-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 08:54 AM 1/17/96 -0500, John Young <jya@pipeline.com>wrote:
By any means, emulate elitist indolents and avoid anxiety. Display iron-fisted civilized beliefs, practice tough-love humiliation and master-over-slave manners and militant mind-couture, but do nothing truly disruptive of the status quo that so rewards niche market exploiters of genuine dissent.
The patient displays advanced signs of Stephen Donaldson's Disease. We recommend _immediate_ replacement of the TrendyLeft <tm> thesaurus and spelling checker package with more robust models. Strunk&White GoodWrite <tm>, say, or perhaps RichardScarrySoft <tm>. More seriously, I recommend a re-reading (or first reading, as it may be) of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". I quote: "In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. ... Orthdoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy. ... And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. ... "Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like: 'While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, adn that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete acheivement.' "The inflated sytle is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft now, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details." Ironically, of course, Tim May's brutal honesty (right or wrong, he's almost always clear) is lots more "populist", the sense of being readily and widely understood, than John Young's stale academese. Bruce Baugh bruceab@teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEPAwUBMP2PZX3AXR8sjiylAQG6gAfPVudIcO/WocUGwVYF7GVk5GvYT7ToYnR0 76SQXeEmwuvoG0reFoJdKJEGpJ5IQTboIgIyHYmEtirteH3y1vGeeiqQfmIhtx+S aUUtNHSOGKNUfSNvwY2Fw0Ij/3sAR16jZFmh4T1TPRW1xwgo0KYUkvB4tk5tx1sD Hzd+D2cPJNP/WhmwntkaXhynwnlgcYyLxqwjoD4QfiEHHS0Lbv+JVWuutJpKTih0 yFnhStoD9YL0ynZwIbfqZpl7HiX3FAAQ7aNLFPyqqRajJmTO7GuQLju8T1cWT+n+ oUTzgmXLtw5FY4OOLPR6mKkLvilyb1UzmX+GG/AlA671Ng== =qBu4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Bruce Baugh bruceab@teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab