Puns can be fun if all your ducks are in a row

We are getting used to receiving all sorts of diversions from friends and fellow workers by their emailings over the Internet these days. Many of these diversions come in the form of word play or puns.

Although an analysis of humor is scarcely funny, let's take a deeper look at the various structures that can make language funny when put in good hands. Firstly, a couple of useful definitions which themselves come supplied with further sub examples:

A pun (or paronomasia) is a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar-sounding words for humorous or rhetorical effect. (That is, puns use phonetic confusion to effect some emotional or intellectual result). (Wikipedia)

For example, in the phrase, "There is nothing punny about bad puns", the pun takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny." By definition, puns must be deliberate; an involuntary substitution of similar words is called a malapropism. (Wikipedia).

Word play is a term better applied to the use of puns in literary and narrative technique (novels, plays) in which the nature of the words used themselves become part of the subject of the work. (See Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest) which includes such characters as John Worthing (a man of worth), Reverend Canon Chasuble (church law, and sleeveless robe worn by a priest), the Honorable Gwendolyn Fairfax (a fair lady), and Lady Bracknell (an unpleasant lady).

Grammatical aspects of puns: A pun may also cause confusion between two senses of the same written or spoken word, due to various aspects of polysemy (the ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used (in different contexts to express two or more different meanings): a) homophony (words having the same sound but different spellings and meanings, b) homography (words that have the same spelling but different meanings), c) homonymy (seemingly a synonym for homophone and homograph), d) heteronymy (two words with identical spellings but different meanings and pronunciations; another example of polysemy and seemingly a synonym for homograph. There is also an aspect to puns that is metaphorical, that is, to use figurative language representing another meaning). Walter Redfern has said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms."

Other manifestations of Puns which may include phonetic or graphic mix-ups include: spoonerisms, (unintentional transposition of the first letters of two or more words--"dear queen/queer dean), malapropisms (the substitution of one word for another incorrect word with a similar sound, usually to comic effect--"What are you incinerating?..." instead of: insinuating); "I can say that without fear of contraception" instead of: contradiction). (See The Rivals, by Richard Sheridan in which an eponymous character, Mrs. Malaprop, epitomizes the incorrect substitution of one word for another based upon phonetic mix-ups.

Still more manifestations of puns include: obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names"Oliver Twist" sounds benign, but little Oliver is "twisted" because he is a thief of the streets. (Wikipedia)

Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning. (Wikipedia).

Recently arrived "funny stuff" with analysis:

Mensa Invitational Winners--Members of Mensa compete against one another to invent the following word play marked by: (intentional phonetic and/or graphic mix up--intentional malapropisms, for comic effect):

Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which
lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
(plays on "taxation" and "intoxication") 

Bozone: The substance surrounding stupid people
that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone
layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking
down in the near future.
(plays on "ozone layer" and "bozo")

Cashtration: The act of buying a house, which
renders the subject financially impotent for an
indefinite period.
(plays on "cash" and "castration")

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic
wit and the person who doesn't get it.
(plays on "sarcasm" and "chasm")

Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you
are running late.
(plays upon "innoculate" and "latte" coffee drink)

Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
(plays upon "hip" (cool), and "hepatitis"
(a liver disease caused by a virus)

Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got
extra credit.)
(plays upon "osteoporosis" (disorder characterized
by dwindling of bone mass and "pornography")

Karmageddon: When too many people on the earth
pass off enough bad energy to cause the earth to
explode.
(plays on "karma" (idea that an individual's actions
determine his fate) and "Armageddon" the final
battle between good and evil at end of world)

Doppler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to
seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. 
(plays on "DopplerEffect," the change in frequency
and wavelength of a wave for an observer moving
relative to the source of the waves, and "dope,"
a not so smart person)

Arachnoleptic: The frantic dance performed
just after you've accidentally walked through a
spider web. 
(plays on "arachnid" (spider) and "--lepsis" 
"to be seized by something) 

Beelzebug: Satan in the form of a mosquito, that
gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and
cannot be cast out.  
(plays on "Beelzebub" (Satan), and "bug" (insect)

Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an @sshole.
(plays on "ignorant" and "anus")

More puns and wordplay, but without analysis:

Energizer Bunny arrested: charged with battery

A pessimist's blood type is always B negative

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but
mean your mother

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

A gossip is someone with a great sense of rumor.

