ENG 102-1105--Niger Ambush, What Congress Isn't Telling--TRUTH OR DARE

ENG 102-1105

Prof M Judd

University of Nevada, Reno

Spring 2018  15M18

James Langelle

A Deadly Game of Truth or Dare

    On February 19th of this year, the New York Times published “An Endless War,” its findings on the ambush in Niger that resulted in the deaths of four American servicemen last October. The lengthy article includes not just whatever details of the actual firefight have been made available  to the public thus far, but select biographies of some of those who were killed. What is also found in the text are quotations by members of Congress as well as the current and previous presidents of the United States.

    There is an unwritten rule that is often times applied when someone, or a group of someones have their backs against the wall; that rule is, to close ranks. It simply means that everyone watches out for everyone else and Washington politicians are no different, even though on the surface there appears to be constant squabbling and bickering between members of opposite political parties.  A second rule for the political elite is to deny knowledge of information and if necessary, avoid lying by not telling the truth.

    As case in point is Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who serves on the Armed Services Committee. When interviewed a short time after the ambush on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”  Senator Graham had this to say,

    “I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,”

The anchorman on NBC, at least according to the evidence available in the Times article, makes no mention of any follow-up inquiry to the senator, but does mention that there are only 800 American soldiers in Niger.

   “This is an endless war without boundaries, no limitation on time or geography,” Mr. Graham continued, adding, “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world militarily and what we’re doing.”    

    Forgive me for drawing a conclusion without any evidence to back it up that the senator, who is on the Armed Services Committee, doesn’t know where our soldiers are deployed. It does support the theory of not telling the truth to avoid lying, since the senator conveniently gets the number wrong. It is also worth noting that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), also claimed no knowledge of the Niger deployment, an example of the ranks closing.

    Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) characterized the development in Niger by saying,

    “What we have today is basically unlimited war — war anywhere, anytime, any place on the globe,”

There appears to be very little anybody is willing to do about it. Although Senator Paul makes a sweeping criticism of America’s far-flung military exploits, nowhere in the article does he suggest any legislative action to curtail the ambitions of the Oval Office. In fact, as the Times points out, it wasn’t the post-911 legislation used by former President Obama to commit troops to Niger, but the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a 45 year old piece of legislation from the last century to justify troop deployment into global hotspots. The initial deployment was for just 40 soldiers to assist the French in Operation Serval, to drive militants out of Mali in 2013.

    Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), in keeping with the cautious guarding of each others’ backs in Congress, offered very little in the form of direct action to halt the indiscriminate sending of soldiers to their deaths in faraway places,

    “If we’re going to have people who are in harm’s way and we know we are putting them in a dangerous situation, there ought to be a more thorough discussion of it.”

    For now it seems that escalation to fight a shadowy enemy someplace that doesn’t even show up on Google Earth is the truth or dare of the current administration, with very little, if any authorization from Congress, and even less willingness to question that authority.

    

ANTHROPOLOGY 281-1005 Mid Term Exam Notes #002-- NSL, POTO AND CABENGO,

ANTH 281--1005//Dr. J Ferguson//University of Nevada, Reno, Spring 2018




Signs of the Times and Invented Language--




     Nicaragua, according to some reports, is the second poorest country in Central America behind Haiti. The education system is far below minimum standards set forth by various institutions monitoring the development of regional learning. Many students drop out of school because it's "boring" and they can't make any money, opting for menial low paying jobs in order to support their families and "buy new clothes."


     If the overall educational system in Nicaragua, where kids drop out before the eighth grade, is in such a shambles, why is there such great emphasis on illustrating the particular merit of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL)? Affecting only an extremely small segment of the population, hearing impaired kids, where hundreds of thousands more have little or no interest in education, what significance does NSL play? Very little.


     A close friend of mine, Donaldo Gomez, built a hotel on the Pacific Coast in a small beach village an hour's drive from the capital of Managua. He paid his workers eight dollars an hour, when they complained, he replied,


"What are you complaining about, I'm paying you eight dollars a day."


     Such is the nature of education and the economy in Nicaragua with sign language having little or no bearing on the future of the communist dictatorship, just a passing interest to be used as a proletarian classroom YouTube example for linguistic anthropology studies and a long answer question on a mid term exam.




