The great thinker Voltaire went to an orgy and had a good time, but declined a follow-up invitation. He said, “Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.” That’s how I feel about watching the WTF Network.

Here’s the setup: Out on the West Coast, a colleague is fighting for a cause that’s already taken him to some extremes. Apparently, he slanted his story in a way that fits the format of a TV series called “Most Daring.” (We’ve discussed the proposition that there is no such thing as bad publicity.) So for the sake of team spirit, I decided to watch it, and even turned the TV on a bit early, and caught part of a show called “Cops.”

You will have guessed that the title up there at the top of the page is a gag. Oh, the network has a three-letter name, but they’re a different three letters. I call it the WTF Network, because the words that come to mind again and again are – “What the f***?”

Take “Cops,” for instance. I’m sitting here with a cup of tea, engaging in the spectator sport of looking at my fellow citizens being violently arrested. WTF were the people thinking, who first proposed this as entertainment? WTF causes anybody to watch this genre of television? It’s hard to imagine anyone who has actually been a victim of police brutality, wanting to see this stuff. Or the families of anyone at all who’s been in trouble with the law which, these days, is most people. If I had a son, I wouldn’t want to see a boy his age and general description being taken down by the cops.

Is any of this stuff for real? How much of it is “re-enactment”? I can’t imagine any actor, no matter how underemployed or desperate, consenting to be brutalized in the ways shown here. A large part of this has got to be real, genuine police photography.

“Cops” includes a long, Academy-quality performance by a shirtless driver who is questioned by officers at the roadside. With just a slight tweak, this old boy could be on the “Blue Collar Comedy” stage. Can this possibly be spontaneous and real? Why does this dude so tamely allow his humiliation at the hands of the law to be filmed?

Is any of this stuff, on any of these shows, spontaneous and real? Are they seriously asking us to believe it’s all real? Okay, tornadoes and stuff like that. Fine. But other stuff is impossible to have captured in the way it is shown, under any conceivable circumstances. Is it only obvious to media professionals? Maybe it’s obvious to everybody. Maybe the entire TV audience, these days, is so hip that everyone knows exactly what degree of verisimilitude to infer from any given image. Am I the only moron too unsophisticated to understand that nobody believes anything they see on TV any more, and I’m getting all excited over nothing?

Pretty soon, “Most Daring” starts up. It offers:

—- A subway riot in Buffalo, where I once lived.

— -A train/trailer truck collision that seems to have been filmed from about 99 different angles. Does a railway crossing really have that many cameras pointed at it?

—- A high-speed chase, where two truckers collaborate on blocking the fugitive from passing them. When he tries to pass on the right, they pin his car to a guardrail. Cut to cop being interviewed, later. He says, “To this day, I don’t know who they are.” Are you kidding? They just rode off, like the Lone Ranger? “Who was that masked man?” “Dunno, we’re just an agency with the ability to tap every nationwide database there is, as well as review the footage we ourselves took. How the hell should we know who those truckers were?”

—- Some pedestrian bandito leans in the window of a car stalled in traffic and steals a purse. He weaves his hazardous way through a herd of vehicles, and is chased, and so on. The amazing thing is, the footage is shot from many different directions. No single, stationary surveillance camera took all these pictures. I mention this to somebody, who assures me: Everybody has camera phones now. Okay, say there were 20 people in the area, who could spare enough attention from driving their own cars to take pictures of the crook. How did it all wind up on this show? Did the producers send out a call throughout every possible channel, asking for footage of the event that took place on such-and-such street, on such-and-such date? Did everyone with a camera spontaneously realize they could sell their footage to “Most Daring,” and take the initiative to get in touch? Do people get paid for turning over their amateur videos? Do they get paid the same whether it’s real, or really real?

How does it happen, that cameras are always present for these weird incidents? Sure, security cameras are ubiquitous, the average person is photographed 300 times a day, bla bla bla. But how does all this artful tracking and refocusing come about? This isn’t the work of automatic camera mounted on a wall.

The editors work overtime. If for some dire reason, they don’t have shots from a lot of different angles, they just replay one snippet a whole bunch of times. A suspect on foot gets mowed down by a cop car, and we are treated to the sight of the impact at least half a dozen times. Apparently, they could just put that vignette on an endless loop and sell it to people as a standalone product.

