Dum Pendebat Filius

I’m off to Africa tomorrow night, readers (13 March 2010). I probably won’t be back in the US until April 2011.

If you are interested, why not follow me on my travel blog?

Here’s an open thread. Do watch this space for news — I’m heading off to Africa in March 2010 and will be there for over a year. This blog will be offline while I’m in Africa (so that I don’t have to worry about upgrading my damn blog software every few weeks), but I will put up a page here with a link to my travel blog for anyone who’s interested in following me on my journey through Africa.

Even the New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, has lost the ability to get the who/whom distinction right. Here’s a sentence from an article in today’s Sunday Book Review section:

Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.

If you’re ever confused about when to use who and when to use whom, use the “he/him-substitution” method.

Who = subject = HE
Whom = object = HIM

You can see where the author of this book review went wrong if you use this “he/him” method.

Take the clause where the author went astray: whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.

First, see if “who” would work. Try substituting “he” for “who”:

(1) She decided he was the "intellectual heir" she had been waiting for.

That looks and sounds like good English. So far, so good. No problem with who.

Next, try substituting “him” for “whom,” and look what happens:

(2) *She decided him was the "intellectual heir" she had been waiting for.

Yikes! That’s not how we say it in English, readers. That’s ungrammatical.

“Him was the intellectual heir” is obviously ungrammatical. Thus, you can’t say “she fell in love with this boy… whom she decided was the intellectual heir.” No, “she fell in love with this boy… who she decided was the intellectual heir.”

Whom is worthless, readers. We don’t need it in English anymore. It’s a relic of the long-ago days when English still had a functioning case system.

Even college-educated native speakers of English have trouble using whom correctly. This is OK — whom serves no purpose. It’s a relic. It would be all for the best if we would just let whom die a natural death, like it would have done hundreds of years ago if left to its own devices. But it hangs on artificially, deployed almost randomly on occasions when someone is consciously trying to write or speak in a “formal” register.

Notice, too, how the author of the book review had no compunction whatsoever about ending that sentence with a preposition. That’s good, that’s healthy. That’s how people use English in real life. Most educated speakers of English understand that “never end a sentence with a preposition” was always a very silly, arbitrary “rule” (a “rule” that was dragged screaming into English from Latin grammar, no less), and it no longer raises eyebrows when we ignore that ridiculous “rule” even on semi-formal occasions (such as a NYT book review).

But here, the author was so afraid that who might be “wrong” that he fell victim to hypercorrection and stuck in whom instead.

It’s time to say goodbye to whom, a relic that has long since outlived its usefulness.

Sometimes I read something that just makes my jaw drop. I have to read it multiple times to make sure I’m not missing something. Then I have to make sure I’m actually awake, that it isn’t all a dream. I had one of those am-I-dreaming? moments this morning, when I saw Sarah Palin’s comments on healthcare reform. Readers, this is just surreal:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin refers to, but does not link to, something she read by Thomas Sowell (or, more likely, something somebody told her Sowell said — Palin, by her own admission, is not much of a reader), so I don’t know whether the quotes she puts around “death panel” and “level of productivity in society” are just what they call “scare-quotes,” or whether she’s quoting something Thomas Sowell said, or what.

But that’s kind of beside the point. What makes me wonder whether I’m actually reading this, or if it’s all a weird dream, is the sheer lunacy of her assertions.

Does she actually, honestly believe that President Obama has proposed to convene a “death panel” that will judge the “level of productivity in society” of individual American citizens, and deny said citizens access to health care if said citizens are not deemed sufficiently productive?

Aside from the fact that no such proposal has ever been made, that’s one of the craziest things I’ve heard all year. Is there any human being who actually believes something that wacky?

Readers, I think that’s too crazy even for Sarah Palin to actually, literally believe it. I think she’s playing her admirers for a bunch of fools, which is pretty much par for the course in America in the year 2009.

We Americans are in very deep trouble, readers. Our economy is in very bad shape. Our armed forces are still bogged down in two completely useless wars in Southwest Asia. There are a lot of problems we need to solve. Yet we citizens have to go out of our way to get the most basic facts about any of the issues we’re facing as a nation. How come?

Well, one of the biggest problems is that we’ve got a political press corps who believe, and openly state, that it’s not their job to evaluate whether the utterances of public figures are true or not, a press corps that is just hopelessly addicted to bullshit, gossip and trivia, whose idea of “reporting” boils down to He said this, and she said that, and how will that affect their popularity ratings in the next public-opinion poll?, who could not care less about policy — they find it boring — and prefer to look at politics as an extension of celebrity gossip. We’ve got a completely polarized electorate, who look at everything through the lens of tribal affiliation (and this, readers, is basically why I quit blogging, because I’m just as guilty of that as anybody, and I’m sick to death of it).

All our political “news” is just thinly-disguised celebrity gossip, and all our political “commentary” is just one-sided propaganda and bullshit from a bunch of rich people who collect big fat paychecks from even richer people to play their viewers (or readers, or listeners) for a bunch of fools. Olbermann and Maddow are just as bad as Hannity and El Rushbo when it comes to playing their audience for fools (although they’re not quite as nasty and hateful as their right-wing counterparts, I will give them that).

Worse, we are living in a culture that openly scorns knowledge in favor of belief. If you know something I don’t, that doesn’t matter — what I believe is just as important as what you know. President Bush governed our nation for eight years on the basis of what he believed, rather than what he or anybody else knew, and look where it got us, readers.

And so maybe that’s why Sarah Palin feels comfortable saying, apparently in all seriousness, that President Obama would like to put her parents and her son in front of a “death squad” — because that’s what she believes, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not in real life, because she believes it?

That’s a possibility. But I still don’t buy it. Not even Sarah Palin is ignorant enough to believe this “death squad” bullshit. No, she’s playing her fan base, the unfortunate souls who actually take her seriously, for a bunch of fools. That’s how we roll in today’s America.

The truth is out, readers, about who I really am…

Why do you think my mom is in Kenya right now, readers? She’s doing secretary-of-state stuff to fool the MSM, but she really went to Africa to “take care of” the person who leaked a copy of my birth certificate to the truth-seekers all over the Internet.

There are now a bunch of pictures of Harar for you to enjoy. Just click on that picture below (yes, that’s me feeding a hyena with a piece of meat off of a stick clenched in my mouth).

There are plenty of pictures of Lalibela for you to enjoy, readers. Just click on the image below and you’re there.

You know the drill by now, readers. If you want to see some pictures of Axum, just click on the picture below.

Click on the picture below, readers, to see some pictures of Gondar.

Click on the picture below, readers, to see some pictures of Bahir Dar.