Imagine consistent outrage over the use of slavery as a metaphor (disaggregating it from any lust to get Sarah Palin).

"It’s deplorable for people to work wages, slave wages, in the 21st century evolutionary country." That's a quote highlighted in this local CBS report, which is currently highlighted at the top of Drudge with the simple teaser "Slave wages."

Now, we were just talking about all the trouble Martin Bashir encountered after he went super-dramatic about how despicable it was for Sarah Palin to have used slavery as a metaphor, and I said:

Bashir — if he was ever worth having his own show — should be able to say very clearly that he intended to express the depth of the horror of slavery and therefore why it should never be used as a metaphor. Now, of course, he'd be open to the criticism that he only chose to go where he did because his target was Sarah Palin, but he could confess to that, say that was wrong, and dedicate himself to permanent across-the-board opposition to slavery as a metaphor.

So... imagine going Bashir over the use of the term "slave wages." Remember, all Sarah Palin did was use slavery as a metaphor, and she was grilled by Jake Tapper on CNN — here's the transcript — in what to me looks like an effort to make her say something off (as if Tapper wanted to be the new Katie Couric, ruining Sarah Palin all over again).

TAPPER: So, you obviously feel very passionate about the national debt. The other day, you gave a speech in which you compared it to slavery.

PALIN: To slavery. Yes. And that's not a racist thing to do, by the way, which I know somebody is going to claim it is.

TAPPER: Don't you ever fear that by using hyperbole like that -- obviously, you don't literally mean it's like slavery, which cost millions of people their lives and there was rape and torture. You're using it as a metaphor. But don't you ever worry that by using that kind of language, you -- you risk obscuring the point you're trying to make?

PALIN: There is another definition of slavery and that is being beholden to some kind of master that is not of your choosing. And, yes, the national debt will be like slavery when the note comes due.

More at the link. You see what Tapper is doing, playing the old game of Screwing with Sarah. And Bashir just came tripping after Tapper. He can get in there too. They want to tap her and bash her. Rape metaphor intended, because I'm trying to highlight the political use of metaphor and responsive arguments that this metaphor is not allowed. Bashir said:

Given her well-established reputation as a world class idiot, it’s hardly surprising that [Palin] should choose to mention slavery in a way that is abominable to anyone who knows anything about its barbaric history. So here’s an example. One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years. Thistlewood was the son of a tenant farmer, who arrived on the island of Jamaica in April 1750, and assumed the position of overseer at a major plantation.

What is most shocking about Thistlewood’s diary is not simply the fact that he assumes the right to own and possess other human beings, but is the sheer cruelty and brutality of his regime. In 1756, he records that a slave named Darby ‘catched eating kanes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of inhumanity.

And he mentions a similar incident in 1756, his time in relation to a man he refers to as Punch. ‘Flogged Punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper. Made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.' I could go on, but you get the point....

When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.

I'm asking you to imagine consistency about the use of metaphor, disaggregating it from the lust to get Sarah Palin or somebody else you think is asking for it. Imagine doing the Bashir routine when anyone talks about "slave wages" or being a "wage slave." That's what Bashir would have needed to do to prove his good faith in his outrage over the cheap deployment of the idea of slavery. It's not something you can realistically imagine, and that's why we know it was Bashir, even more than Sarah Palin, who carelessly appropriated the suffering of others to make a political point.

Bonus: Imagine what Bashir — in a quest for consistency — would have to say to Bryan Ferry:



By the way, Bashir's Thistlewood story was about torture, and torture can occur in many contexts other than slavery. True consistency would require him to rage against the use of torture as a metaphor. He ought to lose his cool whenever he sees, say, a headline like "Homework torture for some gifted students."

Be consistent and principled about metaphor or eat shit and die.

Bashir resigns.

He'd apologized, but "upon further reflection," he resigns from MSNBC.

ADDED: I think this is all such nonsense (including the ousting of Alec Baldwin). They can't trust people to understand explanations. Bashir — if he was ever worth having his own show — should be able to say very clearly that he intended to express the depth of the horror of slavery and therefore why it should never be used as a metaphor. Now, of course, he'd be open to the criticism that he only chose to go where he did because his target was Sarah Palin, but he could confess to that, say that was wrong, and dedicate himself to permanent across-the-board opposition to slavery as a metaphor.

