#240 Okay Antonin "Tony Guns" Scalia and You Too Frankie "Dutch" Lautenberg--Let's Talk ... About THE Gun Law of 1791 [UPDATED]

Here is Justice "Tony Guns"  in his youthful gangbanger days sporting a  longer coif, and wearing a single, distinctive and quite becoming earring in the LEFT ear, which I'm told is the secret double-reverse signum of underworld connections (see last post), perhaps even unto the depths of Hell. Or not.

But he sure does love himself them fararms ... and that good ol'-timey Second Amendment of the US Constitution, by which he "justifies" his love. Sweet. Known only to intimates: the mobster-benchman has it tattooed where his tramp-stamp would go. A rite of passage in the organization. And which, lucky for us Patriots, he believes gives us the right to "bear arms" in a delightfully unfettered way.

Now as a "Strict Constructionist" (aka "entomologist") in interpreting the Constitution, he had to eliminate from his decision-making the possibility that the "Framers," or whoever, were NOT thinking of "bear arms" as a noun-noun double morpheme compound substantive as in "bear arms"--that is, weapons to kill bruin-kind (family Ursidae), such ursidicide being a common pastime in Colonial America, especially in Philadelphia, where these quaint gunslingers were meeting. But bears of several species (not including the Koala, which hadn't been discovered yet) can be dangerous for colonial campsites, and pose a threat to New-Nationhood. Proper weaponry guaranteeing Ursine lethality.would have been required of all.  Big long guns. Most antebellum colonists had them anyway. Did the 2ndA restrict firearms to bear-musketry only?

Here's the Original (spelling and all), consisting of one syntactically awkward sentence that "originalist" Justice Mafiabagman had to deal with--tattooed, as I said, slightly north of his hindquarters and tail, making it prima facie difficult for ready reference:

A well regulated Militia, being neceffary to the fecurity of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear armf, shall not be infringed.

Even the fpelling is difficult, as you can see, the Framers being inodinately fond of the alternate orthographic form of "s" (technically, the fistula) at the time. It's an effete rightward slanting "f"-like grapheme (as in parfum, not to be confused with parsum, which is not a word anyway), whose type key the Blogman had installed in the keyboard device for just such an occasion. A curious but meaningless  fact: an unusually high number of Founding Fathers had a lisp, or developed one soon after the Convention ... as would we all.

These minutiae are important to an "originalist" interpreter of our Founding Document and its first ten amendments, because there may be even more. The "textualists" represent the other related approach in the (coinage alert) "Constrictcunnalinctionist" family of two. This branch also sanctifies the words-as-written epistome, but unlike the "originalists" these seditious folk allow for some semantic evolution to be taken into account. Patriotic "originalists" (aka Tea-Baggers) will have none of that. They want to "figure out" what the "Framers" were "actually" THINKING at the "time" they were "actually" WRITING the "words."

Thus the Devil was appropriately in the details for Mr. Justice Uuderworld because he had to come up with the RIGHT (haha) Opinion as he consulted the oft-disputed 2ndA, as nobody affectionately calls it yet. He was deciding a case involving a law prohibiting home hand-gun possession in Wash DC, Difficult. But Antonin came through. This Associated Press headline and lead say it all:
Gun-Crazy*** Justice Scalia Writes Demented Majority Opinion That Strikes Down DC Anti-Hand-Gun Law Based On Delusional Constitutional Right To Bear Armf  Joining Scalia in the 5-4 Decision Banning the Banning of the Ownership of Handguns in the Home Were the Other Barely Humanoid Members of SCOTUS [?]: Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and What's-His-Name (AP 6/22/12)

It would be hard to make these things up. Anyway, Justice Scalia's "originalist" interpretation began by eliminating something SO elementary that it was beyond even my ken, and barbie's too. Bear armf? thought Scalia, trying to think the thoughts of the great Thinkers-up of the thing. Could the Framers have been thinking of the severed fore-limbs of the Ursine-kind? As weapons? To CLUB a Redcoat into submission perhaps, after a soldier's ammunition ran out or gun jammed? Broken bayonet? Might work, till spoilage set in. Heavy enough. Lots of bears around then. The claws would surely be effective. But noooo, too messy for fussbudget aristocrats like Adams, Hamilton, and esp Dolly Madison, who I've heard wrote most of the Constitution. Problem is: never happened. And the OED cites no instance of  "armf" used for bear parts. 

Then the revelation. He had been painstakingly parsing the ideation of each word separately, but now he remembered the "and" preceding "bear armf" and ...  Epiphany. "Tony Guns" knew right then that he was on to something.

