. [emphasis mine]

I got out my 1956 World Book Encyclopedia and looked up “presidents of the United States,” found a portrait or a photo for each president, and observed that none of them, sure enough, appeared to be black. I can name, and give a fairly good physical description of, all the presidents since 1956, and I am quite certain that none of them was (or is) black.

Who knew?

Blackness defined

By “black,” I mean “African American.” Ulysses S. Grant, of course, had a fine, robust black beard, but we are speaking of ethnicity here.

It appears, based on my limited research, that the official U.S. definition of an African American is “a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.” Wikipedia’s “African American” entry begins, “African Americans or Black Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.”

Wikipedia points out that the “vast majority” of African Americans now have “varying degrees of admixture” with people of Native American and European ancestry. Various courts in various states at various times have adopted other criteria: In Virginia, you were black if you had “one-sixteenth black ancestry,” elsewhere if you possessed “a single drop of ‘black blood.’”

Why it matters

In one sense, it seems anachronistic to call attention to a person’s ethnicity (even if that person is running for president), especially in the courtroom, since it is illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of his or her race, color, creed, sexual orientation, and so forth.

In the real world, ethnic background still matters, for several reasons:

(1) Freed black slaves—largely uneducated, ill prepared to compete for lucrative jobs, essentially powerless—were objects of pity, scorn, or hatred. All the civil rights legislation in the world cannot erase that legacy, which is with us still in many forms—poverty, educational inequity, and antagonism are just a few.

(2) Many African Americans, especially those whose ancestors were slaves, share a unique and fascinating culture, idiom, and solidarity—which is not to say that they have uniform ideals and beliefs. “Blackness” is more than skin-deep.

(3) In June 1998, three white men chained a 39-year-old black man, James Byrd, Jr., by his ankles to the back of their truck and went for a joy ride. Racism, subtle or overt, is not dead. James Byrd is.

Is Barack Obama ‘black’?

Last week, a caller to one of the conservative radio talk shows—the caller was an African American—contended that Barack Obama (who would be the first black president) wasn’t, technically, black. The caller’s rationale was that Obama’s ancestors were not slaves. His father, in fact, was a native of Kenya who had earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, and his mother was a Kansas-born white woman. Thus, though Barack Obama’s skin is dark(ish), he doesn’t share the legacy or the culture of most African Americans—or, strictly speaking, the ethnicity, since most slaves were West Africans and Kenya is in East Africa.

It would be accurate to refer to Obama as a mulatto—the offspring of a white person and a black person or, more generally, a person of mixed black-and-white ancestry. The origin of the word mulatto is Spanish; it means “small mule”—a mule being the offspring of a horse and a donkey—making the appellation anything but complimentary.

“Mulatto,” according to Wikipedia, was “an official census category until 1930.” In parts of the Old South, mulattos had different, and often more favorable, legal status than blacks—which illustrates my point (and I do have one, in case you were wondering): Race is not a black-and-white issue, and the single label black hardly suffices to describe such a rich assortment of people.

I and Thou

I recommend to you the book I and Thou, by Martin Buber (1878-1965), a Jewish philosopher who urged human beings to always “meet one another in their authentic existence, without any qualification or objectification of one another” (Wikipedia).  

“The ones who count,” Buber writes, “are those persons who—though they may be of little renown—respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit.”

I was shocked, not too long ago, to hear a friend refer to a particular black person as “a n—-r.” (I can’t write the actual word. My parents would rise from the grave to wash my mouth out with soap. In their home, profanity might be ignored but the N-word was never said more than once; the mouth-washing was that ferocious.)

When I chastised my friend, the N-word-user, he said, “Mary, there are blacks and there are n—-rs.” I disagree with the word choice, and with the logic behind it, but I got the point. Our vocabulary is insufficient. In any case, the “particular black person” at issue was a scoundrel, and would have been a scoundrel regardless of his origin.

