ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

The Lost Country

This post, originally intended to be titled “Mitt Romney Hates Me” in response to the decision of whoever manages his Youtube channel to ban me from leaving any further comments after I spent last week debating with some of the commenters on one of his videos. There’s something else in the news however that is a little more disconcerting than being banned from further debate by someone who wants to be the president of the country that champions free speech and democracy. It is about the so-called investigation in the corridors of power about someone in the Obama administration leaking “sensitive” foreign policy information.

It began about a week or more ago when two consecutive New York Times articles came out one of them boasting that President Obama has a “Kill List” of wanted terrorists marked for death by the US drones that he personally supervises. The other talked about an extensive cyber war conducted by the administration and Israel in which computer systems in Iran were targeted with debilitating viruses. Responses to the two articles were mixed. The response to the Kill List article was definitely very mixed, and very weird. Republicans and other right-wing conservatives who had tried to paint the president as otherwise soft on terror suddenly found themselves faced with a well-done reportage that showed that the commander-in-chief had actually been personally conducting a strong, brutal, foreign policy. The Left however, the otherwise human-right touting base of the president who beat up on George Bush for being such a hawkish man who misled the country into war in which innocent lives (and of some bad people too, no less), kept curiously quiet. They found no contradiction whatsoever in the image of a president who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2009 personally supervising the killing of suspected terrorists not yet convicted of any crimes.

Therefore, in a weird twist of fate, logic, and political identity, Democrats silently cheered that their president finally locked down the foreign policy cred (nevermind that his supervising of the killing of Osama Bin Laden already wrote him into the history of decisive leadership), while Republicans – otherwise usual supporters for whistleblowers who leak government information that show abuse/misuse of power – are now up in arms, jumping up and down, and making loud noises that the leaker of the said information should be found. Why? Because the leaked information made the president look good. Of course if the information “leaked” to the New York Times had included some embezzlement or some sort of information, these same Republicans would have been the first to find ways of protecting whoever the person is, touting him/her as a hero.

So, here’s where we are. The biggest developing news on TV today (bipartisan, nevertheless) is about the call for a private investigation, not – as you would imagine – to examine the rationale for the president himself personally supervising the life/death decision on who lives or who dies in Yemen, Afghanistan or Iraq tomorrow, but to punish whoever made that information public. The Republicans making the most noise about the call for this panel do not care much for those accused bad guys (and the innocent collateral deaths accompanying it), but they hope on some level that the investigation would lead to the president himself, and he would thus be embarrassed. Again, not so that the killings would stop or become more open, but so that he would be painted as a weak, narcissistic leader. The president himself, calling the insinuations that he purposefully leaked classified information “offensive” is investigating the leaks so as to plug it, and not really to stop or modify the draconian policy that made some mockery of his 2009 Nobel Prize and his earlier stance on the policies of the George Bush administration.

It all just seem weird to me. But what do I know. I’m just one naive observer. But all liberal observers now keeping quiet would do best to remember that Obama won’t be president forever. The spy and killer drones however, and the capability for government abuse, will.

Hoarding School

There were about six recent past issues of The Economist outside my door when I opened the door this evening. My supervisor and mentor had left them there. And although I’d read many of the stories in them online already, holding the glossy prints still left a mixed feeling of the times. As with books I had bought (and been given) sometimes reluctantly, one big problem will be where to put all of these when it’s time again to move.

Understanding Techman 2012

One of the biggest victories for the new media is the relegation of language as performance to language purely as thought, purely as an abstract medium. Maybe it’s not a total progress if we look at where we came from (in fact, it could be a form of regression), but the result is a total transformation of old systems into even older ones (in the garb of new shiny ones) where language becomes relevant only as a tool, and no longer as an activity.

I’ll break it down.

Prehistoric man as I imagine him lived only on grunts, brute behaviour, and the subliminal expectation that those around him understood every of his actions as relating to certain demands or requests, as many who ended up on the blunt side of his club found out. Language however brought clarity, and thus sophistication, and a need for a more active set of rules with which everyone negotiated the rote of existence. Our tongues adapted to the needs of our mind, and the mouth became not just a hole for food consumption but for actual articulation of speech. It has been a long time since then.

Justine Bieber and his girlfriend, on vacation

I’ve been thinking about the benefits of new media – technology, mostly – if you could call them benefits, and how it has returned us to silence and the rote of hand movements. The image here is of a couch in a public park on which two teenagers sit, each using an iPhone and texting (either each other, or others. It doesn’t matter). An alien looking at them might – if s/he is aware of our earlier methods of communication – conclude that humans have finally given up on talking to each other, in favour of more effortless means of interaction: sitting side-by-side. A more discerning alien may however find out that our new means of communication includes hand gestures – not of the usual, traditional kind that you’d find between two deaf humans, but those between the thumb and a mobile touchscreen. All around the globe as I convey these thoughts to you using the same means of mute finger-based thought transmission processes, millions of other people are doing the same, some – like me – while also staring at a live picture of another human being located thousands of miles away in another continent. None of us is “talking”, at least not to each other at the moment, yet our fingers keep moving, and thoughts move between us.

