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By Elvin Lim

The tragic shootings in Newtown, CT, have plunged the nation into the foundational debate of American politics.

Over at Fox News, the focus as been on mourning and the tragedy of what happened. As far as the search for solutions go, the focus has been on how to cope, what to say to children, and what to do about better mental health screening. It is consistent with the conservative view that when bad things happen, they happen because of errant individuals, not flawed societies. The focus on mourning indicates the view that when bad things happen, they are the inevitable costs of liberty.

At MSNBC, the focus has been on tragedy as a wake up call, not a thing in itself to simply mourn; on finding legislative and governmental solutions — gun control. This is consistent with the liberal view that when bad things happen, they happen because of flawed societies, not just the result of errant individuals or evil as an abstract entity.

The question of which side is right is an imponderable. Conservatives believe that in the end, our vigilance against tyrannical government is our first civic duty. This was the logic behind the Second Amendment. It comes from a long line of Radical Whig thinking that the Anti-Federalists inherited. That is why Second Amendment purists can reasonably argue that that citizens should continue to have access to (even) semi-automatic guns. They will say that the Second Amendment is not just for hunting; it is for liberty against national armies. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that a government duly constituted by the people need not fear government; and it is citizen-on-citizen violence that we ought to try to prevent. This line of thinking began with Hobbes, who had theorized that we lay down our arms against each other, so that one amongst us alone wields the sword. Later, we called this sovereign the state. The Federalists leaned in this tradition.

Should we fear government more or fellow citizens who have access to guns? Should government or citizens enjoy the presumption of virtue? Who knows. There is no answer on earth that would permanently satisfy both political sides in America, because conservatives believe that most citizens, most of the time, are virtuous, and there is no need to take a legislative sledgehammer to restrict the liberty of a few errant individuals at the expense of everybody else. Liberals, conversely, believe that government and regulatory activity are virtuous and necessary most of the time, and there is little practical cost to most citizens to restrict a liberty (to bear arms) that is rarely, if ever, invoked. Put another way: conservatives focus on the vertical dimension of tyranny; liberals fear most the horizontal effects of mutual self-destruction.

What is a president to do? It depends on which side of the debate he stands. Barack Obama believes that the danger we pose to ourselves exceeds the danger of tyrannical government (for which a right to bear arms was originally codified). The winds of public opinion may be swaying in his direction, and Obama appeared to be ready to mould it when he asked: “Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage?”

Here is one neo-Federalist argument that Obama can use, should he take on modern Anti-Federalists. If the Constitution truly were of the people, then it is self-contradictory to speak of vigilance against it. In other words, the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It was written in an era of monarchy, as a bulwark against Kings. To those who claim to be constitutional conservatives, Obama may reasonably ask: either the federal government is not sanctioned by We the People, and therefore we must forever be jealous of it; or, the federal government represents the People and we need not treat it as a distant potentate and overstate our fear of it.

If this is to be the age of renewed faith in government, as it appears to be Obama’s mission, then the President will be more likely to convince Americans to lay down our arms; he will persuade us that our vigilance against government by the people is counter-prouctive and anachronistic. But, to move “forward,” he must first convince the NRA and its ideological compatriots that we can trust our government. Only the greatest of American presidents have succeeded in this most herculean of tasks, for our attachment to the spirit of ’76 cannot be understated.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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The post On the Second Amendment: should we fear government or ourselves? appeared first on OUPblog.

Check out FOX News’ recent report on First Book and Martha’s Table, the soup kitchen where our president and CEO, Kyle Zimmer, first realized the incredible need for books in low-income communities.  The report focuses on how these two organizations are navigating the nonprofit world and continuing to make a difference despite a significant decline in charitable donations.

Read the full report at: http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/money/charitable-donations-at-all-time-low-101810

I have taken a vow of silence. A week back, I received a ticket to attend an advance screening of a big Hollywood film that premieres later this summer. I went to the film and signed some piece of paper saying I wouldn’t release information about it and I plan to hold true to that pledge. I know first hand how advance reviews can occasionally sour enthusiasm. All I will say is that during the screening, people cheered and clapped and I was absolutely flumoxed. It wasn’t the worst film I’d ever seen, but it was, to put it lightly, rather awful. And yet clapping. Cheering even. For one liners and kisses and such.

I’m going to attribute it to peoples’ excitement at being the first to see something. They were so invested in believing that they saw the next colossal hit, that they whooped and whistled their doubts away and went home and updated their Facebook profiles with something along the lines of “Guess who went to a big Hollywood premiere? I probably won’t respond to any messages for a while, cause I’m guessing I’ll be grabbing cocktails with Matthew Lillard and Eddie Furlong later. So suck it, zeroes.” Now consider this. No one was cheering when I went to see Avatar, and that movie’s box office dwarfs the GDP of many a nation. The Navi need not get their braids in a twist. I doubt the film I just saw will challenge their record.

Then again, maybe I’ve completely lost touch with the public. Maybe it will be the hit the world’s been waiting for. I’ve been wrong before. There are a few things I was sure would bomb, but went on to be wild successes:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Euginedes – I read this book months before it was released and while I could appreciate the scope, I was sure it would derided for being a blatant rip-off of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Homage is one thing, but I felt Euginedes took the ideas, the form, even certain plot points of Rushdie and transplanted them with far less elegance and wonder to Greeks in the upper Midwest. I didn’t think Euginedes would be run out town with pitchforks, but I thought more than a few critics would wag a finger at him. But no. Oprah pick. Pulitzer winner. Modern classic. And no Greek equivalent of a fatwa to deal with. Go figure.