"We think of it as the best thing in the world... and they think of it as toxic and nasty and disgusting."

We = organic farmers. They = U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

It = shit.

Floaters... a post inspired by the Chris Matthews statement that Obama's "got floaters, like Valerie Jarrett, floating around."

See the the previous post for the context and analysis of the quote. This is a more light-hearted exploration of "floaters."

1. "Float On," by The Floaters... a hit song from 1977. Lyrics here. Each Floater — Ralph, Charles, Paul, Larry — has his own verse in which he begins by announcing his astrological sign and proceeds to tell use what kind of women he likes. Ralph, the Aquarius, likes "a woman who loves her freedom," etc.

2. "Float On," by Modest Mouse, is a completely different song. It's about not worrying about your problems: "Even if things get heavy, we'll all float on/Alright already, we'll all float on alright."

3. The top definition for "floater" at Urban Dictionary is: "a social mastermind who wavers between members of one particular clique or between multiple cliques in general, pitting people against one another and leeching out information without seeming like a threat." Definitions #2, #3, and #5 refer to buoyant fecal matter. Definition #4 refers to those bits in your eyes, and #6 is "A dead body found in the water."

4. In Adelaide, they eat a comfort food called a "pie floater." "Anthony Bourdain, Joe Cocker, Billy Connolly, Nigel Mansell, Shane Warne and Angus Young are high profile fans of the pie floater."

5. Bob Dylan has a song called "Floater (Too Much To Ask)." The word "floater" does not appear in the song, though Bob appears in a boat in verse #3 fishing for bullheads, and in verse #12, there's a reference to "rebel rivers," which include the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee.

"The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel."

"The Atlantic recently assembled a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others to assess the innovations that have done the most to shape the nature of modern life."

I was interested to see nitrogen fixation at #11, because it's something I've got to tell you I had never thought much about that at all until last week when I was reading this excellent New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Head Count, Fertilizer, fertility, and the clashes over population growth," which begins with this topic:

Early in the history of agriculture, people realized — without, obviously, understanding the chemistry behind this insight—that when usable nitrogen ran low fields turned barren. Eight thousand years ago, farmers in the Middle East were already planting legumes, whose roots harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria, in rotation with cereal crops, such as wheat. Later, Cato the Elder recommended that Romans “save carefully goat, sheep, cattle, and all other dung.” Bird shit is an excellent source of nitrogen, and in the early nineteenth century, when Europeans learned that there were mountains of the stuff on remote islands off Peru, the discovery inspired a guano rush; by the eighteen-fifties, Britain was importing four hundred million pounds of bird poop a year, and the United States a hundred and seventy million pounds....

By [Fritz] Haber’s day, the appetite for crop-friendly nitrogen was so huge that scientists had turned their attention skyward. Nitrogen is the most common element in the earth’s atmosphere.... but almost all of it is floating around in the intractable form of N2. When... Haber showed how to bust up N2 to produce ammonia — NH3 — he basically solved the problem. No more guano would be needed. Haber had, it was said, figured out how to turn air into bread.

"18 Fun and Utterly Fascinating Facts About Joe Lhota."

He's the GOP candidate for mayor in NYC. I'll highlight one, the most legal one:

6) Remember the Giuliani administration's showdown with the Brooklyn Museum over a portrait of the Virgin Mary that involved elephant dung? A lot of that was Joe Lhota! As deputy mayor, he spearheaded negotiations with the museum, threatening it with eviction and funding cuts. He admitted recently that his legal argument was flawed, saying, "I have a much clearer understanding of the First Amendment now."

 And now I'm following Lhota on Twitter. Sample tweet:

Exhibit 5673 that @deBlasioNYC won't talk about the issues http://t.co/tW1sJTweJU #blahblahblahdeblasio

— Joe Lhota for Mayor (@JoeLhota4Mayor) September 23, 2013

"Women have sexualised themselves and made great art, which they may get flak for, but it's powerful."

"But if you sexualise yourself and you're not making art, you are just sexualising yourself. Everyone's embarrassed. It's not very good, is it? You're just pooping on yourself."

Said Tori Amos, somewhere into the answer to The Guardian's question "Do men age more easily?" and right after saying "I won't talk about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs."

