ANTHROPOLOGY NOW: Ten thousand talkers whose tongues are all broken!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 2018

Interlude—What Bob Dylan heard:
"I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken."

Bob Dylan reported the sighting—in 1962! Visitations from the future may have been involved.

We offer that speculation for an obvious reason. At that time, it was much, much harder to see so many broken-tongued talkers.

Today, such talkers are all around; they're all over cable news and talk. Their cousins are widely found at print publications, where they can be found composing headline sets like this:
Can Richard Carranza Integrate the Most Segregated School System in the Country?
A new chancellor is talking a big game about making New York City’s schools more equal—but that’s the easy part.
Are the New York City Public Schools "the most segregated school system in the country?"

The academic study from which this claim derives actually makes no such claim. And sure enough! By the second paragraph of the Atlantic essay found beneath that set of headlines, it's clear that the author of the essay understands this fact.

That said, so what? The inaccurate claim is becoming quite popular among us on the pseudo left. So is the puzzling insinuation at the start of this op-ed column in today's New York Times, headline included:
How Elite Schools Stay So White

Who deserves to get an elite education?

That question is being debated in Massachusetts, where court papers argue over Harvard’s use of race in its “holistic” admissions process, and in New York City, where politicians are trying to increase the number of black and Latino students at top public high schools.

But the answer has always been obvious: only the elite.
The "top public high schools" to which that passage refers are currently 52% Asian-American—and Asian-Americans reportedly have the highest poverty rate of any group in New York City.

On that basis, it's puzzling to see the operation of those top public high schools lumped in with the authors' claims about the way "elite schools stay so white." But those claims are popular among our tribe, and the New York Times is inclined to promote them. On that basis, a column appeared which didn't exactly seem to make perfect sense.

It's very, very easy today to find talkers whose tongues may seem broken. They're found all over "cable news." They even exist in print.

Sometimes, their efforts provide bits of comic relief. At the top of page A3 in today's New York Times, some unnamed editor has listed seven of today's "Noteworthy Facts."

Three of those noteworthy facts would be these. No, we aren't making this up:
Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY'S PAPER

The Leadenhall Building in London is known as the Cheesegrater.

Many good historians believe that Bills in Sydney, which opened in 1993, was the first restaurant to serve avocado toast.

In 1984, Bernard Hinault, a five-time winner of the Tour de France, punched a shipyard worker who was part of a protest over layoffs that stopped the early season Paris-Nice cycling race.
Dylan didn't report seeing talkers whose efforts seemed naively parodic. But those are three of today's seven "Noteworthy Facts."

It isn't that the New York Times includes no accurate facts. Right next to the column about the way Asian-majority schools show that elite education has always been designed to favor whites, a regular columnist tells Times readers about a recent poll:
BRUNI (7/25/18): On Sunday, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal released a poll that took place mostly after Helsinki. It showed that Donald Trump’s approval rating, which usually hovers around 40 percent, had risen to 45—still bad but, bafflingly, better than before. Republicans were why. They gave him an approval rating of 88 percent, which is positively alpine and higher than the one that Democrats gave Barack Obama at the same point in his presidency eight years ago.
Trump's approval rating did indeed stand at 45 percent in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll—unless you watched a pair of talkers on Monday evening "cable news!" The pair of talkers said this:
O'DONNELL (7/23/18): And, John, a new poll, NBC/Wall Street Journal, shows that the president's approval rating is far below a majority. But 88 percent of Republicans say they support the president. And unfortunately, in most of the media, they never do the math on what that actually means, since only 26 percent of voters are Republicans.

HEILEMANN: Here we go.

O'DONNELL: Eighty-eight percent of 26 percent is something like 23 percent of voters support Donald Trump.

HEILEMANN: Yes. The Republican Party is shrinking.
That's what the talkers actually said—and no, nothing they went on to say corrected the bizarre misimpression they'd given. Injecting a note of comic relief, Lawrence complained that the rest of the press corps refuses to do the math!

(Just for the record, that approval rating—45 percent—is almost exactly where Obama stood at this point in his own first term, in July 2010. USA Today/Gallup had him at 41!)

Bruni seemed to say he's "baffled" by Trump's approval number. That said, many talkers insist that no one should ask Trump supporters why they feel as they do. Heilemann voiced a related bit of pique as he spoke with O'Donnell.

When Dylan won the Nobel Prize in 2016, Patti Smith sang his 1962 song at the formal ceremony. Listening to her performance, we were struck by the prophetic quality of his claim about the talkers.

Today, they're all around! From the White House over to Fox and then on to The One True Channel, it seems to us that tongues are broken all over the American discourse. For the past several years, we've been wondering if anthropology can explain our transparently broken culture, which didn't start with Trump.

This culture didn't start with Trump? Just for the record:

The lunacy didn't start with Trump, but it always ran through him. In April 1990, Diane Sawyer scored the big interview with Marla Maples for her dim-witted ABC magazine program, PrimeTime Live.

“All right, was it really the best sex you ever had?” That's what Sawyer thoughtfully asked, letting us see the types of things she'd do to acquire her wealth and her fame. (At the time, her salary was reported to be $3 million per year.)