It is not inconceivable that when man discovered language and found that it was much easier to talk one’s way out of a threatening gesture of a spiked club pointed by a bigger man with a menacing eye than simply running away or bending in obeisance, he never thought that evolving into more sophisticated means of communication will one day lead back to a different culture of silence. On the bright side, the process evolved through a fascinating period that showed us (from Alexander Bell’s telephone to the telex, fax and then email), the many creative ways of staying far away from each other and still get our points across. As for the fallout of our evolution, we may not end up being physically fitter for it – not needing to move our jaws as much anymore except for eating – but we can at least fool all earth-bound aliens that we’re not communicating to each other whenever we sit idly at our desks and stare at the screens.

Maybe that’s how ants and other lower animals have managed to fool us all these years.

Another Short Digression on Tone

Whenever I’ve told people that my thesis is on L2 tonal acquisition, except for folks with sufficient familiarity with the field, the first question usually is – “what is tone?” or “what is a tone language?”, followed by “so what exactly are you trying to find?” I therefore spend the first five minutes explaining to them what tone languages are (and that about 70% of all world languages are tone languages), and then tell them a few more details of the direction of my work. I found myself in this direction by chance – though I don’t tell them that – but after taking the patience to explain why in the absence of sufficient research materials on the process of L2 tonal acquisition I find it fascinating to be involved in discovering all that can be found there, they usually look enlightened suddenly, and then give me a look of “well done.” I feel better, although I know that a good number of them are just happy to be done with the conversation.

Having taught Yoruba at the university level for a while here in the States, it was natural to be interested in phonological and pedagogical dimensions of the language acquisition. Then I took a course on Second Language Acquisition with all its arguments on the critical period hypothesis that implies that language learning becomes difficult or impossible after a certain age. It all coalesced at some point in my head, and here I am. The data gathering part of the work itself is almost done, and the writing is halfway done already. I have discovered very many fascinating things, and encountered enough data to advance into a few more research directions in the future. One of the main things, of course, is that nothing at all prevents anyone from learning and acquiring tone or any language at any age whatsoever. There are influences of first language, to be sure, but they don’t pose enough challenge to prevent a subject (even those above the so-called critical period) from acquiring the form.

Just last week, I helped another colleague conduct a shorter research than mine on the questions of tonal perception among American English speakers. The results were equally interesting regarding which tones were easier to learn in isolation and in context, and whether tones are generally easier to learn in context or in isolation. I have been busy. In a few weeks, all of this should be over, and I should have some time off to myself. What to do with that time is another matter. There seems to always be something. What I will take away from this research (and the whole Masters experience) would be the fascinating unpredictability of results, along with a few frustrations of disobedient subjects and other constraints of time, space, and materials. Somewhere in there will also be an appreciation for the Graduate School here – along with my ever patient supervisors – for the small research grant that has made the whole exercise worthwhile and less exacting, and my supportive family and friends.

The commencement is on May the 5th. I shall have become a master in something (else).

On Word Predestinations

One of the premises of linguistic determinism is that “the structures, hierarchies, and hidden associations of our individual human languages determine the conclusions that we reach in our logic, the aspirations of our lived lives, and all our emotional content.” (Wiki). As opposed to linguistic relativity – a flip side of the debate which allows for more latitude as relates to the purpose and limits of language and thought, determinism suggests that all events are caused by all previous events, and – similar to predestination – that they were meant only for a particular purpose.

My fascination with words and poetry stems from a similar line of thought – at least as it relates to those still benign implications of the school of thought. One of my favourite parts of Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay was where he was contemplating the source of words, and whether somewhere on a mere conceptual plane they had been predestined to fulfill the roles they do in poetry, jokes and fiction. A song by Rihanna titled “We found love in a hopeless place” was recently satirized as “We found Dove in a soapless place”, successfully replicating the rhyme and rhythm, and yet providing sufficient absurdity to make it a joke. Last week, a host on Fox news joked about the Sandra Fluke contraception controversy and its tv coverage, saying, “You don’t judge a Fluke by its coverage.” Boom.

There are a thousand and one instances of lexical serendipity to support a theory for “poetic determinism” (my coinage). Like Milosz, I find more than just co-incidences in the abundant evidence of the hand of the mystic in our communication patterns. I noted it when Obama killed Osama, or when the most remarkable election in America’s recent history just happened to feature a man with a middle name “Hussein” right during a war in Iraq. Mitt Romney’s last name has been occasionally anagrammed as “R-Money”, for good reason, and poetic justice. And just two days ago, a video surfaced that successfully arranged all his public gaffes into a rap song scored by – wait for it: another Michigan native – Eminem. Watch below:

Of course, due credit must go to the genius of the people patient enough to arrange such a brilliant collection of sound bites into a meaningful piece of poetic art. A bigger credit – for those convinced of such a thing as the predestination of words – must go to the mischief-making lexical muses of the realm. And then sometime last year, a congressman who tweeted pictures of his genitals just happened to have been named “Wiener”. Don’t even get me started on the endless tonal possibilities of ambiguity in the Yoruba language. Well, here’s one more:

« Older Entries Newer Entries »