[NEXT: How "Tony Guns" justifies thousands upon thousands of needless homicides.]

 *** Saw Gun Crazy, the movie, at the old Avalon theater (q.v. in several archival posts) in 1950 on a "double-bill" (yes, Virginia, TWO movies for a quarter) and tried unsuccessfully to reach and relate it to Annie Oakley and Hoot Gibson . Re-saw it recently on TCM. Wonderfully trashy/campy noir with moral that gunf make good people into killers. Tsk, tsk, a truth for the ages.
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#222 Sloth

Yeah, this glorious summer-like weather has got to me, I guess. More to do than just write web-log entries ... or less. Can't hope to compete literally with those other "diurnals" in the blogosphere by the likes of Tina Brown or Markos Moulitsas, anyway. Or John Stewart on TV for that matter. I'd have to hire a staff. (Make your contributions payable to my nonprofit organization, Concerned Americans for Superior Homeblogs, by simply making out your check to C.A.S.H.)

It's been too late to re-title ever since I began this blog two years ago, and lately its twin. So look at "daily" this way: current posts and the wonderful archival treasures can be read at any time of day or night. By sunlight, even. Most often the bloggage is produced during daylight hours as well, co-terminus pretty much with my circadian bio-rhythms, too. The latter (and quite recent) compound-coinage is, by the bye, almost pure Latin: circa = "about" + diem (acc. sing. of dies = "day"), modified slightly for adjectival use. Aha. Now there would have been the ideal mast-head: The Circadian Mosteller--i.e., "about" or "approximately" daily. Too late, alas.

So much to write about--and lately it seems, as Hamlet said, "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions"--yet sometimes ... you gotta just "hang."
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#198 Bring On the Filibuster

Tuesday's election of Republican Playgirl-centerfold Scott Something-or-other to the late and sorely lamented Edward Kennedy's Senate seat subtracts by one vote the so-called "super majority" that the Democrats have held in the American House of Lords. So what?! Did it help them at all when they had it for well-nigh a whole %$@ $#@% legislative YEAR? No ... not to mention that they still have the largest majorities in Congress since Jimmy Carter. And along with moderate Republicans, these majorities--reflecting about 75% of the Electorate--want to do the right thing and pass laws insuring that EVERY American has access to adequate health care. Which is the number one Domestic Issue of our time, and one so embarrassingly far behind the times when compared with what other civilized peoples of the Earth have done.

So what has happened? For one thing, Democrats are WIMPS. Or must be, since they can't translate their superior numbers in Congress into laws of the land. That's their JOB, after all. Constitutionally. And they're not doing it. I think this is what the voters in Massachusetts had in mind when they angrily cut-off their normally progressive nose--they have a form of universal health-care--and spited their face with a wing-nut Republican. Who, ironically, promised in his campaign to vote against Reform--thus invoking that ever-menacing monster by the dreaded name of Filibuster.

Second, Obama is a WIMP. Or must be, since the President can't translate the will of the people who elected him and his future-tense Platform of Hope--by a more-than-convincing majority--into some sort of Congressional action. Surely, Obama meant more by "Change You Can Believe In" than the sheets in the Lincoln bedroom. He made a monstrous mistake in effectively handing over primary leadership on health-care reform to the Grafters and Grifters on key Congressional committees. Shouldn't he have known, for instance, that Sen. Max Baucus was a "made" man, by Big-Med?

Third, the U.S. Senate is a WIMPERAGE, to coin a word. Or must be, since it seems powerless to pass laws, or even to advise and consent effectively. I'll leave it in the personified collective singular because as a legislative entity its wimpery is systemic. Built into its current Rules of Order are procedures guaranteed to preserve the the status quo ante, to discourage changing laws and to obstruct making new ones. MAJORITY doesn't quite rule in our Upper House. Funny part is ... it can and should, according to ancient Constitutional principles, backed up by a Supreme Court dictum over a hundred years old.

The elephant in the room is the current Cloture Rule. This allows a Senator to extend deliberation on a bill indefinitely, to presumably "filibuster it to death" unless debate is stopped by a vote of SIXTY of his/her fellows. (A colorful and apt borrowing is "filibuster," first popularized by southern Senators of the the early 19C and meaning essentially "pirate"--descended from Dutch vrijbuiter = "freebooter" and passed through Spanish and French as filibustero and filibustier, respectively, and finally to the folk-etymologized form we have in English today--accidentally appropriate for its "bill-BUSTing" connotations--though I'm sure the original "booty-for-all" implications are not lost on the smarter Grafters in the Senate, who would cut a bill's throat for money. You know the ones, by now). However, just to illustrate just how congenitally LAZY is that Body in every way, the Lords don't even have to bother debating debate. If a poll shows that FORTY-ONE Senators would vote against closing debate, the bill is busted. Hi-jacked, as if by some Somali pirate. Republican Sen. What's-his-name supposedly represents that forty-first vote.