                                    ***
While on the subject of invented language, the following proves to be a far more interesting case, Poto and Cabengo:


(Decoded from Detroit Free Press, (22 May 1981) unedited--


Twins' unique language talks about their isolation

By DIANE HAITHMAN ;roe Press Stott Writer Poto and Cabengo's real names are Virginia and Grace Kennedy. They were six years old at the time film director Jean-Pierre Gorin captured a brief por-tion of their lives on film. This Friday's Detroit Film Theatre presentation is Gordin's peculiar and lo-vely documentary about how Ginny and Grade, believed to be slightly retarded since birth. and their lower middle-in-come San Diego family become short-lived celebrities when the girls' teachers discover that they have invented a secret language all their own. Our first view of Grace and Ginny, the mischievous twins, is as two children playing with clay, normal except for the fact that they are babbling rapidly in a logical-sounding gibberish. We are told the girls have spoken nothing but this peculiar tongue for years. Yet they seem quite happy.


THE SPEECH EXPERTS approach the phenomenon cautiously — one states that the girls, a product of one German and one American parent who each speak a different ungrammatical brand of Eng-lish, could simply be suffering from this defective verbal environment. Or the girls could simply be retarded, as their odd, hyperactive manner suggests. Once the newspapers get hold of the story, however, the girls become freaks, chattering, as one newspaper puts it, in Martian. The headlines, which slowly grow smaller and smaller as the press loses interest In the story, are inter-spersed throughout the film.

POTO AND CABENGO Detroit Film Theatre U.SA, 1919 A documentary film directed and narrated by lan•Pierre Gain. Camera work by Les Blank, SOund by Maureen Gosling. editing, tilt and animation by Greg Durbin. Running tiny I hour 7 min 7 and 110 o m Detroit Institute of Arts Auditorium. 5200 Woodward PARENTS GUIDE: no ouottohable torrent

Thus "Poto and Cabengo" is not really a story about media hype. As soon as it is discovered that the girls have actually distorted English and German words, rather than inventing their own lan-guage, the story Is dropped. A film com-pany which planned to make a movie on the girls cancels out. GORIN'S APPROACH says more about the desperation of this isolated, bigoted family where each member speaks a language outside the American mainstream of speech and whose only hope for financial security is to cash in on the problems of these two children. Gorin does not make the same judg-mental statements about the girls de-prived background as do the speech therapists — he simply gapes at it. The camera lingers on the fake wood panel-ing, the huge old television set that domi-nates the living room, the used Cadillac in their small garage. Gorin feels especially for the girls' alienation, since he, too, is separated from the typical American by his French accent. Gorin, very much a part of the film as Its narrator, sees the girls as 1980s Katzenjammer Kids, possessing both the confusion and wisdom that comes of approaching American language and cul-ture from the outside.

 A follow-up from Wikipedia on the twins' status:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poto_and_Cabengo


A follow-up in 2007 revealed that Virginia works on an assembly line in a supervised job training center, while Grace mops floors at a fast-food restaurant.^[3]

ANTHROPOLOGY 281-1005--Mid-term Exam Notes-- IN TONGUES, RELATIVELY SPEAKING.

ANTH 281-1005//Dr J Ferguson//University of Nevada, Reno//Spring 2018  15M18
     Categorically speaking, the analysis of language, in a limited and antiseptic environment such as an experiment involving observer and subject, will almost always yield results expected, from inductive or deductive calculations, by the observer. It is the inherent nature of "ethnocentrism," a word originally used by Ludwig Gumplowicz in the 19th century to justify racial and class discord as a cause for war in order for a culture to progress.
     Juxtaposing the above on to the field of anthropological linguistics, it is no wonder that results are speaking, not necessarily in tongues, but in categories. Categories of syntax, grammar, phonemes, morphemes and the like. When it wasn't enough to break down language into its components, the tendency then existed to do what every other field of scientific endeavor did in the last century, make it relative. Thus, the Edward Sapir-Benjamin Whorf theory. But like every other attempt to connect process (thought) with procedure (speaking), there would also be refutation. But in order to first do this, what little evidence exists to define a culture in terms of its language, there needed to be yet another division, hence, the "soft" and "hard" interpretations of Roger Brown,  where that dialectic could just as easily be replaced by ching and chung. 
     There seems to be little emphasis on rather obvious components of the thinking-speaking-real world chain missing here; not so much in a strict Pavlovian take on the process, but from a Darwininian  vis-a-vis BF Skinner approach.  Without going into the details of the operant reaction experiments, it will suffice to say that conditioned response, behavior reinforcement and the environment play significant roles in whether there is any kind of influence on the process chain that constitutes a linguistic theory, whether relative of universal. To what degree conclusions can be drawn from over-simplistic experiments involving color terminology or spatial representations in various cultures might explain why the theories do not hold up to criticism.
     To leave it on a metaphorical note, "the proof is in the pudding."