Maybe she figured you'd already pre-voted her vote with one of your dozens of self-10s.

It's going to be the saddest thing in the world if you really only remember Dave Matthews' "All you need is love, love, love" from The Christmas Song and not "All you need is love" from the Beatles song.

I can't think of a common-use situation where the phrase "go ahead" isn't a command - or at least a subtle or weak close cousin.

Okay - mostly because -=Dark_Angel=-,P.I. knows better, yes I can. In a bank-teller's line, for example, you might say, "Can I go ahead of you?" But I'm sure we can agree that's nothing like the case we're talking about here.

Ibid as far as "ignore me, don't hire me," etc etc goes. Dovina probably meant something closer to "you ignore me, you don't hire me," etc, but that's not what she said. What she said has no other English usage, common or not, except mandative.

Does German have a mandative tense with distinct conjugations? (I figure it's probably known in German as a 14-syllable word meaning roughly, 'the way we talk to each other all the time', but that's another matter.)

I thought of that. But then I thought it was probably your real personality. Hence my original comment: "Have you ever read Margaret Atwood's short story 'Rape Fantasies'? You should."

I believe it is possible; it's certainly been done well hundreds of times. The trick is probably to find some new angle, like Alice Walker writing about blacks's search for post-African identity in her short story "Everyday Use", Zora Neale Hurston writing about power-struggles in isolated all-black communities in all her books, or (since I haven't named a white author yet) all the white authors of the television show "Martin".

No, "maybe it's time for retribution" is not a new angle.

Oh. Maybe we should have said in the beginning that writing about any GROUP from the perspective of a GROUP is a major mistake.

Of course, you've already said that you were writing about one person, and even identified the poetry-reading-disser you were thinking of. But I think we can agree all that flew out the window a long time ago. And for that matter, (and this is the last time, I swear,) why did you call the poem "Middle-Aged White Woman" instead of "Dovina"? And why all the "my kind abused your kind" stuff?

Of course, it's also perfectly reasonable here to say that any person writing about any person, from his own group or another, can be read as writing about the group as a whole. That's why you have to be very careful.

Thanks! Interestingly, that's really the only image in this poem, and I used it about 10 times in 20 lines. I'd have liked to have included more, but I just don't know that much about moths.

Oh. I guess it's a marvel of computer programming then.

My wife says that as an undergraduate she got a mild preference for blacks on the Harvard test. Should I worry?

Only a few decades ago, it was considered perfectly enlightened to say things like, "I love blacks; they're such great athletes and dancers. They've such gleaming white smiles! And they're always very polite and docile."

What's changed since then? I doubt very much Americans' biases have changed very much. And besides, the speaker of the quote above might easily have scored a bias FOR blacks on -=Dark_Angel=-'s test. Still, I doubt even Dovina would feel very comfortable about saying something like the above today.

What's changed is the vocabulary for talking about blacks, women, or groups of any kind of people. Someone decades ago realized that despite the above's seeming pro-black bias, it was still mildly offensive or denigrating to blacks, especially ones who, I don't know, fly fighter jets or own small stores of some kind, and the word got around. Most of us probably didn't hear it expressly in school or whatever. And I'd go even further and say our current aversion to saying such things doesn't come naturally to most people. However we learned it, we did have to learn it somewhere, even if just from TV or casual conversation.

There are still tons of things that are slightly denigrating to blacks, though most people don't see how until they're told. Perfectly unbiased people accidentally say them all the time without realizing it. Most of what I'm trying to say is that, with all the best intentions in the world, Dovina has. Mostly, like you said, from naivete. I don't think she's really a racist.

I don't think it's fair to criticize my country for lacking female leaders. All you've done is borrowed some other country's aging queen.

And I'm ashamed to have repeated it all. You just didn't seem to have gotten it before.

1) The verb go in "go ahead" is in what's called the mandative tense. That comes from the same root as command and mandatory. "Go ahead, make my day" is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The guy obviously can't really make Clint Eastwood's day, except by Clint's express permission.

2) I don't see how the poem implies that retribution isn't in order. Out of curiosity, what part do you think implies that?

No, it's almost surely Dovina.

And maybe "just", too.