Monday....."Missileanus".....Dialect and Vocabulary

It was July of 1970 in a small EM (enlisted man's) club just north of San Fransisco. A small group of us were there for a month's training on the Vietnamese Problem prior to flying over there, as we had previously been trained only generically in our job. None of us knew each other. We sat there talking, over beers. One man was Black and the others were tip-toeing around the topic of race with condescending talk. I wasn't joining in and it must have looked as if I held a differing opinion. Finally, he looked at me, without smiling, and brusquely asked me point blank, Do you have something against Blacks? There was a palpable tension present. I responded simply I'm not going to condescend to you by telling you how much I think that we are equal. Apparently, this is what he wanted to hear for we spent the rest of the evening consuming mass quantities of beer proving that we were indeed brother idiots. I'm not thrilled with all the hubbub by conservative radio talk show hosts over Harry Reid's comments. John Bunyan probably did not speak the King's English but one who did, John Owen, greatly desired to hear the former tinker preach Christ! It took me years to live down a Buffalo dialect when I moved to Pittsburgh. Little did I know that the Pittsburghers, of what I am now, were the ones with the problem. Yuns Stiller fans know where ah mat. You may be familiar with Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angles. Once a night manager at McDonalds (second only to Navy Seals in courage), he's a radio talk show host nowadays, and a good one. His accent is very strong Brooklynese, but he could put most Harvard intellectuals in their place through logic, common sense and honesty. I paged through a book at Barnes and Noble today called Intellectuals And Society (9780465019489) by Thomas Sowell. The author takes a much needed critical look at the failure of the intellectual to function up to the level of his vocabulary and degrees. I didn't purchase it because I have a few books on the table already, but intend to do so later. Politically speaking, why would the talk shows want to disparage Harry Reid any more and encourage him in refraining from running for reelection? I would think that they would want him, and Nancy Pelosi, and a host of others around in November; for we don't want to reminisce about the attempted scams perpetrated upon us this past year, rather we should want their words at the time bringing back total recall.