I would not like to see all references to diversity disappear. I do not long for a color-blind society (except in the courts), any more than I would enjoy the banishment of celebrations of Irish, Hawaiian, or Jamaican heritage. Diversity is fascinating, as are the remnants of almost-forgotten dialects throughout the country.

Still, in all human interaction, including the current lead-up to November’s presidential election, I hope and pray that each person will be assessed “not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.”

♦ 

Check out the definitive business-writing workbook Write Better Right Now, by Mary Campbell.

 

The Language of Technology: The Big Con

Good Old MPUI and Other Merry Pranks

It is no accident that modern information-technology history all but began the day I was born (October 23, 1947). My birth, in fact, coincides with the formation of the Association for Computing Machinery. Which is why I’m sure the Bittorrent Client and Pareto front are part of the Big Con.

Early history: Mistakes are made

As a child, I live, breathe, and eat technology:

1948: The transistor is invented. I discover radio. A Philco. I pull knobs off and gum them.

1949: MIT’s Claude Shannon builds first chess-playing machine. I discover chess pieces — entire drawerful. My experiments yield the following data: The knights are gristly and bitter while the pawns can be swallowed whole. I learn that experimentation sometimes produces intense pain.

1950: Maurice V. Wilkes uses symbolic assembly language on EDSAC. Experimentally, I use language on my dad that replicates model my brother uses with his friends. I hypothesize that my dad, like my brother and his friends, will pee his pants with amusement, but results surpass anything I might have hoped for: My dad washes my brother’s mouth out with soap. I learn that experimentation sometimes produces intense gratification.

1952: Univac predicts Eisenhower landslide soon after polls close. Big whoop. My dad predicted Eisenhower landslide previous February.

1953: Remington-Rand develops high-speed printer for use with Univac. I become highly efficient self-contained printer for use with spelling tests, independent of hoity-toity Remington-Rand, though I do collaborate with Jane Frovick, who sits beside me in back row, on spelling test containing unhypothesized word comb. Based on Univac-type logical algorithm (home = H-O-M-E, tome = T-O-M-E, and so forth), we experimentally print C-O-M-E at high speed on our spelling papers. We learn that logic is inimical to spelling.

1954: I memorize spelling of antidisestablishmentarianism. Univac is still scratching its head over comb.

1955-1956: This period marked by squabbles among large entities such as Burroughs, Sperry-Rand, IBM, and the U.S.A. I am likewise at odds with my brother, a large entity relative to me, over Stan Musial rookie card. In ill-advised midsquabble replication of 1950 language experiment, outcome is again not as predicted: My dad washes my mouth out with soap.

Adolescence to young adulthood: Reactionary period

1959: Computers and ordinary people (which is to say, people who rarely need to calculate guided-missile trajectories) begin to “interface” routinely. Early encounters are not promising. Ordinary people are receptive to computers much as Plains Indians were receptive to Iron Horse. The next few years are notable for…

·   Dawn of Era of Verbing, with nouns such as interface appropriated for simultaneous use as verbs.

·   Mutual suspicion erupting into overt hostility as ordinary people receive electric bills for $17,009.83 and college students enrolling in “History of the Napoleonic Era” end up in “Marine Biology Practicum” doing shrimp census in Gulf of California.

·   Gangs raiding corporate offices, seizing punch cards to Staple, Cut, Fold, Spindle, and Tear.

·   Regression to older, less threatening technologies (carbon-paper consumption surges).

1962: At public library, I discover 25-cent photocopier that produces a negative; for another quarter you can photocopy the negative and get a positive. Machine is slow compared to later models. In same amount of time, I could manually copy page twice, in calligraphy.  

1963: Through volunteer work, I learn to use Addressograph, Mimeograph, and Ditto machines. I discover with glee that Ditto “masters” are available not only in purple, the official public-school Ditto color, but in red, green, and turquoise. Why were we not told?