When an actress saw her first strands of gray hair,
she thought she'd dye.

In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism, your count votes.
(spoonerism)

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KBR, let's call it a scandal, not a "flap"

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times led with the headline:

"Ex-Army official says he lost post in KBR flap"

Flap is slang for: "uproar, commotion, scandal," (Concise Oxford Dictionary). "Flap!" Read the story. You decide if it should be called a "flap" which carries a soft connotation, as if the event is marginal, or a "scandal" which carries a condemning connotation pointing to corruption linking the administration to the military.

Facts from story:

• Official fired for doing his job, by his account. Comment: Whistle blowers get tarred these days instead of celebrated and protected.
• Official refused to approve more than $1 billion in charges to KBR until the Houston company provided credible spending records--reported by New York Times. Comment: KBR was a subsidiary of Halliburton where Vice President Dick Cheney previously served as chief executive. Further comment: When will the American people accept that a criminal class has been running its government?!
• KBR money would have gone to the troops. Comment: An army man explaining the firing of Charles M. Smith (a hero to us) explained: "Blocking the payments could have eroded services to the troops." Comment: A text book example of "double speak" the language of the government used in George Orwell's book 1984.
  

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War Inc., Satire for sanity and perhaps reform

With respect to reviews of War Inc., John Cusack’s recent film, few reviewers get it, including the film critics on Pasadena’s KCRW and, oddly, the satirical journal, The Onion.

Carina Chocano gets it. Ms. Chocano in her Los Angeles Times review understands that War Inc. is a satire, not a comedy, at least not purely. Certainly, it uses “sick gags” (Tasha Robinson, The Onion) to push the plot, but then satires aren’t much concerned with plot, nor should they be, even if the gags, better described as dark comedy in War Inc, could propel the movie to “cult status” as Robinson suggests, but not for the right reasons.

Even so, “War Inc. has survived bad reviews such as Robinson’s to “find an audience in its very limited theatrical release” (Tina Daunt, Los Angeles Times). Selected audiences are getting it. That is, they appear to be interested in the film’s intent: the censure of war criminals, and are subsequently relieved by the purging effects only this sort of film can bring. While most in the media, academia, the streets, have shrunk from the task of their public citizen obligations, (We engage in too much private complaining these days), John Cusack and his troupe have stepped up to engage us in the most difficult dramatic form, political satire, and they have largely succeeded. Even with the adverb, that’s a triumph when choosing satire, the best means Cusack could have chosen to tell the sordid and surreal story of the Iraq War and the corrupt elements of our culture that even presently sustain it.

Ron Suskind has described the current political malaise in America as the unwillingness of its citizens—all of us in all endeavors—to “take responsibility and be adults (my emphasis) about our political circumstances,” a lacking which may remind us of the term: Trahison des Clercs*. Most Germans did not understand what was occurring in Weimar Germany either; they failed to take responsibility looking to Daddy (in the form of the State) to take care of the business “grownups” engage in, certainly not the citizens in a democratic framework. You can believe everything Daddy says and does. Well, even though our Daddy has lost his grace and many seem to be looking to a new Daddy, where is the cultural activity substantiating and informing all the doubt. Are we credible to ourselves as a body politic, or are we not? Some suspect the early signs of cultural psychopathy because of these odd disconnections.

What is satire, and why is it those who should know better seem confused by it? “Satire is strictly a literary genre, but it is also found in the graphic and performance. In satire human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, (emphasis mine) (ideally with an intent to bring about improvement). (Wikipedia).

Why would John Cusack et. al. wish to expose the rotting decay by giving a speech, or shooting a documentary featuring Dick Cheney, Black Water, and the parasitic plague of others who are eating away at the host culture? Surely, others have; some with reasonable, critical success— Robert Greenwald, Iraq for Sale. If Cusack, an actor/writer/director with a cinema background wishes to get the truth out concerning a most sinister and serious story, how does he do it? He makes a satire.