Well, in reality, these aren't magic numbers at all. It's a pernicious meme indeed, bruited even by those politicos who should know better, that the Cloture Rule is somehow sacrosanct. It's not. True, currently it takes SIXTY Senators to close debate, and that's coupled with a seemingly impossible SIXTY-SEVEN to change the rule for closing debate. The latter number is, however, fundamentally unconstitutional, and the minority Republicans in the Senate know it deep down and dirty. For when they were in the majority during the last administration's tenure, and when they were threatened upon occasion with a Democratic filibuster over certain abominations otherwise known as Bush/Cheney appointments, these Republicans in turn threatened to go "nuclear" and revoke the Cloture Rule by simple majority vote--thus making any business before the body subject to simple majority vote, including closing debate. How soon they forget, when the situation is reversed. Oops ... I forgot. They're politicians. (more)
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#76 Friday Funnies--the "Plinth" [update]

Arrrrr.... But belay that. Nineteen September is "Talk Like a Pirate Day" and, tomorrow the 20th, my eldest son's birthday.

• The former is celebrated annually by sea-raiding corsairs along the Moroccan coast, I think, and by folks who have, through carefully-deferred dental maintenance over the last ten years, lost a front tooth...like me. "Shiver me timbers" sounds so much more authentic with the acoustic hint of a whistle. The tooth had become decadent no doubt, like its owner, but it was a stealth attack--piratical if you will--the evidence of marauding Tartar-beings becoming known only after the fact (i.e.= in the palm of my hand). Admittedly: after using said frontal dentation as nature intended in time of need...as pliers. The tooth actually split laterally in half, the front part leaving behind its stumpy counterpart--and forensic clues to the crime. So like a true buccaneer, this Blogman needs to SAVE UP for a "peg-tooth"--a prosthetic...no, make that cosmeticappliance of some sort, just to make him more presentable in the marketplace. Or lacking that: a pirate costume and a stuffed parrot.

• Birthdays are celebrated annually too, I understand. But tomorrow I inaugurate a new tradition in the gift-giving department, which I'll share with my MRs. For their birthday presents, all my sons and whoever else from now on will receive a "thought-gift"--after all, isn't it "not the gift, but the thought that counts"? So let's just take that to its reductio ad absurdum and make the damn thing TOTALLY IMAGINARY. Hey, it'll never wear out. And size and cost...no object. So I'll be giving my son a PLINTH--defined as a pedestal-like slab of stone, usually squared, beneath a column or pier; OR, in wood-joinery a flat member at the bottom of an architrave, dado, baseboard, or the like. That should explain it. Love the word. Borrowed from L. plinthus > Gr. plinthos = "stone"--but cognate in the language already (as often happens) from the Indo-European up through Germanic as our more familiar "flint." Rocky, not woody origins. My gift therefore will be a blue-speckledy granite slab 6' x 6' square and 3" high, to be viewed in the mind horizontally with a slight parallax, to get the full effect. Now this can exist purely in space, or it can be imagined in the back yard surrounded by rose bushes and a gaggle of mannequin pis statues--whatever. Such is the infinite UTILITY of the Thought-Gift.

• Which...I hereby dub generically a plinth, for all time. In honor of its maiden voyage. Thought-gift = Plinth. And you are free to use the term as such, royalty-free, whenever you feel the pinch of hard economic times, or of your own native parsimony. "Sorry, Mildred, I can only afford a Camel-Caravan to Shangri-La this year. Next year a Date with George Clooney or that Breast Augmentation you've always wanted...I promise."

But you know what?--you can give a Plinth to anybody, any time of the year, and all the year around. Make somebody happy with a Plinth today. Failing that, try to come up with a word that rhymes with it. I couldn't. Or just try to pronounce its plural: "plinthes." Takes a pirate, maybe.
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Update 9/21: Just thought of a rhyme that a pirate might enjoy: "absinthe"--the Green Fairy...to be quaffed while contemplating a Plinth.
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#70 Thursday Thoughts

In no particular order...

