Reflections  

Climbing the ladder — In 2005, Bill Clinton made (or, at least, reported) $7.5 million in income. The large majority of this came from the giving of speeches. He made $650,000 for two speeches given to a Tony Robbins gathering. He made $800,000 for four speeches given to Gold Service International of Bogota.

You gotta hand it to him: not everyone looks at the presidency of the United States as a stepping stone. — Ross Levatter

The market has spoken — On June 12, the Antioch College Board of Trustees announced that the 155-year old institution would be closing its doors because of "low enrollment and lack of funding." Surprise, surprise! Being a national center for political correctness and left-wing lunacy doesn't pay. Who'd a thunk it?

Founded by Horace Mann in 1852, Antioch was at first a beacon of sound progressivism. It was co-ed. It admitted black students. It made a woman a full professor. All this happened before the Civil War — and it was something to be proud of.

But Antioch never really took off as a great center of higher learning. Probably its most distinguished graduate was Stephen Jay Gould (class of 1963), the paleontologist and popular science writer. (Gould was also an exceptionally arrogant guy, which may tell us something about his alma mater.) Other graduates included Eleanor Holmes Norton and Chester Atkins, who was my congressman back in the 1980s. Ms. Holmes Norton, the D.C. representative, is I'm sure well known to Liberty readers. Atkins I remember as a Tip O'Neill clone who was always voting to deny funds to anticommunist forces in places like Angola.

After the annus horribilis of 1968, Antioch went off the rails. It recruited some of the worst riff-raff it could find into the student body. It transmogrified from a college into a Petri dish for perpetual revolution. At the end, it was no more than a parody of itself. Who can forget its hilarious code of sexual conduct, providing written guidelines for the art of love? (May I remove your blouse? May I insert my . . . ?)

The trustees announced that despite the shrinking enrollment, the puny endowment, and the crumbling facilities, Antioch would seek to reopen in 2012. I say the market has spoken. Turn the campus into something more useful — a mall, maybe? — Jon Harrison

Protest is the marinade of freedom — "What is this, socialist China?" asked Teresa Matuska. "This must be a joke," added Rose Terkay. "There are many more things that need watched other than if I make a hot dog or a piece of kielbasa after eight."

Those complaints were quoted in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review after the mayor of Canonsburg, a small town to the south of Pittsburgh, issued an executive order banning the use of propane, wood, or charcoal grills after 8 p.m.

"Laura Marra, 72, who attends every council meeting, said the mayor issued the order Monday night after Canonsburg resident Dave DiTullio complained that a neighbor constantly starts fires next door, sending smoke onto DiTullio's property," reported the Tribune-Review.

There's a warning for first-time offenders and then fines up to $300 per each occurrence of after-eight grilling.

Predictably, the new edict isn't popular. Said Barb Mavrich, a local librarian: "Now you can't even eat a weenie at night! You've got to eat your weenies before eight."

The town isn't without its rebel history. There's a Whiskey Rebellion Race each July 4th through the streets of Canonsburg, before the Independence Day parade, commemorating the time when the locals met at the Black Horse Tavern, downed some homemade spirits, and proceeded to tar and feather a federal tax collector and burn down the houses of some local excise officials, to protest the new federal tax on whiskey, a levy on the homemade product of their stills. George Washington sent in militias from Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, and Maryland to crush the insurrection.

In that same unruly spirit, Canonsburg resident Robert Folk, 22, said he will stand his ground: "I will," he declared, "grill illegally."

Protest sometimes pays off. On July 12, the mayor rescinded his order. — Ralph Reiland

To each their own — When I was young, I used the most sexist language you can imagine. I called servers "waiters" or "waitresses" and flight attendants "stewardesses." Mail carriers were "postmen" to me. I even called fishers "fishermen." Oh, I know, so did everyone else, but that's no excuse. Not really. I should have known better, and I'm ashamed that I didn't.

Eradicating sexism from our language has been a decades-long struggle. There have been many skirmishes along the way. Some have resulted in victory, while others have yet to be won.

The victories have been sweet. When in high school, I read notices like this: "Anyone who wants to go to the game on Friday should bring his money tomorrow."

No, I didn't go to an all-male high school. Yes, people really wrote things like that. Today the notice would automatically be written like this: "Anyone who wants to go to the game on Friday should bring their money tomorrow."

The victory? The grating, sexist "he" has been replaced by the melodious, inclusive "their."

Of course, "anyone," although indefinite, is singular and cries out for a singular possessive pronoun to precede "money." But, in addition to being singular, "anyone" is neuter and cries out for a neuter possessive pronoun. Using "its" isn't allowed, so we must prioritize these cries in the form of a rule: gender trumps number, as in: "If you love somebody, set them free."