War Inc. is not a “grim hyper comedy or overblown melodrama” as Tasha Robinson asserts in The Onion, a very good satirical instrument in its own right. Though Ms. Robinson is half way home when she says in her review, “It’s hard to laugh or cry…because each makes the other feel wildly inappropriate.” That’s right, laughter is often of the wrong sort when responding to satire. George Bernard Shaw discovered that many in the audience who made his play Arms and the Man a “success,” laughed for the wrong reasons—“Yes, but their tears are the wrong kind,” he said responding to a friend who had emphasized the tears of laughter falling down the faces at intermission. Arms and the Man satirized idealistic thinking (could be ideological in our day) and the adverse military outcomes that followed in its dreadful wake.

With successful satire—“successful” being the operative word—the laughter issues from the brain not the belly. Use the word “gag” if you wish, but these necessary plot elements are darkly humorous dramatizations of what has happened and is still happening. They are not intended to tickle us. Gags in a variety of comedy, excepting dark comedy, make us giggle and laugh from the belly. No giggling in proper satire, no belly laughs. Just the intellectual laugh, accompanied by a sardonic grin, and the relief that you are not crazy for feeling the pent up anger the satire has allowed you to vent. Satire can also educate the uneducated while not preaching at them. This is the underlying hope, I’m thinking, of War Inc.

A savvy person could have a conversation with someone who liked War Inc. for the wrong reasons, i.e. the “oddly funny gags” and decode them possibly leaving the unenlightened fan with fresh insight and the incentive to become an active, public citizen. Too elevated? Movies are just for entertainment? Cusack is not so cynical or pragmatic. If he were, he never would have engaged War Inc.

Thus, War Inc. Funny, ha, ha. Not. “Reports that the 6th century BC poet Hipponax wrote satirae that were so cruel that the offended hanged themselves” gives new meaning to the potential power of this literary and dramatic genre. Although, Ms. Chocano points out in her review in the Los Angeles Times, “Once upon a time, it was possible to watch a movie like “Dr. Strangelove” (which satirized the atomic bomb age descending upon the world in the 1950s) and have an eye opening, revelatory, even epiphanic experience. Not so much anymore, now that culture and politics are no longer cloaked in a façade of seriousness and unimpeachability.”

Chocano’s is an elegant way of suggesting that today’s audiences are perhaps too complacent to be aroused. If you expect corruption, why act? This thinking may appear illogical, yet it seems to explain current inaction in the face of great danger, which hints at psychopathy. Yet Ms. Chocano does not fully accept her suggestion—phew!— when she states at the end, “War Inc. is both right-on and somehow off, but it gets points for trying.”

More from Chocano’s review and how it gets it right: “(The) Deadpan satire hits close to home.” Indeed. Just after seeing the film, my wife and I learned from a neighbor that the brother of her fiancé, a homicide detective in Chicago, had decided to sign up with a private contractor, the type John Cusack satirizes in his film, to make more that $250,000 a year, easily three times the money he makes in Chicago. Does this confuse us? Is the man going for patriotic reasons or financial, or both? Thousands of amputees are coming home from Iraq, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost counting Iraqi lives, many of them innocent civilians. What are we to think? How are we to think? Enter satire which exposes the elephant in the room and brings psychological relief while edifying, even promoting reforming, healthful activity.

Here’s what one might think when speaking deeply about the truth behind the “gags” in War Inc.—The government is broken in its corruption. We are breaking another nation in order to build it up for reasons of strengthening our geopolitical and market presence. Corporate profit determines foreign policy. Here’s the revelation from War Inc.: It’s not about “building democracies.” Daddy lied.

*Traison des Clercs: Term originally used by the French philosopher and novelist JULIEN BENDA (1867-1956) to describe the betrayal of intellectual values by the right wing. More generally, intellectuals by allying themselves too closely with government, states, or political parties betray the independence which is essential if they are to contribute to public discussion. (We may add today intellectuals of all stripes).

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Rhetoric and the death of Tim Russert

added: 1 Jul 08
Should Keith Olbermann replace the late Tim Russert?

The rhetoric surrounding the death of Tim Russert did not take me off guard. Though saddened and admittedly prayerful for the loss of his humanity on our fair planet, I questioned the repeated encomiums (particularly those issuing from other NBC colleagues of Mr. Russert's from CNBC (the financial incarnation) and MSNBC (the political version) marked by the following lofty phrases:

He (Russert) led the way; (He) always encouraged us to dig deeper, (You)) trusted this man from Buffalo; the power and authority coming from Tim Russert; he set the gold standard of going after (the truth); Meet the Press (Russert's famed program) was a record for America...