At some point I realized this was the wrong TV show. “Most Daring” comes in several varieties, and this was “Commuter Chaos,” which I knew wouldn’t include the segment I was watching for. But I sat there anyway, wondering how much worse it could get. “Commuter Chaos” was a lot like “Cops.” In fact, I’m not even sure which things were on which show. But that doesn’t change the basic essence of the matter.

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Finally, the show I’ve been waiting for – “Most Daring: Bedlam in the Burbs.” The person I sort of know is supposed to be in this one. Some highlights:

—-  A backyard demolition derby. My inner libertarian says people have the right to do whatever they want with their own property, including destroy it. Still, whenever I see cars being gratuitously wrecked, I think of all the people who could really, really use a car and can’t quite manage to get one. What a waste.

—- Police chase a motorist through a semi-rural neighborhood. A guy comes out of a house and throws something at the fugitive’s car as it goes by. Further on, another resident comes out with a gun and shoots at the fugitive’s car. Cut to a cop being interviewed about the helpful citizen with a firearm. “He’s listened to the police scanner over a case of beer and decided to get involved.” Not a word about the wrongness of vigilantism, no word on any arrest of the gun-wielding citizen, nothing like that.

—- This guy tells his girlfriend to pick up a dog collar, and they’re walking along, and all of a sudden she yelps and falls on her ass. It is, of course, a shock collar, whose purpose is to cure gratuitous barking, and the boyfriend has the control in his pocket. We’re supposed to think it’s all spontaneous and the girl was surprised. Didn’t she wonder why somebody was filming her and her boyfriend on their ordinary, mundane stroll through the back yard?

—- There’s a real short clip of a guy firing some kind of long gun, and when it goes boom, his pants fall down. Okay, that was interesting. But why was anyone filming him, to begin with? The unaccountable presence of a camera at these boring scenes is a pretty good indication that a lot of what the audience is supposed to believe accidental, is really on purpose. WTF is the point?

Okay, fine, set up a gag and film it. That’s what Chaplin did. Nothing wrong with that. But these guys want viewers to believe their subject matter is real accident, rather than a staged scene. It’s not enough that an audience should see it and laugh at it. The creators of it also require the audience’s belief in its authenticity. Why?

Why would anyone be filming any of this stuff, unless they knew beforehand that something would happen to liven things up? Well, one of the reasons is that parents will take any amount of pictures of their kids. This is how we get such masterpieces as a little boy learning to ride a bike, crashing into a toy car. And little boy knocked off a trampoline. This is how we get nonsense like the Balloon Boy media circus, as a direct result of the WTF Network culture.

— Some moron douses a basketball with gasoline, lights it on fire, kicks it, and manages to set his foot on fire.

Is it only because I worked as a nurse, that I don’t see the humor? There really isn’t anything funny about, for instance, a hand whose digits are all fused together by scar tissue. I knew a man whose hand was like that. When he was a little boy, his brother tied a rag around his hand, soaked it in kerosene, and put a match to it. He probably told him it would be fun. The parents were Alabama sharecroppers. Reconstructive surgery wasn’t in the cards for that kid.

The argument for not televising jackass stunts: I knew a kid who tried to duplicate one of them, broke his leg, cost his parents a bundle of money and hassle when they could least afford it, because his mother was recovering from two major surgeries and his father had been out of work for a couple of years. Do we really need TV that encourages that kind of thing?

The other side: I had a relative, a couple generations back, who spent his entire life on a couch, in the kitchen of a farmhouse without plumbing or electricity. There was nothing else he could do, being permanently crippled by a fall from the barn roof. Maybe he was up there on legitimate business; maybe it was a jackass stunt. They didn’t have TV. Nobody had TV. Those Alabama folks had kerosene lamps, not electricity. Okay, it could be said that I’ve just demolished my own argument. Kids have always gotten hurt

But to go from “Boys have always done asinine things” to “Therefore we should televise the asinine things done by boys” is a leap of logic I can’t quite negotiate. (For somebody who doesn’t believe in censorship, this is a difficult position to be in.) Let’s start with the very real possibility that the basketball pyromaniac could have set the building on fire. There’s very little humor in a house fire, or a fire of any kind, really. People’s lives are devastated by fire. It’s the kind of thing a survivor never really gets over. I sure hate to typecast myself as a curmudgeon and a stick-in-the-mud, but fire just isn’t that funny.

