A grand jury in San Francisco is reporting that the city spends $186 million a year in city funds to finance homeless programs. As a result, 50 to 75 percent of the “street people” actually live in taxpayer-supported housing. Still, the pandhandling persists, and people seem baffled:
“We just warehouse addicts,” said the grand jury’s Stuart Smith. “Granted, it is a nicer place for them, but it doesn’t address the problem.”
In short, the jury is reflecting the views of many San Franciscans who made the choice to live here. They understood that housing and taxes would be higher, and so would the cost of a meal in a restaurant. They understand and believe that the city needs to provide for its poorest homeless residents and don’t begrudge what the grand jury says is $186 million a year in city funds spent to finance homeless programs.
But, they ask, can’t someone stop the panhandling? And, given all the programs and services, is it unreasonable to ask those who are being given supportive housing to start making some effort to be self-sufficient?
You get more of the behavior you subsidize. If that one simple truth could be pounded into liberals’ heads, more than half of what’s screwing up this country could be corrected.
If you demand quality veterinary care for your pets, then you already know that this is not inexpensive. If your pet becomes unexpectedly ill or injured you may find yourself suddenly facing hundreds to thousands of dollars in veterinary bills. Many pet owners have found that pet health insurance can be a convenient way to help cover the costs of routine or emergency treatment for their pets.
My last cat, Pierre, was mostly low maintenance, but when he had a kidney problem, it cost me $1,200 before it was finally taken care of. The load might have been lighter if I’d doled it out a little at a time over the years as “insurance,” but I suspect the bottom line would have been about the same. This seems more like a payment plan — spread out that gas bill instead of having such giant bills in the winter — than real insurance. My in-house survey of Dutch and Maggie revealed a consensus:That’s your worry, don’t bother us with the trivial details.
On the other hand, some people probably can’t even afford pet insurance, not to mention pet therapy. We should probably pay attention to Obama’s and McCain’s plans for this looming national crisis. Somebody at least needs to come up with a Pets Maintenance Organization plan.
I once remarked to a friend that somebody must be watching Steven Seagal movies; otherwiswe, they wouldn’t keep making the damn things. I feel the same way about “The View,” although the demograpics of its audience would probably scare me to death.
“View” co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck was in tears Thursday after a discussion about the use of the n-word, in which fellow co-host Whoopi Goldberg told her the two “don’t live in the same world.”
During a segment covering Jesse Jackson’s recent use of the n-word while preparing to tape an interview on FOX News, Whoopi and co-host Sherri Shepard, who are both black, contested that the word has a different meaning for black people.
“It’s something that means something way different to me than it does to you,” said Shepard. “I can use it as a term of endearment.”
Shepard also said to co-host Barbara Walters: “I don’t want to hear it come out of your mouth.”
[. . .]
Goldberg, who used the n-word repeatedly during the broadcast (it was bleeped out), said that “We don’t live in the same world. What I need you to understand is the frustration that goes along with when you say we live in the same world. It isn’t balanced.”
Goldberg and Hasselbeck can fight over what worlds they’re in all they want to, as long as they stay off my planet. (Here’s video if you can stand it.) The dual use of racial and ehtnic epithets has long been the subject of debate. I’ve gone back and forth on the issue, but I find this persuasive:
Still, despite the best intentions, critics argue that using the N-word, particularly in entertainment, does more harm than good and gives others — whites and minorities alike — the impression that it’s no longer offensive in every context.
And don’t call me hillbilly, unless you’re going to buy me dinner first.
Once upon a time tattoos were – as the French say – “for criminals and Germans”. Now they are in Vogue – literally, starting on p152. “They walk among us, people. The tattooed,” the article on “How tattoos stopped being taboo” begins. “Once you start looking, start taking note … everyone’s got a tattoo these days.”
Everyone has become a nonconformist! Except me. I may be the only person you meet who doesn’t have a tattoo. That you can see.
Hope Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can get right on this before Barack Obama’s election puts them out of the race-hustling business:
A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.
Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”
That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.
Today’s “Well, duh” headline — “Drinking games prove deadly to college students”:
An Associated Press analysis of federal records found that 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, drank themselves to death from 1999 through 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available. The number of alcohol-poisoning deaths per year nearly doubled over that span, from 18 in 1999 to a peak of 35 in 2005, though the total went up and down from year to year and dipped as low as 14 in 2001.
“There have always been problems with young people and alcohol, but it just seems like they are a little more intense now than they used to be,” said Connie Gores, vice president for student life at Winona State. “The goal of a lot of them is just to get smashed.”