On listening to these expressions, one experienced the feeling Mr. Russert was being apotheosized, that these folks weren't broadcasting to us "out there" but talking among themselves while perpetuating certain myths that they obviously believed about themselves and the subculture in which they operate, which is the political world of Washington, D.C. In their almost private, though televised, interlocutions, they were making Russert into a God.

Yet, what can we believe about Russert? Truly, when the mourning, fellow journalists grieved "the loss of a wonderful colleague, of a great son and himself a great father," one could embrace their words on a humanistic level, yet become cautious when dovetailed with the professional legacy. After all, Tim Russert and his colleagues have occupied only a niche in American journalism, one may say an insular, circular, and frankly neutered niche of political journalism. This fact rendered the praise half-true--that which spoke of Russert as a decent human being. The rest, extending to the legacy left to journalism, somewhat improbable, almost imaginary. To his credit, and as Tim Rutten said in the Los Angeles Times, "(Russert) understood the foundational value of initial questions and how to follow up effectively on his guest's responses," a practice Charlie Rose could surely cultivate. Furthermore, Russert worked diligently at his facts and tested his guests on these facts. "He disagreed civilly."

Agreed, we all have appreciated these qualities in Russert, so different from the staged animus and confrontational approach of so many political shows these days. What proved troublesome, alluded to above, was the "circular" milieu Russert operated in while being "Russert" that "fueled a descent into "character" status, a cloying willingness to trade on sentimentalized Catholic boyhood and working-class roots" (Rutten). Thus, we knew "our boy" was in there with the "big boys" digging out the truth, exposing political misdeeds. Yes, in his way he was "in there," but more along political lines than journalistic, and this tarnishes his legacy.

Thus, the critical problem with Tim Russert's credentials comes from the fact that his professional career rose from the seed-bed of politics to the interviewer's podium. Despite his own emphasis on spending time with family, and we believe this, Russert still seemed charmed by the powerful elites operating in the unseemly, broken world of Washington, D.C. where "leadership" and "ethics" is just empty rhetoric, and "ethical leadership" an oxymoron. Though Russert claimed he was "not a very social animal.... I don't go to many cocktail parties" (as told to TV Week), he did attend enough parties to get himself into serious historical trouble. He had become a celebrity in his own right, "descending into character status" as Rutten says.

That Tim Russert was an honest man in his family life and among his colleagues seems reliable; that his personal ethics stemmed from his belief in a higher power seems most credible; but, that he might have been self-deceived to think he could operate as a purely objective journalist getting the story out for all us "common" folk "out there," also appears likely. Russert probably spent too much social time with Washington's power brokers. That is, he wasn't strictly operating as a journalist, even while believing he was. If it is true that Russert had become an "insider" journalist, as many do, then he violated the warning of a truly eminent political journalist, I.M Stone, who discouraged anything but a strictly subject-object relationship with the powerful. Subject-Subject would have been unthinkable to Stone. Stone admitted attending but two social gatherings during his entire illustrious career. It was Stone who also said: “Rich people march on Washington every day.” We may complete the implied, if paradoxical syllogism:

"If rich people march on Washington (in the form of well-paid lobbyists), and if "Washington" is comprised of those who are influenced by the lobbyists who in turn represent the rich and well-connected, then Washington must be run by people really effectively representing those rich and well-connected people."

It was said by Lawrence O'Donnell that Russert read the New York Times and the writings of the Washington Press Corps each morning. How should that impress those millions of us who live in St. Louis, Oxford, Mississippi, and Los Angeles? "Meet the Press is a record for America," said O'Donnell. We may ask: for America or for the goings-on in the Beltway, which is more similar to the Paris of Louis XVI than the Washington of John Adams, FDR, or even JFK.

Nevertheless, the circular, dizzying world Tim Russert worked in put Dick Cheney in Russert's studio one Sunday morning blurting out a headline from that morning's New York Times, a headline based on information fed to the New York Times almost certainly by Cheney's White House staff (see Lewis "Scooter" Libby" further below). This interview became one of the two dramatic terminuses of Tim Russert's political destiny, the other being his personal run in with Libby himself "who claimed Russert leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to him. Russert went to the grand jury to deny it and Libby went to jail," an exposed liar. (Nancy Henry). Important to add that Russert, when he interviewed Dick Cheney, said he had not understood that the White House had leaked the same story to the New York Times that Cheney the same morning "delivered" on Meet the Press, "a record for America," as Lawrence O'Donnell states. (see video below).

