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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (78400)	10/17/2004 3:41:06 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793845

<Americans, Brits, Canucks, Aussies, and Kiwis all share a common language but we don't really understand each other. Actually, here in America, people who live in different social enclaves can't understand each other. That's what "red state/blue state" is all about.> There are some gaps, but the language isn't quite the same. Americans speak and write American. Living there, one needs to use different words and roll the r a bit to be understood. A bit of twang helps too. I suspect it's because of size, economic power, distance, and cultural flow [movies, books and so on], but the USA is introspective and ignorant. It's so big and has so much going that it's self-contained and externalities are largely irrelevant, so not many people know what's going on elsewhere. NZ, Australia and Canada, Britain, France, and elsewhere have to deal a LOT with externalities, so we develop a much better understanding of other people and have a need to understand them. "Putting lipstick on a pig" seems to me to be intelligible across cultures, provided you know what lipstick is and why it's worn and have some knowlegdge of pigs. On first hearing it, one would need to decipher it, but it's easily doable. Oh, I've just read it and it does have tones of calling John Kerry a pig. Sure, the primary meaning was that he was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but there was an overlay of other implication suggesting that John Kerry with lipstick on would still be a pig [and maybe a homosexual one at that, with his carefully coiffed hair and allegations of Botox]. Okay, maybe I'm reading a bit too much into it, and getting carried away with the last bit, but descriptions have multiple interpretations and allusions [which I admit to sometimes doing myself]. Sometimes they are inadvertent, but sometimes they aren't. Just as John Kerry was congratulating Dick Cheney on a good family, he was also razzing them for their hypocrisy. It's a bit disingenuous to claim that he was just being Mr Nice Guy. He was making a harsh point about the Rabid Republican Right's attitude to homosexuals. Lipstick on a lesbian, or pig, doesn't make her feminine or the pig pretty. From Mrs Cheney's point of view, it was probably not the best choice of expression. I think she intended to call John Kerry a pig. No wonder her daughter went wonky [I don't entirely subscribe to the "born that way" theory]. Mrs Cheney could use some charm school [using the phrase isn't lady-like]. She is hoist by her own petard, to coin a phrase. With sars, chicken flu, incoming bolides, Mexican invasion, Islamic Jihad, greenhouse effect possibility and unresolved geopolitical relationships requiring a revamped UN to avoid a dog-eat-dog world and the need for mega militaries, the greatest debts in human history floating on a fiat currency and the danger of economic dislocation, not to mention the relationship between the individual and the state, and ignoring the burgeoning power of cyberspace as a non-state power, it seems absurd to be focused in the USA Presidential election on lipstick, be it on any of the Cheney's, John Kerry, or his pig. It is a bad sign. Perhaps it's time for me to vote with my feet. Mqurice