A separate AP analysis found that “victims” (that’s not exactly the word I’d use for people who engage in voluntary behavior) drank themselves well past the point of obivion, with an average blood-alcohol level of .40 (five times Indiana’s legal driving limit). That is some damn stupid drinking. But I still remember (vaguely) what it was like to be young and feel invincible. Most of us have done some damn stupid stuff and are lucky to be here.
Hoosier deaths from overdoses went up 147 percent from 1999 to 2004, and the main culprit is not illegal drugs but the growing abuse of prescription drugs. And get this:
The problem, Wright said, is believed to be most serious among young adults and adolescents who take part in “pharm” parties, where they bring pills, throw them into a bowl and then indiscriminately grab a handful to take.
I know it’s a cliche for us fuddy-duddies to say that the kids today are getting more and more reckless, but this seems to justify the term. Even those of us with misspent youths tended to ingest one thing at a time, know in general the effects it would have, and be somewhat prepared for the bad as well as the good. Peer pressure must be a hell of a lot stronger than it used to be.
Singling out some players as better than others at an all-star game? Those elitist monsters:
Beachwood has cancelled its annual 4th of July Rec League All-Star Game for 9 to 12 year olds.
In a letter to coaches, Assistant Recreation Supervisor Frank Vicchiarelli announced that the decades old tradition would end because certain kids were being singled out as better players than others.
For the all-star game, some coaches encouraged kids to select their team’s all-stars, and in other cases the coaches made the selections..
Geniuses, I say. This will certainly give the kids incentive to excel.
Nearly half of all Americans reported that they have dated outside their race. Sixty percent of Americans between the ages of 18 to 29 have dated outside of their own race — the highest percentage of all age groups.
Interracial marriage may be widely accepted now, but it’s only been 41 years since the Supreme Court, in the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision, ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated the 14th Amendment.
They are slightly surprising, though. Given how much less young people are said to even care about race, it seems like the 18-29 percentage should be a little higher and the “all Americans” percentage a little lower. Still, the point to get to is where race becomes irrevelevant to dating rather than an exotic experience some people try for the novelty value. Seems like we’re getting closer.
I don’t expect I’ll watch it, but The “Baby Borrowers,” on NBC tonight, is a reality show that might actually contribute something to society:
The show is based on a controversial British series in which teen couples considering parenthood are given a taste of what it might be like. In many cases, the participants succumb to soul-crushing stress. Rifts in the relationships develop. Frayed nerves, tears and arguments are plentiful.
Executive producer Tom Shelley claims it’s an “entertaining, family-friendly” program with a vital “Scared Straight”-style message for teens: Think twice about sex and pregnancy. Along those lines, NBC has partnered with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to deploy “The Baby Borrowers” as an educational tool.
The only problem is that the ones who would benefit most from the message probably won’t be watching, and the ones who do tune in won’t be the ones who need to see it. Maybe some schools should get tapes of the series and show them in health class.
I’m getting so tired of Bush and Obama and McCain and gas prices and Iran and flooding and taxes and all that silly stuff. Thank God I stumbled across a cable news outlet last night and learned about something really important: the Hulk Hogan crisis:
Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, is expected to discuss his son’s case and what CNN is calling “shocking jailhouse tapes,” a reference to 26 hours of recorded conversations between Nick Bollea and his family. The tapes were recently released by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
I learned that Hulk Hogan (a stupid name, I guess, but The Rock is already taken) is a beloved American pop-culutre icon who could probably have ended up being elected governor of his state but whose image is being tarnished because his son is a jerk who got drunk and crashed his car, severely injuring his friend. Hogan and his wife (esecially her!) are guilty of talking supportively to their son while he’s been in jail (it was caught on tape!) instead of going on “60 minutes” and confessing to what a scumbag he is.
I’m so glad I no longer have to rely on those boring old newspapers to find out what’s really important.
A teenager accused of plotting a school attack wrote that he wanted “instant recognition” for shooting a record number of victims and that he wouldn’t feel sorry about it, according to documents unsealed Tuesday.
A black spiral notebook authorities obtained from the 16-year-old boy’s locker at Penn High School in Mishawaka, Ind., contained handwritten entries in which the teen expressed his hatred for most of the people at the school.
“I wanna break the current shooting record. I wanna get instant recognition. The only thing that stops me is the fact of being put in jail forever, or having to kill myself, or getting killed by an officer. I could kill anyone without feeling sorry because society sucks!!!” read an entry dated April 18, the day before he was arrested.