Nine years later, Sawyer scored the big interview with Candidate Gore when he announced his race for the White House. She hit him with a brain-dead, broken-souled "pop quiz" designed to show that he'd never been anywhere near a farm, one of the ten thousand broken-tongued lines of attack being aimed at Bill Clinton's chosen successor by the mainstream press.

In June 2014, when Sawyer interviewed Candidate Hillary Clinton, this wealthy goddess of TV faux "news" attacked Clinton for her unseemly wealth! That said, people like Sawyer have dragged us down all across the past three or four decades. We liberals have luvvved them every step of the way—and their ugly parodies of public discourse have always run through the inanities and the disorders of Donald J. Trump, who was excitingly said to have given Maples the best sex she ever had.

Diane Sawyer is Donald Trump. So are quite a few others. Somehow or other, Dylan heard their tongues a-talkin' all the way back in 1962!

What can anthropologists tell us about all this broken-tongued talking? At this point, we feel the discourse has fallen apart to such a degree that this is pretty much the only real question left.

The question won't make sense to you unless you're willing and able to see the depth of the nonsense which surrounds us. The tongues are broken inside the White House, but quite a few tongues are also broken inside our own failing tribe.

Some of us can't make out that second fact, but it's true nonetheless. As we wait for Mister Trump's Ultimate Fully Dispositive War, we've asked Professor Harari to explain how we got to this place.

Given our "massive brains," how has our "highly intelligent" species managed to create such a mess? Tomorrow, we'll resume Harari's account, 100,000 years in the past.

According to Professor Harari, our species drove all other humans to extinction. "Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark," he mordantly says at one point.

Can Harari explain how we managed to reach this brain-dead place? As we wait for Mister Trump's War, what sort of enlightenment can we derive from the story he tells?

Tomorrow: Toward that chance mutation

23 comments:

  1. "As we wait for Mister Trump's War"

    Yeah, your repulsive lib-zombie death-cult is always craving for war. And this time for a massive termonuclear one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies


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  2. Is Richard Carranza a liberal? He could be a conservative for all we know. Is he a member of our tribe? Offices like superintendent of schools tend to be bipartisan.

    Does Broken tongued even refer to lying? Maybe it refers to not telling people what is going on, to silence about important things. We don't know what Bob Dylan meant but Somerby borrows the phrase nevertheless.

    Species don't die out because other species attack them. They die out because they cannot survive in an ecological niche, a specific environmental context. They may be competing with other species for food but, unless they are prey, they aren't being attacked by those other species directly.

    Harari's vision of competition is this:

    ""One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction," Harari wrote. "Imagine a Sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for thousands of years. The newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals' traditional staples ... The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves and slowly died out."

    That isn't the same as what Somerby considers intolerance. Harari's other quote refers to that:

    “Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species?”

    But this is intra-species conflict, not fighting between species. Harari is making political comments about today's conflicts. Somerby glosses that this is the source of Harari's comment. His musing is understandable given that he is an Israeli living in a contentious time.

    He also says: "“Brexit may well initiate the simultaneous unravelling of both the UK and the EU. But in the long run, history’s direction is clear cut,” he writes. “In recent generations the few remaining civilisations have been blending into a single global civilisation.”

    So Somerby, attributing a belief to Harari that humans cannot get along, majorly distorts Harari's actually belief that humans are moving toward a global unification as a species that will transcend differences, as we unite to address problems like global warming. He does not believe what Somerby attributes to him at all.

    Somerby commits his old trick of pulling sentences out of context and using them for his own purposes. Dylan may subscribe to none of Somerby's views but he seems to be Somerby's favorite source. Somerby should show more respect for the actual views of the authors he steals from. Otherwise, I believe Somerby's tongue is the one that is broken as he distorts what others have said about their own beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Right. “A single global civilization”!is the essence of tolerance and diversity and a guaranteed heaven of endless truth and light.

      Can’t wait.

      Delete
    2. It was so nice while you were gone.

      Delete
    3. Cecilia, I enjoy your comments. But if all the posters who can’t be bothered to make themselves base-line identifiable via a “pen-name” of some sort all disappeared from this blog tomorrow, I’d see it as cause for celebration.

      Delete
    4. Anon 1:47pm, I wasn’t gone.

      Delete
    5. Hey Eric,

      Go fuck yourself, you poltroonish broken record.

      Delete
    6. A single global civilization may be our last chance at survival on a rapidly warming planet that doesn't care whether we live or die. We may need to set aside our differences in the interest of continuing the species. That is far from "heaven." You and your conservative buddies don't seem to grasp that the planet is going to get a lot worse if no one does anything to reduce carbon emissions and cool the planet down. Did you think the news about Greece was a joke? Or do you have that famous conservative lack of empathy?

      Delete
    7. Unabashed Non Nym-ElitistJuly 25, 2018 at 8:31 PM

      @ 8:04 PM - obviously the latter.

      Delete
  3. I know and love Dylan's cover of I Stole Your Love.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I know and love that song that Dylan cowrote with Michael Bolton, Steel Bars.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don’t think it’s a matter of their not bothering.

