On Politics, the Media, and the English Language

Ol' Wristy is getting better. Again. Still in a brace, but we're going swimming in six days, whether it likes it or not.

In the meantime, dear god, is this week's On The Media ("Normalize This!") ever relevant. Because I write things for my day job, and because I've been thinking a lot lately about the principles that comprise "plain language," I've also been thinking about George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. And if the timeliness of this essay wasn't established already, OTM - discussing what it means when the media use "normalizing," "politically correct," "alt-right," etc. - brought it home fiercely.

Love and a very short fuse

Pardon the inconsistent timeline; I wrote this last Thursday and just got to post it today.

Since that foot fiasco over the summer I've only really been running since the beginning of October. Monday was the first day it felt natural again. Today's run was short - just one loop of the park - but it reminded me how much I love it and how it clears ye olde noggin like nothing else.

During the run I got Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" stuck in my head ("There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in") and realized that what the world needs is another blog post quoting that song, so here is that post. 

...and I feel fine.

People, horrified by whatever the latest turn of the 2016 election is, claim they simply can't pay attention to media coverage anymore lest they clutch their pearls so tightly they choke. But the same people, according to this radio piece, have apparently also stopped going to the movies and watching TV, and have even foregone football (heavens!) for the sake of the real-life drama of “forcible grabbing, groping, small hands and tongue gymnastics in the current presidential election” (not sure what that last one's about TBH). And, so the argument went, the reason they're doing so is to sate their addiction to "junk entertainment."

In the Matter of Cure v. Disease

Horrors! Advances on a married woman!

Never mind that this person didn't ask to be groped by tiny orange hands attached to an orange subhuman chancre. Irrelevant that she rejected these actions out of hand. The true affront, my fellow Americans, to the entire body politic and to thinking self-determined humans everywhere is the marital status of the vixen in question.

Swimming gives you lots of time in your head

We've all been this dog:

I was definitely this dog last week when I met a log in the water next to the aquarium at Coney Island, maybe 100 yards off shore. Now everyone runs into stuff in the water and it definitely wasn't my first time, but the thing is, the damn log didn't move! It was, like, stuck to something, or else it was a small lure-like appendage of something huge and inevitably terrifying! So, like any grown-ass swimmer, I let out some underwater shrieks and sprinted toward my nearest swim buddy.

Swimming/moral turpitude

First, in April, we got the privileged guy who raped a woman while also being graced with the ability to swim really fast. Then, in August, we got the privileged guy who was a vandal in a foreign country, repeatedly lied to police, the media, and his mom, and impugned the entire culture that was hosting him. Well actually we got four of those guys (not sure if the mom part holds for all four). So that's fun.

Looking/seeing

A white friend put something on Facebook about how he hasn't watched any of the videos documenting the horrible events of the last week in the US. I couldn't agree less with his reasoning, but it made me want to try to articulate, as disjointed and clumsy as the attempt feels, some issues underlying the decision to watch them or not.

The problem with who decides how screwed we are

It's been a while, but if the events of the last week and months don't prompt a resurrection of this blog then nothing will.