Is That Red Ink Or Blood On Your Finger?

All eligible Zimbabweans went to the polls today to cast a vote for their president… or at least they had better have gone if they don’t want to suffer punishment.

From the New York Times:

Zimbabweans expected to be rounded up and taken to the polls. If they are
unable to read or do not understand how to vote, according to a journalist in
the state-owned news media, they will be “assisted” by a police officer who has
already voted publicly in front of a senior officer, as apparently all members
of the armed forces are required to do.

Zimbabwe has been besieged by violence since March 29, when opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai defeated President Robert Mugabe in the general election by a margin of 47.9 percent to 43.2 percent. Because neither candidate received the “50 percent plus one vote” constitutional requirement to be declared the winner outright, the Zimbabwean Election Commission called for today’s runoff election.

Through a systematic and escalating series of beatings and murders in the last couple of months – the body count is up to 86, with thousands having been beaten – Mugabe’s supporters have greatly increased the odds of Mugabe winning the runoff election. For one thing, they have ensured that Mugabe is unopposed, which should make it easier for him to achieve the democratic mandate of greater than fifty percent of the vote. (Tsvangirai withdrew his candidacy on Sunday, retreating in fear to the Dutch Embassy.) If that were not enough to tip the scale, they are now forcing citizens to participate in the formality by actually checking off the sole box on the ballot, almost literally with guns pressed to their temples.

Naturally, this is a grotesque and obvious farce that is fooling no one (or lest I neglect some of the modern intelligentsia, let me instead say it is fooling almost no one). In only the most superficial sense is this “democracy” in action. Nevertheless, I maintain that it highlights the dreadful error of substituting freedom with democracy. All Mugabe has to do to maintain power is to provide enough democracy to be construed as a mandate representing “the will of the people.” Freedom and liberty never enter the conversation.

It would be foolish to label Mugabe as undemocratic and to think that he simply doesn’t understand democracy. On the contrary, I think Mugabe understands democracy perfectly, and in particular, he understands exactly how the commitment to democracy of today’s intellectuals paralyzes them in opposing dictatorships. This is his best move.

There is hue and cry, of course. Ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations questioned the legitimacy of the election, insisting that they would not respect a vote that did not represent the “will of the people.” The UN Security Council condemned the violence saying that it has “made it impossible for a free and fair election to take place on 27 June.”

Yet despite all this, Mugabe and his henchmen persist in perpetuating the charade. Why would they bother? Obviously they are calculating a benefit from pretending to have an election. They know that they have probably crossed the line a bit – with the murders and terrorism, for instance – but they also know that going through the motions of holding the election will pay dividends in the end.

The advocates of democracy have no intellectual defense to counter Mugabe’s thuggery. What they demand, literally, is that the “will of the people” be served. They can mumble about human rights violations, but in the end, the “right” that is demanded is the collective “right to self-determination.” So, if Zimbabweans go to the polls and vote themselves into a dictatorship (like Iraqis who elected Saddam Hussein in a landslide and the Palestinians who voted overwhelmingly for Hamas in January), then all is well. True, at the moment, the election is strongly contested across the world, but all Mugabe has to do is some damage control. In the coming weeks and months, the fact that Zimbabwe held an election today, however farcical it was, will greatly help diplomats, politicians, and the media to pretend that Zimbabweans are well served in the end.


P.S. By the end of the day, it appeared that despite the threats, participation at the polls was relatively light. Incidentally, the title of this post refers to the red ink that was used to mark the fingers of Zimbabweans who had showed up at the polls. Citizens without marked fingers were in danger of retribution.

Rachmaninoff Prelude in G Minor

I haven't had time to post in a while, so I thought I'd simply add this link to a performance of my favorite Rachmaninoff prelude: the G minor (opus 23 number 5).  I've been working on arranging this piece for two violins so that my daughter and I can play it together.

Mr. Deity

For several reasons, I generally avoid making fun of religion.  First, religion is a deadly serious problem that is getting worse.  Second, I hardly think laughing at someone is likely to persuade him to reject faith in favor of reason.  And let's face it - poking fun at religion is rather like shooting fish in a barrel.  It’s not very sporting.

Nevertheless, I recommend watching these Mr. Deity videos.  They are utterly hilarious and not mean-spirited.

From Crackle: Mr. Deity and the Evil - Season 1, Ep 1

Ayn Rand, Strunk and White, and the Oxford Comma

In addition to my American Heritage Dictionary, one of my most trusty and useful books, one that is always within reach when I am sitting at my desk, is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.  Its tiny size belies its value.  It is the only reference book I can think of in which the fastest way to find something is simply to flip through the pages rather than to use guidewords, the index, or the table of contents.

Anyway, if you examine the end of the previous sentence, you will see an example of the so-called serial comma, which is described in rule #2 in the Elementary Rules of Usage, found on page 2 of The Elements of Style.  The rule states:

In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.  

The title of this post is a good example of this usage.  Without the serial comma, the title would have been “Ayn Rand, Strunk and White and the Oxford Comma.”  One can see the ambiguity that results from the missing comma.  Are “Strunk and White” a pair?  Or is Strunk one of the elements in the list and “White and the Oxford Comma” another?  The serial comma makes the meaning clear and I have long been in the habit of using it (though the British tend not to use it).

Anyway, it is not my intent in this post to elaborate on the merits of the serial comma, though I think there are some.  What I really wanted to relate was a surprising thing that I found when I did an Internet search for “Oxford comma.”  I had seen a reference to an Oxford comma somewhere and wondered if it was the same thing as the serial comma in Strunk and White’s rule #2.  It turns out that it is.

The surprising thing I found, however, was that for some reason, Ayn Rand figures in what is evidently the classic example of usage used to illustrate the Oxford comma.  To pick just one instance, quoting from World Wide Words:

[Q]  … Can you tell me what the Oxford comma is?... I wonder if it may refer to the practice of putting a comma after the penultimate item in a list, before the and – for example “eggs, bacon, and sausage” rather than “eggs, bacon and sausage”, which is how I would write it.

[A]  You have it exactly right.  That form of punctuation is uncommon in British English,… but it’s a characteristic part of the house style of the Oxford University Press, hence the name…

Perhaps the best argument for the serial comma is that apocryphal book dedication: “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” [emphasis mine]

I don’t know why Ayn Rand was chosen for the example, but the use seems to be widespread.  (Come to think of it, though, if I ever write a book myself, I could hardly leave Miss Rand off the dedication list!)  Of course, the whole point of the illustration is to show that without the serial comma, “parents” and “Ayn Rand and God” satisfy the form of apposition, suggesting that Ayn Rand and God are the parents of the author!

I find it fascinating that this example would propagate – and it apparently has.  A Google search of “Ayn Rand” and “Oxford comma” yields thousands of references to the phrase.

That illustration of the missing comma is amusing, but there’s an even funnier one in the Wikipedia entry for Oxford_comma.  Apparently, The Times (UK) once included in a description of a Peter Ustinov documentary the sentence, “highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.”