1965: Technology and I begin a dizzying convergence. Summer job requires mastery of IBM electric typewriter, Verifax “wet copier,” and Thermo-fax copy machine requiring use of special pink tissue sheets and heavy white paper with faint blue flowers on one side. Late in summer we acquire Xerox machine that prints “Xerox” in tiny letters across the top and bottom of every page.

September: I arrive at Stanford University for my freshman year. I gain instant popularity due to ownership of 1930s-era Royal typewriter that has big, fat pica type, filling page with fewer words than weenie elite type of most other typewriters in dorm.

1968: I work for temp agency, accepting every assignment regardless of skill requirement. Confronted with massive cord switchboard like mutant octopus, I plead temporary amnesia and ask for “a few reminders.” I catch on quickly and adopt officious nasal patois: “One moment, puh-leez; connecting you with your party.”

Technology and I grow up, get down to business

1970s find me in vanguard of emerging technology, from dictation equipment that shrinks each generation to sleek 64-line PBX systems and Mag Card electric-range-size word processors.

1977: I am in Arizona and new territory, literally and metaphorically. I edit University of Arizona catalog, programmed in SNOBOL, using HTML-like SOS (Son of Sam) text editor. We take turns arriving at office before dawn to avoid “login queue” since all CRTs on campus are “timesharing” on single DEC 10 computer occupying largish red-brick building three blocks north. Every five minutes or so we have to punch a few keys to let CRT know we’re there. Otherwise it will “throw you off.” Sometimes it throws you off anyway, with maniacal chuckle.

We order printout, wait three days, walk to DEC-10 site, pick up printout, walk back. Done periodically to make sure all coding accurate. If we have inserted code <it> as instruction to italicize text, but we omit <eit> at end of specified text, italics go on and on until halted at state border for illegal vegetable transportation inspection.

Our spellchecker is called Mary Lindley, who astutely points out peculiarities in text, such as Special Education course title entered as “Reading and Study Skills for the Dead,” which ordinary spellchecker, not yet invented, would in any case ignore, at sacrifice of much office merriment.

When time to print catalog, we haul tractor-tire-size magnetic tape to printer.

1983: I am in Hutchinson, Kansas, working at dial-up news service designed for farmers. We have TRS-80 Model II computers with up to four floppy disk drives and zero hard drives. If someone runs vacuum cleaner near server, it (server, not vacuum cleaner) reboots, causing total loss of data. Our modem is telephone-receiver cradle transmitting thirty characters per second.

I am computer genius. I converse smoothly about binary code, bits, bytes, and “baud” (modem speed). Computers produce mainly letters and numbers. It is cake to understand how each bit in eight-bit code represents tiny switch that is either ON or OFF and how sequence of ON and OFF switches determines letters or numbers.

We have full-time staff person, pretty Vicki, to instruct owners of TRS-80, Texas Instruments, Sinclair, Commodore, IBM, Atari, Apple II-e, and other computers how to access our database. It is precise configuration; tiny mistake links user’s computer to Interpol, causes international incident.

1992: Am back at University of Arizona. DEC 10 has been converted to student housing, CRTs are in museum with Commodores, Daisy-Wheel printers. New software is suspiciously colorful. What’s with the sinister floating windows? I balk at using mouse.

Recover aplomb, become adept at learning software, even if not easily comprehended in terms of ON and OFF switches. By end of decade emerge as Internet pioneer with own Web site. Breeze through graphic-design, spreadsheet, database classes. Experience bliss of broadband.

1995: Create “Small Business Builder” feature on fledgling ABCNEWS.com Web site. Is first of many one-hundred-percent-remote assignments made possible by marvel of telecommunication.   

May 2000: Leave secure University of Arizona position with desirable benefits to accept big bucks, cushy job, impressive title with dot-com in posh foothills location. My ship has come in.

September 2000: Ship sails away. Am stranded on Gilligan-type island minus Gilligan, Captain, Professor, Jim Backus, Lovey. Some days am Ginger, other days am Mary Ann. Occasionally am Bishop Desmond Tutu, Pointer Sisters. It is as Teddy Roosevelt on San Juan Hill that I see passing ship, fire musket to signal, provoking Navy SEAL mission resulting in rescue.

