Pet Peeves / Misuse of Language

Language is a living thing.

Our language is constantly undergoing change. Since the first reliable English Dictionary, compiled by Samuel Johnson and published in 1755, there has been a constant tension between strict "prescriptivists" and "permissivists." Are "ain't" and "irregardless" real words?

In truth, dictionaries are reactive and largely passive repositories. Once a definition of meaning and usage is established, however, it takes the force of persuasive use to bring about a change. Some words simply die for want of usage.

Language is slippery. The implications and "spin" of certain words or phrases change over time.

Is this a good thing? Would we all be better off if our language was always fixed, if no one was ever "allowed" to break the rules?

New words come into being to describe new objects, or new processes and relationships. New technologies breed special vocabularies.

For communication requiring greater precision, mathematics furnishes another kind of language.

Does common discourse suffer as a result of the decay of proper usage?

I often feel that common misuse of words or phrases, which may occur as a result of laziness, or haste, or simple ignorance, is probably not a legitimate generator of useful, meaningful language.

Lazy thinking generates poor speaking and writing, and it works the other way around. The more we all misuse our language, the less effective our speaking and thinking become.

From time to time, the Compass Rose will note examples of bad English, in the never-ending fight for Truth, Coherence and Literacy!

1. A "whole n'other". This is a false contraction of "a whole other" or "another whole" but it's ungrammatical. It's a stupid mistake which has begun to take root in common speech.

2. "Mischievious". This is not a word. The correct word is "mischievous". There's no "i" after the "v.". Probably people think the word works like devious, but they're wrong.

3. "Massive" as meaning large in size or extent. Massive means DENSE, not large. Lead is massive. Teakwood is massive. A mountain or a large crowd or a glacier are not examples of massive phenomena.

4. "Little, tiny" as a compound adjectival phrase. This, or "small, little" is naively redundant; yet perfectly intelligent people will consistently use these phrases, when they know they're wrong. Why?

5. "In regards to". This phrase simply isn't English. "With regard to" or "in regard to" are perfectly acceptable, but "regards" is only appropriate as the plural form of regard for a thing or person. "Warmest regards." "Give my regards to Broadway." Smart people use "in regards to" all the time, but they should stop.

Variations For Two Pianos

On Donald Justice's Variations For Two Pianos

A villanelle is a poetic form in which the first and third lines of the first stanza are alternately repeated as the third line in each succeeding stanza, and then are repeated together in the last stanza. A villanelle is 19 lines long, five tercets and a concluding quatrain. But augmented villanelle forms use the same principle, and can be just as satisfying. The example below consists of 15 lines; you could call it an abbreviated villanelle. I find it even more powerful for its relative brevity, in relation to its classical antecedent.

Here is Justice's villanelle:

Variation for Two Pianos

for Thomas Higgins, pianist


There is no music now in all Arkansas.
Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Movers dismantled the instruments, away
Sped the vans. The first detour untuned the strings.

There is no music now in all Arkansas.

Up Main Street, past the cold shopfronts of Conway,
The brash, self-important brick of the college,

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Warm evenings, the windows open, he would play
Something of Mozart's for his pupils, the birds.

There is no music now in all Arkansas.

How shall the mockingbird mend her trill, the jay
His eccentric attack, lacking a teacher?

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.
There is no music now in all Arkansas.

There are several things to talk about with this ingenious poem.  Characteristically, Justice's subject is a real person, not an idealized presence of one, or a personified, mythological being from classical literature.  Justice will often play classical themes against Modern situations, using the irony of high art to throw ordinary phenomena into stark relief, or for humor. 

Another nicety is that there is nothing "outside" the poem which our curiosity requires to make the poem work.  We don't need to know, really, any more about Higgins, than that he is a classical pianist, certainly a professional, as well as an academic (whose appointment may have ended, necessitating his departure from Conway [home to no less than three colleges, including the University of Central Arkansas]), and that he takes his pianos with him.

Why Variations for two pianos?  Perhaps this is a joke.  Pianists have played two pianos before; Liberace used to do it on his television show in the 1950's.  To be more precise, the poem is indeed a verbal "variation" for, since it is "about" Higgins's pianos.  Obviously it's a poem, not a musical composition, though in a very real sense, as a villanelle, the poem is superficially not much more than a set of banal musical phrases.  We are tantalized by the notion of a poem for two pianos, even if it is just a little joke.  Not the kind of "lyrics" one could set to music, though, since their tone is conversational, what Robert Frost often referred to (in his own work) as "the sound of sentences."  By which he meant, I've always assumed, the way people naturally speak, as opposed to the artificial language of "poetry."  And naturalness is very much a part of Justice's approach.  

