I'm going to quote this verbatim, maybe just adding some bold and italics for emphasis.  This came from my bank today:

Sovereign Santander Bank.

SKIP YOUR NEXT LOAN PAYMENT AND FREE UP SOME CASH: 

Dear____________

Re:  loan # ending  in _____

As a valued Sovereign customer with  an excellent credit history you qualify for our special, limited-time Skip-A-Pay offer.  Since finances are often tight this time of year, we're offering you the option to skip your next loan payment* and use the money for back-to-school  expenses, a late summer vacation, or just to have some extra cash in your pocket.

To skip your next loan payment,  simply fill out the Skip-A-Pay Certificate below and return it with the $35.00 processing fee.  For your convenience please use the enclosed postage-paid envelope to accept this offer.  If you're using a coupon book, please don't throw away the unused coupon.  Instead, keep it in the back of your payment book as a reminder that you deferred a payment and the the final maturity date will be extended by one month.

It's simple to get the money you need this summer.  All you have to do is sign and send in your special Skip-A-Pay certificate today and skip your next loan payment! If you have any questions, feel free to call us at _____________________

Sincerely, (etc. etc.)

  When I finish this, the letter gets composted and the envelope gets mailed back empty.

Oh yes... the fine print (it really is smaller) on the coupon itself

I've enclosed my check for the $35.00 processing fee.  I understand that my loan will be extended one month  beyond the  maturity date for the monthly payment I skip. Interest will continue to  accrue on  the entire outstanding balance, including  the month I skip my payment.  As a result, my final payment will most likely be larger than my regular monthly payment amount.  My final payment will be determined by my payment record.

So I can pay $35.00 for the privilege of owing more money than I would otherwise later on.    I suppose this is an answer to recent financial reform legislation. 

It makes me understand why bankers have been popular villains for generations.  Curse you,Smedly Pewtree.   So thanks, but no thanks Sovereign.

Acerebral a.  Without a brain.  A word for which there would  at first sight appear to be no use, since no entity to which there would be anyh point in applyng the term could in fact  possess this attribute.  (There would be no point in speaking of an acerebral windowsill.

In the interest of improving the intellectual, if not the moral, tone of comments and posts at Talking Points Memo's Internet Cafe.  I would like to introduce my fellow bloggers to one of my favorite books I recently uncovered on my desk,  The Superior Person's Book of Words, by Peter Bowler.  If it indeed is one of my favorite books, then why would I have to uncover it?  Because I'm a slubberdegullion, that's why:.  Slubberdegullion n.  "A glorious seventeenth century term of  contempt (found in Hudibras), apparentley meaning a dirty, wretched slob."

Clearly we need to extend ourselves beyond  hurling epithets like moron and idiot at Rush Limbaugh.  So how about this example of  Abededarian Insult?

Sir, you  are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenal, papufilerous, thersitical,unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylophagous, yirning zoophyte. 

Translation:  "Sir, you are an impotent, conceited, obscene, hairy-buttocked, brainless, wicked, toadying, goatish, indecent, stable-smelling, hunchbacked, thick-lipped, stinking, turnip-shaped, feeble-minded, pimply, trashy, repellent, smarmy, foul-mouthed, greasy, gluttonous, loathsome, wooden-headed, whining, extremely low form of animal life.

Not bad even in translation, eh?  But the advantage of the Superior Person's words, is that one can say them with enthusiasm, sincerity and  a smile on one's face and the object of the word will think they're being complimented:   George Bush, sir,  regardless of  what your detractors might say, I believe you're one of the most oligophrenal Presidents we've ever had. When your monument is  erected in  Washington , I expect it to be as jumentous as you are.  Truly your administration represented kakistrophy at its best. 

So lets beef up those comments, folks..  And I promise to recommend the first post which uses the word desuitude.

But this fandangle has gone on long enough.  Back to cleaning my office I go.  Other discoveries may be announced in due course
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Tiny update:  The link to Bowers' book didn't make it through the edit I rushed to finish  before lunch and a meeting.  I've got that fixed now, I think.

