Click twice to enlarge each one. - L
https://nitter.poast.org/Culture_Crit/status/1686510589776961536
You only seem to hear about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, but there were several other artists who certainly were no slouches.
You only seem to hear about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, but there were several other artists who certainly were no slouches.
Mr. Mulligan - the only plane to win both the Bendix and Thompson Trophies the same year.
A Matter of Speaking - Taki Theodoracopulos
Source: Bigstock
I am writing this dispatch from the birthplace of “oracy,” the art of public speaking first perfected by the Athenian Demosthenes, a speaker so eloquent and influential he managed to force the great Aristotle to move back to Macedonia, his birthplace. Demosthenes did not like nor trust northern Greeks like Aristotle and his pupil, one Alexander the Great, the same distrust that many American Southerners felt for the interfering Northerners circa 1861.
Oracy, needless to say, is a skill equal to numeracy and literacy, one mastered at school in my day but, judging by today’s public speakers, no longer taught at any level. Only last week, sitting in a London café, I took out my notebook while three attractive American young women babbled away nonstop. I felt a bit like Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion taking down Eliza Doolittle’s cockney outbursts. One of the three women noticed what I was doing and asked me rather coldly why. “I’m counting the times you’re using the word ‘like,’” I answered her. I did not dare tell her I was a linguist—which I am not—because they might have called the fuzz thinking that a linguist is some kind of sexual pervert. Never mind. Let’s get back to oracy and the beauty of eloquent speech.
The great Tom Wolfe once wrote, while reviewing a collection of my writings, that Americans cannot compete with the Brits in public speaking because the latter are examined orally in class, whereas the Yankees write it down. It made sense. Educated Englishmen are above anything else very good speakers. Americans can be, like, like, you know, like…you know, and so on.
“In today’s schools, pupils are taught that speaking properly is elitist and snobby and not with the times.”
When I look back at my youth and my education at an American private school for boys, public speaking was a popular subject taken even by “jocks” like myself anxious to avoid science, math, and other difficult majors. In class we had to read aloud poems or passages of literature, and at times we had to read a speech written by our own little old selves. Captains of sports had to review the year and their individual sport at the end of each term in front of the whole school, and public speaking came in handy then because “jocks” on scholarships were notoriously inarticulate, as they remain to this day.
Needless to say, the debating society was crawling with wimps who preferred to jaw rather than fight, but looking back, my sore soccer knees and numerously operated-on wrestling shoulders convince me that the wimps were smart and we, the jocks, were the dumb ones. In today’s climate, good speech is a negative, especially if the f-word is left unsaid. It is also dangerous for teachers to teach things pupils might not relate to. Worst of all, of course, is the invention of trigger warnings, a system that allows students to remain as dumb or even dumber by doing away with all difficult subjects—like Shakespeare, for example. Ditto safe spaces, another invention by the woke mob for a student to remain uneducated and stupider than when he or she arrived at school.
It all has to do with elitism, the kind practiced by ghastly lefties who write lies for The New York Times and spread nonsense when reporting the news on television. This warped and degenerate elitism wants the scope of teaching to be narrowed, for high standards of word use, elocution, and presentation to be done away with and replaced by “ordinary” speech—in other words, dumbed down to the level of the uneducated.
Let’s put it another way. When was the last time you saw a movie where the hero spoke well, like an aristocrat? If you watch TCM, you hear William Powell, Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Grace Kelly, Herbert Marshall, Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, and others like them articulate and pronounce their words beautifully. In today’s films, a proper accent usually means the person is up to no good, a phony and a crook. And today’s actors mumble on cue. When was the last time you heard and understood every word pronounced in a recently made movie? The inability to speak well was once upon a time a great hurdle to overcome. Yes, it was unfair, because not everyone could afford to send their children to a posh school where they learned to speak clearly and get their ideas across. But in today’s schools, pupils are taught that speaking properly is elitist and snobby and not with the times.
British society was always separated by the way Brits spoke. It is still split, but the other way round. A posh accent today is suspect when applying for a job, a working-class or regional accent is the winning ticket. America never suffered from such class distinctions, and regional accents are a joy, at least for this writer, who loves Southern drawls. But an extreme regional accent does not exclude oracy, and great American public speakers in the past all had accents of their birthplace.
F—ing this and f—ing that have become the lingua franca of today’s celebrities. Needless to say, all this f—ing does is show how limited in brain power these freaks really are. Masters of the devastating retort these inarticulate vulgarians are not. Learn to speak clearly and there are no limits.
