Bush, We Bid You A-Doo

Slate and the BBC have compiled their favorite "Bushisms" over the past eight years, and the results are hilarious...and sad, given that W. was our president for two full terms. The Republicans' strategy of celebrating W.'s willful ignorance as some kind of "folksy," from-the-gut authenticity now lies in tatters.

Here are some of the best Bushisms out of the bunch:

"I want to thank my friend, Senator Bill Frist, for joining us today. He married a Texas girl, I want you to know. Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me."
Nashville, Tennessee, 27 May 2004

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Washington, D.C., 5 August 2004

"Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat."
Washington, D.C., 17 September 2004

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"
Florence, South Carolina, 11 January 2000

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."
LaCrosse, Wisconsin, 18 October 2000

"I understand small business growth. I was one."
New York Daily News, 19 February 2000

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."
Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 6 September 2004

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."
Washington, D.C., 12 May 2008

On Technocratic Style

Apparently Louis Menand of The New Yorker has already written a review-cum-farce about the issues of writing with Microsoft Word that I've taken up here and here. "The End Matter" deserves a complete reading, but here are some highlights:

On Word:

First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you’re not ready to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool by a chip.

On Clippy, Word's late Help icon, an eyeballed paper clip:

[I]f, God forbid, you ever begin a note or a bibliography entry with the letter “A.,” when you hit Enter, Word automatically types “B.” on the next line. Never, btw (which, unlike “poststructuralism,” is a word in Word spellcheck), ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

On the Chicago Manual of Style's somewhat curious advice about punctuation:

Some of the advice is frankly a matter of taste. “An exclamation point added in brackets to quoted material to indicate editorial protest or amusement is strongly discouraged, since it appears contemptuous,” the authors counsel. “The Latin expression sic (thus) is preferred.” First of all, the reason the bracketed exclamation point appears contemptuous is that you use it when you wish to express contempt. There is nothing wrong with contempt. Second (which Chicago insists on, although generations of pedants have believed “secondly” to be the proper usage), sic is a far more damning interpolation, combining ordinary, garden-variety contempt with pedantic condescension. Elsewhere in Punctuation, the instructions are sometimes the reverse of enlightened. What could the authors possibly have been thinking when they committed the following sentence to print: “The semicolon, stronger than a comma but weaker than a period, can assume either role [!]” ?

Keepin' It Real?

Cora Daniels's incisive new book Ghettonation laments our society's increasing tolerance for low expectations, signaled by the way the ghetto has been transformed from an actually existing place into a mainstream lifestyle or "mind-set." The ghetto (noun) remains a site of racial oppression and economic poverty for some, but for the vast majority of Americans "ghetto" has come to mean a way of doing things, a style, an adjective used to describe the qualities (or lack thereof) of someone or something -- as in, "That's sooo ghetto."

Daniels reminds us that most Americans are not concerned in the least with alleviating the depressed socioeconomic conditions that characterize minority-dominated ghettos in our inner cities. Rather, in a perverse, consumerist twist (or collective "fuck you" to those actually languishing in ghettos), "ghetto" has become sheer mask and performance, a way for people of all races and classes to "play" poor and black.

One example of such playful, anti-materialist spectacle stands out in Daniels's research. It is Gizoogle.com, which translates any website address you enter into its search engine into "ghettospeak," an urban, rap-inflected, and decidedly raced ("black") slang. (A more "neutral," race- and class-variable "dictionary" of youth and urban slang is the user-edited Urbandictionary.com.) This is how the website translates two passages from my previous posts:

Me: I wonder what the implications of such overseas profitability are for domestic jobs. It's true that U.S. corporations are profiting from high sales in Europe and Canada, but I'm not sure if that necessarily translates into more jobs or better employment conditions (e.g., wages) for employees of those corporations.

Gizoogle: I rappa what tha implications of such overseas profitability is fo' domestic jobs n shit. It's true tizzle U.S. corporizzles is profit'n fizzle hizzy sales in Europe n Canada, but I'm not sure if T-H-to-tha-izzat necessarily translates into mizzy jobs or playa employment conditions (e.g., wages) fo' employees of those corporizzles fo' sheezy.

Me: But then Bauerlein makes this unusual concession: "The problem isn’t the inclusion of sociopolitical forensic per se. Rather, it is that the selections fall squarely on the left side of the ideological spectrum. They are all more or less radically progressivist. They trade in group identities and dismantle bourgeois norms. They advocate feminist perspectives and race consciousness. They highlight the marginalized, the repressed, the counter-hegemonic."

Gizoogle: But then Bauerlein makes this unusual concession n shit: "izzle problem isn’t tha inclusion of sociopolizzles forensic per se. Brotha it is that tha selections fall squarely on tha left side of tha ideolizzles spectrum , chill yo. They is all more or less radically progressizzles. They trade in group identities n dismantle bourgeois norms . Nigga get shut up or get wet up. They advocate feminist perspectizzles n race consciousness. They highlight tha marginalizzles, tha repressed, tha wanna be gangsta."

Admittedly, Bauerlein's stodgy prose is made so much more amusing by this translation. I especially love that it automatically translated "the counter-hegemonic" to "tha wanna be gangsta" because the latter, in fact, captures the precise meaning of the former with its ironic undertone. Bauerlein, of course, is taking critics to task (unfairly, I think, but still...) for appropriating a kind of counter-hegemonic "cool," which is, in a different context, something like a gangsta pose.

At any rate, you can see how the mainstreaming of ghettospeak can be utterly entertaining, often hilarious, and yet remain troubling somehow. Just what kinds of assumptions are we making about race, class, and even gender when we "playfully" submit to talk like this? Who are we trying to be -- what are we trying to say about ourselves -- when we end every other sentence with "fo' shizzle"? From whence this desire to call a close friend or confidant "my nigga"? All of which is to ask, What histories do we elide in such flights of raced fancy?

Whose ghetto is this anyway?