This plot is in line with the finding of the National Institute of Justice that school shootings are rarely impulsive; most are planned at least a couple of weeks in advance. When the derangement needed in such incidents is combined with a desire to “break the current record,” watch out. I’m afraid the media contribute to the numbers-game mentality. When we report such incidents, we make so much of how many were killed that there we almost convey a sense of disappointment when the previous body count hasn’t been topped.
Athletes aren’t the only ones who take performance-enhancing drugs. A growing number of college students (as well as their professors, apparently) are taking drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin, which are typically used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder, as “study drugs” to stimulate their memory, concentration and focus. Alarms are being sounded over this “drug abuse” crisis, but Reason magazine wonders what the big deal is:
Still, there is widespread alarm about the possible health problems arising from unsupervised dosing. “Put the pills in the wrong hands and the results can be dangerous,” NBC News warned. Henry Chung, Director of the New York University Student Health Center has warned that, “Students may have some kind of manic reaction or a seizure that could occur from taking these medications.” For high doses, Chung is correct. But today’s performance-enhancing undergraduates exhibit more responsibility than Chung realizes. One NYU senior I spoke to says it’s mainly a case of “every now and again for finals. I don’t know anyone who abuses Adderall or Ritalin.” Moreover, “because they’re prescription you can find out so much about them so you know how you can take it safely.”
There is also the claim that student dopers—like testosterone-injecting athletes—are cheating because college is a competitive environment in which participants are obliged to play fair. Of course, this argument ignores the fact that most of the abilities being enhanced by such drugs are already unequally distributed (due to a mixture of biological and socioeconomic factors). Why is doping to achieve “normal” functionality a permissible act for ADD sufferers, but wrong for those seeking better grades or greater knowledge?
But those athletic skills are also unequally distributed. That’s why stereoids are taken — to make up for what biology didn’t provide. The question to ask is: Why is artificial enhancement wrong in a competitive athletic environment but not wrong in a competitive academic environment? Why aren’t they both right or both wrong?
How to tell if an issue merits a lot more discussion: When liberals start saying “the debate is over”:
Someday soon the fracas surrounding all this will seem like a historical artifact, like the notion that women were once prohibited from voting and a black individual from marrying a white one. Our children will attend the marriages of their friends, will chatter about whether they will last, will whisper to one another, “Love him, don’t like him so much.” The California Supreme Court called gay marriage a “basic civil right.” In hindsight, it will merely be called ordinary life.
That’s Anna Quindlen, writing in Newsweek. But in the same essay, she writes that immediately after the California decision, “opponents were suggesting that civilization would crash and burn if two guys could register at Pottery Barn and raise kids in a ranch house.” So, the debate isn’t really over. What she means is that the debate should be over, if only everyone were as enlightened and as morally superior as she is.
The grandaddy of all “the debate is over” isssues is, of course, global warming, and Anna’s right in there on that one, too — one of the most complex, difficult-to-predict phenomena there is, and the debate is over. A definition of marriage that has been operational since the dawn of history, and the debate is over.
Everything old is new again. And we’re not just talking about Indiana Jones and the raiders of the movie box office or that remake of “Get Smart.”
Coming to the small screen this summer are “Million Dollar Password” and “Celebrity Family Feud,” updated versions of vintage game shows.
The original “Password” started on CBS in 1961 with Alan Ludden as host. It eventually ran on ABC and NBC and was on and off in daytime through the 1970s.
I caught the premiere of “Million Dollar Password” last night, and it was: bad, terrible, awful. I was trying to get you to think of “atrocious.” With the word “millionaire” in the title and Philbin as the host, the show was about what you would expect — lots of flashing lights and swelling music and sweeping camera shots, plus lots of giggles and bantering from the “celebrities” Rachel Ray and Neal Patrick Harris.
Watching the old “Password” was like being in a library — you wanted to be quiet and respectful, even if there wasn’t a librarian going, “Shhh.” There was Ludden with his glasses, the static and boring set, the announcer actually whispering the word so we’d know the contestants couldn’t hear. The classiest of game shows, and now they want to trash it up.
Whenever I get too pessimistic about the future, I console myself with the knowledge that I haven’t gone completely around the bend:
BUSKIRK, N.Y. - A few years ago, Kathleen Breault was just another suburban grandma, driving countless hours every week, stopping for lunch at McDonald’s, buying clothes at the mall, watching TV in the evenings.
That was before Breault heard an author talk about the bleak future of the world’s oil supply. Now, she’s preparing for the world as we know it to disappear.
Breault cut her driving time in half. She switched to a diet of locally grown foods near her upstate New York home and lost 70 pounds. She sliced up her credit cards, banished her television and swore off plane travel. She began relying on a wood-burning stove.
