The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck: The Oldsquaw

 

The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck

A word becomes a thought crime

 

Part I: Why Birdwatching, Beauty, Words, & History Matter

 

My mother was a foreigner and at the drop of a hat she and my dad would speak with totally different words. The Italians across the street, the Ukrainians across from them, the Spaniards next door to them, the Filipinos down the block – our town was crowded with words and the worlds that came with those words. I understood, young, that words are as diverse as the people who speak them. I felt an overwhelming craving to master all these words, and these various worlds.

 

We ate oskvarky. We visited with tetka. When swimming in the river, we had to resist the hastrman, lest he drag us down and drown us. My mother had words in English, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and German. When neighbors commented on how smart my mother was – and they did and still do so – I feel proud. This immigrant woman who had to work to support her five siblings and therefore could not go to school commanded words and the worlds that came with those words.

 

One day I was five – maybe – maybe four, or even three. The age when you have imaginary friends. When you talk to the family dog and understand his replies. My mom and I were kneeling on a bed and looking out a window facing east and the green hills that were a minute's barefoot walk from our front door. I gazed at pink, purple, and white blobs that I'd recently learned to name, or would soon learn to name: rose-of-Sharon, bridal veil, Oswego tea, peach blossom, mountain laurel. How did my mother fit all those fruits and flowers into our tiny plot? With her strong hands she worked her dreams-deferred of streets-paved-with-gold into dirt crowded with flowers.

 

Brown blobs scattered before us.

 

"Sparrows," my mother said.

 

I knew the word "bird." She knew the word "sparrow." She could take a big general class of things – "birds," – and divide it into a more specific sub-class – "sparrows." I resolved to master magical power like hers.

 

"Sparrow:" the sound fed me. The sibilant "s" sliding sensuously into the earthbound, explosive "p;" "arrow" providing a liquid-vowel soft place to land. "Sparrow:" sensuous and yet authoritative. "Sparrow," according to one online source, comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning "flutterer." In Slovak, "vrabec" is onomatopoetic, that is, an attempt to imitate the sound sparrows make when they chatter together. Germans saw sparrows. Slavs heard them.

 

I know so little about my Slavic ancestors. Peasants and serfs don't leave much in the way of written records. To know that they named sparrows vrabec in an attempt to recapitulate the bird's sound touches me deeply. I get a hint of how they made sense of their world.

The Story of Everything 2026 Movie Review

 

The Story of Everything 2026

 

A new documentary argues that science supports the concept of a creator God

 

The Story of Everything is a 2026 documentary addressing the question of whether or not science supports the possible existence of a creator God. Before I get too deep in the weeds of this review, let me say, I loved The Story of Everything. The Story of Everything is a polished, professional, engrossing documentary that any thinking person, including high school students, could enjoy. Please go see it in a theater if you can, and if you can't, grab it up as soon as it appears in other formats. Its run is limited, and in the theater where I saw it, there was only one showing. Otherwise, I would have happily sat through this film three times. I was on the edge of my seat. I want a miniseries continuing the work of the documentary, complete with supplemental materials, including question-and-answer notebooks viewers can fill in to review, test, and reinforce all they've learned.

 

The Story of Everything is not just a series of scientific talking heads, utterly fascinating and authoritative though these talking heads might be. It includes animations so unique, so valuable, and so engrossing I cannot wait to purchase the DVD of this film so that I can watch these animations repeatedly. The inner workings of the cell are depicted in minute detail. All lifeforms are made up of cells; those complicated little factories constitute our physical forms. Thanks to these animations, we can see ourselves as never before.

 

The Story of Everything travels from the microcosm to the macrocosm. The film includes gorgeous footage of life on planet Earth, from tiny hummingbirds to majestic blue whales. The film adjures the viewer to again take up the previously discarded awe of a child, and to be bowled over by the powerful mystery that is life. We are made up of billions of miracles occurring every second. We are part of a larger miracle we can never fully understand but can always be inspired by. This movie gave me chills and it caused me to tear up.

 

I love engrossing discussions of big ideas, and that's what you get in The Story of Everything. I love finishing a film determined to do some research on ideas presented therein. Since watching The Story of Everything, I've been gorging on science podcasts. I've been asking questions I didn't ask before, questions about why the carbon molecule shook Fred Hoyle's worldview, and how the Hubble telescope does or does not support the Big Bang.