In a word, the most honest and succinct praise and revelation about the late Tim Russert might have been: "Tim Russert was a working class Catholic guy from Buffalo" who went on to become a celebrity himself, a Washington "insider" journalist. Again, that he personally operated by a strict code of ethics, no doubt, but that his professional ethics remained as flawless, leaves doubt. In any case, let us be clear, Tim Russert plainly compares not to the plutocratic dissemblers, war mongers, and war profiteers that we know manifest as Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney. While we may love Russert for trying, and understand the inflated praise coming from authentic friends and colleagues who themselves operate in his insular journalistic world, we may conclude that the two Vulcans, Libby and Cheney, preyed upon an honest naïf, used him. Chris Matthews' own description of Russert: "If he was anything, he was you and me, he was America." This sounds right to me. Cheney and his gang fooled America, and he fooled the journalist Russert, our said, avatar operating in Washington.

More on Libby, who couldn't have proven healthful to Russert's heart:

"What few have realized at this historic moment is that for the past four-and-a-half years, Libby has been "scooting" from scandal to scandal. Libby has been at center stage for the other major national security scandals of the Bush administration, including the Iraq intelligence debacle, the secret meetings about Halliburton contracts, and doubtless others we have not heard of yet.

It was Libby - along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House - who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11. (emphasis mine).

For a now historic look at Tim Russert's destined drama with Dick Cheney see the video from Bill Moyer's Journal, the PBS television program in which he questions Russert on Russert's famous interview with the vice-president. Or should we say, the deputy president of vice:

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To Bill O'Reilly the oil crisis is merely a "thing"

Bill O'Reilly of Fox News is provoked. OK, so that's an oxymoron. O'Reilly overreacted recently, (OK, so that's an excessive oxymoron) to a statement made in a commencement speech in which Brian Williams of NBC News said to the freshly minted graduates of Ohio State University: "We need you to fix the country.... And I'm deadly serious..."

To those not so casual observers of the world scene, or better yet, those with no ax to grind, Williams' petition might not seem so odd.

Though O'Reilly is no casual observer, we may yet identify him as a tendentious media man. O'Reilly responded roughly that Williams didn't know what he was talking about.

What was Williams proposing to be fixed? Well, he highlighted: "Energy, politics, diplomacy, science, education, military, transportation...(and) climate." Who would disagree who reads the news or has any feeling left for contemporary history? The response: Fox News, and its main man Bill O'Reilly.

Marginalizing all except the energy problem facing the world, O'Reilly, deferring to "energy" as "fix worthy," bleated something like, "OK, there is the oil thing."

As we spoke earlier, (8 May 2008) employing the word "thing" as a replacement for otherwise perfectly useful, specific nouns is acceptable in normal daily speech, but certainly not in any discussion respecting specificity and clear communication. That is, when we're getting down to serious business. Most average people would say the price of fuel counts as serious.

Certainly, Mr. O'Reilly counts not as an average person, nor is he a run-of-the-mill propagandist. He may be more fairly described as a tendentious media type posing as a news analyst who makes millions each year striking his surly poseur stance.

The phrase "Oil thing" works just fine for those making millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. They who wouldn't flinch if the price of fuel were to climb to $8/gallon. The phrase does not work for the millions who struggle daily just to makes ends meet. These folks might speak more expressively saying instead of "oil thing": oil dilemma, or oil catastrophe.

The savvy observer will correctly say, those damned oil speculators operating in the New York Mercantile Exchange, (NYMEX). What goes on in that unregulated trading environment where the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been kept from enforcing margin requirements is the "artificial manipulation of oil prices by hedge funds and speculators resulting in ever higher gasoline bills." --Deborah Fineman, president of Mitchell Supreme Fuel Co. in Orange, New Jersey

"Oil thing," Mr. O'Reilly! You'd better stay away from using the word "thing" in any commentary unless, of course, you happen to be Keith Olbermann who takes care in his use of words.

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The "end of..." You name it.

