Tagged: Knoxville News Sentinel

Op-Ed

Look What They’ve Done to My Beautiful Country

(This is yet another letter (5/4/2025) to the editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel that was not published. This time, however, they teased me with their standard E-mail message that starts “We are considering publishing your letter….Please [re-] provide the following information….” I waited for several weeks and finally had to conclude that they weren’t going to publish it after all. Nothing personal, perhaps: they didn’t publish any letters to the editor from anyone. However, they did have various op-eds provided by VIPs (like elected officials) and other movers and shakers that they perhaps invited to send in something. As usual, we little people have no role to play in the discussion of local, state, and national politics in our local newspaper. It is very big on sports, though, so if that’s what interests you, they are speaking to you.)

My beautiful country – look what they’ve done to it!

We weren’t perfect, but we exemplified the ideals of tolerance and caring about the less fortunate. We helped the world feed their hungry, recover from disasters, and fight awful diseases. Inside the country, we supported many programs to do the same for our own people, from Head Start to Meals on Wheels. Not any more.

Our economy, “the envy of the world”, is now being wrecked by a cockamamie idea disproved back in the days of Smoot and Hawley. Our strong medical research and monitoring programs have been gutted. Our free speech protections are treated as unimportant in the name of protecting Trump or allowing him to take personal revenge for long-past offenses.

Nincompoops are in charge of our national defense and foreign relations, a gang of haters in charge of our immigration approach. Our strong moral sense about war and its victims has been set aside – because Mr. Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, whether it is for settling the Hamas-Israel war, with the poor Palestinians caught in the middle, or for settling the Russia-Ukraine war, with the poor Ukrainians being thrown to the wolves. ICE dementors are snatching up people and sending them to Azkaban – er, El Salvador. Due process, a pillar of democracy, is inapplicable if your skin isn’t the right color and your last name has strange syllables.

This is so not what people voted for. This is Covid by other means: a terrible disease that is racking our country.

But our resistance is strong. People are fighting for our democracy, the courts are upholding the rule of law, and, I hope, at long last Congress will impeach Trump and end our long national nightmare.

Op-Ed

Using Plural Pronouns: Prelude to a Mess

[This is a longer version of a letter I sent to the Knoxville News Sentinel on 4 April 2022; they did not publish it. But they did publish a letter by someone who used plural pronouns to comment on the article below, someone who is apparently all for using whatever pronouns individuals declare they want others to use to refer to them. That is just madness.]

In “Amani Declines Plea Deal…” (3/29/22), the News Sentinel sacrifices clarity and informational value to political correctness by using plural pronouns to refer to a single person simply because he “uses they/them pronouns”. The story was confusing as to what happened to whom, given that there were two policemen and one arrestee, Amani. E.g., “Deputies handcuffed Amani and carried them facedown by their arms and legs into a holding room.”

One is sympathetic to a person’s desire to be seen as what he or she is, but it does a disservice to the rest of humanity to allow that person to dictate how he or she is to be referred to regardless of custom or grammatical expectations. Who is Amani to tell the rest of the world that plural pronouns must be used when referring to him? This is obviously a power move, not a logical correction of a past discrimination.

Long ago, language developed to include pronouns that distinguished actors by number and gender, i.e., singular vs plural and male vs female, the two most outstanding third-person signifiers in describing people and actions. (There could have been pronouns for old vs young, familiars vs strangers, etc., but that would have been unduly complicated.) Smooshing everything together into one pronoun set that serves for all (they, their) blurs meaning and makes reporting of any event or action difficult. Imagine the confusion in the interpretation of police reports if the police started to use one set of pronouns – there would be clarity only when the officer himself appeared on the stand to testify and when repeated questions by defense and prosecution established clearly how many did what.

News Sentinel folks are supposed to be giving light to the people, not making them say, “Huh?” Refusing to use the new pronoun set is not demonstrating prejudice against LGBTQ people; in fact, it is just the opposite because it is a tacit recognition of them as sensible people like everybody else, wanting clarity in language and so conceding an accommodation to themselves. A few militants should not be allowed to make things difficult for the great majority of other people.

To quote Joan Didion, ”I am committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language”. (Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, p. 180)