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I include, as a target for scorn, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which may be on a different network, but that’s not really important. On most of these programs, most of the material involves somebody getting hurt, with genital injuries especially prized. Again, WTF? Just as a baby can find endless fascination in a bunch of jingling keys, men find endless amusement in the sight of some other guy taking a shot to the balls. And for some unfathomable reason, men love the sound of emergency vehicle sirens and screeching brakes. What’s up with that?

One of these shows even has a motto, “There’s nothing funnier than pain, embarrassment and humiliation!” Maybe so. Maybe also, there’s nothing worse than justifying sadism and bullshit under the guise of humor. Maybe there’s nothing worse than a sense of humor that’s limited to pain, embarrassment and humiliation, and incapable of moving beyond those hilarious qualities. Maybe there’s nothing sadder than elevating funniness to the very highest echelon of values. Maybe… a lot of things.

Humor is great, it’s healing, it’s stress-relieving, yada yada…. But just because a thing makes us laugh, that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically good. I’m sure there were concentration camp guards who found abundant humor in some of the stunts they got up to. There’s nothing sacred about humor, and if we’re able to see that there are different kinds of humor, and that some are more desirable than others, we are probably happier. The fun of “Blue Collar Comedy” can make you feel good for minutes at a time, and even affect your whole day. The humor of a guru can blow your mind and change your life. Why not aim high?

When negativity takes over my brain, I apply the Codger Test. “If I were 16 or 21, would I feel the same way?” (A song by Will Crist says, “I’ll help you remember your youth.” To which I reply, “No, thanks.” It is all too easily remembered. While I wouldn’t change anything, neither would I want to live through it again.) So I imagine watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or, Goddess forbid, “Cops,” at one of tender young ages. First of all, in the Sixties, only a few science fiction writers (and Paul Krassner) could have envisioned the shape of media to come. If, as a young adult, I had by some magical means glimpsed this future, it would have been added to my list of reasons for suicide. So, that’s the Codger Test. Would my opinion then, be the same as now? Hell, yeah. Pacifist though I was, I might even have found it a good reason to put my foot through the TV screen.

“Cops” is particularly distressing. The law-and-order freaks and cop wanna-be types who justify this show’s existence, sit hypnotized by the flashing lights of the patrol car – exactly like strobe-mesmerized hippies at a rock concert, a class of people they consider deviant zombies. (Has anyone ever sued the show for inducing an epilepsy attack with those flashing lights?) I keep wanting to say, “This is pornography,” then I remember the word means “writing about prostitutes.” Does that apply to this show? I haven’t watched enough of “Cops” to know whether it covers hookers, and don’t intend to. Sometimes research is a waste of time.

But on another plane of cogitation, yes, this is prostitution. What is prostitution, but selling something that probably shouldn’t be sold? It’s the same kind of whoredom practiced by small American towns struggling for economic survival, that can’t think of any idea better than “Let’s build a prison!” – with all the enthusiasm of an old cornball movie, “Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!”

Another TV series I don’t intend to treat myself to is “Operation Repo.” Just the ad for it was enough. This is how our invisible rulers maintain control over the population. All they gotta do is, make half the people into government minions with weapons, and the other half into outlaws with weapons. Keep our sorry asses busy clobbering each other, while they get their hands on everything. And free Americans voluntarily subject themselves to this indoctrination. The whole WTF Network is about America wallowing in its own worst impulses, and ya know what? It’s okay not to like it.

Here we have a photo of a veiled woman. Its ostensible purpose is to provide a visual means of identifying the subject, to which one can only say, “Huh?”. The paradox is almost too much to contemplate. It’s hard to say which aspect of this concept is most stupid.

First candidate: the entire women-as-property ethos. I like to respect the religious beliefs of others, but dammit, making humans cover their faces, like all the rest of the misogynist creed, wherever it is found, is just repugnant. I’m not in favor of women wearing veils unless they want to, and surprisingly few do seem to want to.

So that’s the first stupid thing. The second is: even bothering to take a picture. A principle of equal treatment? People who have no faces are afforded the same opportunity as those with faces: a means to prove or disprove their identity and their very existence. Seriously, would this picture stand up in court as a solid ID? No? Then what is it doing on this passport?

