DICTIONARY BANNED IN CALIFORNIA TOWN

I saw something on the 11:00 o’clock news last night that made me think I was back in the 1950s.

It seems that a few days ago, the Menifee Union School District in Riverside County, California, removed the Merriam-Webster 10th Collegiate Dictionary from its classrooms. This was done in response to a parental complaint that some entries about sexual activity were too explicit. The news broadcast showed the offending page where the words “oral sex” could be found along with a portion of the definition. (My DVR allowed me to run the story back and hold the picture long enough to check it out.) There were no explicit illustrations or verbal instructions on how to perform the activity. It simply gave the Latinate synonyms, cunnilingus and fellatio. Someone who still wanted to pursue the subject would have to look those up to learn more.

After I’d clicked off the TV, I checked out my own dictionaries. Neither my Merriam-Webster 7th Collegiate nor my Random House Unabridged contained the term “oral sex” although both defined the technical Latinate terms along with their etymology. I then checked out Merriam-Webster on line and discovered that “oral sex” was added to the dictionary in 1973. The words cunnilingus and fellatio, by contrast, date from 1887 and 1893 respectively. (My own dictionaries were published in the mid-1960s.)

I then decided to find out just where this town was, so I Googled the name "Menifee," and was rewarded with numerous sites, official and unofficial, telling me more than I wanted to know about the small, recently-incorporated town that is home to the famous “Sun City” retirement community. The article in Wikipedia seemed quite complete and, as I read down the page, I discovered that the story I had just heard on the evening news had already been incorporated into the Wikipedia article giving a footnote to a story in the Los Angeles Times as the corroborative reference.

Clicking on that reference I discovered it was from that day’s paper. The folks at Wikipedia were certainly on their toes! When I checked the TV news story online it referred to a similar story in the Riverside Press-Enterprise. All the on-line stories at the TV station and the newspapers were followed by comments, mostly decrying the notion of censorship, and suggesting that children should be free to learn and inquire, and that parents should not censor their knowledge but explain the reference in terms appropriate to the child’s level of understanding. The critics also made the “slippery-slope” argument that banning one book would lead to banning more books as more parents found more reasons, sexual, social, racial, or political, to object to their content, until nothing would be left but Dick and Jane. A few defenders of the action suggested that more “age appropriate” material should be provided.

One thing I found remarkable is that Merriam-Webster has had “oral sex” in its dictionaries since 1973. That’s nearly four decades ago. How did the parents of these children avoid finding it themselves at some time in those intervening years?

Some date the current interest in the subject from the time of a very public case of oral sex that was tied in with a presidential impeachment, at which time it was proclaimed, by no less an authority than the occupant of The White House, that oral sex wasn’t really sex after all.

I think the real irony here is that, from what I’ve read about current practices of the young, teen-agers nowadays may well have more personal, practical knowledge of oral sex than their parents. According to some researchers, the youngsters see it as a form of “abstinence” and a way to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

So, is this dictionary suppression the cutting edge of a new wave of censorship? Keeping explicit sexual material out of school libraries is perfectly appropriate. But a dictionary? Dictionaries don’t advocate behavior and they don’t make up things. They just define words. The protesting mother should have asked her child how he or she happened upon the term in the first place: because he heard about it from his school friends, or because she was looking up “oracular” or “orange”?

What is so amazing is not the fact that some protective mommy frets about what her child sees in print, or that some timid school administrator is cowed into pulling the offending dictionary from the classroom, but the fact that it has received such wide coverage in the media. The whole thing seems so silly, but it has struck a nerve somewhere.

Bob Martin

DERIVATIVES EXPLAINED

Economists have told us that the current economic recession was triggered by the collapse of the Derivative Markets. Accordingly it is time that we had an easily understandable explanation of derivative markets, so here goes.

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral. And, he has an MBA to back up this analysis.

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don't really understand that the securities
being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics.

Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank's liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Heidi's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the
bonds.

Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations. Her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers.

Now, do you understand?

Will Harry Reid be the Next Victim of Political Correctness?

Poor old Harry Reid. The big news on the Sunday morning political shows concerned the fallout from what was certainly intended by Senator Reid as a private assessment of Barack Obama's chances of being elected. He said that enough Americans would vote for the then-senator Obama despite his race, because he was "light-skinned" and did not speak in a "Negro dialect." Reid's Republican opponents are calling for his scalp, saying that his remarks were "embarrassing and racially insensitive."

Now I am not a big fan of Harry's, and if I were a voter in that great western state of Nevada, I would probably be working for his opponent. But this is a bum rap. I personally do not know Senator Reid's feelings about race nor his level of "sensitivity" (whatever the heck that's supposed to mean), but this was simply a statement of fact as he saw it.

As a shrewd and seasoned politician he was sizing up how the American electorate would respond to the persona of Obama, and his judgment was that, although the first of his race to be a major party candidate for the presidency, Obama was not so exotic as to repel the average voter, and he does not come across as just a spokesman for an oppressed minority.

Americans love a certain amount of novelty, but they are not about to elect as their president somebody who appears to be very different from themselves or who speaks for just a single segment of our very diverse society. Obama, (being half Caucasian) did not look that exotic, and his speaking manner is in a mainstream, mid-western, American dialect. In other words, enough voters could feel comfortable voting for him because he was "one of us."

And Harry was right. So now he is being pilloried for saying the obvious. President Obama is light skinned. He does not speak with a Negro dialect. How could Harry have said it differently? One complaint was that he used "language appropriate to the 1950s." He did not insult anyone by using what is now euphemistically called "The 'N'-Word." The term "Negro dialect" is the appropriate and accurate term to describe a certain type of speech. Is it now the essence of political correctness to pretend that there is no such thing? Or to pretend that voters do not respond in some way to skin color, whether consciously or not? It is not "racist" nor "racially insensitive" to recognize that racial differences exist.

Harry's Republican opponents cite the case of Senator Trent Lott who was hounded, perhaps unfairly, out of his leadership position in the Senate for saying something nice about Strom Thurmond, and suggest the cases are parallel. Now I don't know Trent Lott any more than I know Harry Reid, so I cannot tell you what was in his heart when he made his speech. Maybe he was just making nice because it was old Strom's birthday party, but implicit in Lott's remarks was the suggestion that he endorsed the racial segregation for which Senator Thurmond had fought so strenuously over the years. Harry's remarks contained no such message.

As is customary today, Harry issued an immediate apology, and Obama announced his acceptance immediately thereafter. Small wonder. The President certainly didn't want to hurt the guy who is running his health care bill through the Senate. I do, however, wish Obama had struck a blow against knee-jerk political correctness by saying that "no apology was required."

Bob Martin