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By John Tirman The American public is essentially indifferent to the victims of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The native populations that U.S. troops intervened on behalf of, or who were under the thumb of dictators we were trying to depose, suffered greatly in those wars, with millions dead and additional millions made homeless, impoverished, widowed, injured, or deprived of a normal life. This staggering human toll was and is not America’s responsibility alone, of course. But what is remarkable is how little the American public sympathizes with these victims, how little concern is registered.

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By Brooke Blower

Thanks to Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris and David McCullough’s book The Greater Journey, summer crowds are again satisfying their appetite for that guilty pleasure: the Americans-in-Paris romp. Such celebrations of the adventures of Americans in the City of Lights are certainly fun. But they evoke a version of the city that’s rooted as much in fantasy as fact. Like many guilty pleasures, they actually tell us a lot more about who we are, and about our yearning for an elusive American innocence, than they do about the gritty realities of the French capital.

In his chronicle of artists and apprentices who journeyed to France during the 19th century, McCullough gives us his trademark vignettes, so richly descriptive that you can feel the tight clothing and smell the candles going out. The Americans are well-meaning and hard-working. In turn, Paris is obliging, with picturesque rather than menacing poverty, and where, the author tell us, no drunks stagger through the streets.

With Allen we also get postcard Paris and a parade of illustrious expatriates ripped from history as we follow Owen Wilson’s character on his fantastical journey back to the 1920s. The film’s opening montage sets the tone: shots of Fouquet’s café on the Champs Elysées; the wind-milled Moulin Rouge; squares magically empty of traffic jams; and alleys mercifully free of noise, drug deals, or urine. While Wilson plays the incredulous but enthusiastic initiate, the French serve as scene shifters and helpful guides.

Allen and McCullough may look to different golden ages, but both essentially give us old-timey Paris with mirrored brasseries, obligatory homages to the Eiffel Tower, mustaches, and just a dash of prostitution so things don’t seem too sanitized. It’s the same airbrushed city that wowed moviegoers in An American in Paris and Funny Face. It’s the same depoliticized place that armchair time travelers look for when they pick up Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Here, Americans are bystanders to war and civil unrest, and, in peacetime, the only bad guys around are Englishmen, snooty waiters, or maybe a few fussy bureaucrats.

In this mythical Paris, no one rolls their eyes at your American accent or asks you to defend U.S. foreign policy. No one rubs up against you in line. No one gets arrested. Can’t you see the lights dancing on the Seine? Can’t you hear the accordions? Americans eat this stuff up — but not simply because Allen and McCullough do it so well.

Such a romanticized Paris provides the perfect backdrop for depicting Americans abroad as wide-eyed newcomers exploring foreign lands with only the best intentions, as reluctant heroes who never intended to throw their weight around. The Americans-in-Paris romp allows us to imagine ourselves out in the world, but removed from political quagmires, the burdens of world leadership, anti-American blowback, and other problems, which have, in fact, long plagued tourists and policy-makers alike. Going to Paris was imagined as novel and chic by those coming from a nation with few French immigrants. It wasn’t like a homecoming, which is how many experienced London, Berlin, or Rome. But at the same time, it didn’t seem too threatening. It promised to be only delightfully exotic.

In truth, Paris back then, like today, teemed with conflicts that Americans never fully escaped. In addition to its revolutions and failed insurrections, the city attracted anarchist assassins, angry exiles, and anti-Semites who waged their battles in the streets (not to mention plenty of unruly absinthe drinkers). While Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent painted their portraits, distrustful national leaders and a far-right municipal council ruled the capital with an iron fist.

 I just have to get something off my mind this morning. Call if a pet peeve. Call it bitching. Either way, it could qualify.

I was watching Good Morning America this morning when they had a segment that just proved to me how nuts we’ve become in the past twenty years. The segment had to do with decorating a child’s room and having the cost run from $50,000 upward to give the little darling a wish come true. And that little darling could be an infant at the time.

You could call my reaction one of disgust, disbelief, etc. You’d be right, but you’d also miss my secondary response. That one would cover words like disappointment, outrage, and defeat.

Why would I have such a strong reaction to someone spending that kind of money on something as transient as a child’s room’s décor? I think it has something to do with the fact that it exemplifies the chasm between those with and those without. Recent news reports have discussed the reality of more millionaires being created every year than ever before while the ranks of the poor increase exponentially during the same timeframe. The middle class is separating into upper and lower classes.

We are truly becoming a class system in this country. It’s been coming for a long time, but the blatant signs of the division have finally come out to blind us with their neon lights.

Some watchers of this trend speculate about creating a generation of children who believe they’re entitled to all the perks in life without having earned anything. My question is this. Why haven’t these people already seen that trend?

Bigger and better houses, a new bigger and better phone every time one comes onto the market, expectations of a new car on that 16^th birthday—all of these imply a need for status symbols. Stand in any electronics department of any store, including discount stores, and listen to kids with their parents. Do this for an hour and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Any time a child throws a temper tantrum because they’re going to have to wait for a new phone, or that a 60” HDTV for the child’s room is not possible simply because they’ve asked for it are only two examples of a normal day in that electronics department. I have to ask, though, if all of the kids’ influences come from advertising or peers.

There are plenty of adults out there who live the same way, and I’m not talking about those in their 20s and 30s. There are plenty of those in their 40s who seem to have the same problem as the kids. Instant gratification runs rampant.

