He is so badly underweight that he will receive an emergency ration: two weeks' worth of enriched cornmeal and oil. He weighs 9 pounds.īintow is lucky, as far as it goes. His stomach bulges, all of his ribs are visible. He shrieks at the sudden discomfort, thrashing his arms and legs. The medical staff take an infant named Bintow from the arms of his mother and place him in a black harness attached to a hand-held scale. Here, the tradition has become a nightmare. They have come to have their babies weighed. In a dust-blown clinic on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, scores of women crowd into a bunkerlike structure, clutching children with emaciated limbs and listless eyes. Until the West overcomes its apathy and works toward long-term solutions, millions of people - many of them children - will continue to die unnecessarily. World hunger is by far the worst crisis humanity faces, and it's getting worse - especially in Africa. The plain style is the mark of Knave and Dupe alike. Information presented with a counterfeit of openness, trust and candor can be disinformation, as when provided by marketers, lobbyists, politicians, or as a public service by think tanks. The spy can write like an honest man, as can the Terrorist, or CIA plant. Now, of course, that plain style can be faked. The liberal writes as an honest man or woman to other members of that club, assumed in some sense to be universal. You see it defended in Swift for sermon oratory, and you see it in the blog of AKMA, in the same easy going high church style, brought down to daily doings of the parsonage, as if Sterne still wrote, awaiting his birth as his father winds the clock. And that style with some footnotes and academic starch, dominated Anglo-American arts and letters in figures like W.K Wimsatt, G.E.
You saw the style again in the heyday of the New Yorker in the Talk of the Town columns of E.B. You see it in the virile plainness of Ben Jonson, and is reflected in news writing of Addison and Steele, who again wrote as if for good citizen friends around a beer or a coffee. It was picked up and perfected for English by Dryden in the essays drawing on the conversational style of the English coffee house. This style goes back to Horace writing epistles from his Sabine Farm as a pal of Maecenas and Augustus. Liberals in the broadest sense are those who write plain and candid prose on the assumption that those to whom they write, or in whose presence they write, are gentlemen and ladies who share a common commitment to fairness, truth, evidence, good humor, good sense, and courtesy. An archaeologist can also wonder if this sentence is complete: “Pardon for not meaning to say.” but what exactly? And to whom? Who, to whom? more. “Pardon for not meaning.” is now a citation. Here is thus the secret of a sentence: “Pardon for not meaning.,” it says. Unless I found this improbable phrase one day, unless it found itself, alone, visible and abandoned, exposed to every passerby, inscribed on a blackboard, legible on a wall, or right on a rock, on the surface of a piece of paper or saved on a computer disk. Imagine that we left this statement to its fate.Īccept at least that for a time I abandon it thus, alone, also stripped, without goal, errant, indeed erratic: “Pardon for not meaning….” Is this statement a sentence? A sentence of a prayer? A question of which it is still too soon or already too late to know if it will have been only interrupted, deserving or excluding ellipses? “Pardon for not meaning.
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