Is it possible to write highly complex, finished poems, even in classical, traditional forms, in the language of common speech?  Since the early Modernists, in the 1920's, that's been a preoccupation.  William Carlos Williams believed that poetry should not only be about common people, but should, in effect, speak through them.  This tendency, to want to bring poetry down to the level of the everyday, now has a clear history, at least in America. Imagine Frank O'Hara without his "deep gossip."  Think about the Confessionalists, who wanted to work out private, psychological issues, in their lives, as if they were relating directly to a therapist (the reader).  

Justice certainly didn't believe in confessing in his poetry.  His poems often seem like the work of a master tinkerer, perhaps a watch-maker.  The little gears and levers spin and click and mark time, ingenious meters of our mortality.  

Is the poem a joke about Arkansas?  Is Higgins the only man in the state to make real music? Without him, playing Mozart through the open windows on a peaceful Sunday afternoon, as the birds outside chirp in unison, is the whole State an empty wasteland of quiet, or cacaphony?  

Even in going, "the first detour untuned the strings," the pitch, the tone, is distorted.  But what does he mean by detour?   Does the poem take a detour?  If his only real pupils were "the birds" was he not appreciated, for his teaching?  

But nature's music is not perfect, either.  The jay and the mockingbird need instruction too, to mend their trill, their "eccentric attack."  

The first line is repeated four times, the second line, three times.  Between these (musical) refrains, there are four couplets of description.  This is very like a first movement of a Mozart sonata or sonatina, the statement of thematic element introduced, "trifled" with briefly, then repeated primly at the end.  Light, pure, limpid, lapidary, seemingly simple-minded, easy.  

This purity of song is contrasted with the "brash, self-important brick" of the college.  This last reminds me of a snatch of dialogue from John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [1974], where George Smiley is talking to Roddy Martindale who says "just a red brick don...a few bits of sandstone..." to satirize the pretensions of a lower class academic.  Brick being, in the history of English architecture, a decidedly "lower class" building material, perhaps suitable for flats and full service banks, but not nearly sophisticated enough for gentry!

Higgins is probably too good for Conway, and its little pretentious college.  They didn't appreciate him, and now he's leaving, has left.  Does anyone mark his passing, other than the birds?  Justice does.  

We should all be so lucky to have a poet as talented and inspired as Justice write a poem about us.                

Cutting Taxes

In negotiations over the desirability of putting tax cuts into the Democratic Administration's so-called Economic Stimulus Bill, the Republican minority has resumed its party's traditional, familiar refrain of advocating tax cuts as the best method of creating economic incentives for the growth of employment, the freeing up of investment capital, and the general health of free enterprise.

The Stimulus Bill is in its specific parts, essentially a huge spending bill emphasizing public works and government programs, along with a large dose of tax cuts. During the Bush Administrations, the rich and the corporations benefited mightily from tax cuts, designed to stimulate investment and job growth. But those tax cuts did not have that effect.

Domestic investment and employment in this country have been steadily decreasing for the last two decades. American capital has turned its back on American workers, transferring hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and semi-technical positions overseas. These jobs were once the backbone of American prosperity.

Apologists for the Right argue that American workers, with their unreasonable demands for high wages, favorable conditions, health care and pension benefits, can't compete on the new "global market." They tell us that Americans need to "gear up" for the future technological era, when everyone will need to be skilled and flexible and "work smart."

Bullshit.

At any given time, there are relatively few professional and technical positions in the general economy. If you put all the skilled jobs from science, management, law, and technical fields together, even those imagined by the dreamers of tomorrow-land, they wouldn't employ more than 15% of the able workforce. Despite what people say about the technological revolution, our electronic gadgets and the computer age, unskilled or semi-skilled labor still is the basis for the great majority of employment in the world. Sending "everyone" to college, even if that were feasible, isn't going to "produce" jobs or maintain a strong middle class. The factory system and the mass employment it requires is the real engine of prosperity in the modern world.

China now dominates the manufacturing field. It has transformed itself from a primarily agrarian society, to a fully industrialized one in less than two generations. And it now out-earns and out produces the United States by a significant margin. It also maintains effective trade barriers (de facto tariff), and currency policies, to insure that that advantage continues.