* for Emuctory see here.

This is going to be a quickie.  I know, I've promised that before, but this time, maybe I'll keep my word.  As is often the case, I'm a penny short and a day late to the debate about WikiLeak's document dump.  It hasn't quite fallen off the front page yet...but if I count right, the last column by one of the paid guys is number twelve down the list, (posted July 27) and we're on to the Chevy Volt, the Anti-Defamation League and bigotry, anyeating chickens or starving, and final lessons (are any lessons final?) from BP.  I'm not complaining--the topics are interesting and to coin a cliche, variety is the spice of life.

Us ordinary  folks have moved on to other things as well--as best I  can determine by title, none of the recommended posts are specifically about the document dump...so everyone else is off to other places too, and here I come to the prom (stag as usual) only to find the streamers are limp the lights about out, and the janitor sweeping up the confetti.

I posted a few little snippets in the  comments, including a paragraph in response to an interesting question from KGB999 I was supposed to answer in 60 words or less--an impossibility for someone as guilty of Logorrhea as I am. 

ANYHOW--I added a link to a place the historians like to play... the National Security Archive at George Washington University.  On the 27th the NSA had not a mention of the document dump.  Historians are slowpokes, aren't we? 

BUT we're starting to catch up.  Today, Nate Jones, Graduate Student in History at GWU  has a pretty interesting (MHO) blog post at the NSA. Document Friday: wikileaks, Raw Intel, and the Rise of the Taliban,  Read it, and make sure you read down to his example, which not only includes a picture of Mullah Omar (remember him?), but links to the documents in the security archive upon which his example is based.

The NSA is getting some overdue plaudits out of all this.  The Director, Tom Blanton, appeared on  the Stephen Colbert Show...proving that Harvard History Grads can have a sense of humor.  He also appeared on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on American University's Radio Station. 

So there you have it...some insight into how the minds of historians work... I'll turn out the lights now that the prom is officially over.

Do I dare try previewing this?  Nah.  I'm on vacation--let the typos take care of themselves.

the eighth question Awhile back, I posed some simple questions in a highly unscientific survey.  The questions related to issues of geographical mobility, a subject which has interested me for a very long time.  I asked quesions I've asked my freshmen students for many years:

1. How many houses have you lived in during your lifetime?
2. How many schools have you attended?
   
3. How many different cities have you lived in during your lifetime?
4. How many different states?
5. How many different countries?
6. How did your various moves effect your life?

Far more readers  shared their experiences with me than I had anticipated.  go back, if you will, to take quick look at the answers, I  Thiik you'll find them interesting too.  Save for the lenght of time during which TPM readers have accumulated experience upon which to base their responses, the responses aren't all that different from thos given by my students.  At the extremes, I've had one student who moved seventeen times in her eighteen years.  At the other, I had one student who had never moved--and not only had she not moved, she was of the fifth generation to live in that house.   But the median number was  somewhere around 8-10 houses in 2-3 cities.  My students are a quite mobile bunch.  The readers who responded were clever (as one might expect of TPM habitues) and broke their respnses down by categories--no two quite the same way, but generally they made a distinction between moves as children and moves as adults and/or types of property intop which they moved--houses, condos, apartments.

I didn't answer my own set of questions over there, and I owe it to everyone to do so now.  I will divide my life into three segments--that in which I lived "at home" (which was defined my my parents--and into her nineties my mom alwas asked when I was coming home), my years in higher education, (BA to Ph. D). and the years since.

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I while back I wrote a piece about how the American Dream has bifurcated into a Horatio Alger version and a Martin Luther King version, and how the Alger version had led to a segregation by social class which made the King vision more difficult.  I'm thinking about following up with another piece on geographic mobility--but before I do, I'm curious whether anyone is interested, and what kind of experiences TPM readers have had.  At the core of idea is a book entitled Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class, which I found fascinating, at least in part because I've been aspects of the book with new students for about fifteen years, more or less.  Each fall, I ask the freshmen these questions:

1. How many houses have you lived in during your lifetime?
2. How many schools have you attended?
   
3. How many different cities have you lived in during your lifetime?
4. How many different states?
5. How many different countries?
6. How did your various moves effect your life?

