Out of My Mind (41 page)

Events like these make the rest of us think the stock market deck is stacked against us and we're right; it is. Something like 70 percent of Americans are invested in the stock market. Dishonesty in high places makes us aware that we don't have the same chance of profiting that business executives do. In spite of laws prohibiting their taking advantage of information about their companies, they know where the cards are in the deck and we don't. Martha knew and took advantage of this. If an average American makes money in the stock market, it's more apt to be based on luck than financial perspicacity; by happy accident, they picked the same stocks that people picked who had inside information.

Specific incidents like Martha Stewart's stock sales and Harry Stonecipher's foolish behavior undermine our confidence in the system that needs our confidence to prosper. Two great systems, democracy and capitalism, are sort of tangled together in our minds. They are in mine, I know. We think of them as equal, and they are not equal. Democracy is a great, high-minded idea. As a theory of government, it is unassailable. The prosperity and freedom of the lucky people of the world who have lived, as we do, under a democratic system of government, are proof enough of that.

Capitalism's credentials are not so unassailable. The defenders of capitalism speak of it as though it was an economic religion but it is anything but that. It depends for its effectiveness on one of the least admirable of our traits: greed. The free enterprise theory is that if everyone takes as much as he can get for himself, things will work out best for everyone. Well, they don't. If the theory is right that everything works for the best for everyone when selfishness is God, it's a sad day for all of us.

But uncontrolled capitalism doesn't work and we've known it since Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. Unfortunately, we've been undermining the strength of that law recently.

One flaw in capitalism is that it's at the mercy of dishonest business people, and I hope we scared a lot of them by making an example of the exemplary Martha Stewart.

When the Pentagon announced its intention of saving $48 billion by closing 62 major military bases and 775 smaller ones, there was an outcry from local people near the bases. Their complaint was that the communities would lose jobs.

There's no doubt that when we close a base, lots of people lose their golden-egg-laying goose, but the purpose of a military base is not to provide jobs. The purpose of a military base is to contribute to our national security.

The people who contend that military spending makes jobs claim that a billion dollars spent by the Pentagon on weapons, soldiers and supplies creates 25,000 jobs. It's been pointed out by people who are not so enthusiastic about the arms industry that the same billion dollars would create 37,000 jobs if it was spent on mass transit, 36,000 jobs if it was spent on housing, 41,000 jobs if we spent the same amount on education and 47,000 jobs if it was spent on health care.

We were kidding ourselves, or our military establishment was kidding the rest of us, when they renamed our “War Department” the “Defense Department.” It sounds better, even though we obviously don't have to defend ourselves against being attacked by Russia, France, Zambia or Zimbabwe.

We spend almost half of all the money the whole world spends on weapons. Our military establishment costs every single American, man, woman and baby girl and boy $I,533 a year. We are paying for weapons
for wars there is no chance we'll ever fight. We have not dozens but hundreds of military bases for which we have no need. Our military establishment is bloated and overweight.

In the last ten years, our so-called “defense industry” has sold $I42 billion worth of weapons to foreign countries. If we ever got into a war with a country like Turkey, Uzbekistan or Colombia, we'd be battling ourselves.

The respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute keeps figures on military spending. Last year, we spent $455 billion on our military. Japan spent $42 billion, Russia spent $I9 billion, South Korea, $I5 billion. Italy spent $28 billion.

The United States has about I,393,000 men and women in uniform. We have a total of I,I55,I87 enlisted men and women and 225,373 officers. There are about 55,000 first and second lieutenants, 70,000 captains, 44,000 majors, 28,000 lieutenant colonels, II,559 colonels, 435 brigadier generals, 271 major generals, 128 lieutenant generals and 36 full generals. A general's base pay is $I44,932. We're paying 3,0II retired Army generals and I,300 retired admirals.

One of my life's heroes is Dwight Eisenhower. He was a great general and good, if not great, president. No one ever said anything truer about our arms industry than what Ike said as he was leaving office:

“The country must guard against the unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Right after deciding to walk on two legs instead of on all fours, the greatest thing humans did for themselves was develop language, a system of words with which they could exchange information. It was a big improvement over grunting.

It is certain that the world would be a better place to live if everyone spoke the same language. The languages spoken by the most people are, in order, Chinese, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, Javanese (not “Japanese”) and Korean. French isn't even in the top ten, and it makes me wonder why I studied it for five years in school. One strange linguistic aberration is that more people speak Portuguese in Brazil than in Portugal.

There's still plenty of room for misunderstanding even when we're all speaking the same language. But when more than one language is being used—or a proliferation of them—this can lead to a total lack of any kind of understanding. This is already happening in the United States. Twenty percent of the people living in America today speak a language other than English at home.

Where you stand on any of approximately ten popular issues identifies you as either a liberal or a conservative. If you're anti-abortion, hate the United Nations and oppose gun control, you're a conservative. I'm a moderate liberal with a couple of strong conservative opinions. One of those is that English should be the official language of the land.

In twenty-six of our fifty states, there are laws of varying strength that make English the official language. I have no patience with anyone who chooses to come to this country to live, to work, to raise a family, but who refuses to learn and use English.

Last year, liberals were angry with five conservative members of the Supreme Court who turned down a challenge to an Alabama law that makes English the state's official language. The case came to the court through a suit brought by a Spanish-speaking woman named Maria
Sandoval, who argued that her civil rights were violated because she was unable to take the test for a driver's license in Spanish.

Until our traffic lights read both STOP! and PARADA! driver's license tests should be in English. We drive in English. What language did Ms. Sandoval expect to hear when she came to the United States?