This trend has led to the wholesale destruction of our American middle class. The social and political implications are staggering.

Until or unless we are willing to address this destructive paradigm in our economic policies and practices, our position in the world, and the welfare of our nation, will continue to decline.

Tatiana in Heaven

Few events in the history of zoo-keeping have generated as much publicity (and controversy) as the "tiger attack" which occurred on December 25th, 2007, at the San Francisco Zoo. Tatiana, a female tiger, was born, in captivity, in Denver on June 27th, 2003, and was brought to San Francisco Zoo, to provide the resident male with a mate. Tatiana had been involved in a minor mauling incident during a public feeding in December 2006; she was not blamed for that incident, because there had been inadequate precautions and training, and the tiger was, in the words of the zoo director Manuel Mollinedo, "acting as a normal tiger does."

What occurred in December 2007 was as follows: According to eyewitness accounts of patrons in the SF Zoo in the late afternoon of 12/25/07, three young men loitering just outside the tiger compound were taunting Tatiana, throwing things over the fence into the cage, yelling and growling, generally attempting to incite the tiger to anger. The tiger compound was surrounded by a deep concrete moat, which is ordinarily designed to function as filled with water, but had been allowed to go dry. Tatiana suddenly leaped over the interior barrier, bounding into the moat and up the steep wall, and over the exterior fence, and proceeded to attack the startled youths. Tatiana killed 17-year old Carlos Souza, Jr. immediately, then chased Paul Dhaliwal (age 19) to just outside the zoo's Terrace Cafe. When police arrived, Tatiana had Dhaliwal at bay, and was "toying" with him. Police managed to distract the tiger, which then ran towards the officers, who proceeded to pump seven rounds into its body and head, killing it at once.  

The three youths, it later was reported, had criminal records. Not long after the incident, the two Dhaliwal brothers hired a lawyer, and have filed suit against the City of San Francisco and the Zoo for negligence and huge damages.

Wikipedia provides a neat summary of developments in the case subsequent to the incident:

"The zoo remained closed until January 3, 2008. On January 15, 2008, the transcripts and the recordings of the 911 calls were released. In the days immediately following the attack, the director of the zoo stated that Tatiana was probably provoked. He said, "Somebody created a situation that really agitated her and gave he some sort of a method to break out.  There is no possible way the cat could have made it out of there in a single leap. I would surmise that there was help. A couple of feet dangling over the edge could possibly have done it." Sources told the San Francisco Chronicle that pinecones and sticks were found which might have been thrown at Tatiana, and which could not have landed there naturally. Amrital (Paul) Dhaliwal would later admit to the deceased victim's father that the three had yelled and waved at the tiger. Kulbir Dhaliwal stated to police that the three had smoked marijuana and had drunk vodka on the day of the attack, which toxicology tests confirmed. A partially-filled vodka bottle and marijuana were also found in the 2002 BMW car used by the Dhaliwal brothers on the day of the mauling. According to early news sources, the Dhaliwal brothers had slingshots on them at the time. The discoveries reinforced suggestions that the brothers might have recklessly teased the 253-pound Siberian tiger before she leapt from her grotto. Zoo visitor Jennifer Miller and her familiy allegedly saw the group of young men, including an unidentified fourth person, taunting lions less than an hour before the tiger attack. She later identified Sousa as being part of the group, but said Sousa did not join in the taunting. The Dhaliwal brothers' lawyer, Mark Geragos, denied that the brother teased the animals, but later testimony by another park visitor corroborated Miller's story by saying the four men were taunting the animals.  The Dhaliwal brothers were reportedly 'hostile" to the police following the attack. They initially refused to identify themselves or Carlos Sousa to the police, and they refused to give interviews to the police until two days after the attack. Initially, the brothers would not speak publicly about the details of what happened to them. On January 1, 2008, the Dhaliwal brothers hired Geragos, planning to sue the zoo for their "utter disregard for safety".  

Despite what you believe about what precisely occurred at the zoo on Christmas Day 2007, there is little doubt that the tiger is not to blame for what occurred.  

Today, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the four uniformed officers who answered the emergency call and killed Tatiana, were receiving gold medals of valor, for bravery.  

It's hard not to feel disgust at almost every aspect of the case. Almost no one escapes fault, except, of course, the poor tiger Tatiana.