Now I'd like to ask those who are willing to reply to this very unscientific little survey to do so before the post disappears into never-never land.  I'll try to incorporate ideas from the responses into my Reloville meditation.

I'm writing this without access to preview.  Apologies in advance for links which don't work,  typos, grammar glitches, etc. etc.

Yesterday Bluebird asked a very interesting question in response to a post I created.  "When did choosing the lesser evil become the American Dream?"  I answered briefly and with a little more convolution than necessary.  After answering, I couldn't get the question out of my head.  So to exorcise it I'm posting this.

What is The American Dream?  I'd probably deny there is such a thing--in  the singular at least.  The American Dream as a concept is as tricky as love is as a concept.  I love my friends.  I love pizza.  Not the same thing at all.  So, what are  The American  Dreams?  Plural, please.  There are lots of them,  certainly.  Some of them are contradictory--which  isn't a problem in the dream world, but which can be very problematic in  the world awake.  Let's start with  two iconic dreamers,  Horatio Alger and Martin  Luther King.  I  place them in  that order for chronology's sake, and I use those two because the one of the dreamers I really like, John  Winthrop, is remembered by nearly no one except history types like myself. 

Algerite's beliefs can  be summed up in the words of the Horatio Alger Society.

The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans is dedicated to the simple but powerful belief that hard work, honesty and determination can conquer all obstacles. Today, through its Members, the Association continues to educate our nation's young people about the economic and personal opportunities afforded them by the promise of the American free enterprise system.

Founded by Kenneth Beebe and Norman Vincent Peale after World War II, the membership of those who "made it" is composed largely of corporate executives.  I see characterstics  of "Mr.  Hyde" in this version of the American  Dream--if I'm allowed to bring English Fiction into the discussion.   More about that later.  Where there's a Mr. Hyde there's also a Dr. Jekyl.  The good side of the American Dream--without the transformation into  the nightmare.

Here's Dr. King's Version, to which I aspire.

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

If king were to deliver that speech today, he'd probably have to include more states and more races/ethnicities than he did nearly 50 years ago.  I'm not talking just Arizona here.  I'm talking  about most of the United States, largely because of what we've done as we've achieved Mr. Hyde's version.  Just a little from John Winthrop and I'm off to prove my case after what  I hope is a page break.

While still aboard the Arabella, Winthrop said



.  Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Sounds almost communist!  Call up the shade of Joe McCarthy.  Call  out the Club for Growth.  But please recognize this as communitarian thought--which infused the thinking of the early Puritans.

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Short and sweet, or maybe just short.  A recommendation of a book by the novelist,  Sinclair Lewis--some of you may have heard of him, or even been forced to read a novel or two of his--too bad it took forcing, but there you are.  You probably weren't forced to read It Can't Happen Here. It was published in 1935,  Lewis was a bit passe by then, after all he won the Nobel in 1930--rather the kiss of death to get that kind of cultural certification.
How many have heard of

• The Prodical Parents
• Bethel Merriday
• Gideon Planish
• Cass Timberlane: a Novel of Husbands and Wives
• Kingsblood Royal 
  
• The God-Seeker

much less read them?  (true confessions.  I haven't read any of them).

1935--sixth year of depression or I should perhaps capitalize it thus The Great Depression.  The natives (read Nativists) were getting restless.  Someone had to dooooooooo something.  Why wasn't the President taking charge?
 
Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.) speaks to the ladies of the Beulah Rotary:

...for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great powers, have no desire for foreign conquest. Our highest ambition is to be darned well let alone! Our only gen-uine relationship to Europe is in our arduous task of having to try and educate the crass and ignorant masses that Europe has wished onto us up to something like a semblance of American culture and good manners. But, as I explained to you, we must be prepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves 'governments,' and that with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung fields.