Convinced the planet’s oil supply is dwindling and the world’s economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn’t prepare.
The exact number of people taking such steps is impossible to determine, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the movement has been gaining momentum in the last few years.
To be honest, I’ve toyed with the idea of taking survivalist precautions a time or two (starting back about the time of the last oil crisis in the 1970s); nothing like having a secret cabin in the wilderness, but just having an emergency kit in the trunk of the car (batteries and dehydrated food and blankets and gold bars, cigarettes and bullets for their cash equivalency). I’ve never quite gotten around to it, but I know a few people who have who aren’t delusionl or off-the-deep-end conspiracy nuts. But somehow, I think if I take that step, I will have crossed a line you can’t come back from.
I continue my impressive record of seeing buzzworthy movies on cable months after everyone else has stopped even talking about them. This gives me the advantage of being able to read a lot of informed comment immediately after seeing the movie, to see if there’s anything I missed. And there’s little need to worry about issuing a SPOILER alert for anything I might write.
My most recent viewing experience was “No Country For Old Men,” which my sister and I watched on Saturday. And it doesn’t look like I missed much. The last 20 or 30 percent of the movie lost steam and meandered disappointingly, and the ending was abrupt and unsatisfactory. And what do I read in dozens of blogs and online reviews? The last 20 to 30 percent of the movie meandered, and the ending was abrupt.
But the Coen brothers are Hitchcockian in their attention to detail, so we can probably assume they MEANT for the last 20 to 30 percent of the movie to meander and for the ending to be abrupt. When you think of those elements that way, they start to make sense.
Think about the title. Put that with Tommy Lee Jones’ opening voiceover about how violence has gotten worse and his last remark to his wife about the dream of his father riding on ahead to light a fire in the cold and dark (”And then I woke up”). And put that all together with the scene involving the wheelchair-bound uncle in which the sheriff is told “you can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.” The movie is saying that evil is eternal and relentless and random in whom it strikes (as capricious as, oh, a coin toss). Even if it wanders off with a broken arm, evil will be back. Each generation comes along and thinks it can make a difference but gradually (meanderingly) gives up the fight. We finally (abruptly) realize we haven’t been handed the torch we thought we had been.
It’s tempting to see this as a cuationary tale — that if good doesn’t stay focused, evil will win. But the Coen brothers aren’t sunny optimists, and these are cynical times. I suspect the movie pretty much represents their world view.
Ifeel that cynical sometimes, but it’s hard to get through life with that as a permanent attitude. Evil doesn’t have to do anything but be evil — it has the much easier job. Good has to concentrate on fighting evil AND doing something meaningful with the time and space, however temporary and limited, wrested from evil’s grasp. That’s the much harder job. If we don’t stay focused, each generation lighting the path for the next one, there’s no hope for a sane and moral universe.
Anyway, a great movie, and for now, I will see it as a cautionary tale, even if that’s not what was intended.
Next: Come back early next year for my take on “Sex and the City” and the new Indiana Jones movie!
I frequently go to Google News and do a search on “Indiana” to see what’s happening around the state. Occasionally, an “Indiana Jones” story shows up — about one or two for every 50 entries or so. But in the last few days, as you might imagine, I’ve had to wade through dozens of Jones entries just to get a few good “Indiana” hits. Sometimes, even the stories that seem to be about our state really aren’t
MUNCIE — Just because she is an archeologist does not mean she carries a whip and fights Nazis like Indiana Jones.
She’s never seen a cultist tear the heart from a man’s chest.
Nor has she witnessed a Biblical ark unleash spirits of death against any who looked upon them.
And no, she has not found the Holy Grail.
Being an archeologist is not as glamorous as Hollywood hypes it up to be, said Beth McCord, acting director of archaeology at Ball State University.
Being an archeologist is not glamorous. Well, that’s not too lame. Thank goodness our state is called Indiana and not Chick Flick.
In most math problems, zero would never be confused with 50, but a handful of schools nationwide have set off an emotional academic debate by giving minimum scores of 50 for students who fail.
Officials in schools from Las Vegas to Dallas to Port Byron, N.Y., have proposed or implemented versions of such a policy, with varying results.
Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.
[. . .]
But opponents say the larger gap between D and F exists because passing requires a minimum competency of understanding at least 60% of the material. Handing out more credit than a student has earned is grade inflation, says Ed Fields, founder of HotChalk.com, a site for teachers and parents: “I certainly don’t want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there.”