I age gracefully, I.T. develops dementia

2007. I am Neanderthal woman. My computer is dinosaur. I no longer have vocabulary to describe problem to computer-fixer guy. I feel like caller on “Car Talk” making sick-transmission noises.

Attempt to download Mplayer for Windows. Do I need Binary Codec Package? What does “supported natively” mean? Is it racist/chauvinist thing, like “American-owned”?

“Great news,” subhead blares. My heart does a little dance. “Mplayer package contains SMPlayer front-end.” Sigh. “Of course, good old MPUI is still included.” Whew!

I click “download.” Do I want “Secure Download (US)” or “Secure Download (RO)”? What is “RO”? Rome? Republic of Ontario?

Am advised that “To download from torrent links” I “must download and install a bittorrent client.”

Scales fall from my eyes, clog keyboard. No matter. Is all Big Con. If I bite on “bittorrent client” scam, will get error message: “Access denied. Could not find active alienated download buffer. Repair by finding Pareto front of simple problem using Genetic Algorithms with fitness sharing. Or you could just stick peanuts up your nose. P.S. Your computer has 2,937 registry errors. Hahahahahahaha.”

 

In Business, ‘Branding’ Is a Way of Life

A company’s brand is the perception — both within and outside the company — of what it stands for. ‘A business doesn’t just HAVE a brand; a business IS its brand’

A company I’ll call Max Accounting Services began as a two-person certified public accounting firm thirty-five years ago. Max E. Mumm, CPA, was a top-notch accountant and financial consultant. He was also a genuinely friendly fellow who won clients effortlessly through referrals and community contacts.

 

Max chose his community-service activities not according to their client potential, however, but according to his interests and principles. He was passionate about the importance of sports in children’s lives, for example. Thus he not only coached his own kids’ soccer teams but also organized new teams in areas of the city that weren’t being served.

 

Everyone in town knew that the name “Max E. Mumm” was synonymous with integrity, generosity, good humor, and professional excellence.

 

Max’s assistant, Sunny Disposition, was every bit as highly regarded as Max was. She knew each client’s name and those of the client’s spouse and children. She was invariably kind and friendly, even when, rarely, a caller or visitor was rude or condescending. Her work, like Max’s, was above reproach.

 

When Max’s practice grew beyond his ability to handle every client, he took on a partner and hired support staff, renting adjacent offices as they became available. He refused to consider bringing anyone into the firm whose personal or professional standards were even slightly dubious. After five years, Max Accounting Services consisted of eighteen friendly, honest, capable people who were as pleasant to each other as they were to clients.

 

Suddenly, it seemed, the firm numbered thirty, then forty-five. The client base — once primarily individuals, families, and sole proprietors — had shifted, with a majority of the clients being businesses with ten to a hundred employees. As occurs with many such CPA firms, Max Accounting Services began offering management consulting as well as financial services. The firm’s reputation was such that new clients came knocking and existing clients signed on for the added consulting services. More CPAs and support staff were needed in a hurry –- so quickly, in fact, that Max couldn’t supervise all the hiring.

 

The four senior partners met and promptly agreed to rename the firm “Max Management Consulting.” What was harder to agree on was how to handle the growth. Should the firm move to a larger, posher location — or, perhaps, should it open a second office in a location more convenient to businesses while continuing to handle the smaller clients at the original site?

DEFECTION + STAGNATION = WRECK OF REPUTATION

It was at this point — about ten years ago, when the firm was celebrating its twenty-fifth year in business — that Max began to suspect he had lost control of the company’s culture. His suspicion was confirmed when longtime employees whom he had hired personally began seeking him out for “a private moment,” complaining of Mr. Jones’s brusque manner or Ms. Smith’s habit of calling every female member of the support staff “Honey.” At the same time, a few formerly loyal clients defected to another firm, and growth seemed to stagnate while staff turnover accelerated.

