No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

“African-American” Does Not Mean “Black”

Published in the Observer-Dispatch (Utica, NY), January 17, 2005. Noted on the Hamilton College Web site, January 18, 2005. Published in the Spectator (Hamilton College), January 30, 2004.

Asked to describe a person with black skin, most people would reflexively call him an African-American. But not all black Americans come from the African continent—many are Haitians and Jamaicans—and relatively few today actually grew up there. Race does not necessarily follow geography. Additionally, many people native to Africa are white, like the settlers whose ancestors have been there for centuries, or brown, like the Arab tribes in the north.

Therefore, we should not interchange African-American (an American raised in Africa or who retains African customs or mores) with black (a person with black skin). Self-identity is important, but objectivity is imperative.

In fact, let’s not even refer to people by their superficial and divisive skin color. Let’s just identify people, of all colors, by their individual traits, by what Martin Luther King Jr. once called the “content of their character.”

Addendum: In contrast to “African-American,” “Hispanic” derives from culture and language instead of race.

“The Man Who Speaks to You of Sacrifice”

Published on the blog of Capitalism Magazine, Dollars and Crosses, January 7, 2004. Published in the Spectator (Hamilton College), January 23, 2004.

Earlier this year Saturday Night Live ran a skit on Islamic terrorists, who Osama bin Laden has just dispatched to martyr themselves for Allah—and for the 72 dark-haired virgins that await them in paradise. When somebody asks the bin Laden character why he isn’t sacrificing for the cause, he fumbles over his words, screams out something about Allah, and proceeds to dispatch another group of martyrs to die—in his stead.

Indeed, since the start of the Second Gulf War, whenever we heard from Saddam, he invariably exhorted friends, Romans and countrymen to fight the infidel—to sacrifice in the cause of a greater good. And yet, when we found him last night, the ex-dictator was in disguise and hiding, crouched in a six-by-eight-foot spider hole. Sure, he had a pistol, but even at this point of no return, he refused to martyr himself.

Ayn Rand explains, through Elsworth Toohey in her novel The Fountainhead (1943). “Don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes. . . . It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. . . . The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”

Social theorist Chris Sciabarra draws the political implications. “Hussein, bin Laden, and other leaders of Islamic terrorism are fully capable of sacrificing their own people; they most assuredly do not wish to die themselves.” (Stalin, too, was a physical coward, terrified of death and gunfire, even of flying in airplanes.) It is therefore reasonable “that pointing a nuke at Baghdad”—the U.S. Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction—“can still have the required effect of keeping Hussein in check . . . Why would he have so many tunnels and escape routes under his various castles if living were not a priority?”

First Thoughts on Free Trade

Published on the blog of Capitalism Magazine, Dollars and Crosses, January 19, 2004, and in the Spectator (Hamilton College), January 23, 2004.

How do today’s politicians rationalize their politics? In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Second Thoughts on Free Trade,” Charles Schumer, the senior Democratic senator from New York, and Paul Craig Roberts, an assistant treasury secretary under President Reagan, give us a glimpse: “[T]he United States may be entering a new economic era in which American workers will face direct global competition at almost every job level—from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst. . . . When American companies replace domestic employees with lower-cost foreign workers in order to sell more cheaply in home markets, it seems hard to argue that this is the way free trade is supposed to work.”

Of course, these “second thoughts” are old-hat; protectionism, whatever the rationalization, amounts to a money-grab.

It’s also racist, as Harry Binswanger observes in an essay titled “‘Buy American’ Is Un-American.” As Binswanger writes, “Economic nationalism, like racism, means judging men and their products by the group from which they come, not by merit.”

Furthermore, one big reason American businesses transfer labor overseas is because the relative cost of doing business stateside is artificially high. Why artificially? Because the federal government, via tariffs, subsidies, minimum wage laws and countless other statist mechanisms, insulates myriad domestic industries from the global market.

Yes, Indians and Chinese will probably always work longer hours for cheaper wages. (As the land of opportunity, the U.S. should welcome these assiduous “foreigners,” instead of heaping the welfare state on domestic moochers.) Yes, Japan will heavily underwrite its automobile industry, as will the European Union vis-à-vis Airbus. But Americans—we titans of industry—rather than fear competition, should embrace the challenge.

A Little History of the Little Book

Published by Polaris (abridged) and in the Spectator (Hamilton College), February 13, 2004.

We pass the building daily, yet most of us have been inside only once. Upon matriculation, we entered Kirkland Cottage to sign the College Register. An administrator then gave us each a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, a practice that began in 1999. With Hamilton’s commitment to a “writing-intensive experience,” this “little book,” as Strunk sardonically called it, unites all Hamiltonians; so shouldn’t we know more about it?

In 1918, as mandatory reading for the fall semester of his English 8 course at Cornell University, Professor William Strunk Jr. copyrighted and privately published in Ithaca, New York, a textbook titled The Elements of Style. Arguing that one must first know the rules before breaking them, Strunk intended his reference book “for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature.”

In 1919 Strunk reprinted The Elements for the spring and fall semesters of that year’s course, in which one Elwyn Brooks White was a pupil. In 1920 Harcourt Brace and Company published Strunk’s textbook as a 52-page book, often called the “first trade edition.” In 1935, two years before Strunk ended his 46-year tenure at Cornell, one of his sons, Oliver, copyrighted a “revised edition” of The Elements by William Strunk Jr. and Edward A. Tenney. (A search on Amazon.com reveals nothing about Tenney.)

Strunk died in 1946. In early 1957, H.A. Stevenson, editor of the Cornell Alumni News, filched from the campus library one of its two remaining copies of The Elements and mailed it to a longtime friend, E.B. White. Seeing the book again inspired White to write an affectionate piece about his late professor, “A Letter from the East,” for the New Yorker. J.G. Case, editor at the Macmillan Company, spotted the article and wrote to White asking whether he’d like to revive the book.

Case’s original proposition was to use White’s essay as an introduction, but the project expanded and White revised the text as well. According to Letters of E.B. White, edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth, Case commissioned several grammarians well versed in the textbook field to submit suggestions to White. No doubt, Strunk would have applauded his co-author’s retort: “If the White-Strunk opus has any virtue, any hope of circulation, it lies in our keeping its edges sharp and clear, not in rounding them off cleverly. . . . Any attempt to tamper with this prickly design will get nobody nowhere fast.”

Thus was born The Elements of Style, with Revisions, an Introduction, and a New Chapter on Writing by E.B. White (1959).

In 1972, White published a second revision with the help of Eleanor Gould Packard. A longtime copy editor and authority on grammar and style at the New Yorker, Miss Gould had bought a copy of The Elements when it first appeared, marked it up as she would mark a raw proof, and slid it into a drawer of her desk. White knew nothing about this—Miss Gould was too shy to admit doing it—but later, when The Elements was up for revision, White asked for her help. She agreed, and revealed that she had in her possession a marked-up first edition.

In 1979 White published a third edition, which included an index prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Laurence W. Mazzeno of the United States Naval Academy.

White died on October 1, 1985, but The Elements of Style lives on, published in hardcover and paperback by Allyn and Bacon. For the “modestly updated” fourth edition, Roger Angell, E.B. White’s stepson and also a New Yorker staff writer, wrote the foreword; Charles Osgood, who also produced a video called The Elements of Style Video, wrote the afterward; and Robert DiYanni furnished a glossary. The book remains, as The Chicago Manual of Style puts it, a pithy “classic that offers excellent practical advice.”