Tom Glenn's Blog, page 91

The Comics

The Washington Post on Saturday ran an article on the venerable comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” that ceased publication 25 years ago. I remembered the strip vividly, and the article got me to thinking about comics and their place in my life.

I suspect it must be obvious to my readers that I peruse the Washington Post everyday and search the internet for articles from other papers, especially the New York Times. What may not be so clear is that I never fail to read the comics.

The Post features 41 different comic strips seven days a week. Among my favorites is “Doonesbury,” now in its fiftieth year of publication. The strip regularly lampoons Trump, giving him the drubbing he richly deserves. Equally beloved to me is “Peanuts,” since 2000 running reprints of older strips—its artist, Charles Schultz, died in February 2000. The last original strip was published the next day.

It’s clear to me that the comic strip is an art form. The cartoonist must deliver his message and a laugh in no more than four black-and-white panels (in the daily paper) and half a page or less for the color versions (in the Sunday paper). All the strips depend on characters with humorous character flaws well known to the reader. Dagwood Bumstead, the hero of “Blondie,” for example, has throughout the history of the strip (running since the 1930s) been known for his voracious appetite. As I read the comics every day, I feel as though I’m seeing old friends, people I’ve known since I was a child.

The only three strips I don’t read are “Mark Trail,” “Judge Parker,” and “The Amazing Spider Man.” The first two tell serious stories and the latter is about a superhero. I read the comics to laugh—as the name itself implies. These three don’t do that for me.

I read the newspaper at lunch and dinner (I don’t eat breakfast) as I am eating. The comics are always the last thing I read. Sometimes, on days of fast-breaking news or when there are multiple articles that deal with Trump, I don’t get to the funnies. They stack up. Then I read the comic pages serially. They guarantee that my meals will always be accompanied by laughter.

One of the reasons that I don’t subscribe to the New York Times, the greatest newspaper in the world, is that it has no comics. Fine. Let it be. I’ll settle for the second-greatest paper, the Post. Laughter is too important to ignore.

Back to Socialism

Some weeks ago, I addressed the question of socialism in a blog post. I defined it as “a system which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Socialists, in other words, believe that the means of making, moving, and trading wealth should be owned or controlled by the workers.

Trump and the Republicans regularly condemn as “socialist” programs that Democrats offer to make the benefits of society available to more people. The president and his supporters are misled by the misappropriation of the word “socialist” by dictatorships such as the one that rules Vietnam and calls itself the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Such errors damning egalitarian moves is a symptom of our American culture. We emphasize individualism, competition, and personal achievement and downplay or even dismiss cooperation, collaboration, and joint action. One result is our failure to make health care a right rather than a privilege. In the U.S., medicine is a way to make money, not a system to take care of our citizens. We are alone among the western democracies in failing to provide a government-controlled program of health care for all.

It’s time for us to mature as a nation and recognize that we are responsible for the good and well-being of all our fellow citizens. We already have Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—obviously socialistic programs. Maybe the new administration coming in 2021 will begin the much-needed movement toward government-provided health care for all.

2021

At last it’s here—a new year to replace the worst year in memory, 2020.

I’ve listed here before all the things that made 2020 a perfect storm of curses—the pandemic, the lockdown, economic collapse, new revelations about deeply rooted racial prejudice, and the worst president in U.S. history who made things far worse than they had to be.

I had two books published in 2020, the novel Secretocracy (about the Trump administration) and Coming to Terms (a short story collection about people coping with life’s challenges). They haven’t sold well, mainly because book shops have been shuttered and publishers have been partly crippled by the pandemic. And I haven’t been able to be out and about, doing presentations and readings and autographing. I’m hoping that all that will change in 2021.

I look forward to singular improvements in the new year. The Biden administration at its worst will be mammothly better than the best of the Trump administration. We will see immediate steps to combat the pandemic, vaccines will begin to flow, the nation’s health and economic wellbeing will improve rapidly.

And the hidden mistakes and even crimes of the Trump administration and his Republican supporters will begin to become public. I fully expect that during his last days in office, Trump will wreak vengeance upon the nation that rejected him. He could do enormous damage if he set his mind to it. My only hope is that he and his supporters are too inept to inflict permanent injury.

So 2021 will be a year to remember. The world and the nation will heal and thrive. And I am able to say with confidence to all:

Happy New Year!