 

When he heard Mr. Brown noisily berating the receptionist for being five minutes late one treacherously icy morning, Max knew the time had come to pull rank. Over the objections of all the partners except one, an eager beaver with an MBA, Max contracted with the firm Brand X to engage in a “branding process.”

 

Max was no fool. When Brand X had made its initial pitch, complete with an elaborate PowerPoint presentation studded with pie charts and organizational maps, Max saw straight through the jargon and its embellishments. He understood that branding was a fairly simple process but also one that demanded a great deal of legwork (for data collection), tedium (for data compilation), and creativity (to develop and present a simple, comprehensible report in complex, multisyllabic terms conveying, above all else, that Brand X had indeed earned its twenty-thousand-dollar fee).

 

The Brand X final report — 127 pages of text plus various supplemental multimedia eye candy — was based on interviews with current and former clients, employees, vendors, strategic partners, and members of the public. Through these interviews, expressed as nuggets of meaning wrapped in rhetoric, Max Management Consultants learned — just as Max had anticipated — that its most important competitive advantage was its reputation for square dealing, personal attention, and professional excellence. Brand X had also uncovered, as Max had known it would, a growing disenchantment within every group interviewed. Max Management Consultants no longer held sole possession of the “friendliest, frankest, most financially astute firm in the region” trophy.

 

Brand X’s crack design team (a guy named Tritt) had developed a friendly, frank, financially astute “graphic identity” with matching sample print ads –- copy provided by Brand X’s crack copywriting team, Jo Beth. At the final presentation, when the last slide had been oohed and aahed over and the Brand X people were packing up their projector, Max stood up and cleared his throat. The room grew quiet, and the Brand X people stood, respectfully if restlessly, waiting for Max to congratulate them on a fine job.

 

“Branding,” said Max in his straightforward way, “is more than a pretty logo and some slick ad copy. Branding is a way of life. If we are the friendliest, frankest, and most financially astute firm in the region, then we must be friendly, frank, and financially astute at all times, in every way. Those values need to be in our hearts, and in our bones. We must practice them not only with clients but also with each other, with our friends, our families, our felines. In this sense, everyone is our client.

 

“All it takes is for one of us, known to be associated with this firm, to be overheard in a rude exchange with her daughter at the mall. All it takes is for a witness to the rude exchange to whisper to his wife, ‘Doesn’t she work at Max Management Consultants, the friendliest firm in town? That didn’t sound very friendly to me.’

 

“All it takes is one person talking to two other people, each of whom talks to two other people, and so forth, before we are known for our hypocrisy rather than our high-mindedness. All it takes is for one disgruntled employee to tell his wife — who tells her best friend, who tells her office buddies — that there is internal animosity at this reputedly friendly firm.

 

“A business doesn’t just HAVE a brand,” Max concluded. “A business IS its brand.”

 

The last time I checked, Max Management Consultants was thriving. It had culled a few chronic manipulators from its staff. It began giving employees paid time off for community service. It encouraged a group of innovators to split off and form their own firm specializing in retail accounting and management. The two firms have a friendly, frank, and fruitful relationship. Every employee is a member of the Max Management Consultants unofficial fan club. Naysayers needn’t apply.

 

Sen. Clinton, Former Swim Champ, Not Ducking Out

Small talk about a May 19 Reuters story by Ellen Wulfhorst…

1. “None of us is going to have the number of delegates we’re going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand [that] my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that,” Clinton, a New York senator, said in Maysville.

Kudos is due to Senator Clinton. Most people, speaking off the cuff, would have said, “None of us are going to have….” Most people would have erred. None, as a contraction of no one, takes a singular verb, as does kudos, which means “praise.” Erred, by the way, rhymes with “bird,” not “bared.”

2. “I’m going to make my case and I’m going to make it until we have a nominee, but we’re not going to have one today and we’re not going to have one tomorrow and we’re not going to have one the next day,” said Clinton, a former first lady.