This will, of course, have the same effect as other experiments in grade inflation. If it is known that a student had to master not 80 percent of the material to get that B but only 30 percent, the B isn’t worth nearly as much, is it? And how are we to know which students mastered 80 percent and which mastered only 30? We can’t, can we? That’s the damn purpose of giving out F’s, ya nitwits.
I eat too much or eat the wrong things or both, and the predictable results come about Naturally, it’s the government’s fault, not mine:
The problem at first was that the problem was ignored: For almost two decades, young people in the United States got fatter and fatter — ate more, sat more — and nobody seemed to notice. Not parents or schools, not medical groups or the government.
But since the alarm was finally sounded in the late 1990s, the problem has been the country’s reaction: a fragmented, inchoate response that critics say has suffered particularly from inadequate direction and dollars at the federal level.
“The sense of this as a national health priority just doesn’t come through,” said Jeffrey P. Koplan of Emory University, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s 2004 study of childhood obesity. The top recommendation of that seminal report was for the government to convene a high-level, interdepartmental task force to guide a coordinated response. No such body has been assembled.
Contrast that with the offensive mounted in European countries: France mandated health warnings on televised food ads. Spanish officials reached agreement with industry leaders on tighter product labeling and marketing as well as reducing fat, salt and sugar in processed foods.
Stop me before I make another bad choice! Come on, folks, let’s get back to taking responsibility for our own lives.
Harl Delos, who’s become a frequent commenter here, on his blog refers to my rant on the meaning of effete, but only in passing, which is probably the attention it deserves. It’s in the middle of a nice, thoughtful essay about relationships and marriages:
When a guy marries, he promises to love, honor, and protect. My wife says that until the Monica thing came up, she didn’t consider fellatio to be sex, so maybe Bill felt the same way. As Gore and Howard illustrate, love has many meanings, and it need not be carnal in nature. The honor is pretty self-explanatory, but protect is the big one for guys.
Bill’s been doing a lot of “protect” on the campaign trail, and this week, Barack Obama has been doing some, too, with his assertion that the GOP should lay off his wife.
I made one of those vows, too. And when my first wife developed SLE, I tried. Oh, Lord, how I tried. And she died anyway, damn it. Protect?
‘Til death do us part isn’t talking about premature death from an incurable disease. It means sticking around for three-score-and-ten, or maybe even twenty years past that.
Committing suicide isn’t fair play, nor is abandoning your husband by failing to draw a breath, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors working in a frenzy, either. If you leave him for another man, a guy can understand that. If you leave him for another woman, a guy can understand that, too. But dying is the ultimate rejection.
A few years after my father died, I asked my mother what she missed most about him, and she said, “Just having him to talk to.” A few years into my divorce, I find that’s what I miss most about my wife, too. Having someone who shares so much with you — life journey, physical space, world view — just hang out with you every day bouncing words back and forth defines how you see the world and helps validate your own sense of self. That may be the only thing I really know about relationships.
(I’ve added Harl to my blogroll. Give him a visit.)
To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the present is a good time to be young only if you don’t mind a tendency toward empty-headedness. In “The Dumbest Generation,” he argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.
Adults are so busy imagining the ways that technology can improve classroom learning or improve the public debate that they’ve blinded themselves to the collective dumbing down that is actually taking place. The kids are using their technological advantage to immerse themselves in a trivial, solipsistic, distracting online world at the expense of more enriching activities – like opening a book or writing complete sentences.
Mr. Bauerlein presents a wealth of data to show that young people, with the aid of digital media, are intensely focusing on themselves, their peers and the present moment. YouTube and MySpace, he says, are revealingly named: These and other top Web destinations are “peer to peer” environments in the sense that their juvenile users have populated them with predictably juvenile content. The sites where students spend most of their time “harden adolescent styles and thoughts, amplifying the discourse of the lunchroom and keg party, not spreading the works of the Old Masters.”
I know every old generation has been dismissive of every new generation and that the new generations eventually grow up and take their rightful place — we’ve talked about that here before. But maybe there is something different this time. What happens when we try to reinvent the culture over and over instead of “passing down a fixed, canonical culture” that evolves gradually?
I usually avoid commenting of “family values hypocrites,” because the left does such a good job of bashing them, and there are plenty of hypocrites out there of all political persuasions. But this guy is just beyond the pale:
Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch “family values” pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.
He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said.
This is the guy who had a DUI, then had to confess to having a 3-year-old child with his mistress. Which threatens marriage more? People like Fossella or people like his sister? Easy answer.
A Dartmouth professor feels the heat and flees the intellectual kitchen:
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.
The louts! They argued with her ideas. Anyone who’d question French narrative theory deserves to be sued.