The English Language (2)

English is a western Germanic language, but it is influenced by just about every other language in the world. The most influential tongues were Latin, Greek, and French, but we English speakers have picked up words and expressions from most of the other languages known to man. And as we have added to our language, we have, at the same time, uprooted any sensible set of rules about how we pronounce our words. The way we say our vowels is exemplary. The letter “a” can be pronounced aa (as in “nasty”), ah (as in tardy), uh (as in about), or it can be silent (as in read). The letter “e” can be pronounced as eh (as in “bet”), ee when doubled (as in “feet”), uh (as in “brother”), and so on. We have two letters, y and w, which can sometimes act as vowels, sometimes as consonants. Then we have diphthongs combining vowel sounds. Beyond them are the consonants. The rules for how to pronounce consonants run to pages.

In short, our pronunciation rules are voluminous and make little sense. My favorite example of English inconsistency is the way we pronounce the vowel-consonant cluster “ough.” You can prove my point by saying aloud tough, through, though, thought, and cough.

All the languages I have worked in other than English follow strict spelling and pronunciation rules. As far as I know, English is unique in its failure to systematize its usage. That makes learning to spell in English a major challenge, even for native speakers. That in turn makes it probably the most difficult language in the world to learn for speakers of other languages. Learning vocabulary in English means memorizing spelling/pronunciation for every single word in the language.

So I have another reason to be grateful that English is my native tongue—I’m spared the struggle to learn it. And English’s rampant inconsistency explains why our children must spend years in school learning to speak and spell words in their own native language.

So here I am in English. It’s mine, and, like it or night, I’m its.

The English Language

My recent post on gender in languages reminded me of my good fortune to be a writer using English. It is the most widely spoken language in the world. It’s the primary language in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and several island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, Singapore, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. And English is the first choice of a foreign language to study in most other countries of the world. It has long since become the global lingua franca. Something like a third of the world’s population, some two billion persons, now use English.

That puts me as a professional linguist at a distinct disadvantage. In my travels all over the world, my attempts to speak the native languages of the countries I visited invariably led to responses in English. It turned out that people everywhere spoke English better than I spoke their language. The only exception was Vietnam during the war years, and even there ordinary people were so anxious to practice their English that I was discouraged from using the three languages of that country, Vietnamese, Chinese, and French.

But my primary role in life is not as a linguist but as a writer. That American English as my native tongue has proven to be enormously beneficial. For one thing, English is probably the most versatile language now in existence. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are an estimated 171,146 words currently in use in English, and there are another 47,156 obsolete words. As my readers know, I particularly enjoy delving into archaic usages in my writing.

So I am blessed with having at my fingertips an endless variety of words to allow me subtle distinctions not possible in other languages. If I want to say something is strong, I have the choice of almost endless synonyms, including robust, sturdy, stout, durable, solid, resilient, tough, heavy-duty, and hard-wearing. And that’s only in one sense of the word “strong.”

More tomorrow.

Gender in Languages

Depending on what language you speak, you may think of all things in existence as being masculine or feminine. That’s a characteristic of all romance languages. Other languages, like Latin and German, offer you another category: neuter—for those things lacking sexuality. Then there are languages, like English, in which gender is rare, used only for nouns specifically identified by sex, e.g., man, master, and stag for male items, and woman, mistress, and doe for female. All other beings, that is, the vast majority—like house, bush, and car—have no gender. They are sexless.

The Asian languages I know, Chinese and Vietnamese, don’t express gender at all. It’s possible to specify masculine or feminine in those languages, but nothing is assumed to be either unless expressly so identified.

I’m left to wonder about the degree to which language shapes the way we perceive the world. Do native speakers of those languages that identify everything as male or female tend to think of the world as divided between the masculine and the feminine? How different is their perception from those who speak languages that make little or no distinction?

I have no way of knowing. My impression of the French, Spanish, and Italians is that they are more focused on sexuality than are the speakers of English. But that focus doesn’t seem to extend to the Germans, known for their practicality. And the Asian cultures I’ve known impress me as much more centered on survival than procreation.

But the observations in the previous paragraph are based on nothing more than vague feelings. I have no verified facts to work from. And I am reminded that American English is the richest language in history, with more words and more ways to express things than any other tongue. And I’m lucky enough to be a writer with English as my native language.

I’m left to ponder how English affects the way I think.

TG3 (2)

That nameplate, fashioned by a craftsman at the request of troops in Vietnam in 1967, still sits proudly on the desk where I write every day. It reminds me of the years I spent with the troops, how much I enjoyed them, and how I grieved when one of them was killed. My days of helping U.S. and friendly troops on the battlefield are sacred memories for me.

During my Vietnam years, I acquired a “chop,” a small stone implement with a carved seal on the bottom to allow the owner to stamp his unique signature character on an official document. I had my initials, TG3, as I wrote them back then, carved on the bottom. The result looks something like a handwritten Chinese character. So to this day, I can “chop” a document. I mainly use the chop on greeting cards.