It's an interesting chain of thought, no? Here's how I visualize the thoughts of Tori Amos, in 11 steps:

1. To ask "Do men age more easily?" is to ask whether aging is more difficult for women.

2. Miley Cyrus — who's very young, but used to be younger and who's trying to gain credibility as woman and not a kid anymore — showed some awful awkwardness with that sexy dressing and dancing.

3. Sexuality can work, since obviously I've used sexuality well in my artistic performances.

4. I'm not going to get sidetracked into talking about Miley like everybody else, the topic here should be me, and when I think of self-sexualizing, I want the subject to be me, and this interview is PR from my artistic work product.

5. The most graceful way to retrack onto me and my excellent use of sexuality is to speak in the abstract.

6. Women have sexualized themselves and made great art which they may get flak for, but it's powerful.

7. The key is to unleash the power of self-sexualizing only when you can arrive at great art, which is what I have done and Miley has failed at.

8. All these artists, including me, have a powerful effect on young girls, who want to be like us, and this is a problem that I have a responsibility to solve.

9. If your self-sexualizing doesn't produce art, then the product is you — your body out there in the real world.

10. The self-sexualized woman out there in the world — not on the stage within the trappings of art — is bad... is shit.

11. Oh, my dear fans, do not poop on yourselves!

"The Dung Beetle Is a Climate Change Hero."

Hail, dung beetle.

"Can you start a post and thread on the adverse economic and environmental impact of pets?"

Asked Phaedrus in the comments to "If you really care about global warming, stop all unnecessary travel."

The same tree huggers that yammer on and on about the environment allow their pets to use everyone else property, public and private as a restroom for their animal. Human waste has to be treated under all kinds of regulatory requirements. Pets are allowed to deposit equivalent waste at will wherever as if they are wild animals which they aren't. And don't get me started on what it takes to feed them, the grain, meat etc. You could feed a lot of starving people using the grain that goes into pet food.

Consider this that post. And let me also call attention to my 2010 post "If you really believed in global warming, you would turn off your air conditioning," which had an addendum with a list of 6 more things people should do to demonstrate actual belief in the coming calamity:

1. Your weight should be at the low end of normal, indicating that you are not overconsuming the products of agriculture.

2. You should not engage in vigorous physical exercise, as this will increase your caloric requirements. You may do simple weight-lifting or calisthenics to keep in shape. Check how many calories per hour are burned and choose a form of exercise that burns as few calories as possible.

3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don't run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.

4. Get up at sunrise. Don't waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.

5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don't have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.

6. If you have free time, such as a vacation from work, spend it in your home town. Read library books, redo old jigsaw puzzles, meditate, tell stories to your children — the list of activities is endless. Just thinking up more items to put on that list is an activity that could be on the list. Really embrace this new way of life. A deep satisfaction and mental peace can be achieved knowing that you are saving the earth.

"If you wanted to spend the first day of July watching a timelapse video of a Hippo enclosure being cleaned, filled & then dirtied again..."

"... you've come to the right place."

This is 3 days in the Milwaukee County Zoo hippo enclosure:

Spying on...

... poop.

Dog poop.

Snoopy.

"The doctors told a story of a married man who got a transplant, and whose wife had a parrot."

"They told them the parrot had to go. The wife refused. The guy caught an avian infection and died after going home. I don't know if that was premeditated or not, but the story sent home the message. So, I had all my bird stuff taken down and cleaned up, and I avoided gardening and playing in my pond for a while...."

Also: "While we are on the subject of grossity and contact with it, I have a suggestion for dog owners...."

AND: Thanks to bagoh20 for the parrot story. Click on the link for the whole thing.

"A man with a cow slurry fetish has admitted threatening..."

"... to kill a family who live at a farm where he has repeatedly rolled naked in animal muck."

"Slurry" is "A mixture of manure or farmyard waste and water; manure in fluid form," according to the OED, which provides these historical examples:

1965 Punch 22 Dec. 932/2 In a modern fattening house..the manure from several hundred swine falls through slatted floors into tanks beneath the building where a daily dose of water soon turns it into a forbidding quantity of evil-smelling slurry.
1970 R. Jeffries Dead Man's Bluff i. 5 He went through from the dairy into the herringbone parlour and stared..at the two days' accumulation of slurry.
1971 Farmers Weekly 19 Mar. 48/4 It takes one man about six minutes a day to clear away the slurry and a bit longer to put out the hay.