The zoo deserves condemnation for not providing adequate barriers against the possibility of escape. They admitted that the mote was designed to work when filled with water, not empty. They seemed to have no contingency plans for dealing with animal escapes. There seemed to be no monitoring of visitor behavior, allowing almost any kind of activity to occur, including people climbing over fences directly into animal compounds.     

The youths acted irresponsibly, with malice, mischievously inciting naturally aggressive predators to go on the offensive. They were bingeing on drugs and alcohol, abusing themselves, making a public nuisance at a public attraction, and ultimately playing chicken with wild animals in an artificial situation. Finally, to top it all off, they have the audacity to blame the zoo and the city for their own immoral and grossly irresponsible behavior.

Rather than blaming the zoo, the city, and the tiger, it is rather these men who should themselves be prosecuted as the vandals and low-lifers they are, for having caused the whole thing.  

In a larger sense, my sympathies go to the animals. Zoos have a long tradition in Western Europe and America. Most people have at some point, usually as children, taken pleasure in the casual, vicarious appreciation of "wild" animals, captured from nature, caged and sustained in completely artificial conditions. Most of these animals are miserably frustrated, and eventually become autistic or otherwise profoundly disturbed by their captivity. 

Tatiana was a beautiful, natural, creature, whose true destiny was stolen from her. She was not responsible for her actions, which were the result of hormonal/chemical reactions in her nervous system over which she had absolutely no control.  

Man continues to bring misery and harm to wild animals across the globe. Our unbridled overpopulation and expansion into wild habitat is causing the wholesale extinction of thousands of species every year. Those we find attractive or aesthetically inspiring we pluck from their world and make them do duty as playthings, pets, public attractions, circus or carnival animals. It's disgusting.

The whole concept of zoos needs to be re-thought. It may be that instead of zoos, humankind should consider establishing and maintaining animal rehabilitation centers, designed to assist endangered species from harm or extinction. That's the least we should be doing, given our appalling history of exploitation and cruelty to nature's creatures.         

 

      

A Tribute to Ronald Johnson (1935-1998): Part Two

Cows in Pasture, Arthur Dove, 1935.

This is the second post on the work of Ronald Johnson's poetry.  It continues with a consideration of our favorite poem of Johnson's, Three Paintings By Arthur Dove, which was published in his first book, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees.

I might mention in passing that the title of that book, which was published by Jonathan Williams and his Jargon Press, suggests preoccupations that would become increasingly important to Johnson during his writing career.  The sense of writing as having a graphic resemblance or link to abstract form, is central to the concept of Concrete Poetry.  Not everyone knows this, but Johnson kept up a steady interest in concrete poetry, or word-in-image composition, throughout his "straight" writing life, and published several livres d'artist booklets in this genre or mode.

The second section of the poem under discussion, Three Paintings by Arthur Dove, is Cows in Pasture (pictured above).

II

What is wanted

is someone who can open the chestnut-burr

with his bare heel,

& bark, hide, the bull-calf's eye, 

as forms.

Once open, form is wind, 'water in an old hoof-print',

but must branch an eye,

the bull's or buck-eye,

as if--

it grew bark. Give it hair, turf,

willow.

'Raw sienna, black & green'.

Form has no 

size.

The burn-out log

is not a whale.

Nor is it

'silver burnt brown

wood 

color dark'.

And there are no cows.

We walk,

careful not to step on snails.

The grass is very

green.

'That the mountainside

looks like a face

is accidental'. 

    

Do I hear the encyclopedist's clerical air in these lines, especially in the quotations, which sends me back to Marianne Moore?  I do.  The interest in specificity, the taxonomic delight in inspired definition, which is the scientist's mettle, confirmation of origin(s), birth of naming, assumption of external authority.  Could any tendency be less poetic?

And yet what we hear--and feel--is delight!  Here is pastoral engaging directly with textures, essences, through the vivid and tactile sounds and frictions among syllables and consonants--we're walking, there is grass, mud, bark, twigs, even snails!  Ever stepped on a snail?  

Our feet are bare, the "bare heel" of the first stanza.  You'd have to have a tough heel to crack a chestnut, especially if it was still encased in its gnarly green casing.  

Doubtless cows, in their meanderings, lowing as they go, step on countless such burrs, or nuts (or snails!). Nature could be said to count on such events, for the proliferation of her kinds, the natural hybridization of species.  Aesthetically, "form has no size" and resemblances between mountains and heads are purely gratuitous. But resemblances are the stuff of art, whether through anthropomorphism or metaphoric vision.  