Even though I’m still stuck with the same payroll signature, almost no one calls me TG3 these days. But I have my nameplate and my chop to remind me of my glory days in combat in Vietnam. I can’t say I miss those days. But I am proud of my work to help U.S. and friendly forces on the battlefield. I always will be.

TG3

I have written before in this blog about my initials, TG3, and why and how I use them. The story is good enough to bring up to date and retell.

My payroll signature is Thomas L. Glenn III. I started using that unwieldy name when I was working my way through college at the University of California in Berkeley. My father, Thomas L. Glenn, Jr., between prison terms, started forging checks against my bank account. So I changed my signature from Thomas L. Glenn to Thomas L. Glenn III. It worked, but I was stuck with a pretentious moniker.

During the thirteen years I spent on and off in Vietnam as a civilian supporting combat troops with signals intelligence on the battlefield, I worked under cover as an enlisted man of whatever unit I was assigned to. The purpose was to prevent the enemy from knowing that an intelligence operative was snooping on them. As far as I know, the cover was effective—the enemy never discovered my presence.

The troops I was supporting knew, of course, who I was. When they learned that my official name was Thomas L. Glenn III, they couldn’t stop laughing. They called me TG3. Because I regularly used tactical very-high-frequency (VHF) voice communications to alert friendly forces to the presence and actions of the enemy, they assigned me the callsign of TG3. The word got around. Every time I went back to Vietnam, the troops knew before I got there that I was TG3.

During one 1967 trip, I operated not far from Đà Nẵng in central Vietnam. Close by was the Marble Mountains. The U.S. troops I was supporting took it upon themselves to hire a local sculptor to make a desk nameplate of black and white marble for me. The name on it was TG3.

More tomorrow.

Obama’s A Promised Land

I am currently reading for review Barack Obama’s newest book, A Promised Land (Crown, 2020). Now more than halfway through the long text (750 pages), I want to speed up my reading so that I can get my review done as soon as possible. But, as has been the case since I began the read, I am so taken with the writing and what Obama has to say that I stop and ponder, then read again.

The marvel is that the writing is all Obama’s. He employed no ghostwriters. Among his many virtues is that he is a fine writer. And what he has to write about is compelling. His days as a senator, running for the presidency, and first term as the most powerful man on earth make for mesmerizing reading. His success, despite being Black and having a name that sounds Asian, is remarkable in and of itself.

Following a long-established tradition of an ex-president not criticizing his successor, Obama has said little about the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump. I don’t expect to find anything like that in A Promised Land or the volume that is to follow it on his second term in the White House. But maybe once Trump has left the presidency, Obama will finally deliver a judgment.

Meanwhile, I am spellbound by the book. I am more and more persuaded that Obama is a great man.

Christmas

Christmas is here. And what memories it brings.

As I was growing up, Christmases were often stingy. My mother was usually drunk (she was an alcoholic), my father was in prison, and I was working at parttime jobs so that I’d have enough to eat and clothes to wear. I promised myself that when I had a family, we’d celebrate Christmas properly.

And we did. I ended up with four children who enjoyed Christmas to the hilt. We always had a big, beautiful tree, lots of decorations, plenty of holiday food, and wonderful gifts. Unlike me, my children grew up looking forward to and reveling in Christmas. It was the best time of the year.

Those days are long since past. My children are grown and have families of their own. All indications are that their Christmas celebrations are full and rich. Good for them.

But for many years now, I haven’t spent Christmas with any of my children. There have always been a variety of explanations, but I’ve also been suspicious that the unspoken reason was that while they were growing up, I was so often absent. So many Christmases I was away “on business,” assisting American and friendly troops on the battlefield with signals intelligence data. I spoke seven languages and was an expert at tipping off the friendlies as to what the bad guys were up to. My skills were in constant demand. So maybe my children got used to doing without me.

Those years when I was on the battlefield at Christmas have left me with totally different memories. Those of us in combat barely acknowledged the season. Young soldiers and Marines homesick for their loved ones hid their feelings—they didn’t want to appear weak and unmanly. Sometimes there was a special meal provided by our suppliers, and every once in a while a gift sent by someone in the states would appear. But for the most part, we ignored the day rather than acknowledge the hurt of being away from family. Once in a while I’d hear a disgusted “Merry Fucking Christmas.”

This year, of course, there is no question of me getting together with anyone for the holidays. The pandemic condemns me to solitude. So Christmas is just another day. It’s a workout day (I lift weights every other day), so my afternoon will be taken up. Other than that, I’ll read, write, cook, and clean as I do every day.

But the day will be special in one way: I’ll have a top sirloin steak for dinner. My oldest daughter sent me four superb frozen steaks as a Christmas present.

I’ll enjoy myself to the fullest.