And now, a skirmish yet to be won. The other day at the mall I watched as a woman approached a group of women and said, "Omigosh! You guys look like totally awesome!"

See how she needlessly tacked "guys" onto the perfectly inclusive second person plural "you"? Her impulse to pluralize the already plural "you" is understandable, if only because today "you" serves as both singular and plural. But pluralizing "you" can be done in modern English without making the plural masculine. In the South, "y'all" has been forged from "you all." In Appalachia, what was once "you ones" has been shortened to "you'uns" and even "yins." While these alternatives may not appeal to everyone, if only for stylistic reasons, they are preferable to "you guys" because they are truly gender neutral. In remote corners of the Northeast, it is said, the objective second person plural is sometimes "yous guys." This is a very bad choice.

In Late Middle English, all of this was nicely sorted out. The second person pronouns were as follows: the subjective was singular, thou, or plural, ye, while the objective was singular, thee, or plural, you. The clarity of this formulation gives rise to the thought that consideration might be given to expanding the struggle for gender neutrality to include a systematic reintroduction of these pronouns into modern American English, perhaps at the undergraduate level in progressive universities. Mmmm.

But back to the woman in the mall: can't she hear herself? A guy is a male, not a female. Is proof needed? "It's a guy thing." Not convinced? Try this: "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Or how about: "Oprah Winfrey is a very powerful guy." You get the point.

I am sure that this woman does not think of herself as a slave to the patriarchy. But sexist language is insidious and forms our perceptions from the deepest levels of our collective consciousness, often at a more fundamental level than thought. Indeed, language is the very stuff from which thoughts are made. Throwbacks like "you guys" must not be allowed to creep into a language that so many have worked so hard to make gender neutral. It is simply not acceptable.

Remember: gender trumps number, as in: "Omigosh! You look like totally awesome!"

It is better to be a bit unclear about whether you are talking to an individual or to an entire group than it is to risk undoing the linguistic progress of a generation by calling women men. In other words, for the betterment of all mankind, each of us must do his level best to avoid calling gals "guys." Okay, you guys? — Scott Chambers

Mencken's Baltimore — On Independence Eve, I took the train from Washington to Baltimore in pursuit of the ghost of H.L. Mencken, the libertarian journalist who, in the first half of the 20th century, personified independence of an eminent sort. I found his city sagging and tired, far from the charming literary capital to which he ascribed "the brilliance of a circus parade." It was obvious that the parade had long ago abandoned Baltimore, and I wondered if it ever had existed.

Naturally the city patriots tried to relax my doubts — mainly through the revelation that F. Scott Fitzgerald had lived in Baltimore. But they were not so quick to admit that the city was more purgatory than paradise for Fitzgerald, who supported his wife Zelda as she undertook treatments for mental illness at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Edgar Allan Poe resided in Baltimore, and died there too. Apparently the city was sinister enough to inspire "Berenice," his first horror story.

Navigating through dirt and decay, I imagined that Mencken loved his city not for its lights or wonder, but for the underrated reason that it was his. Returning from New York to Baltimore, he wrote, "is like coming out of a football crowd into quiet communion with a fair one who is also amiable, and has the gift of consolation for hard-beset and despairing men . . ."

But the city does not return the sentiments. Aside from the Enoch Pratt Library's Mencken Room, which is open only to scholars, Baltimore has evicted its legend. Streets aren't named for him. Statues don't boast of him. Official guidebooks ignore him. The city considers the Mencken House at 1524 Hollins St. a piece of "surplus property." And though the Friends of the H.L. Mencken House, having received right of entry, give tours of the vacant house by appointment, they are forbidden from running a real museum.

It was Dr. Vincent Fitzpatrick, the gentlemanly curator of the Mencken Room (where some of Mencken's effects are stored), who gave me the tour of Baltimore as the Sage experienced it. "That's where Mencken lived with his wife," Dr. Fitzpatrick said, pointing to the plastic-covered building of a Maryland museum. "And that's where he went to school," pointing to a hospital. "And he drank his famous toast to the end of Prohibition here" — once the bar of an elegant hotel, now a parking lot.

It was as if, to the objective world, Mencken's Baltimore had vanished, leaving its scents and trails only in the imagination of those who knew of it. The experience reminded me of Rudyard Kipling's poem about that lost road through the woods, which had forever vanished. Yet if "you enter the woods of a summer evening late," he wrote:

You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

— Garin K. Hovannisian

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

Send editorial comments to letters@libertyunbound.com.
All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.

Send web site comments to webmaster@libertyunbound.com.