All right. I can accept the parenthetical “a New York senator” in paragraph 1. I suppose there might be a reader who needs that vital information, perhaps someone who has just returned from a stint as an anchorite on one of the Outer Hebrides. But is it really necessary to add that Senator Clinton is “a former first lady” in paragraph 2, given that the aside isn’t even relevant to the context?

If so, then let’s be thorough: “If Kentucky turns out tomorrow, I will be closer [to the nomination],” said Clinton, a former child.

3. “Premature victory laps and false declarations of victory are unwarranted. Declaring
[']mission accomplished['] does not make it so,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said.

Ah, but so often it does. If it walks like a candidate, if it talks like a candidate, if it looks like a candidate….

♦

Find the best no-nonsense business-writing, branding, and marketing-communication advice in Write Better Right Now, by Mary Campbell, available at www.LifeIsPoetry.net.

 

Sittin’ with the Clintons at the Witenagemot

If you and I and senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain had lived in medieval England, we would not be having this little talk, for of course we would be dead or, at least, reincarnated, and perhaps we would be sitting down for tea in Chelsea, separately or together, I really cannot say.

A little-known (perhaps because it is not very interesting) “rule” of capitalization, by the way, dictates that Senator Obama is a proper noun and thus Senator takes a capital S, and that senators Clinton and Obama is not a proper noun, so the initial s of senators is in the lower case. The same “rule” governs Mississippi River but Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

More to the point, the three senators would be members not of the senate but of the Witenagemot, advisers to the king. Each would be a wita, and the three of them would be witan or witena.

The Old English word wita meant “wise one.” Wise is from Middle English wis, ultimately of the same origin as the Sanskrit vedas, “knowledge,” and the Latin videre, “to see.” In gemot, the first two letters, ge, serve as a prefix meaning “with.” Mot was related to the Old English metan, “meet,” so a gemot was a meeting or assembly.

If you want to slip witenagemot suavely into your vocabulary, practice pronouncing it for a while: WIT ‘n uh guh mote (rhymes, roughly, with KIT-ten of a goat).

♦

Got a question? Leave a comment.

 Learn more about language in Write Better Right Now, by Mary Campbell, available at LifeIsPoetry.net.

We, We, We, All the Way Home

This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country. Because we all agree that at this defining moment in history — a moment when we’re facing two wars, an economy in turmoil, a planet in peril — we can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s third term. We need change in America. —Barack Obama, North Carolina primary-election victory speech, May 7

Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!… We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. —The Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Doesn’t it just make you squirm when speakers and writers use the word we as if they’re talking about you, as in, “We Americans have gotten too comfortable, too complacent, with our 9-to-5 jobs and our weekend lakeside retreats…”?

And you’re in the audience, and you’ve just been fired from your eighty-hour-a-week job, or you’re late on the rent of your four-hundred-square-foot walkup, or you recently lost a spouse or a dear friend and the last thing you’re feeling is complacent.

Too many writers and speakers use we irresponsibly. It misleads, sometimes by design, sometimes by accident.

Senator Obama announces, “We intend to march forward as one Democratic Party….” For whom is he speaking? It’s not clear.

The rest of the paragraph is a throwaway. Which moment in history is not, in one way or another, “defining”? And of course we need change in America. We always need change in America. Right now I’m thinking we need a three-party system in America.

 

 

The Reverend Mr. Wright, in the paragraph quoted above, doesn’t mean we at all. He means they, the unenlightened, the selfish, the blind, the powerful. Using the word we might be a nod to humility, as if he means, “We as a society, and I’m a member of that society, so I’m guilty, too.” Might be. From what I know about the Rev. Mr. Wright, humility isn’t a conspicuous trait.

I never trust we statements, and the phrase “in our society” puts my back up. Americans are a bunch of oddballs, really, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. “Our society” has only as much power as we, individually, one at a time, give it.

♦

Find answers to your writing questions in Write Better Right Now, by Mary Campbell.
Got a question? Leave a comment!