What about those who will buy the newest, brightest, flashiest phones with apps out the whazoo and they’re worrying about making the mortgage at that moment? Or, how about the fifty some-year- old that just has to have a new paint job on his car instead of paying down the credit card?

It seems as if our culture has bred a few generations of citizens who’re more concerned with living the good life rather than having a good life. I’ve come to disbelieve people who look as if they have everything. I guess I’ve watched too many shows educating people about dealing with debt and witnessing those that are trying to climb out of a hole so deep it will take years of careful planning to prevent them from losing everything.

Until the mindset changes within our country, I doubt that much can be

By Anatoly Liberman

Few words are more offensive than ethnic slurs. The origin of some of them is “neutral” (for instance, a proper name typical of a group), but the sting is in their application, not in their etymology. The story of squaw is well-known, but it bears repetition. It is also a sad story because it should not have happened.

In 1992 Suzan Harjo said to Oprah Winfrey that the word squaw means “vagina” and added: “That’ll give you an idea what the French and British fur trappers were calling all Indian women, and I hope no one ever uses that term again.” Countless TV viewers believed her and joined the ranks of protesters. Fight against the s-word began. On June 6, 1994 Saint Paul Pioneer Press carried an article titled “Students Seek to Expunge Place Name ‘Squaw’.” This is its beginning: “Squaw Lake. Minn. ASSOCIATED PRESS. Two high school students have launched a campaign to change the names of a small city, a reservation community, a half-dozen lakes and a pond, all of which contain the word ‘squaw’. The word, the students say, is offensive. Their teacher [I deleted the name] agrees. He referred to works by Saxon Gouge, an instructor in American literature at Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and a book Literature of the American Indian, which said the word probably is a French corruption of the Iroquois word “otsiskwa,” which means “female sexual parts.” The initiative met with near universal approval. The students were also encouraged by Indian elders and tribal authorities, who until they were enlightened by the two teenagers (or the TV show) had had no idea how bad the word squaw is. But “[b]oth students knew that the word went beyond its definition as ‘Indian woman’, found in some dictionaries, and they wrote letters to several newspapers advocating changes” (emphasis added).

The moral of this episode is that etymology is a science and in serious situations should be left to specialists. Neither an instructor in American literature nor Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peck, the authors of Literature of the American Indian, could have an informed opinion about word origins and should not have been cited as authorities. It is now an open secret that squaw has never meant “vagina, vulva,” but lots of people, including some Native Americans, decided that they had either done wrong or been wronged, and the fib triumphed, for any word means what speakers believe it means. This is how misspent political zeal turned squaw into an ethnic slur. Place names have been changed in Minnesota and Arizona, Utah did not stay away from the campaign, and there is little doubt that the stone will keep rolling. An ingenious author even mentioned the horrors of sound symbolism and explained that no one would want to be called a name beginning with the sounds one hears in squint, squat, squalid, and the like. I wonder whether he is equally squeamish when it comes to eating squash, crossing a square, or looking at squirrels playing in front of his house

Mohawk  ojiskwa (such is its usual spelling) does mean “vagina,” but squaw was borrowed by Europeans from Massachusett, the language of an Algonquian people, which is not related to Mohawk or any other Iroquoian language. Nor were there any cultural ties between the two communities, separated by half of North America (a reminder: Massachusetts is not in the Midwest, and the action of The Song of Hiawatha is not set in Massachusetts). By contrast, cognates of squaw exist in many Algonquian languages and mean “woman” in all of them. Present day Mohawk speakers do not identify the English word squaw with any word in their language. The similarity between -sqwa and squaw is accidental. One can as well compare squaw with the last syllable of Moskva.

The motto of every political initiative should be: “Do no harm” (as in medicine). Looking before leaping is also useful. Although language is easy to politicize, historical linguistics rarely falls prey to this kind of maneuvering. Rabble rousers occasionally use borrowed words for boosting the national pride of their group, but in retrospect such campaigns fill the victims of fraud with shame and surprise at their gullibility. Words for “woman” have a tendency to deteriorate: from “the loved one” to “whore,” from “maid(en)” to “a pert, saucy girl,” and so forth. The causes of such changes reflect the societal attitudes that are known only too well. But the recent history of squaw is a unique case: ignorant people explained to native speakers that the word of their mother tongue is an ethnic slur. Some evidence exists that in English (but not in Mohawk!) squaw was used in a disparaging way. This happened because some people chose to treat the Indians as unworthy of respect. Compare nigger (which, like Negro) means simply “black”), pickaninny (perhaps from Portuguese; the original meaning is approximately “a small one”), and zhid (a slur for a Russian Jew, probably from Italian giudeo, from Latin judaeus “belonging or pertaining to Judea”). All of them are racist terms despite their innocuous etymology. Depending on the mores of a given society, squaw had the potential of becoming offensive. Compare madam “a woman who manages a brothel” or villager acquiring in the Middle Ages the connotations of villain, whereas things urban, naturally, became urbane. If squaw had to be ostracized, it should not have happened for etymological reasons.

Anyone with an interest in this problem will find abundant material in the Internet, in the magazine Native Peoples, and other sources. The article “The Sociolinguistics of the ‘S-Word’: Squaw in American Placenames [sic]” by William Bright was published in the periodical Names (vol. 48, 2000, 207-216) but is also available online, and so is the passionate defense of the word by Marge Bruchac.