Taki is an ex-Greek Davis Cup player as well as a former captain of the Greek national karate team. He has won the U.S. national veterans judo championship twice, and in 2008 was world veterans judo champion 70 and over. Since 1967, when he began his career with National Review, he has been a columnist for the London Spectator, the London Sunday Times, Esquire Magazine, Vanity Fair and Chronicles Magazine. In 2002 he founded The American Conservative with Pat Buchanan. He has covered the Vietnam War as well as the Yom Kippur War and the Cyprus conflict of 1974.
Copyright © TakiMag.com
From: Bitter Klinger from Chad’s Substack <chadklinger@substack.com>
Date: Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 2:33 PM
Subject: “We can’t coexist anymore”
To:
Date: Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 2:33 PM
Subject: “We can’t coexist anymore”
To:
The Obvious Solution
Call them homeless persons if you wish; I call them vagrants, a word falling steadily in frequency of use between 1880 and 1980, most likely because of its perceived negative connotation in a “kinder, gentler” world that has come to value individual freedom and dignity more than public order, which is why we have ceased altogether to call such people tramps and vagabonds. Tracing the word’s origin back through Anglo-French to Latin, vagrancy has always denoted “wandering, without fixed abode,” encompassing the idea of “mental wandering” and “eccentric conduct.” In the late 18th century the word was a legal catch-all term for miscellaneous petty offenses against public order. There’s that phrase again — public order, that contemporary society appears to value less and less, and which has certainly deteriorated in proportion to the rising numbers of vagrants in our urban centers. But let it be noted that, as the 2020 “Summer of Love” rioting made clear to all with eyes to see, our perverse tolerance of public disorder transcends mere literal, physical vagrancy: mentally and spiritually, we are all collectively wandering out of bounds from previous societal norms and standards. Where we are headed, and why, is less clear. But it seems that on several levels “We can’t coexist anymore.” I am quoting a Miami Beach city commissioner who is backing more aggressive measures to restore public order by forcing vagrants off the streets, away from beach entrances and schools, out of public parks and all the other places where they drink and do drugs, defecate, have sex (with themselves or others) in front of children, keep people away from retail stores, and in general lower the quality of life for people who foot the bill for a decent, orderly, civil way of life. These measures would basically subject people sleeping outdoors on public property to arrest if they don’t accept placement in a shelter. The objections and obstacles, there and probably everywhere else, are as follow:
More expedient measures — such as giving vagrants a bus or plane ticket out of town — are justly condemned as “passing the buck.” Besides, these people aren’t “hobos” — who are more like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher than the tranqed-out zombies staggering around the same plot of ground or pavement for months at a time. Clearly we’re getting nowhere with this blight, this affliction, this social pathology and paralysis. And, of course, the past century has made us wary of the horrors of any kind of “Final Solution” or holocaust wherever one population decides that it can’t coexist any longer with another. So we keep throwing platitudes and money at the problem, and it keeps getting worse. Perhaps before we say “No how!” to good old German know-how, we might consider that, while what the Nazis did in response to the so-called “Jewish problem” was hellish and horrid, the organizational skills they employed in doing it were pretty impressive. Not unlike those of The New Deal, that took thousands of unemployed men off the streets and put them to work in the CCC and WPA. Not unlike what the same government did after Pearl Harbor, taking thousands of Japanese-Americans out of their lives and into remote internment camps like Manzanar. And not unlike those that are operating right under your nose in the present moment. How do you think the nation is absorbing huge populations of migrants, if not through an ingenious Underground Railroad, funded by “dark” federal dollars flowing through NGOs such as Catholic Charities and, more generally, the Catholic Church — or that part of it that is in bed with the Democrat Party. I trust my point is clear. Call them “relocation camps” or “reeducation camps” or “work camps,” or “rehabilitation centers,” they are where most of our hard-core vagrants need to be — until they are detoxed and sober, given psychiatric and spiritual counseling, reacquainted with work, and returned to us or to other appropriate facilities. It can be done. Round ‘em up, clean ‘em up, train them up, and return them to actual lives. So why shouldn’t we do it? “Compassion”? Ha! What in God’s Name is compassionate about the status quo? When Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and started talking about immigration, his election was assured. Similarly, as soon as you hear a candidate, from either party, articulating a clear vision of how to reclaim lost souls and restore public order, you’ll be looking at our next president. Thanks for reading Chad’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
© 2023 Chad Klinger
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Of course all of these came from a single cell lying in a swamp somewhere, by chance. Scientists have yet to construct a single living cell. Not for lack of trying.
Below is a short video that I believe you will really enjoy. It is amazing how God has created so much beauty.
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