The Big Bang Theory - Not the actual theory, which I knew the kids would love. I’m talking about the television show. I think I watched the first episode or two of this sitcom and wrote it off as formulaic tripe. Virgin nerds fumble around a pretty lady while trading Star Wars metaphors. Insert laughter. I figured it would last a couple seasons with a “well, nothing else is on,” viewership, but it has become a verified hit. And critics dig it. I’ve poked my head back in to see if it’s changed. It hasn’t.

Communism – My buddy Karl assured me he was onto something. I thought it was some hippie BS. “Go back to the drum circle, Karl. Go date a girl who wears skirts and jeans at the same time, Karl.” But one toppled tsar, a shining path, and an arms race later, and it’s still kicking around. Even in our White House, at least according to my most trusted news source: Victoria Jackson.

NOTE TO SELF: AVOID FOX NEWS DUE TO GROSS INSENSITIVITY

Sometimes the ignorance of some news media makes me gasp in "what-were-they-thinking" mode. In this particular case, it's Fox News that has gone out on a limb to show its dumbness for lack of a better word in their assessment of the Canadian presence in Afghanistan.

Last week once again when Canadians were mourning the loss of four more soldiers, Fox News and more specifically, one Greg Gutfeld (who is this guy anyway and when did he seep out of the wood work?) who hosts some type of TV talk show, decided that it would be oh-so-much-fun to make fun of the Canadian military.

The five-minute segment, which aired recently on Fox News late-night program "Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld" and later posted on YouTube.com, features American panelists suggesting Canadian soldiers need time off for "manicures and pedicures."

The item aired after Gen. Andrew Leslie, the Canadian Forces Chief of Land Staff, told a Senate committee the military would need a one-year break from operations after the mission in Afghanistan winds down in 2011.

"The Canadian military wants to take a breather to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white capri pants," Gutfeld said with a sneer. Another panelist Doug Benson said he was unaware Canadian troops were on the ground in Afghanistan.

"I didn't even know they were in the war. I thought that's where you go if you don't want to fight - you go chill in Canada," he said.

As a Canadian I'm disgusted with what they probably pass off as satire but in effect, is gross stupidity and far from amusing. There is a fine line between satire and insult and in this case, it has been crossed and then some. I do not, nor would I now for sure, subscribe to Fox News.

The show should be re-named, "Red Face with Shame."

Shame on Fox News! Canadians are NOT at all amused!

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2009/03/22/8847666-sun.html

Online www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJn5XlbSFk

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, will be published by Perigee in July. In the post below Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, wonders what makes a dictionary “hardcore”.

There was an accidentally interesting discussion on the subject of orthography last week on Fox News. Hosts Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy were giving their learned opinions on spelling reform, and whether it was necessary. When it seemed to me that they were just about to decisively put an end to several hundred years of debate, Carlson suddenly interjected a new question into the conversation: “do they even sell hardcore dictionaries anymore…?You are doubtless thinking right now ‘what is a hardcore dictionary, and where can I find one?’ There are a number of ways to interpret the meaning of this word, and so before answering Carlson’s question we should perhaps examine some of them.

Mark Liberman, in an excellent post at Language Log, recommended Allen Walker Read’s study on graffiti, Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary. This is a good example of a hardcore dictionary since, as Liberman points out, the book was judged incendiary enough in the 1930s that it had to be privately printed.

If we are to assume that Carlson was using the word hardcore in the sense of ‘pornographic’ then she is in luck, as there are a great number of dictionaries that fall into this category. I think that the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang is pretty hardcore. So are Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word, and Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. In fact, the tradition of hardcore dictionaries in English lexicography goes back hundreds of years, with such gems as Sir Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (from 1785, but available in a modern reprint), and Henry Nathaniel Cary’s, The Slang of Venery and its Analogues, a two volume compilation of off-color words taken from 18th and 19th century dictionaries (privately printed in 1916 and unfortunately hard to find).

Although perhaps she meant hardcore as it is defined by the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary (‘2. Stubbornly resistant to improvement or change’)? There are a number of prescriptivist dictionaries available that resist the inevitable change of language.

I suppose there is always a chance that Carlson already owns the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and was referencing that work’s own definition of hardcore (‘hardened, tough, pitiless’). In that case I would recommend Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, which has all those qualities and more.

But maybe she meant hardcore as it is defined by the Harper Collins Dictionary of American Slang (‘essential and uncompromising’). There are a great number of dictionaries that I think are essential, and a few that are uncompromising as well. The 1916 version of The Century Dictionary comes to mind - this single volume work is over 8000 pages long (almost two feet tall when laid on its side), and so feels pretty uncompromising when you try to hold it in your lap. Plus, the publishers inexplicably chose to cover it in brown corduroy, which to me seems hardcore for a dictionary.

What if she had recently been reading The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green, and liked his definition of ‘…serious, committed, experienced, full-time…’? If this is what she meant then she can walk into almost any bookstore in the world and find that they most likely will sell a dictionary that meets these criteria. So no matter what meaning of the word was intended the answer is yes, Carlson, they do still sell hardcore dictionaries.

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