Although millenarians have gone away, presumably only to reemerge in 2099, we are well-along in the new millennium, one which apparently has not swayed from the anxiety of the last age. You can tell by the hyperbolic titles of books and other media marked by the irrevocable phrase end of in the title.

Hyperbole is a type of trope or figure of speech marked by exaggeration or overstatement. Hyperbole may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, and is not meant to be taken literally (unless you are Francis Fukuyama, see below). (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Perhaps it's the hyper anxious age we are living in, but quite a few book titles, and other media titles suggest a finality to many things we value from the food we eat (Paul Roberts and Thomas Pawlick) to the ultimate political configuration of human culture.

Most of the authors use hyperbole for the traditional purpose of gaining attention to a serious subject, although one, stunningly, holds nothing but literal intentions. (Again, see Francis Fukuyama, below).

In a book apparently written by two authors, Thomas Pawlick and Paul Roberts, The End of Food: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply, the author(s) describe a "system entrusted to meet our most basic needs (that) is failing dramatically... (and is) growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve."

Though the system has proven productive over the last half century, it currently "has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns (with) ...vegetables and meat (providing less) nutritional quality. Overproduction is so routine that nearly one billion people are now overweight or obese worldwide...one billion (people), roughly one in every seven of us—can't get enough to eat. In some of the hardest-hit regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the lack of a single nutrient—vitamin A—has left more than 5 million children permanently blind."

More, "Pawlick exposes an alarming trend in the food available in our grocery stores. This is not an argument about unhealthy, processed foods, rather it exposes the problems with all foods, including fruits and vegetables that people commonly assume are healthy." Esteemed writers on the subject such as Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben have praised the book.

Thomas Pawlick also wrote a book with the title, The End of Food.

More books or other media with the phrase the end of in the title include:

The End of the Internet strikes a humorous tone: "Thank you for visiting the End of the Internet. There are no more links. You must now turn off your computer and go do something productive.

The End of Suburbia, a movie that discusses the dwindling supply of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels and its effect on society.

The End of History, by Francis Fukuyama, referred to above. Fukuyama seems to be the only author mentioned taking a literal position. (From Wikipedia): In his The End of History and the Last Man, "Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government" (emphasis mine).

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalizing of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." (quoted from "The End of History?" 1989)

This thesis conflicts strongly with Karl Marx's version of the "end of prehistory." According to his philosophy of history (historical materialism), this is a time when class distinctions no longer exist, and "real" human history begins. Fittingly, Fukuyama seems to have been influenced by the prominent Straussian political philosopher Allan Bloom, who taught Fukuyama.

What might we conclude from these titles? If we may venture a psycho historic analysis: We may truly be in a heap of trouble and writers, those who sit back, research, and deliberate, might be telling us something, at least those using end of figuratively in their titles. Otherwise, why bother.

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Is Denise prostituting herself?

Actress Denise Richards, the former wife of actor Charlie Sheen, recently stepped unintentionally into self-parody.

Allowing herself to be filmed in her "real life" in her new "reality" television show, Ms. Richards professes to get out "the real story" in matters related to her turbulent life surrounding the breakup of her marriage with Sheen. Is the show merely a publicity stunt? Is it sincere? Probably a bit of both. No matter. Whatever the motivation, Richards needs to fire the writer.

Most enlightened onlookers understand that the new genre of "reality shows" are guided by loose scripts which provide the situations for the "reality." In a recent episode, Richards sits with a girl friend at a computer and "decides" to google her name, which can be scary business for pop stars these days. She discovers the epithet "hooker" attached to her name, then feigns disgust as she vamps it up saying, "I'm not too bad as a hooker." She might be kidding, but she's also putting the sex out there indicating that while she won't be tainted, she minds not at all being tinged. In any case, it turns out to be ill-fated shtick. (n. Yiddish for trick or gimmick).

As most pop culture fanatics know, Richards' former husband, Charlie Sheen, cultivated a crop of prostitutes in not-so-earlier years, paying handsomely for his habits. In not-so-recent years, he has not been known to happily pay out alimony. Thus, any connection between Mr. Sheen and someone calling herself a prostitute would be an unhappy one, particularly coming from a former spouse.

The point was not missed by a pop culture reporter who took the straight line and ran with it: "If she (Richards) were a hooker, Charlie Sheen wouldn't have tried so hard not to pay her."

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