Valid Point

[Undertoad]

I'm very smart, and I know it's bad writing when I can't understand it.

The best writers should be able to communicate with a large audience, even drummers.

Normally an analogy helps to get across a more complicated concept. In this case, it's used to muddy it.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by tw

Sentences like that also made me hate poetry. Apparently there is some meaning there. But it requires me to speculate which no honest person should do. I don't like posts that require me to speculate, assume, or identify implications - which is why short posts are also so difficult to read. What exactly does that sentence mean and what is 'personal Gumpism'.

I like poetry. I don't mind speculating but there has to be something for the mind to grab hold of. A consistent theme. Something that makes sense.

Like a peom about wet moss,red leaves and rough bark. You could guess it is about a tree. Maybe it's raining but for sure it's probably Autumn. Even if you are not a visual person it still discribes something.

This Forest Gump thing dosn't make sense. We are trying to relate what she is saying to a movie character.
ok he's dosn't have a normal IQ, He is basically good if slow and life for him is a series of one hit wonders.

I think Bruce said it well by saying he was 'pinballing here and there without rhyme or reason'.( pharaphrase)

If she could have stated one characteristic she saw and made a reference to the movie then maybe we the readers could make more sense of it?

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I'm very smart, and I know it's bad writing when I can't understand it.

The best writers should be able to communicate with a large audience, even drummers.

Normally an analogy helps to get across a more complicated concept. In this case, it's used to muddy it.

She could have at least piggy backed the "life is like a box of chocolates" analogy but then she would have to explain how the ' you never know what your going to get' fits in.

I still want to know what personal gumpism means or not to be a gump while watching the daily show.

I don't like major condradictions in peoples thinking .

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The best writers should be able to communicate with a large audience, even drummers.

Maybe she needed to use some SMILIES . . . ???

Welcome to Dubya & Co's Empire & Police State. Get in line bitch.
American now means Cattle or Cop.

[tw]

Originally Posted by skysidhe

I like poetry. I don't mind speculating but there has to be something for the mind to grab hold of. A consistent theme. Something that makes sense.

So many assumed that Bob Dylan was writing about the end of the world - Cuban Missile Crisis - when he wrote about a Hard Rain. And yet he says he said nothing of the kind.

Speculating to me is imposing lies upon what another intended.

Gibran is another author with so much poetry. I love his stories. But his poetry required me to speculate. That means I must assume lies or half truth assumptions - same thing. Same thing used by religioius people to claim they are following god's will. I loved Gibran's stories.

It's me. I don't like liars which means I also don't like wild speculation and assumptions not based in reality. And yet that is what poetry (too often) is about. Again, Paul is dead because he was not wearing shoes on Abbey Road? Such reasoning insulted me.

I loved Dylan for the images he portrayed, for the wording he used (who in his right mind would say those things), and for the way he sung it. But I don't think for one minute that he was a prophet. He was fun. He did something unique. I could also hear the words. And I also agree with him: who in his right mind would write those lyrics.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

A pickup truck rolls down an embankment and into a person's back yard at 10:30 at night. The home owner goes and checks on the driver, who is not hurt, but is "incoherent". He calls the cops. When the cop arrives, the driver attacks the cop, and it takes the cop plus three non-cops to hold the driver down even after pepper spraying. Other cops arrive and try to control the guy with tasers. They hit him with the most powerful stuff they have, but he still resists. Finally he just suffers some sort of malady and slumps over and passes out. Emergency personnel fail to revive him and the guy dies at the hospital. Thirty people witnessed the tasering.

That happens like three times a week ... in my hospital lobby.

Okay, so the tasering thing only happened the one time, and we usually manage to allow people to die somewhere else ... but the rest of it, that's an average night.

I interpret the gist of this writer's Gump analogy to mean that if more citizens boldly acted on conscience and common sense (i.e. "Gumpism) rather than on other people's expectations, this country would be a better place. The writer implies that we don't just have to be entertained and amazed by "Gumpism" when we find it (e.g. The Daily Show); rather, we should practice it. Unfortunately, the writer could have communicated this message much more effectively in a music video by performing a song which states it much more eloquently: The Impossible Dream

The writer also states "The proper response may not be, as in the Three Little Pigs, to build a stronger house. It may be simply be to walk out the back door, change the dynamic, shift the power perspective in our own worldview. It is asymmetric warfare of the finest kind." This may be the worst analogy I've ever read. So the wolf runs around to the back of the house and eats the Three Little Pigs! Ironically, the last time I saw the term "asymmetric warfare" used it was by a Guantanamo Bay Commander who was characterizing the detainee suicides there. This writer seemed to be implying that our best course of action would be either emigration; or, capitulation!

I found the rest of the article to be mostly superficial and disingenuous.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by NoBoxes

This writer seemed to be implying that our best course of action would be either emigration; or, capitulation!

A liberal wallowing in guilt, self-hatred, moral equivalance, relativism and surrender?

Whodathunkit?

Now we're espousing "Gumpism", eh....I guess that "highly nuanced" elitism of the Kerry campaign didn't work.

[Griff]

LewRockwell.com isn't exactly a liberal site. The writers there support the Constitution and limited government, which I guess is anti-Republican, but probably not liberal in the way you mean.


She came out against the Republican's idiot and the Democrat's idiot during the last Presidential race.