Mark Fuhrman. A Remembrance

 

Mark Fuhrman Dies at Age 74
A Remembrance
 

On the morning of Tuesday, May 19, 2026, I was listening to NPR. Reporter Steve Futterman announced that Mark Fuhrman had died. Fuhrman was a media anti-hero during the trial of O.J. Simpson. LAPD Detective Fuhrman found a bloody glove at the crime scene. Simpson's defense attorneys sought to render Fuhrman's testimony unreliable. They accused Fuhrman of being a bad cop, a racist, who planted fake evidence because he hated black people. To prove their point, they produced audiotape of Fuhrman using the N-word. NPR's report of Fuhrman's death reduced Fuhrman's entire life to these bare facts. Fuhrman was an alleged bad cop, a white supremacist, who allegedly "planted" the bloody glove to frame an innocent black man of the stabbing murder of his white ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

 

On October 3, 1995, I was shopping in a hippie store in Bloomington, Indiana. An announcement came over the intercom. O.J. Simpson had been found not guilty. A thin, very pretty, very well dressed white girl, maybe twenty or so years old, jumped up, clapped her hands, and began hugging shoppers and dancing around the store. She was celebrating the verdict. I was astounded. O. J. Simpson had a documented history of beating Nicole Brown. There were photos of her bruised face. There was a chilling 911 call of Nicole crying and begging for help and O.J. screaming and threatening her. Evidence suggested that he stabbed her to death, possibly because she was in the company of Goldman, a handsome young man. This college-town white girl was dancing around a hippie store to celebrate Simpson's exoneration. What I understood as feminism had utterly failed, at least in the mind of that white girl. A very different ideology had parasitized her brain.

 

In 1997, Mark Fuhrman made the rounds of talk shows. He appeared with Larry King and Oprah Winfrey. As a grad student, I had to focus on my own work. I thought of myself as a committed leftist and I had no inkling that that would ever change. But something really bugged me about that dancing white girl. Something really bugged me about how we were treating Mark Fuhrman. By "we" I mean Americans, my friends, my fellow grad students, and popular culture figures and mass media. I felt like I was in the middle of a cognitive traffic jam. Of course white supremacy was bad. No argument. Of course the N-word was offensive. Of course, as a leftist feminist, I found it easy to make ugly comments about police officers, about macho masculinity, and about former Marines like Fuhrman. Fuhrman was a virtual poster boy for the white male power figure we all assumed was our ultimate enemy. So far, so clear.

 

And yet. And yet.

 

I remember the day I sat down at a campus computer – computers were expensive in those grad school days and I didn't own my own computer – and typed up the essay, below.

 

With every word, I was thinking of cherished friends who were participating in the national show trial of Fuhrman. I was thinking of how my words violated our unspoken social contract. We applauded each other for being righteous, and we never questioned the approved narrative. If we did, we would accuse ourselves of the crimes of racism or sexism or merely wrong think, and we would be cast out.

 

And yet I was thinking things I shouldn't be thinking, feeling discomfort, even outrage, I shouldn't be feeling. I felt compelled to write the essay, below, partly to clarify to myself why the treatment of Fuhrman bugged me so much. I had to struggle for words, because none of my friends and no mainstream media were saying anything like this. I had to struggle for words because I didn't want to lose friends or paint a target on myself.

 

I finished the essay and sent it off to potential publishers. I never found a publisher and the essay has been sitting in my files ever since. I reread it today, the day that Fuhrman's death has been announced.

 

Since I wrote this, the prediction I made in the final sentences has come true. There have been many show trials, many narratives that one dare not question, at the risk of losing friends and accusing oneself. In 2013, Justine Sacco made an unfunny and harmless attempt at humor on Twitter. She made a clumsy comment about AIDS and Africa. Within hours, the tweet went viral, and Sacco was hated, and threatened, around the world. People rushed to hate Sacco. Hating Sacco somehow was a righteous thing to do.

 

These internet show trials have happened to many others. There's nothing righteous about them. They don't help anyone. Hating Mark Fuhrman or Justine Sacco did nothing to help black people.

 

Below is my 1997 essay about Mark Fuhrman.

 

***

 

We knew everything we needed to know about Mark Fuhrman. Even those of us too pure, too intellectual, to follow the trial knew that Mark Fuhrman was not a man. Like a fairy tale ogre, he was our bête noir personified, without individuality or motivation. He was racist, if not racism itself. David Letterman joked about racism using the name as shorthand; a reporter equated him with Hitler. Forces usually in opposition, like the iconoclast Bill Maher and conservative pundits, were united in their vilification of Mark Fuhrman.