For the birds.

The phrase "for the birds" — originally, "strictly for the birds" (I guess the strictures broke down over time) — is defined by the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary to mean "trivial, worthless; appealing only to gullible people." This isn't such an old expression, according to the OED, which finds its first print appearance in  J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," published in 1951: "‘Since 1888 we have been moulding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds."

But the 1957 book "American Speech" tells us about its use in speech, which goes back to 1942:

In 1942, when I entered the U.S. Army..the disparaging term that's for the birds was in common use among officers and enlisted men... The metaphor alludes to birds eating droppings from horses and cattle.

So "for the birds" is a way of saying "shit"!

This is especially amazing to me this morning as I'm pursuing a bird theme this morning, but I'd gone off-theme in the previous post to talk about Maureen Dowd's column and encountered the expression "sad sack" and learned for the first time that it's a short version of the WWII military slang "sad sack of shit."

How many more common expressions have a hidden shit theme dating back to World War II? If I encounter another one this morning by accident, it's going to feel cosmic. And don't tell me "cosmic" WWII slang for Coincidence Of Shit Metaphors In Combat.

Why do 58% of public swimming pools in the U.S. contain fecal matter?

"Finding a high percentage of E. coli-positive filters indicates swimmers frequently contaminate pool water when they have a fecal incident in the water or when feces rinse off of their bodies because they do not shower thoroughly before getting into the water," according to a statement by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fecal incident....

"Elimination communication" — babies without diapers — "is finding an audience in the hipper precincts of New York City."

"Ms. Shapiro, who is a doula, a birth and child-rearing coach, says it is practically now a job qualification to at least be able to offer diaper-free training as an option to clients. Caribou Baby, an 'eco-friendly maternity, baby and lifestyle store' on the border of artsy Greenpoint and Williamsburg, has been drawing capacity crowds to its diaper-free 'Meetups,' where parents exchange tips like how to get a baby to urinate on the street between parked cars."

It's Earth Day, baby. Catch up with the hipsters! Get cracking! Or do you not even know what a doula is? Well? Do you or don't you? Do you doo doo with a doula?

If you had to choose a dimension within which to aspire toward hipness, would you choose poop? Perhaps there's something especially hip about expressing lofty aspirations in the lowliest medium.

"Coming with me to clean up dog poop?"

Meade asks. I say, "That's not me... but can I blog about it?"

Meade, who's getting ready to go out for some dog park volunteer work, says okay, but only if I link to this comment on yesterday's "Obama’s insulting salary stunt" post:

garage mahal said...

He won't even feel his sacrifice. And if he does, he can ease his tiny pains with another deluxe vacation and a few more concerts at the White House performed by whichever pop stars his daughters are enthusing over this month.

Just like you didn't have to feel any real sacrifice from Act 10.

I doubt you ever rub elbows with the peons at the bottom of the food chain who did feel it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Phil 3:14 said:

OK Professor, help me understand, who are the "peons" in this analogy?

Or is this another of you word plays (i.e. pee)?

And think plants are at the bottom of the food chain.

Okay, I'll accept it as my job to pick up the metaphorical poop. I didn't call people "peons," and I didn't mix a metaphor of "peons" and "food chain." I don't even know why Meade imposed that condition on my use of his poop quote.

A "peon" — according to the (unlinkable) OED — is "An attendant, an orderly; a footman or messenger having subordinate authority over other staff. Also: a junior member of staff in an office."

1973 P. G. Wodehouse Bachelors Anonymous i. 8 ‘She treated me like one of those things they have in Mexico, not tamales, something that sounds like spoon.’ ‘Peon?’ ‘That's right.’

"Peon" actually used to be pronounced pyoon. The pronunciation "pee on," however, is better for punning.

Anyway, "peon" seems to be an unusually apt word to refer to public sector employees, who are the people affected by Act 10, the GOP's approach to budget balancing here in Wisconsin. We — I include myself — were required to make contributions to our pensions and health insurance. (Before the 2010 elections, we lost money via the Democratic plan, which imposed furloughs.)