Cosmic Context

‘Some part of the world still cares what color the kitchen is’

If there really is a collective consciousness, it must be something like the Internet. We could, if we wanted to, virtually hold hands and sing “Kum-Ba-Yah,” but we choose instead to huddle in our little corners — the News Junkies sipping cybermartinis over there by the plasma-screen TV, the NASCAR buffs drinking domestic beer in their chat rooms — and they wouldn’t even be aware of one another’s existence if there weren’t a line at the virtual bathroom.

Or maybe they get together all the time. Maybe they Do Lunch. Who am I to say? I don’t even know if there are NASCAR chat rooms.

Meanwhile, right under our virtual noses, side by side, sharing some massive server in Seattle or Silicon Valley, are the Recipe-Exchangers and the Terrorist-Plot-Hatchers.

It’s astonishing, when you think about it, how differently people define what’s important.

Recently, doing some research on Scotland, I stumbled upon a Web site that describes the unrelenting grip of temazepam addiction. Back when prescription temazepam was dispensed in gel-filled capsules, certain adventurous types who like to blaze new trails on the frontiers of self-destruction figured out that it was much more fun to melt the capsules and inject the liquid than it was to (yawn) swallow the capsules. (These visionary pioneers were Scots, which is how my research and the temazepam phenomenon happened to intersect.)

All good things must end, it seems. Not only did injected temazepam (“jellies”) cause inflammation around the injection site, it also congealed in the arteries. Gangrene was a not-infrequent consequence.

I read on, in masochistic revulsion. A temazepam addict whose leg has just been amputated barely blinks before he starts punching holes in the other leg. A man dies after injecting temazepam into one of his eyeballs.

You read stuff like that, it makes you want to listen to Yanni, take a lavender-scented bath, carry an armful of lilacs to your grandmother, and all the way to Grandma’s you pray that while you’re pulling into the driveway she’s pulling cookies out of the oven.

There’s so much we don’t know, couldn’t even imagine, about one another. Everybody suffers, everybody rejoices, but for each, regardless of geography, the causes of pain and bliss might be galaxies apart. A woman in Darfur weeps because of the flies that cover her baby’s pus-encrusted eyelids. A woman in Tacoma weeps because a contractor installed the wrong hardware on her kitchen cabinets. She wanted eggshell porcelain drawer pulls, for God’s sake, not winter white.

I had a neighbor once who threw a big party after her doctor gave her wonderful news: Her malignant tumor hadn’t grown. Great bash. Totally impromptu. She went up and down the block, inviting everyone on the street, even people she’d never met. There must have been thirty-five people there.

It’s a wakeup call. I ask myself: How big is your world? How inclusive is the context of your joys and sorrows?

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Untouchables. Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Costner are Catherine and Eliot Ness, observed billing and cooing as Elliot packs for a business trip. Destination: Chicago. Mission: To put crime boss Al Capone (Robert de Niro) away.

Ness arrives in Chicago. Chaos turns to bedlam. Ness is getting his butt kicked until he enlists the help of a street cop named Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery).

At one point, when Ness and Malone haven’t slept for, I don’t know, months, what with people being “offed” and buildings exploding all over the place and Robert de Niro’s Capone strutting around Chicago, magnificently arrogant and wicked — and smug, because the Feds can’t touch him — the phone rings in Ness’s headquarters, where he and Jimmy are looking at maps, or maybe they’re perusing photographs of evildoers — the sneering Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) and his ilk. 

Ness picks up the phone. Listens. Says something like “I don’t care, Sweetheart. Sure. Yellow would be fine.”

He hangs up the phone and — this must be the hardest part of film acting — he has to stand there for a long time, not saying anything, just looking bemused. For us, the audience, there’s music, there’s motion, there’s context for the look. But Kevin, he’s sizzling in a studio, facial muscles twitching from overexertion, having to look bemused for what must feel like hours without the benefit of bemusement-inducing music and with all those people listed in the credits (the Key Grip, the Secretary to Mr. Costner’s Masseur, etc.) looking on.

