THE ISSUES ISSUE

Before tossing a pile of Fred's magazines, I whipped through them and cut out these interesting items.

GOT A PROBLEM WITH ISSUES

A letter to the editor:

Have you noticed that there are no more "problems" ~ only "issues"? I always thought that an issue is something to be discussed or debated, while a problem is something to be solved. Now I hear people saying that they have "issues" with certain types of medications (meaning allergic reactions); or "issues" with their real-estate agent, banker, boss, etc. Who is responsible for this development, and why hasn't that person been apprehended and flayed? (Joe Rehyansky, Chattanooga, National Review, April 25, 2005)

Editor William Buckley had no answer because he was sidetracked by Joe's and others' remarks about the phrase "three sheets to the wind" (nautical metaphor for drunk).

But I would guess that "issues" as it's used to mean problems (or allergic reactions) grew out of the self-help, feel-good, conflict-resolution teachings that told everyone to say feel instead of think, and to avoid blame (e.g., "I have an issue with your whacking me with a hammer, which makes me feel less-than*").

One meaning of "issue" is to come forth, or something that comes out of something else. When asked after a production/management meeting if there had been any "issues", Fred said, "The Team 7 leader had an open running sore on his left arm, but otherwise there were no issues."

I find myself saying "issues" sometimes but always with mental quotation marks around it. If I say I have "health issues" it's because I don't want to succumb to "problems" yet.

Maybe someday when you thank the drive-through team member at McDonald's, she'll say "No issues!" instead of "No problem!" I think we should all jump the gun and start saying "No issues!" now, instead of "You're welcome", and then we can do an informal survey of how soon we start hearing it, to gauge how long it takes to enter the public domain.

*(And have you noticed that "less-than" is now used to mean inferior or bad or disrespected, not followed by a noun? Less than what? I can deal with feeling less than God, but not, of course, less than you. But remember that no one can make you feel less-than without your permission. Except God.)

RETRANSLATION

From the April 2005 issue (something that comes out!) of Liberty, in the Terra Incognita column:

Washington residents who speak Chinese who tried to view the Secretary of State's web site in their native language found the translation a bit murky. A statement about Secretary of State Sam Reed proposing "state-wide mandates to restore public trust" was translated as "swampy weed suggests whole state order recover open trust."

This came from Systran's translation software, for which the Secretary of State's office pays $6,000 a year.

Google's translator, English to Chinese and back again, came up with "Quanzhou orders to restore publicly trusts". Same with Babelfish. The gummint, to borrow Molly Ivins' Texas pronunciation, can just send the money directly to me, and I'll send them the URLs. For $500 a month I'll even run the translations. (I won't tell them there's a web site that does this already, The Prague TV Retranslator.)

BILITERACY

The same issue of Liberty (6/05) carried a small item about the vast increase in English proficiency among non-English speaking students from 2001 to 2004 in California public schools. Although the state superintendent of public education sidestepped this possible explanation, in 1998 California voters eliminated bilingual education in public schools. The article goes on, "We know that the Peace Corps doesn't send new volunteers into bilingual Swahili classes with African families; they and everyone else knows that immersion is the only effective way to learn a new language." This of course is the Berlitz method, little or no translation, immediate and full immersion in conversation.

EDITOR STALIN

You've probably used this and may have on your shelf the indispensable The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. The May 16, 2005 issue of The Weekly Standard had a one-page parody of it by Nikolai Strunkov Jr. and J. Stalin, headed by this quote from Stalin: A Biography by Robert Service (not the same Robert Service who wrote poems about Dangerous Dan McGrew and others):

It turns out that not only was [Stalin] an intellectual; he was a compulsive and professional editor who corrected any manuscript that crossed his desk for style and grammar as well as for ideology.

Well, bless his heart, Stalin and I are siblings under the skin. Anyway, here are a couple of rules of usage and composition from the parody:

· Do not join independent clauses with a comma. Your late father once did that.

· No one ever made friends underestimating levels of steel production.

· Use definite, specific, concrete language when you feel an urge to be sent someplace else for a long period of time.

YOUR LIFE WILL BE OUTSOURCED

Reuters, the news agency, "has begun outsourcing editing and caption-writing to the Far East, over the protests of the journalists' union." OK, foreign labor can make mistakes, like writing that Krakow is in Portugal, but anyone can make a mistake. (The American Conservative, June 20, 2005)

CHRISTO

Cartoons by two different artists in two different magazines referred to the Bulgarian-born wrap artist Christo. Coincidence? Perhaps.

One depicts three enormous parallel walls spanning a landscape, with a news reporter saying, "With magnificent fuchsia and gold panels stretching from California to Texas, Christo's latest art project solves the border fence problems with beauty and panache!" (Steve Breen, The American Conservative, March 14, 2005)

The other shows a map of the Middle East with Syria wrapped and tied with rope, captioned, "Christo Takes on Syria." (Peter Steiner, The Weekly Standard, February 28, 2005)

In the early 1980s I taped an interview for local cable TV in Tulsa with Christo's wife, Jeanne-Claude, who was traveling with a photo record of one of his temporary art installations; the photos were hung at The University of Tulsa art gallery. Christo had been employed in his youth in Bulgaria by the Communist government to alter landscapes in view of the railroad tracks, so foreign visitors looking out of the train windows would think things were better than they were. I'm not very knowledgeable about art, but I thought it was easy to see the connection between his early work and what he's done since then, which is to wrap up or decorate large areas of landscape or architecture, so I asked his wife to discuss this aspect of his art and how it had evolved. She was immensely offended and said there was no connection, none at all.

I don't remember where I read or heard about the Communist landscape business and it was difficult to find references on the Internet to this part of his life. Jeanne-Claude, however, did not deny that he did it; she just objected to a comparison of that work and what he does now, although at the least there's a connection in the scale of the work. Presumably he has always wanted to sweep it under the carpet, or under three acres of pink polypropylene. I don't see why she was so touchy unless Christo was covering mass graves.

But he did refer to it in a 1973 interview for the Smithsonian Institution, describing his work as merely helping farmers to make cosmetic improvements for the public, "completely different from the Potemkin villages" (which possibly did not exist).

British magician Jasper Maskelyne, by the way, was enlisted by the British army to mislead the Germans in World War II by building false tanks, hiding real tanks, hiding harbors, etc. It's the art of camouflage on a grand scale.

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