Behind this impulse to deduce meaning from structure lies the figure of Blake, the symbolic Visionary deluxe.  

Ultimately, Johnson's writing succeeds by way of the pleasure it affords through the happy percolation of its prosody:

the second stanza running

- /, /, - / - /    (and BARK, HIDE, the BULL-Calf's EYE

Then there's the lovely concatenation spread across the first stanzas--

burr, bare, bark

the buck-eye's (lashes!) 

as if...grew...hair...turf 

and then the delicate turn to

willow

You can almost feel the language--syllables--straining to become what they are describing, as if words could be the things they were signs of.  The quality of immanence, or " the divine as existing and acting within the mind or the world" as a means to transcendence, is characteristic of Johnson's verse.  Over and over, in various ways, you feel the urge to pass through the forms of matter into a higher reality of being or awareness.  At no point do we abandon the physical fact of our bodies, or of our apprehension things, but we acquire a higher awareness of their nature, their qualities, their function, and beauty, through the process of imagining them through words, in words (inwards). 

Coming in Part III, an examination of Arthur Dove, and the third part of Johnson's poem.      

     

Malthus & The Elephant

Over the last several years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the phenomenon of Global Warming, of its causes, of the (sometimes) dire predictions of its probable eventual measurable long-range effects, and of various methods by which humanity may avoid catastrophe.  

Of the many large scale problems facing humanity, in terms of its probable limits to growth, we may count the natural limitations of sustenance:  Limitation of water, limitation of food, limitation of habitable land-mass, limitation of sources of energy.  

For two centuries, people have argued about the cautionary theories of Thomas Robert Malthus [1766-1834], as espoused in Essay on the Principle of Population [1798 and subsequent editions].  Malthus's basic tenets are:  That there is a tendency towards a constant increase in population; and that the rate of increase of population is far greater, by a geometric factor, than the capacity of humankind to increase the rate of supply itself with adequate sustenance. Malthus went further, claiming that poverty, disease and other kinds of social distress were directly attributable to this paradigm, and that only through the efficient reduction in populations--either through catastrophes such as wars, plagues, mass starvation--or through more peaceful, voluntary means of limitation, was a natural balance achieved between population and environment.

Malthus could not have foreseen various future developments---scientific agriculture, fossil fuel (petroleum), atomic energy, Darwinian theory, and so forth--but it's certainly safe to say that, with minor augmentations, his theoretical predictions regarding the effects of overpopulation have nearly all been proven true.  The modern industrial paradigm, with its emphasis on constant growth, both of (industrial) production, and of rapid population expansion, is a construct virtually guaranteed to produce the unfortunate consequences first postulated by Malthus.  

The consequences of the rapid expansion of the means of production have had another unforeseen effect.  Thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries could not have imagined that the unrestrained use of fossil fuel energy would lead to a catastrophic change in the mean temperature of the globe, with serious, perhaps irreversible, secondary effects.  The contemporary model of constant expansion is based on a continuously increasing population of consumers, balanced by a continuously increasing machine of production.  

The problem of Global Warming can be seen, now, as an inevitable result of our misguided faith in the growth paradigm.  Both factors--over-exploitation of resource (with its attendant evil of pollution), and excessive, unchecked population growth--are leading us towards a major world-wide catastrophe, perhaps of Biblical proportions.

Until we are willing to address the riddle of population growth, and of mankind's selfish tendency to exploit the earth to feed that growth, most of the world's problems will not be solved.  It's the elephant in the room which no one acknowledges.  

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.  The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation.  They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves.  But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands.  Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."  -Malthus

We would do well to heed that warning.   

  

      

The Taser Controversy Part II : In the News!

For readers not living in the Bay Area, a bit of background.  Early New Year's day, Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority police were called to intervene in a melee that occurred on a BART train in Oakland at night.  Onlookers carrying portable phone video devices recorded the event, watching in disbelief as one of the police shot and killed a black man, one of several of whom were being subdued and detained on the loading platform.  

BART was slow to respond to public outcries for investigation, and the officer, Johannes Mehserle, 27, quit the force rather than face immediate questions regarding his actions on duty. There were public demonstrations in Oakland, some of which turned violent, as a consequence of what was interpreted as an example of racially motivated violence.  Subsequently, Mehserle was charged with murder and arrested in Nevada where he had fled to stay with a relative.  

