The Dustbin Of History - Et Alios

[D. Spencer Hines]

Here's a brilliant, relevant column by William Safire of The New York Times.

I miss him.

Requiescat In Pace, William.

DSH

ON LANGUAGE; DUST HEAPS OF HISTORY
By William Safire
Published: October 16, 1983

''Those who encroached on the integrity of our state,'' thundered Soviet
leader Yuri Andropov a few weeks ago, ''. . . found themselves on the
garbage heap of history.'' That was the official Tass translation:

garbage heap .

Speaking in London more than a year before, President Ronald Reagan blazed
forth with his belief that ''the march of freedom and democracy . . . will
leave Marxist Leninism on the ash heap of history.'' That was the official
White House text: ash heap.

Well, gentlemen, which is it?

What kind of heap does history offer?

The phrase was popularized by Leon Trotsky, who told the Mensheviks
departing from the 1917 Congress of Soviets, ''Go to the place where you
belong from now on - the dustbin of history!''

That was the way his phrase, transliterated as musornyi yashchik , was
translated in the English edition of Trotsky's autobiography; in reviews of
the movie ''Reds,'' Trotsky was quoted as saying of the faction opposing the
Bolsheviks, ''They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the
garbage heap of history.''

A third translation is trash heap , which rhymes with ash heap and compounds
the confusion. ''The transliteration for trash heap . . . is closer to trash
can ,'' says Prof. Carl Linden of the George Washington University's
Institute of Sino-Soviet Studies. ''In old Russia - and probably still -
there would be a courtyard . . . with a big box for all the tenement
trash.'' That was probably the trash can, ashcan, ash heap, dustbin, dust
heap or garbage heap Trotsky meant.

The most accurate translation would be dust heap . That is what the original
English phrase was, stolen by Trotsky in its metaphoric form. In 1887, the
English essayist Augustine Birrell coined the term in his series of essays,
''Obiter Dicta'': ''that great dust heap called 'history.' ''

I will returneth to dust in a minute, but first to the meaning of ashes when
they appear in a heap : An ash heap , which is written as two words because
of the adjacent h's, was a collection of household refuse, including but not
limited to the contents of stoves. The present-day definition would be
garbage , which is rooted in the Middle English word for chicken's innards.
(Where is this taking me?) In the Bible, when Job announced he would
''repent in dust and ashes,'' according to the 1611 King James translation,
he meant he would sit ignominiously amidst the refuse. In British usage,
dust retains its secondary meaning of garbage: A dustbin is what Americans
would call a garbage pail, and a dustman - immortalized in Shaw's
''Pygmalion'' in the character of Alfred Doolittle - was until recently a
garbage collector , when he became a sanitation worker.

Thus, while the translation offered by Tass - ''garbage heap of history'' -
is accurate and up-to-date, it loses its historical evocation of Trotsky.
Mr. Reagan's choice of words - ''ash heap of history'' - is close, but does
not win the cigar. I would go with Birrell's original dust heap , until this
phrase winds up in the waste-disposal unit of oratory.

Inhumanism

Earlier in his tirade, Mr. Andropov laced into ''hypocritical preaching
about morals and humanism.''

[Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. does a lot of this, as in his admonitory
lecturing to Vladimir Putin. --- DSH]

Humanism is a word that has been treated brutally. It began with a capital H
to mean the rediscovery of Greek and Latin ''humanities'' literature that
led to the Renaissance, as the Dark Ages' dependence on theological
rigidities was replaced by a new reverence for the workings of the human
mind. Then humanism , without a capital letter, took on a fuzzy meaning of
the study of humanity in general or of fascination with human interests.
Later it denoted a study of human nature, in contrast to the sciences, and,
more recently, has been tossed about as a concern for the human condition.

William James, whose espousal of pragmatism made him the patron saint of
White House chiefs of staff, offered this definition in 1904: '' 'Humanism'
is perhaps too 'wholehearted' for the use of philosophers, who are a
bloodless breed; but, save for that objection, one might back it, for it
expresses the essence of the new way of thought, which is, that it is
impossible to strip the human element out from even our most abstract
theorizing.'' A modernist school of thought held that humans were capable of
ethical action and self- fulfillment without the aid of God.

I am developing an animus toward the word humanism . The schmoolike term has
come to mean anything we choose it to mean. But it seems to have stung Yuri
Andropov, who treated it as synonymous with or parallel to morality; perhaps
he meant to denounce preaching about humanitarianism , which is the more
specific promotion of welfare by alleviating pain and suffering, certainly a
topic raised by those angry at the shooting down of the Korean airliner.

Mr. Reagan, not to be outdone by the Russians rhetorically, is a humanizer
in his choice of words. Aware of the ''gender gap'' (strictly speaking, the
''sex gap,'' but nobody in Washington will use that phrase for fear of
appearing starved for affection), the President has banished the word
mankind from his vocabulary. Along with the noun cripple , mankind has been
tossed on the ash heap of history. Because Mr. Reagan is developing a decent
respect for the opinions of you-know-what-kind, the operative White House
word for all statements embracing the people of the planet has become
humankind. The ash heap of history will record that it was during the Reagan
Administration that mankind was obliterated.

Humankind is rampant humanism in language. When I was growing up on
Manhattan's West Side, I longed to be a ''two-sewer hitter'' - that is,
capable of punching a rubber ball the distance between two humanhole covers.
No longer can two-sewer hitters scorn the milk of humankind - ness.

Does humanism pay? The answer may be found in ''Marshall Loeb's Money
Guide,'' a pocket-filling treasure of a book replete with definitions for
such locutions as ''rich-uncle mortgages.'' Mr. Loeb, managing editor of
Money magazine, writes: ''Are you looking for 'humanistic' mutual funds?
There are several of these funds, which do not invest in companies that make
weapons or pollute the environment. . . . The trouble is, idealism has its
price. For the five years that ended Dec. 31, 1982, only one of these funds
did better than the Lipper mutual-fund industry average gain of 121
percent.'' I shall not give that fund's name in this space because I am not
a humanism tout.

Times Marches On

Those of us who consider the substitution of humankind for mankind to be
unmanly (there's a word on the feminist hit list, along with ''unwomanly'')
can compensate with our approval of a recent decision by the editors of The
New York Times to allow women to wed.

A year ago, Chinta Gaston, of Washington, wrote: ''I perceive a new rule of
grammar lurking on the pages of the Sunday Times. 'Laura Ladd Wed to Luke
Bierman,' but 'Frank Hoffecker 3d Weds Leslie West.' The rule? 'The verb to
marry and its synonyms take the passive voice when the subject is female,
the active voice when the subject is male.' ''

Nothing could have been more sexist than such discrimination in wedding
announcements. Sure enough, there used to be a rule of etiquette, not of
grammar, that ''the man must wed the woman.'' A group of editors went to the
news editor and said that the rule was an anachronism. He promptly agreed.
Now it's ''Linda Murawski Marries Thomas Varela'' and ''Laurie Abrams to Wed
Dr. Steven Wexner,'' as well as the other way around. I'll subscribe to
that. (Somebody play ''Here Comes the Groom.'')
----------------------------------------------------

DSH

Deus Vult

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence." -- Ernest Hemingway _A
Moveable Feast_