• I think I'm coming down with political paranoia. Anxiety verging on panic-attack precedes the TV remote-switch, the flip of the newspaper page, the click of the Drudge or HuffPost icon. They're out to get me. I don't know about all you Myriad Readers, but it's getting downright FRIGHTENING to tune in to the news lately. To tap into my last post for this analogy: I feel like I'm back in the Stoney, watching maybe Creature from...II, crouching/peeking through the seat-divide in front of me, heart-poundingly anticipating stunt-man Ricou Browning (later of Flipper fame) as the Amphibious Horror popping up yet again from the depths of the Black Lagoon to wreak havoc upon us all (especially the lovely Julie Adams). And when I knew it was just a split-second before the event--it was time to make my RUN...up that inclined aisle-way to the sanctuary of the lobby. Just for a minute or two till the danger was past. Meanwhile, I'd push those big, heavily-upholstered, swinging lobby-doors open at split-second intervals--just a slight, screen-illuminated SLIT--to make sure. Then return bravely to my seat. As for the political incarnation of the Black Lagoon: slimy, lizard-like creatures--corporeal and not, Republican and Democrat--are popping up from the depths by the split-second it seems: fully finned, gilled, webbed, be-clawed...and ready to terrorize the democratic process. And send me running to the lobby. Fill in the blanks.
• One from Confucius: "In order to understand Death, you must first understand Life"--500 B.C. Maybe too big a leap, but I'm puzzled that Rapture-crazed evangelicals of the Sarah-Palin ilk bother to run for office, or even to vote...what with the End of the World just around the corner. To bring it about more quickly?
• Peeve: Why can't TV and newspaper copy-writers get the spelling of "Whoops" vs. "Woops" (just an "oops" with a cute initial "w") RIGHT, when they mean one thing rather than the other? The former is a plural NOUN, beginning with a "breathy" wh-sound--an aspirated bi-labial phoneme (to get sexy about it)***--and meaning full-throated SHOUTING noises (or, more seriously, coughing ones, in the childhood disease), sounding like the word itself, as if coming from Arsenio Hall's studio-audiences of yore. The latter is almost a contronym in meaning: an Ejaculatory part-of-speech (to get even more sexier), beginning with the the UN-aspirated bi-labial, and signifying an inadvertent error, faux pas, screw-up, etc.--like the seemingly ubiquitous misspelling the word with an "h"when you don't mean shouting noises coming from Arsenio's audience. (***Lauren Bacall gives sort of a lesson in the aspirated bi-labial to an infatuated, soon-to-be-husband-in-real-life Bogie in "To Have and Have Not" 1944--Just whistle if there's anything you need [or some such]...Ya know how to WHISTLE doncha? Just put your lips together like this, and...blow.)

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#57 Sunday Sundries

Worst of the Week

• Obama's Veep pick. That it HAD to be Joe Biden. I'll have more to say about his liabilities (only one, really) in a later post, but right now it's just to whine a little about the woefully LIMITED CHOICES Obama had among a less-than-stellar field of candidates for the job. Where was the would-be VP with no liabilities at all?...I ask you. Gotta blame the Dems themselves for this, I guess. After Hillary and Edwards (Whew!) Obama had a bunch of literally second- and third-stringers to pick from. No, make that strictly third-stringers: the likes of Biden and Richardson et. al. were way down in the cellar compared to the three front-runners all through the campaign. Thus, in a sense, they've already been rejected by the voters. Losers at the starting gate. The interminable nomination process wore everybody out, but it SHOULD HAVE WORKED, dammit. By rights, either Hillary Clinton or John Edwards should be our next VP of the USA. What happened?

Best of the Week

• The Olympics. Great success. And another step toward a Global Village; a big one, considering how resistant China has been historically to opening up to the world outside the "Middle Kingdom," as they refer to the place. That's right, "China" is one of our many exonyms whimsically applied to foreign countries (e.g. our "India"= their Bharata) for no good reason at all. Don't get me started. The interesting thing here is that their ages-old name for the country veritably exudes insularity, and, by implication, XENOPHOBIA, which they've been guilty of for centuries. It is (transliterated) Zhongguo= "middle or central kingdom"...center of civilization, of the world. As host to the Games, though, they did OK. Won some, lost some. Good for 'em.

• School's back in session! Keep the kids off the street. No, this isn't an indication on my part of an old-age get-off-the-grass mentality. I'd like to see them in school all year round for all the right reasons (fill in the blanks). The time has long since come to go to a year-round calendar for public schools, if only to keep up with the more enlightened CHINESE (see above) in this regard. I bring this up, too, because here in NC we've been fighting this battle for several years now. The country-club set with summer-camp kids seem to have too much pull with the courts to get it over and done. But it's inevitable.