Jimmy says, “Was that your wife?” Ness replies that it was.

          Jimmy: What did she want?

          Ness: She’s sitting in some room, surrounded by people she doesn’t know, going over kitchen color charts or something. [Pause. Bemusement.] Some part of the world still cares what color the kitchen is.

Damn good thing, too.

I love that line. I look for ways to work it into conversations.

Sara: Looks like rain.

Me: Yeah… Well, some part of the world still cares what color the kitchen is.

♦

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John McCain: Opposed to Innovation?

Combatting Comma Clumsiness

In a May 1 National Review Online story, “The Right Rx,” Republican presidential candidate John McCain asserts that “choice and competition are indispensible [sic] to real reform that brings costs down and broadens access while maintaining quality.”

McCain cites numerous obstacles to an ideal balance of health-care cost, access, and quality. Among them are state-specific insurance regulations and markets that “prevent the best companies, with the best plans and lowest prices, from making their product available to any American who wants it…. We need to break down these barriers to competition, innovation and excellence, with the goal of establishing a national market to make the best practices and lowest prices available to every person in every state.”

The indispensable comma

My goal, as a writer and editor, is clarity. The best writing communicates clearly; it is rhythmic, with a pleasing cadence; and it progresses fluidly from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, point to point. I don’t want the reader to have to stop and reexamine a phrase, uncertain about its meaning or about how it relates to the context.

If these criteria are met, I don’t grumble about the little things. If I were editing Senator McCain’s text, I might have suggested replacing “making their product available to any American who wants it” with “making their products available to any Americans who want them,” but I wouldn’t have insisted on it.

The final sentence in the second paragraph above, however—the one that begins, “McCain cites numerous obstacles…”—contains a Problematic Parenthetical Phrase that demonstrates the utility of our old friend the Harvard comma.

What’s a parenthetical phrase?

Parenthetical information can be removed from a sentence without making the sentence incomprehensible. Often, parenthetical information is enclosed, logically enough, in parentheses: “I went to a production of Rossini’s Barber of Seville with my family (Granny Hilda and Aunt Suzette), and we left at intermission.”

You can flag parenthetical information in two other ways: with em dashes (the long ones, which take up the same amount of space as a typeset m) and with commas. In all cases—whether you use parentheses, dashes, or commas—the punctuation must set off the parenthetical information by appearing at the beginning and the end.

So the following are, strictly speaking, correct:

1. I went to a movie with my family (Hilda and Suzette), and we left after ten minutes.
2. I went to a movie with my family—Hilda and Suzette—and we left after ten minutes.
3. I went to a movie with my family, Hilda and Suzette, and we left after ten minutes.

The third example is problematic because fewer and fewer writers typically use the so-called Harvard comma—the comma that precedes the last item in a series. So example number 3 could mean one of two things: that the writer was accompanied by his family plus nonfamily members Hilda and Suzette, or that the writer was accompanied by his family, which consisted of Hilda and Suzette.

Which barriers?

Similarly, Senator McCain’s imperative about breaking down barriers could be understood in two very different ways: (1) that the senator wants to “break down… barriers to competition” and that these barriers are, parenthetically, “innovation and excellence”; or (2) that he wants to “break down… barriers to competition,” barriers to innovation, and barriers to excellence.

The confusion, such as it is, wouldn’t arise if the senator had inserted, or an editor had not deleted, that small and sadly undervalued Harvard comma. The sentence “We need to break down these barriers to competition, innovation, and excellence…” —note the Harvard comma after innovation—leaves no doubt that competition, innovation, and excellence are fine things, according to Senator McCain, and that the barriers have got to go.

Of course, John McCain graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, where the esoteric mysteries of punctuation were, at a guess, of minor interest to the future naval aviator. And that, I suppose, is just as well.

Find answers to your writing questions in Write Better Right Now, by Mary Campbell.
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