Or maybe it isn’t so stupid. “We have the technology!” was the motto of the 20th century. It won’t be the motto of the 21st century, because humans won’t be around on the planet long enough to look back on the century with nostalgia, or to identify the most characteristic slogan of that century.

So, who needs a whole face? By now we must certainly have the technology to identify an individual from a photo showing one approximate centimeter of flesh. Which many Muslim women do show. This devout lady, however, reveals nothing.

The next stupid thing is, it gives the bludg an excuse to grab more identification markers. “Yes, modest Muslim women are allowed to wear their veils to be photographed,” say the authorities. “This is why we must also have an alternate means of ID, such as fingerprints. And of course we wouldn’t want to discriminate, so that means everybody gets fingerprinted”. Still, this ID method would not capture data from bilateral amputees, so there must be retina scans… and so on, ad nauseum, ad absurdum and ad infinitum.

The fourth thing, and I won’t call it stupid because that would be offensive, but it sure does cause a person to wonder. Doesn’t Islam forbid the making of images? And specifically, images of people? But in order to move about in the modern world, the leaders of the faith apparently are willing to cut the faithful some slack. Well, why not cut them some slack in the matter of veils, infibulation and, you know, that kind of thing?

Decimated Nauseous Prone Aquiline Somewhat Unique State of the Art Older Laundry List Changed the Course of History, and Could Care Less

(Dedicated to the proposition that words mean something.)

Something has happened to the word older. Let’s back up and start with a parallel example. Visualize a big sandwich, perhaps 4” thick. Now picture a bigger sandwich. How much bigger? Maybe 2” of extra bread and cheese, making it a 6”-thick sandwich. It’s bigger than the big sandwich. Bigger means more than big. It means big plus. However thick that first big sandwich may be, the bigger sandwich is – well, bigger.

For some incomprehensible reason, however, popular usage is tending reverse the meanings of “old” and “older.” People are using “old” to mean a bent-over crone in her 90s, and “older” to mean a silver-haired tennis player in her 50s. This is totally backward, and just about the stupidest vernacular innovation in a long time.

Also, to be old-ER, there has to be something to compare it to. There’s an implied question – Older than what? First, you have to establish the quantity of “old”. If a big sandwich is a 4” sandwich, let’s say that an old person is 70. Okay, now there’s something to compare to. A 4” sandwich is big, and a 6” sandwich is bigg-ER. A person of 70 is old, and person of 90 is old-ER.

Examples from real publications:

“…an older woman in her late 60s…” Older than what? Older than anyone from age 1 to 65, sure. But not older than anyone who is 80 or 90 or 100. It’s stupid.

“Older women buy a lot of shoes.” This makes no sense because if you ask the question, “Older than what?” there’s no answer. It’s stupid.

“HIV/AIDS and the Older Woman” Older than what? Stupid.

“… how older women’s identities are socially constructed…” Older than what? Also stupid.

This quotation is the star:

“Most infertility specialists define an older woman as one who is more than 35 years…”
Remember, “older” means “more old than old.” So by this reasoning, a woman of 34 is old. In fact, anything less than 35 is old, because 35 is old-ER, and that means it’s older than something.

There are times when “older” makes sense. It makes sense to say, “an older man told me,” because he’s older than someone. He’s older than me. It makes sense to title an article about intergenerational romance “Older Women and Younger Men,” because in each couple discussed, the woman is older than someone: specifically, the man she’s dating.

Why must it always be a laundry list? WHY WHY WHY must the word “list” always be preceded by the word “laundry”? It’s like “old abandoned.” Is there some kind of federal law that the word “abandoned” must always, always be accompanied by the word “old”? It’s as if they were conjoined siblings, never to be separated. Same with “laundry” and “list.”

Wretched examples:

“… a makeup artist who boasts a laundry list of celeb clients…” Only it’s not a laundry list – it’s a CLIENT list!

“a serial murderer whose victims form a laundry list of some of the most notorious unsolved cases…” It’s not a freakin’ laundry list, it’s a list of VICTIMS, and has nothing to do with laundry.

Stop it!

We live with a whole collection of myths about how things are. For instance, you’ve heard the phrase “It changed the course of history!” What the hell is the course of history? This implies there is a script where everything that’s going to happen is written down and it can’t be deviated from. Sure, there is – invented by some gnomes who live in caves on Saturn. They write it up in a big book, and boy, do they get ticked off when something comes along to change it!

No, I don’t think so. Reassuring as it might be to think there is a Course of History, there isn’t.

In another sense, everything changes the course of history. Not just big things like the assassination of a president. Every time I breathe, it changes the course of history. You too. It’s the Butterfly Effect, which some call the Trimtab Effect, repeated over and over again billions of times every day. Every time something happens anywhere, it changes the course of history. Which, in that case, doesn’t exist.

“I could care less” is just about the stupidest thing anyone can say, because what they mean by it is “I couldn’t care less.” In other words, they don’t care at all, not one little bit. But – “I could care less” means that they do care, which is of course the opposite of what they think they’re saying.

Devaluation of words, degradation of the language? Most people could care less.

Decimated Nauseous Prone Aquiline Somewhat Unique State of the Art Older Laundry List Changed the Course of History, and Could Care Less

(Dedicated to the proposition that words mean something.)

An aquiline nose is a curved nose. Aquila is Latin for eagle, and an aquiline nose is curved like an eagle’s beak. So I Google the words “straight” and “aquiline” in conjunction, and in the first ten results, there are six instances of a “straight, aquiline” nose. How can this be? It can’t. If a thing is curved, it’s not straight! If it’s straight, it’s not curved!

Anne Perry writes some interesting novels, but has a fetish for describing the nose of almost every character in those books as aquiline. In Defend and Betray, there are TEN. Three short aquiline noses, one long aquiline nose. One character has a “curious face with its aquiline nose.” Another has a “nose aquiline and yet broad.” Then there’s a child, “his nose short and already beginning to show an aquiline curve.” Another character has an “aquiline nose that looked almost as if it had been broken,” and one has a “crooked, aquiline nose.” Not content to stop at noses, she says of another character that his “face was aquiline.” Good grief.

“Curved or hooked” is the dictionary definition of aquiline. Another dictionary says “thin, curved, and pointed like an eagle’s beak.” The thinness factor would eliminate Perry’s character whose nose is “aquiline yet broad.” And pity this poor other character, the one whose nose is apparently thin, curved, pointed and crooked, all at the same time.

Memo to Ms. Perry: cool it with the aquiline noses, okay? You’re embarrassing yourself.

The world would be a better place if no-one ever again said somewhat unique. Unique is unlike any other. There’s only one of it. Unique is an all-or-nothing proposition. A thing is either unique or it is not. There is no “somewhat unique,” period.

State of the art, thank Goddess, isn’t heard so often any more, but it sure went around the block enough times to get tired. Probably 15/16ths of the time when people use that phrase, they don’t have the foggiest idea what they mean by it anyway. It morphed into meaning something like the French phrase, le denier cri, the last word, the latest and greatest.

But much, much worse is beyond state of the art, a totally meaningless aggregation of words. Remember the amplifier in Spinal Tap those volume dial went up to 11? Whether you call it 11 or 10, if it’s the highest number on the dial, it’s still the loudest level. “Beyond state of the art” is only in the realm of imagination. The minute a thing is realized, that’s the state of the art, right there. Maybe something was formerly “beyond state of the art,” when it was on the drawing board, but the minute it exists, it automatically becomes the state of the art. Yeah, there are writers who might say “beyond state of the art” in a tongue-in-cheek way, facetiously, as humorous hyperbole, but people are out there using it with a straight face, as if it actually meant something.

Decimated Nauseous Prone Aquiline Somewhat Unique State of the Art Older Laundry List Changed the Course of History, and Could Care Less

(Dedicated to the proposition that words mean something.)

Here’s what makes me sick (little joke there, very little) – not knowing the difference between two words that have opposite meanings, such as nauseous and nauseated. Don’t say “I feel nauseous” unless you admit to being offensive, loathsome, sickening and vile. “Nauseous” describes the thing that causes nausea, not the person who experiences it. A pile of rotting meat is nauseous, and causes those who encounter it to feel nauseated, unless they are carrion birds or jackals.

prone

People, people people…. prone means face-down. Face-up is “supine.” A hand, for instance. If you turn it palm up, as if to hold soup in it, the hand is supine. Turned the other way, palm down, it is prone. A human body is prone when the front of it is down, in contact with the ground, the bed, or other horizontal surface. Best-selling author Sandra Brown doesn’t know this, as shown in Chill Factor, Long Time Coming, etc. In her Hidden Fire, a prone man is asleep with his hat over his face, snoring. There’s a prone woman, who gives birth to an infant and then stares at the sky – all in a face-down position. The heroine, “hypnotized by the bulge between his thighs,” gazes at the prone body of a man. I’d be hypnotized too, if I saw a man whose package stuck out the back instead of the front.

The most appalling misuse of the word was in a novel whose title is blessedly forgotten. In it, the protagonists scamper about in a cathedral, where the carved likenesses of knights lie prone on their carved stone coffins. Butt-up is a very undignified posture for an honored warrior’s statue, created to adorn his sarcophagus throughout eternity, is it not?

In fact, almost no authors or editors seem to know what “prone” means. Writers of dissertations don’t know, and prestigious academic institutions are in ignorance. An article from Stanford University, about the effect of music on the brain, describes subjects lying prone inside an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) chamber. Okay, I wasn’t there, but – prone? I doubt it.

On one of his very popular radio shows, Alexander Woollcott once chided a local newspaper: “In one of our better New York dailies I read a description of a well-dressed woman lying prone on her back on Fifth Avenue. I’d like to have seen that. Must have been quite a sight……”

The most notorious abuser of “prone” was Stokeley Carmichael, in a wine-lubricated conversation with fellow members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, back in 1964. The civil rights activist was reacting to the recent publication, by Casey Hayden and Mary King, of Position Paper: Women in the Movement. Carmichael cracked, “The position of women in SNCC is prone.” Alluding, of course, to sex. The fact that prone means face-down adds insult to the already-inflammatory comment by implying doggy-style or worse.

In A Hard Rain Fell, David Barber says that in the context of the Mississippi Summer Project, the remark was both humorous and true, since a lot of the Northern white women volunteers took the opportunity to do more than register voters. Carmichael was let off the hook by his contemporaries, including feminists, who said it was just an inside joke, because he was a true supporter of women in the movement. (If he’d said that in so many words, “I support women in the movement,” a double-entendre could be easily heard by anyone whose mind inclines that way.)

First, let’s agree that words do and should mean something. The very act of reading this page is an act of faith in the idea that words mean something, and a testimonial to it. And if we can’t agree that words mean something, what’s the point of ever talking at all? If words mean nothing, maybe we should all just shut the hell up for a change. But that’s a whole different discussion.

Word abuse is a blight that impoverishes our language, IMFO. This top ten collection of abused words has no particular order. They’re all culprits. Here’s how you can tell they are parts of a set. Read this as a headline:

Decimated Nauseous Prone Aquiline Somewhat Unique State of the Art Older Laundry List Changed the Course of History, and Could Care Less

Decimate is a word with an exact meaning, inherent in the word itself – TEN – as in, the Decimal System. It comes from the army of ancient Rome, where discipline in the ranks was maintained by decimation. Here’s how it worked. If the troops misbehaved, the officers would line them up, order them to count off, and summarily execute every tenth man. To decimate is to destroy one-tenth of something. That’s what it means. But….

Here are some examples, from books or news stories, of how the word is misunderstood and abused, and how that contributes to debasing the language.

— In Iraq, the “now-decimated Republican Guard….”

One out of ten is not a bad loss, militarily speaking. I’m sure this writer meant “devastated.”

— This is about a forest where wood was obtained, to rebuild Chicago after the catastrophic fire of 1871. It says the fire “indirectly did more to decimate the forest…” than something or other.

The point is, loss of one-tenth of a forest is not, relatively speaking, a great loss. It could have been far worse, and probably was, only this writer doesn’t realize it, and thinks “decimate” means something close to “destroy.”

— Even the great Jonathan Franzen disappoints, by this phrase in The Corrections: “..bearing the names of decimated tribes…”

I think he means something much closer to “tribes that were wiped out, or almost,” which is a much more tragic situation. A tribe that only loses 10% of its members is a tribe in pretty good shape, actually.

— “Most of mainland Europe was decimated.”

In this incident, many more than ten percent of Europeans died. Because of its inaccuracy, the “decimated” is bad enough, but then there’s the “most,” which is worse. What’s being said here is: most of a continent was one-tenth destroyed. And that makes no sense at all.

— From a suspense novel: “The Manning presidency was decimated….”

How do you kill one-tenth of a presidency?

— “the multimillionaire owner who has decimated the Santa Barbara News-Press…“

It may be possible to kill one-tenth of a newspaper, but I’d like more evidence. Besides, one-tenth isn’t so bad, compared to how many newspapers are… you should excuse the expression… folding.

Ten is a number, like any other number. It has an immutable meaning. To decimate is to kill one-tenth of a group of people. I know everybody else in the world misuses it, but you and I, being the brilliant scholars we are, ought not to.

Somehow the public doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the significance of the issue.
Herbert Scoville

How can we dispel the notion of some people that anyone will survive a nuclear war?
Dr. Yevgeni Chazov

“Duck and cover” don’t make it.
Anne Alexander

There is no plausible scenario for the use of nuclear weapons in a conflict between the two superpowers that does not carry with it the dangers of catastrophic escalation.
Kurt Gottfried, Henry W. Kendall, John M. Lee in Scientific American

Nuclear winter presents “a real danger of the extinction of humanity.”
Carl Sagan

Given a little carelessness, life on this planet may be made impossible.
Bertrand Russell

Unless we survive, there can be no just society or any other kind.
Roland N. Stromberg

What shall we do without us?
Kenneth Patchen

Had a dream, it was war
and they couldn’t tell me what it was for
but it was something they could lie about
something we could die about, you know.
Roger Hodgson

If they didn’t’ know what they were doing they wouldn’t be in Washington – and they’re not there!
Mort Sahl

I think the leaders of the freeze movement know more about these weapons systems than does the President of the United States.
Herbert Scoville

Whoever gives another the authority to act on his behalf, must accept personal responsibility for the results of that delegated authority.
Leonard Read

There are so many Sorts of Fools, such an infinite Variety of Fools, and so hard it is to know the Worst of the Kind.
Daniel Defoe 1724

I abhor two principles in religion…The first is obedience upon authority without conviction; and the other destroying of them that differ from me for God’s sake.
William Penn

…it is not thus, it is not thus,
it is not thus
that the whole round world is broken.
Kenneth Patchen

Those to whom the survival of mankind is more important than victory in the next election must strive to enlighten the public while there is still time.
Bertrand Russell

This organization has one goal and one goal only – to start the process of dismantling the nuclear weapons in order to protect life.
PRO-Peace statement

President Reagan would not have begun negotiating in Geneva nor discussed arms control with the Russians in 1981 were it not for the antinuclear movement in the US and Europe.
Herbert Scoville

My greatest hope is that my work may have contributed to the prevention of future wars.
Pablo Picasso

RELATED: Nuclear Annihilation Insurance

1985 flyer

Note: this is the text from the 1985 flyer. The quotations are in a separate post.

There is no such thing as nuclear annihilation insurance, and anyone who thinks there could be is tragically deluded. If you have a notion that nuclear war is survivable, if you think there would be anything at the other end worth surviving for, this message is for you.

Oh, you have a shelter? Is your bomb shelter equipped to withstand 30 million degrees F?

At this very moment people are making “contingency plans.” Plans for how to keep your charge account bills coming, through the U.S. Mail which is guaranteed to be up and running with only a single day’s interruption of service. Of course everyone will have an address, due to the marvelous evacuation scheme which promises to get everyone neatly resettled within three business days after global cataclysm.

Sound like a crock? You bet it does. Do you have any conception of how pitifully, laughably inadequate the evacuation plans are? Or any idea how naïve it is to believe there will be anyplace to evacuate to, or any way of getting there? Missiles arrive within thirty minutes of launch. How far can you drive on the San Diego Freeway during the biggest rush hour in history?

Even supposing that evacuation were workable, will you be one of the refugees or one of the hosts? Even if it were possible to survive a “limited” nuclear exchange, would you want to? Will you be among the many thousands of severe burn cases, or among the walking wounded whose job it will be to nurse them?

Nuclear War – If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen Them All

It can’t happen, you say? Consider this:

• The nuclear policies of both superpowers rest on the concept of “unacceptable damage” at the very least.

• The purpose of NATO is to initiate nuclear warfare.

• The present administration has ignored or refused six major chances to delay our present course toward apocalypse.

• Some very intelligent people say the chance of accidental nuclear war is quite good. In 1980 it almost happened – because of the malfunction of a 46-cent computer chip.

There won’t be any veterans of WWIII. There won’t be any Time-Life Books series about it. The probability is very high that the beginning of nuclear war would lead inevitably to the end of everything.

Nuclear War – Oh, No, There Goes My Career!

If you’re not horrified by the nearness of total destruction, you haven’t been paying attention. Nuclear warfare is not cost-effective. After it there will be no markets, no goods, no customers, no profits. If you’re concerned about any other issues it behooves you to first be concerned about nuclear war. Of course it has the potential to solve a lot of social problems. No more apartheid No more conflict between pro-choice and pro-life. No choice. No life.

Wasn’t Once Enough?

As Voltaire said after the orgy, when invited to another: No thanks. “Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.” As an anonymous teenager said after trying a popular drug: “Once is curiosity, twice is stupidity.”

The worst thing happening in the world today is the belief people have been brainwashed into, that nuclear war is acceptable, necessary, even inevitable; that the “other side” wants it.

In the street a man is beating his wife. One neighbor turns up his radio and takes care to stay away from the window. Next door someone peeks out through the shade. Another neighbor picks up the phone to call the authorities, realizing too late that the line has been cut. Down the block a man stands on his porch and watches, expressionless. Someone else rushes to intervene, not heeding the risk to himself.

We each have our own way of dealing with the rightly named Unthinkable: the prospect of total devastation of the planet and the death of everything on it. We can throw ourselves into partying and turn our backs on the horror. We can let it into the fringes of consciousness and pay it with nightmares. We can kid ourselves into complacency, blind faith in the leaders who will surely take care of us and bring about a “victory” for our side. We can stare it in the face, numb as rabbits paralyzed by oncoming headlights. We can try to stop it, using any and all means at our disposal no matter how futile or hopeless the task may seem.

Give Peace a Chance

A good place to start would be a weapons freeze: Stop all testing, production, and deployment of bombs, warheads, and delivery vehicles of all types. When you consider that enough nuclear warheads already exist to blow up the world about 70 times over, freeze is not such an unreasonable proposition. Better yet, and the only acceptable course if life on earth is to continue – TOTAL MULTILATERAL NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT. Quite simply, take the weapons down. Dismantle them. We figured out how to put them together, surely we can figure out how to take them apart.

Making a Difference

There is no such thing as Nuclear Annihilation Insurance. Not that we can buy with money. But there are other things we can do. Virtually every profession, religion, and ethnic group has a peace group within. Examples of these specialized groups include architects, atomic scientists, atomic bomb survivors, computer experts, lawyers, Asian Americans, Constitutionalists, mothers, gays, professors, librarians, doctors, teachers, and psychologists. In Los Angeles alone there are dozens of groups working for peace. If your town has more than fifty people in it, chances are there’s a peace group.

We need to find ways to let the politicians and general on both “sides” know they do not have our permission or approval in their insane pursuit of Armageddon. We can view Threads or The Day After to get a real feel for what it is we’re dealing with here. We can educate ourselves by reading some of the many informative books on the nuclear threat and the peace alternative.

Some people create art which expresses their anti-nuclear convictions. Some alter billboards and paint slogans on walls. Thousands of people will interrupt their lives to go on a nearly year-long walk to Washington in 1986, to make the elected officials and the rest of the country and the world aware of the strength of their feelings. Thousands are arrested every year in acts of civil disobedience directed against nuclear warfare preparations. Some have gone so far as to damage missile silos and other military property in protest. Some refuse to hand over part or all of the taxes the government demands to buy our destruction. Did you know the seemingly insignificant federal excise tax on your phone bill is specifically earmarked for military use? If we continue to pay now, we will surely pay later.

There are innumerable ways to make a difference, and all of them worth trying. No idea is too wild when compared to the alternative – the end of life on this planet. One prominent scientist proposed an exchange between the superpowers of millions of children – a war prevention plan which has historical precedent.

Wake Up Today: The Future Can Still Happen

The first and most important step toward turning this mess around can happen in only one place: the mind. Your mind. Believe that reversal is possible and that insanity can be ended. Believe that the people, the citizens, of other nations don’t want nuclear warfare any more than we do. Believe that people can say no. We can say no. And that’s the only insurance we’ve got.

P. Robinson 1985

RELATED: Nuclear Annihilation Insurance Quotations

I know, I know, thousands of these things fly around the webwaves. But these are my favorites of the ones I’ve seen.

This last one is a Mad Magazine Poster