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#31 Sunday Sundries

Worst of the Week

• The War, of course, but here's a bit of its absurdity demonstrated in very personal way, as follows: At a memorial service in a NC town for on young soldier lost in last week's suicide attack that killed nine, in what was considered a "safe" outpost in Iraq, friends and family were gathered in "shock and disbelief," according to the reporter. A tall, blonde-headed, boy-next-door-looking guy, obviously adored by all, he had planned to teach HS and coach wrestling after his army service. One of the mourners--not related, but knew him-- said this on camera: "Of all the other people over there and everything, why did it have to be HIM that got killed?" What?! He was a VOLUNTEER SOLDIER in the middle of a WAR, forgoodnessakes. There's an epiphany here. The speaker (and she said it for all in attendance) didn't appear to be a complete idiot; on the contrary, she was expressing a sentiment, sad to say, common to most Americans regarding Bush's war. It's been just too damnably distant and ABSTRACT. It's been manipulated that way. Now here was this poor girl--I don't blame her overmuch--confronted with the stark fact of unique, particular, and individuated DEATH. The true consequences of this idiotic war almost became clear to her. I throw up my hands.

• Bush's smirk. Does he still think by his smug, giggly grinning that everybody out there is with him on all of this? Just give me 15 seconds alone....

Whatever of the Week

• Bizarre Story Dept. Another kind of memorial was held at a town in NC honoring COLORED Confederate Veterans of the American Civil War! All colors in attendance. One African-American man said that he was "proud of their sacrifice." I don't know what to think.

• Cognitive Dysfunction Dept. At yet another memorial service, for a tragically slain (probably by cheating husband), Cary NC jogger and young mother of two little girls. Pastor: "...you all know it's unfair, I know it's unfair, but most importantly GOD knows it's unfair." Get outta here. The good pastor was on to something there, but he didn't quite know what.

• Silly Exactly-the-opposite-meaning Solecism Dept. News report on shut-down of nearby county's EMS service because of complaints about slow response, poor performance on site, and (TV graphic) "wreckless driving."
  

Best of the Week

• Obama's overseas trip. Not so much that it can add to his foreign policy "cred" (as most pundits infer), but also simply to get out and about and show his American multi-racial face to the world. We've got a lot of face-saving and image-repairing to do out there, after eight years of looking at the Smirking Cowboy. Seriously, they need to be reminded/reassured that our system of government is not (like many of theirs) a one-man show. We are not Bush/Cheney, and are only partially responsible for eight years of lunacy. McCain should go too. The Clintons. Gore. Anybody. Carter anytime. Let them see some of the true-blue private and semi-private citizens of good will who are trying their best to restore the better angels of the American character here and abroad.

• Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson back together again, again. I've seen their honeymoon video tape. Made for each other.

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#20 Shabbat [update 7-13]

From the Hebrew, "to cease"-- and it's a good idea to DO some ceasing now and again, and Saturdays would "work" nicely for this blog. Divinely inspired, too--taking my cue from the Jews, of course, and the various Christian sects from 7th-day Baptists and Adventists all the way to the Lemba tribe of southern Africa, believe it or not. Saturday sabbatarians all. (In the pagan Roman and borrowed Anglo-Saxon traditions, our Saturnesdaeg was an unlucky day to undertake anything important, anyway, being governed by the the most disagreeable of the Greek gods--hence the superstition about "Saturday's child." But ironically, Saturn doesn't appear in the various Romance-language names for the 7th day; rather, all descend from the Latin Sambata Dies [e.g. Sp. sabado, Fr. samedi], the sabbath fossilized in the day before the day it's celebrated Roman-Catholically! Sun-day, pagan.)

So...as well as non-blogifying, I will also NOT be beating wool or scraping hides, two of the 39 Talmudic melakhat(=works) that could get you severely lapidated in Old Testament times, but I think I'm relatively safe in most of those areas of endeavor; however, I will be "building fires" today (using electricity) and writing/erasing two or more letters (why would one-letter-only NOT be fatal, while just...one...more aleph or gimel...?) as I am now--compounding the fire prohibition by punching in on the computer--offences that could also get you stoned, but not at all in a good way. Impossible to be a tee-total shomer shabbat, as John Goodman's quirky character tried in vain to be ("No, Dude, can't answer the F-ing phone [or words close to it]; can't even use the F-ing light-switch, DUDE!"), in The Big Lebowski. But I do go on. THAT"S why it's good to take a break at least ONE day out of the week; ergo, I won't be writing this today.
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Update 7-13-08--OK, henceforth every day of the week will be deemed a Saturday, for whatever purposes it needs to be put to--ipse dixit.