Given the "pee on" pun, perhaps garage meant to evoke pity for the public workers and outrage at me and Meade for declining to condemn Act 10. 

A "food chain" is "A series of organisms, each of which is dependent on the next for food, esp. by direct consumption or predation." Where are the public sector employees in the metaphorical consumption and predation? Maybe taxpayers think they are at the bottom of the food chain? The public servants paid by tax money should hardly want to be seen as the predators at the top. But that makes more sense than perceiving the taxpayers as the predators.

"Rub elbows" — the OED tells us — means "to come into contact."  Examples:

1916   L. N. Parker Disraeli ii. 56   You would pass him in the street without the faintest idea you had rubbed elbows with one of the world's greatest powers!
1956   ‘B. Holiday’ & W. Dufty Lady sings Blues i. 16   A whorehouse was about the only place where black and white folks could meet in any natural way. They damn well couldn't rub elbows in the churches.

But you damn well could rub elbows with one of the world's greatest blog commenters at Poopstock '13.

Long-headed.

Long-headed?! Meade questions my word use in a previous post. It came to mind because I was just law-professing the famous Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, within which the long-headed lawprof-turned-justice Felix Frankfurter — explaining that the Constitution's Framers "were not inexperienced doctrinaires" — wrote:

These long-headed statesmen had no illusion that our people enjoyed biological or psychological or sociological immunities from the hazards of concentrated power. It is absurd to see a dictator in a representative product of the sturdy democratic traditions of the Mississippi Valley. The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.

The "representative product of the sturdy democratic traditions of the Mississippi Valley" was Harry Truman, who had accreted a little too much power.

The (unlinkable) OED defines "long-headed" — definition #2 — as "Of great discernment or foresight; discerning, shrewd, far-seeing." The historical examples include:

1711   R. Steele Spectator No. 52. ⁋3   Being a long-headed Gentlewoman, I am apt to imagine she has some further Design than you have yet penetrated....
1841   Dickens Old Curiosity Shop ii. lxvii. 178   Men of the world, long-headed customers, knowing dogs.
1864   J. R. Lowell McClellan or Lincoln? in Prose Wks. (1890) V. 173   Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long-purposed man.

Searching my own files, I see this in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden":

Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty.

Now, don your frock, cronch on in to the comments section, and have a social crack with the long-headed squirrels of Althouse. Extract morals, haul a load of manure, talk of rude and simple times, or try your teeth on the toughest empty nuts. You know who they are!

"I feel like I just won the Academy Award. If an artist can offend so many people that he has to go to prison..."

"... to protect society, that's really saying something. Most shock artists dream of this kind of attention, without the prison part."

Ira Isaacs, sentenced last month by a federal judge — this is in the United States— for 4 years, for violating obscenity law. The Huffington Post — considered a liberal website, and, again, this is in the United States — began its article about the sentencing with a joke: "Looks like someone's career went down the toilet." (The movies included the simulated consumption of feces.)

There is no shame anymore. And yet there still are obscenity trials. Absurd.

I'm finding this story now because I happened across an account to the trial in an article published last March at Reason.com: "Porn So Icky That It Can't Be Obscene" (by Jacob Sullum), describing the argument made at trial, which describes the argument made by Isaacs's lawyer:

"My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made," [Isaacs] testified, "to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently... to think about things they'd never thought about before." Similarly, [his lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government's arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the "reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have."

Sullum wrote:

I will be impressed if Isaacs, who faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison, can pull off this feat of legal jujitsu, transforming the very qualities that make his movies objectionable into their redeeming value — especially since at least some of the jurors... found the evidence against him literally unwatchable. But if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs' references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

But here's some up-to-date news from 2 days ago: Minutes before Isaacs was to turn himself in to the  federal Bureau of Prisons, Isaacs go a call from his lawyer saying "don't go." The judge had approved his motion for bail pending appeal.

Isaacs told XBIZ that today's events were so surreal he had felt like he was in an episode of the "Twilight Zone" or a Quentin Tarantino movie....

"Last night, I was thinking it would be my last night of freedom," he said. "I really thought that this would be it; that I would be sleeping in prison the following night... and that would continue for a very long time."

We'll see what happens in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and — if we're lucky — the Supreme Court.

Matt Damon pledges not to go to the bathroom...

... until there is a toilet for everyone in the world: