June | 2016 | Taking Offense

Offense of the Month: June 2016
He’s back — well, at least in my columns. He’s been daily on your other screens, I know, though we can pray that two or three years from now today’s junior high school students will wonder who he was. But at least for this month he’s back, having taken the art of offending to Olympic proportions.

The offense: explicitly asserting that a federal judge cannot be trusted to rule impartially because of his ancestry.

If you’re reading this years after the event, you can be pardoned for not remembering what is vivid to any American reading the newspapers or watching the evening news in June 2016. The Donald, we learned, doesn’t like Federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is handling two civil class actions brought against him by former “students” of “Trump University,” an unaccredited institute of lower learning that granted no degrees. Continue reading →

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks, writing the first draft of the proposal for the book Taking Offense. During that time, I’ve been musing about a problem that has loomed large in the news this spring, the problem of when to scrub away the names or symbols of honorees whom we now understand dishonor us.

It’s likely a fundamental human impulse to pay homage to those who have achieved great things: saved the community from enemies in battle, governed well, invented processes and machines to raise us from trouble and drudgery, created works of art that inspire, taught us to learn and grow, or helped or enlightened us in some other way. You no doubt have a hero or two in mind as you read this, as do I as I write. Some honorees are known to families, neighborhoods, or particular communities, others to whole nations and the world.

And then comes the moment when you wake up, or grow up, or learn something new, about yourself, the world, and your hero. Continue reading →

A Potpourri of Idiocies

Offenses of the Months, 2019
A good way to appreciate our times is to sample tidbits and morsels from the slush pile of reportage on the American penchant for being gratuitously offensive. I offer here a small sample, in random categories and without regard to chronology, of stories that have bubbled up through 2019 to delight any taste.

I’m O.K., You’re KK
In November, I learned that it’s now considered rude to type “O.K.,” in response to a routine request or inquiry in an email, at least if you’re corresponding with a member of the Millennial Generation (commonly supposed to be those born between 1981 and 1996) or Generation Z (born after 1996). So says Caity Weaver, a Styles writer at The New York Times. The younger folk, it seems, will take you as boorish, even more so if you type simply “k.” (I’ve never actually seen that done—why would you?—but I’m so old there’s not even a proper name for my generation.) The polite response, it seems, is “kk.” Ms. Weaver says that she rarely uses that locution, preferring “O.K.!” (which, she says, “feels more natural, but still conveys to the recipient, through its superfluous exclamation point, the same frantic message that I’m not annoyed or angry (omg why would I be) so please don’t feel bad!!”). It’s apparently come to this. (Or she’s having us on.) But it’s certainly not O.K. read-more..

Taking Offense

Monthly Archives: June 2016

Donald Trump, Olympian Offender

Scrub ’em clean

Offense of the Month

A Potpourri of Idiocies

Dishonor Roll

Time Bombs

Mocking Misery

Megyn Kelly Flames Out

Meek Disinherited

Turtles, but not all the way down

Dying anyway

Gingrich Gets Giddy

Donald Trump, Olympian Offender

Less Majesty, More Speech in Germany

Meow

Wanted: Zombies without a Past

Football Über Alles

Anger verboten

TrumpGate?

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