Language is an important, unifying force in a country. It is divisive to have large segments of our population speaking languages other than English. It's not only bad for the country, it's bad for the people who insist on using a foreign language. It's a quick way to end up on the public payroll for lack of a job.

In New York City, I frequently ride in taxis, and many of the drivers can barely communicate in English. They often have their radios tuned to a foreign-language station. I always ask what language the drivers speak at home and, without exception, they tell me they speak their native tongue. Many of them learn what little English they speak from their children who are in public school. The ability to speak English fluently ought to be a requisite for getting a license to drive a cab in New York.

English has become the whole world's second language. That is partly because of our cultural and economic dominance. It's also because English, screwed up though it may be, in many ways is still the best language. It has the most words and, while there are prettier languages, English communicates the most effectively.

You can usually make out in any foreign country with English because invariably, someone you're dealing with speaks it. I do not defend boorish Americans in foreign countries whose solution to not speaking the native language is to shout louder in English.

The United States should have a policy making it clear to those who plan to emigrate to this country that, as part of the deal, we expect them to learn our language.

It has been said by someone other than me that no language that pronounces the word colonel “kernel” is perfect. In spite of some flaws, English is a great language. It isn't easy, though. I write a lot of English and never stop running into problems.

A recent newspaper story said, “The teachers asked the students to read the papers they had written.” It isn't clear who wrote the papers—the students or the teachers.

It's easy to slip into redundancies. “Purchase price”? What other kind of price would it be? People speak of “the end result,” as if some results were not the end.

How come someone who writes a play is a playwright and not a playwriter?

We use a lot of ungrammatical short cuts, which seem OK to me. We say, “I'll be home tomorrow.” No one bothers to say, “I'll be at home tomorrow.”

When I write a sentence with a quotation in it, I put the period or the question mark that ends it after the last quotation mark but editors often change this. They put the period or question mark inside the final quotation mark. My question is, “Why?”

In Don Marquis' delightful stories about archie and mehitabel, archie the cockroach typed everything lowercase, without any capital letters. He couldn't use capitals because, as a small cockroach, he had to dive headfirst at the keys to make them hit the paper. He couldn't simultaneously hit the key he wanted and the “caps” key, so everything archie typed, including the united states of america, looked like this.

Archie had an excuse, but there's no excuse for e-mail being spelled without a capital E. (For years I have objected to the policy of many newspapers not capitalizing the word “president” when it refers to the President of the United States. Maybe the policy was established for newspapers written by archie the cockroach.)

Written English is at its best when it's plain and simple. Henry David Thoreau said, “If one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly like a stone to the ground . . . he may stick in the points and the stops wherever he can get a chance.”

I always liked that but Thoreau used “one” the first time, then a few words later in the sentence he drops “one” and goes to “him.” Once you start with “one,” you have to finish with it and I wouldn't ever start with it. It must have sounded less pretentious in Thoreau's time. Writing was more formal.

It's wrong, but I routinely use the word “like” as a conjunction in place of “as” both in writing and speaking: “I write like I speak,” not “I write as I speak.”

There are I0,000 phrases that may not be good grammar but which are too useful to ignore, such as, “He wants out.”

I don't like to use “whom.” “Who” suits me just fine for any occasion. I seldom use the subjunctive, either. I write, “If I was home . . . ,” not, “If I were home.”

There are English words that can be used to mean a dozen different things, even though the spelling never changes. The word pretty is an example. We all know what it means when someone says, “She's pretty.” The meaning of that word becomes complex, though, when you say, “She's pretty pretty.” It means she isn't beautiful, just fairly pretty. And it would be hard to explain to anyone who spoke another language what we mean when we say, “He's sitting pretty.” (I seldom start a sentence with an “and” like that.)

It would be hard (difficult) to come to the United States from someplace like Korea without any knowledge of English and have to start learning it. How long would it be before you understood all the nuances of “pretty”?

Writers try to make concessions to what interests readers but inevitably they end up writing about what interests them. I spend so much time writing that punctuation looms large in my life. However, I recognize that a lot of people couldn't care less about it—or “could care less,” as the expression has become even though it doesn't make sense.

There are ten punctuation marks in that first paragraph of mine and they all serve a purpose. The period or dot used as an unequivocal stop to a flow of words is one of the great inventions of all time. It's simple and there's no doubt about what it means. It's interesting that it has recently acquired a whole new use in computer language as “.com” When you speak it, you say, “dot com” not “period com.”

I especially like dashes in a sentence, like the one in my first paragraph, although I don't think they were even an acceptable punctuation mark when I started taking English classes in the fourth or fifth grade. A dash is somewhat similar to but different from three dots in a sentence . . . if you know what I mean.

Commas are useful in making the meaning of a written sentence clearer to a reader but newspaper copy editors have turned against them and I don't understand why. There are many fewer commas in newspaper stories than there were twenty years ago. (I'm not sure, of course, whether it's the editors or the writers who are using fewer of them, but I often have to reread a sentence to understand it because of a missing comma.) I like using parentheses like that occasionally, too. It indicates the thought is sort of a side remark being made to the reader. If you use brackets, they convey a different meaning. Parentheses are rounded marks to set off a group of words. Brackets are a different shape, usually with right angles at top and bottom. I think of them as strong parentheses and hardly ever use them even though there are keys for them on every keyboard. No one writes as he speaks and no one speaks as he writes, but when you put words down on paper, you ought to be able to
hear yourself saying them. If you cannot, the chances are that what you have written is stilted, stiff and too formal. You can't write exactly as you speak, though, because it would be repetitive and rambling.