There is a phrase that Donald Rumsfeld used a lot, in various contexts: “when you get up in the morning.” For example, he’d say, “Who’s going to determine how you live when you get up in the morning? You or a gang that wants to control you?” There are a lot of people, a lot of gangs, that want to tell other people how to live when they get up in the morning. The Iranian regime is one of them. I begin with Iran in my Impromptus today. Then move on to China and Saudi Arabia. Some relief comes with sports and music.
Let’s have some mail. I had a column headed “God and country, &c.” A reader writes,
I appreciated your comments in the September 26th article, especially the Scriptures that you cited.
I believe you used the King James Version which I grew up on, but it does have some old-fashioned terms.
Jesus said some rather unsettling things.
Keep quoting Scripture; we need it.
I especially liked “Jesus said some rather unsettling things.” Did he ever! (“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”)
In a post, I spoke of the Cornerstone Speech, saying I appreciated its “spectacular candor.” (This was the speech given by Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, in Savannah on March 21, 1861.) A brainy scholar I know writes,
The Cornerstone Speech is great in its utter clarity, and its complete commitment to depravity. No one — least of all Southerners — believed there was a War of Northern Aggression or that it had to do with industry and tariffs or the like until the Lost Cause folks began to drip that poison into the South’s lifeblood, letting them rationalize in perpetuity their forefathers’ treason.
In an Impromptus last week, I said that John Bolton had taught me a new word, in a piece of his: “resile” — to recoil or retract, and especially to return to a prior position. (Never too late to learn things, thank heaven.) A reader writes,
I enjoyed your Impromptus column today, and see that you recently learned a new word. I think I had the same little thrill when recently reading Christopher Hitchens’s book Why Orwell Matters, in which he uses the word “frowsty.” Fittingly, given the author and his subject, the dictionary says its usage is mainly British, and means “having a stale, warm and stuffy atmosphere.” I’m a butcher by trade, not a writer, but if I were trying to avoid cliché when describing a stuffy room, I think I could do worse than “frowsty.”
In that same Impromptus, I noted that students were still chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, [someone or something] has got to go.” I said that students and others had been chanting that chant for generations. “I appeal to the creativity of today’s youth: Can you please come up with another chant, sparing us another 50, 100 years of this stale one?”
A reader writes,
A new chant? No way! When I hear, “Hey, hey, ho, ho,” I immediately know what side I’m on. I don’t even have to look.