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, not to be outdone, added these words of wisdom:

"You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General--just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns--'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps--just maybe--when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!"

And thus it begins.  In the face of this cry from the right (anyone for a tea party), the voices of the left are, well, neutralized?  Is that a good word?

 Women, [Mrs. Gimmitch] pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes. In fact, Woman must resume her place in the Home and: "As that great author and scientist, Mr. Arthur Brisbane, has pointed out, what every woman ought to do is to have six children."

At this second there was a shocking, an appalling interruption.

One Lorinda Pike, widow of a notorious Unitarian preacher, was the manager of a country super-boarding-house that called itself "The Beulah Valley Tavern." She was a deceptively Madonna-like, youngish woman, with calm eyes, smooth chestnut hair parted in the middle, and a soft voice often colored with laughter. But on a public platform her voice became brassy, her eyes filled with embarrassing fury. She was the village scold, the village crank. She was constantly poking into things that were none of her business, and at town meetings she criticized every substantial interest in the whole county: the electric company's rates, the salaries of the schoolteachers, the Ministerial Association's high-minded censorship of books for the public library. Now, at this moment when everything should have been all Service and Sunshine, Mrs. Lorinda Pike cracked the spell by jeering:

"Three cheers for Brisbane! But what if a poor gal can't hook a man? Have her six kids out of wedlock?"

But this is just fiction, isn't it? 


One can't substitute names like Palin for Gimmitch or Beck for Edgeways.  or the Rand Paul for the Reverend Bishop Prang and the "League of Forgotten Men". Can one?  We don't have to worry about the left tearing itself to bits in endless battles for ideological purity while Fox tells the Great American Middle what to think?  Or do we? 

It Can't Happen Here, or Can it?  If you haven't read Lewis, or haven't read him for awhile, there are less evil ways to spend your time.

Memorial Day has been problematic for me for a very long time.  When I was a teenager, a quartet of jet fighters performed stunts over the cemeteries of Minneapolis, which I thought a bit strange--I thought it stranger when two of the planes clipped each other's wings wings during a barrel roll maneuver, sending them both to earth.  One of the pilots parachuted into the front yard of the house of one of my friends, and asked to use the phone to call his wife.  The other pilot stayed with his plane to the last minute to direct it to a stone quarry and away from housing.  I don't remember precisely what happened to him, but think he survived.  But I couldn't understand how trick flying memorialized the dead.

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It's early days yet,  but I've found another place which  in which it is going to be fun to hang out.  No, not instead of but in addition to.  It's called

Coffee Party USA

COFFEE PARTY MISSION STATEMENT: The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

I like it because it has a local  component, blogs, and some interesting tools.  I think some of the caffeine addicts here might like it too.

I also like this: 

As a member or supporter of the Coffee Party, I pledge to conduct myself in a way that is civil, honest, and respectful toward people with whom I disagree. I value people from different cultures, I value people with different ideas, and I value and cherish the democratic process.

Quite not the tea party, huh?

Two websites named Demos--one in the U.S. the other in the U.K.  Almost like two countries separated by a common language as you-know-who said.  I visit them both  on occasion, and spent some time at the U.K. version today. 

I've always found this useful--my freshmen come believing that we invented the idea and just maybe the rest of the world will catch up in a thousand years or so.  (When I am lucky enough to get a few international students in class they quickly set the American exceptionalists to backing off).

ANYHOW...some of the people I really enjoy around here have been working to diversify the topics of discussion, and I thought I might direct them (and anyone else interested in ideas) to a recent publication of Demos:  We Mean Power: Ideas for the Future of the Left.  In good e.e. cummings style the title is uncapitalized, but I'm a traditionalist, I'm afraid.

The author list is impressive.  Buying it will cost 10 pounds BUT downloads are free!  So if enough people decide they want to commune with folks from Oxford and other founts of learning, maybe we can get a discussion going. 

Drop a nickel in the Demos bucket while you're at it, you'll feel good for doing so.