    It’s a hell of a lot easier to be unaccountable for what you argue if you’re an anonymouse.

    Thanks, Eric. I enjoy you too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If I make an argument now, using this nym, am I any more accountable than if I called myself accountable? Or would you be accountable for what I said? If I call myself Donald J. Trump, how accountable would I be?

      This is a silly complaint. It arises mostly from people who regard comments as a food fight and want to make sure they hit the right targets. Anyone discussing anything of substance doesn't need a nym to keep the discussion straight. The ideas flow of their own accord.

      Any chance you might go back to being anonymous Cecelia? It is annoying to have you here pretending to be female while you spout Republican garbage at a so-called liberal blog. You are only doing it to annoy. So it strikes me as hypocritical when you complain about others annoying you.

      Delete
    2. No chance. Never was an anonymouse, never want to be.

      That’s a ridiculous argument you’re making and it would be that no matter what you called yourself.

      That you make it under my name makes a point opposite of the one you intend. That you didn’t call yourself Peaches to make your case was in order to make the point that you could make all semblance of accountability irrelevant.

      You then try to suggest that any designated and stable moniker is thereforevirrelevant too, because it is still just a faceless name.

      Hogwash under any name and in every medium.
      Taking name imposed risks that have to do with accountability. You made that clear by taking mine.

      Delete
    3. That's Not My NameJuly 25, 2018 at 9:40 PM

      Where's David Dennison's accountability? Oh yeah, his cult gives him a pass every time.

      Delete
    4. Karma hasn’t...

      (No, that’s not a stripper)

      Delete
    5. Cecelia,
      Take it up with the Right-wing Supreme Court, which recently ruled that money (speech) being anonymous (and accountability free) is a protected Constitutional Right.
      If it's good enough for a representative democracy, it's good enough for TDH.

      Delete
    6. Anon 12:16 am, but candidates are certainly accountable for the positions they advocate and for the actions they take.

      Even with the debate on the delicate balancing act between accountability and privacy, in the case of politicians, there is the acountability of political platforms.

      That this may not be wholly adequate in many opinions and the arguments about freedom and privacy less than persuasive should make you all the more amendable to even the ephemeral accountability of a blogboard moniker, rather than just a snide justification on an internet site.

      Now maybe you can pull out some Biblical character or a Norse god to justify your principled decision to remain an anony putz.

      Delete
    7. "Anon 12:16 am, but candidates are certainly accountable for the positions they advocate and for the actions they take."

      Studies show this not to be the case.
      -----
      Agreed that the Right-wing SCOTUS is a 100% joke, who rules on cases based on desired outcome not law.
      --------
      The Bible? We live in Trump's anti-PC world, which is why ANY mention of religion should be met with, "God is a figment of dim-witted imaginations."

      Delete
  6. Just for the record, Trump continues to have the lowest approval poll numbers of any modern president.

    Just for the record, 538's highest rated poll this week has Trump approval/disapproval at 39/51. The second highest rated poll has Trump at 38/58.

    ReplyDelete

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  8. I AM HERE TO TESTIFY ON HOW MY HERPES VIRUS WAS CURED BY DR LEWIS.

    I'm Liubov Nikonets, from Texas USA. I had been in a relationship with a guy and we had unprotected sex for the first time and within a day i got a big bump on the crease of my thigh and vagina. after a few days it began to hurt more and more. I told him to take a picture of it for me, and it looked like open sores, like bugs were biting off my skin or something. So i went to the ER and they said genital herpes. I was soooo depressed. my boyfriend and i cried. he cried for me, but he had no idea he had it too. next day, same thing happens to him. at this point, we think i gave it to him because I was the first one to show the symptoms. The next phase I went through was depression. At this point, all I did was sleep and cry. I felt like my life was over. I knew I could never get married, I felt dirty, and worthless. I was depressed for about two months. I fought thoughts of suicide and it was a hassle to even carry out my daily tasks. So I started to wonder if there would be a remedy to this disease, which led me to going to visiting many hospitals, and nothing good came out from it, until I read a person’s testimony online that said that they were cured with the help of Dr LEWIS Spell, of this disease that the world deems incurable and tears rolled down my face. That persons testimony sparked a hope in me that led me to contact Dr LEWIS. So he assured us that we are going to be alright, after meeting up with the necessary requirements, he sent us a parcel and gave us instruction guide on how to use it, which we did, after 7 days of using the medication, the herpes was totally cured. So I and my boyfriend went and got tested for every STD in the book and every single test came back NEGATIVE, we also went back to the hospital, and it was confirmed NEGATIVE. I am posting my testimony to help someone out there suffering from this disease. Do not hesitate to contact Dr LEWIS via e-mail: Lewis7temple@gmail.com or WhatsApp him on +393511568477
    HE ALSO HAS CURE TO THE FOLLOWING DISEASE:
    HPV
    GENITAL HERPES
    TRICHOMONIASIS
    CHLAMYDIA
    HIV
    GONORRHEA
    HBV
    SYPHILIS
    CANCER
    PENIS ENLARGEMENT
    BOOBS ENLARGEMENT.

    ReplyDelete