It’s Friday, and Combat! blog is sweating up the futon in Aaron Galbraith’s palatial Manhattan apartment. Everyone in this city is beautiful and lazy, and by “everyone” I mean everyone but me in the first case and everyone especially me in the second. Today’s links are therefore very half-assed—like 49% assed—but they also inspire a certain satisfaction. That’s the key element of lazy, after all: the sense that despite your inaction, you are still doing basically okay, particularly compared to other people. In this case, the other people are mostly residents of the Middle East, plus one writer with a major depressive disorder. Don’t worry—it’s not me. I’m super good. I’m just gonna lie here a moment longer.
Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful
Greetings from Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, which is as spacious and weirdly humid as it always is in my dreams. I have to spend the day with babies and security hires who have been given federal authority, so the blog sucks. Or does it? If you click on this link right here, you can watch a video of a brawl at the dolphin show in a Russian aquarium. It’s a real saga, and like any video of the social order breaking down in Russia, it contains several important themes—not the least of which is everyone’s inability to throw even one punch without falling into the pool. There are also several shots of the videographer’s girlfriend calmly explaining complex ideas in Russian, and it appears that the two sides have dressed in black and white, respectively, for our convenience. Enjoy, and remember that when a guy shoots a double on you without dropping to his knees, you’re not going to be able to pick him up by wrapping your arms around his waist, no matter how strong you are. I cannot emphasize that enough.
Steve King against birth control, end of human race
Not the good one
Representative Steve King (R–IA) lobbed another softball into the American media yesterday, arguing that requiring insurers to cover birth control could lead to the death of civilization. The DHS released a new set of guidelines this week that will eventually require health insurance policies to cover birth control without copays. It’s a great way for working moms to kill the tiny babies that live in their husbands’ sperm, and for coeds to slut it up like Gomorrah. I’m paraphrasing, here, but Rep. King’s comments are little more lucid:
We have people that are single, we have people that are past reproductive age, we have priests that are celibate. All of them, paying insurance premiums that cover contraceptives so that somebody else doesn’t have to pay the full fare of that? And they’ve called it preventative medicine. Preventative medicine. Well if you applied that preventative medicine universally what you end up with is you’ve prevented a generation. Preventing babies from being born is not medicine. That’s not— that’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below replacement rate we’re a dying civilization.
As always when one hears more than two Steve King sentences in a row, several concerns leap to mind.
Bolt upright in the world of fiction
The graph above comes from this excellent New York Times article about the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a massive, searchable database of written and spoken language from the last 20 years. As you can see, people sit bolt upright in novels a lot more than they do in journalism or conversation, possibly because interviews rarely start with the subject waking up and possibly because contemporary fiction is more mannered than we think. There is a big difference between vernacular and prose, as anyone who has read Dostoevsky will tell you. People are always exclaiming and crying and saying darling! in 19th century novels—a cataclysm of melodramatic affectation that was supposedly fixed by the advent of modernism. Modern and postmodern fiction prides itself on writing the way people really talk. The work of George Saunders and David Foster Wallace is peppered with likes and neurotic digressions, and if it does not exactly capture how we speak now, it at least gets how we think we speak now. As a little fiddling with the COCA reveals, however, the gulf between lived experience and fiction remains as wide as ever.
Now everything is fine
Both kinds of white dudes
Remember on Friday when we declared American politics too selfishly broken to address the basic management of the United States? It turns out we were wrong, because the President and congressional leaders reached a deal on the national debt ceiling last night. The package still needs the support of both houses—including several notoriously intransigent members—but tentatively, maybe even presumably, the lights are going to stay on. “Sausage making is not pretty,” Diane Feinstein told the Times. “But the sausage we have, I think, is a very different sausage from when we started.” And in the end, isn’t that what we all what from our food? Different?