Mehserle's version of the story, which has been partly corroborated by statements made after the incident by fellow officers, is that he believed that the suspect, Oscar Grant III, was resisting arrest, and that Mehserle believed that he seemed to be reaching for something--perhaps a weapon, under his belt.  Mehserle pulled his revolver and shot Grant in the back as he was lying face down on the concrete.  Police witnesses have been reported to have said they heard Mehserle saying that he intended to "tase" the suspect; and also that Mehserle appeared to be upset and confused shortly after he made the shot.  

Mehserle's attorney told reporters after his client's arraignment in court, that Mehserle will claim as his defense that he believed, or understood, that he was in fact tasering Grant, but mistook the service revolver he was carrying for a Taser device.  The attorney stated that they felt a reduction of the charge to manslaughter would be more appropriate under the circumstances.

In what must be regarded as a clear violation of judicial ethics, the presiding judge in the case, Morris Jacobson, came out publicly stating that Mehserle's attorney's account of the shooting was "inconsistent" and "to make up something that's not true to avoid consequences."  In a colossal irony, Jacobson set a gag order on the contending parties not to discuss the details of the case outside the courtroom.  

There are several unusual aspects to the case.  Why would an officer suddenly draw a gun and shoot an unarmed man, lying on the ground, in the back, in plain view of witnesses, without apparent provocation?  Public video records of crime and arrest incidents are still unusual, though with the proliferation of these devices amongst the general population, this is going to continue to be a hot issue in the coming years.  

What are the possible extenuating circumstances?  The media has been reluctant to go into the details of the disturbance leading up to the shooting, but it seems clear that several minority men, drunk or stoned, were having what has been described as a sort of "gang" fight.  Oakland, particularly in the African American neighborhoods, has one of the highest crime rates in the nation, with drugs and gang activity, and a high annual murder rate, especially among Black youths.  Historically, there has been considerable distrust and bitterness in the Black community towards municipal police and state patrol officers.

Videos of the incident are not altogether clear.  The view of Mehserle and Grant is partially blocked by the standing body of another officer.  Grant is clearly on the ground, but Mehserle seems to be attempting to subdue him, perhaps to cuff him, when he simply pulls his revolver and fires.  The action seems irrational, unless Mehserle was suddenly losing his cool, and his temper; or, as he has stated, he became confused and somehow thought he was packing a Taser instead of a revolver.  Is his claim plausible?  

My guess is that, whatever you may believe, his claim has enough probable merit at least to leave some doubt about why he may have done what he did do.  Unless Mehserle went berserk, and acted in a way certain to put his entire career and life at risk, what he did looks like the action of a man who was either disoriented, or had become irrational under the pressure of a moment of confusion and tense confrontation.  Officers are trained to handle stressful situations like this, but it's difficult to predict what individuals will do under fire, especially if they are experiencing problems, mental or otherwise, in their private lives.

The point of my relating this story, is to bring attention to the problematic nature of the increasing use of Tasers--a new technology involving applying severe electric shock to victim perpetrators.  This incident points up a new problem which I haven't seen discussed anywhere in the media:  What about the confusion officers may display under stressful situations, which might cause them accidentally to pick the wrong weapon?  Supposing an officer intends to pull out his pistol to protect himself from a man with a gun, but instead grabs his Taser?  Or the officer, as here in this instance, who pulls out his revolver when he mentally "thinks" he is reaching for his Taser instead.  

I maintain that Tasers are bad medicine under any circumstances, given their vastly greater likelihood of causing life-threatening harm.  As this recent incident at a BART station shows, the use of Tasers has now opened a whole new area of concern, namely the confusion about which weapon is being used, and when, and how.  

Wouldn't it indeed have been better for Mr. Grant, if officer Mehserle had simply pulled a nightstick from his belt and tapped Grant meaningfully on the shoulder, instead of reaching instinctively for a Taser?  Suspects may be at risk with the use of sticks, or pepper spray, but they're comparatively safer in those cases, than they are from officers brandishing Taser guns and loaded revolvers.  It could even be argued that street criminals are more likely to take the position that using a gun against a Taser is a superior defense against arrest and conviction, than simply physically putting up a struggle with a police-person.  After all, if you think you're going to be irresponsibly Tasered, it probably makes more sense to run or shoot first, from a safe distance, than it does to try to bluff your way or resist arrest at short range.