Joe Wilson’s (Rep. South Carolina) uncouth and aggressive heckling of President Obama during the President’s speech on health care refo
rm at the Joint Session of Congress on September 9 (“You Lie!”) is now part of the fabric of United States history. Wilson’s behavior is firmly rooted in southern culture and history. There is a particular institution in the south of violence (verbal and physical) that pervades up through modern times, starting in the early history of this country. Below is a very notable example that I was reminded of this week after the “You Lie!” incident.
The Beating of Charles Sumner by S.C. Rep. Preston Brooks
The most notable forbearer to Joe Wilson and his behavior on September 9 was Preston Brooks, another South Carolinian representative. Rep. Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death with a heavy cane in the Senate Chamber in 1856 because of an anti-slavery speech Sumner had made two days previously. A South Carolinian colleague, Rep. Laurence M. Keitt, dissuaded Brooks from dueling Sumner, encouraging Books to treat Sumner as a drunkard, due to the supposedly coarse language Sumner had used in his anti-slavery speech. Sumner had compared the institution of slavery to a harlot, and said of Brooks’ uncle, a Senator and a supporter of slavery, that he “took a mistress who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight – I mean the harlot, Slavery.”
Senator Charles Sumner (Mass.)
Two days later, Brooks accosted Sumner on the floor of the Senate, beat his head repeatedly with the thick, gold-tipped cane. Sumner, who was trapped under a heavy desk that was bolted to the floor could not escape and was left bloodied and almost dead. It took three years for Sumner to recuperate and return to his Senate duties, and he never fully recovered from the beating.
Representative Preston Brooks (S.C.) 
After the beating, South Carolinian constituents sent Representative Brooks many brand new canes, one of them bearing the phrase “Hit him again.” Brooks claimed that people wanted pieces of the cane as “holy relics”.
Dinner celebrations in honor of Preston Brooks’ attack on Charles Sumner were held all over the South, a mid-nineteenth century version of the media attention now being attracted by Rep. Joe Wilson.
Commemorative Sign to Brooks’ attack
The Crime Against Kansas
Here is the text of Charles Sumner’s speech, known as “The Crime Against Kansas” for which he received a near-death beating by a South Carolinian pro-slavery zealot. After his beating, Sumner’s speech was widely disseminated, furthering the anti-slavery movement in the United States and eventually resulting in freedom from slavery for Afro-Americans.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/seminar/unit4/sumner.html
Brooksville, Florida is named after Rep. Preston Brooks.
The city of Brooksville, Florida is named in Brooks’ honor. What is so interesting about this is that the city is not at all ashamed of its association with the attack on Charles Sumner. This is what the Brooksville, Florida website www.ci.brooksville.fl.us has this to say about Brooks and the Sumner beating in the Senate:
Brooksville is about forty-five miles north of Tampa and is nestled among beautiful, rolling hills. It has experienced continuous growth while preserving its original charm. It has three city parks, a nine-hole golf course, and an excellent library. Brooksville and Hernando County are rich in southern hospitality, motivated by visions of tomorrow.
Brooksville was named in honor of Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina because of the role he played in a “drama” that took place in the legislative chamber of the U.S. Congress. “State Right’s statesman Representative Preston Brooks was a man with a strong sense of fair play”. “Representative Brooks whipped out his newly polished gutta percha cane, and rapped it smartly over Sumner’s head, leaving the Senator quite senseless on the spotless Senate floor.” (According to contemporary reports, there was blood all over the floor from the attack, and Sumner could not see because of his blood around his head and in his eyes.)
“The citizens of Hernado Country admired [Brooks’] pluck and voted to give the country’s largest settlement his name.” This is on the present-day (2009) City of Brookville website.
Brooks County, Georgia is mum about the association.
Brooks County, Georgia (www.brookscounty.georgia.gov) , also named after Preston Brooks, is more circumspect about its connection with Preston Brooks, and just refers to its civil war history as being the “breadbasket” of the South. In 2000, the U.S. census indicated that Brooks County was 39% Afro-American.
“You Lie!”
So the next time you hear the phrase “You Lie” (which you will many times from now on), think of United States history and the connection between incivility, southern hospitality, visions of tomorrow, and the attack on a man whose crime was to say that slavery in the United States should be extinguished. When Rep. Joe Wilson is admired for his “pluck”, think of Charles Sumner’s life and works and not Brooks’ attack with a cane. The distinction and the analogy to present-day politics is clear.
This week, I started getting very curious about where the @ symbol comes from and what it means. This symbol is used in all email addresses and in other internet uses. For instance, when responding to another twitterer in a “public” tweet, you might put the sign @ before their twitter name. When your tweet is posted, everyone following you can see it, and the person you are directing your tweet to may get a nice glow of recognition.
No one knows where the @ symbol came from, but probably comes from an abbreviation or ligature of “ad” which means “at, towards, by, about” in Latin. Monks (entrusted with hand copying documents before the invention of the printing press) probably used this ligature as a time-saver.
Another theory of the origin of @ is that it was an abbreviation for the word “amphora,” which was a unit of measurement in 1500s Italy based on the amount held in a large terra cotta jar. These jars were used to ship grain, spices, and wine. Maybe a wine trader somehow associated the symbol used by the Monks for “at” with the first syllable of the measurement unit and liked the way it looked.
The symbol with its new meaning of “at the price of,” migrated to northern Europe and eventually onto typewriter keyboards. The @ symbol was one of a select few symbols included in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) in 1963, which established the way letters and symbols would be translated into digital computer language.
The @ sign first became used in email addresses in 1971, when a computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson (b. 1941) was working on a communication network called ARPANET that would allow scientists and researchers to share each other’s computers. This led into an improvement by his team that allowed email (already existing within a single computer) to be able be sent over the internet to other computers. Tomlinson just looked at his keyboard, saw the sign that meant “at”, and history was made. The @ symbol has now become an ubiquitous icon in technology, business, and on the internet. It is now coming into the popular and fashion arena.
Interestingly, in a non-computer application, @ has been used to create gender-neutral versions of nouns in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. For instance, “amigos” is plural for “friends”, but is really a “masculine” noun in Spanish. “Amig@s” could refer to a mixed gender group of friends, while retaining “amigos” for a bunch of men, and “amigas” for a bunch of women. The @ character is perhaps used for this because it looks like it contains both an “o” and an “a”. Some attack this @ usage on the ground that it degrades the language or is a form of cultural imperialism.
So, my amig@s, I hope you have enjoyed this little romp into the history and use of this important typographical symbol.
After reading David Sedaris’ charming mediation on Kookaburra birds in Australia and a childhood singing jag with his sister, Amy, when he was 10 and she 6 years old (did David carry a notebook with him during childhood?) in the August 24 issue of The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_sedaris
I read the blog “Live Chat” interview with Sedaris about his experiences in the French and U.S. Healthcare systems. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2009/08/questions-for-sedaris.html 
This is what Sedaris recalled.
THE NEW YORKER: Via e-mail, Pat Donohue, from Point Pleasant, New Jersey, asks: As a resident of France and an American citizen, your point of view on health care in the two nations is of interest to those of us who have never received medical treatment via a system such as France’s, which, I understand, is a hybrid between single-payer (the government of France) and some private insurers. We receive so much information to the negative on France’s health care, and I would like to hear your viewpoint and/or comparison between the two. Thanks.
DAVID SEDARIS: Allow me to answer with kidney stones. I had my first one at the age of thirty-four. At the time, I was living in New York and had no health insurance. Never in my life had I experienced such pain, but I couldn’t afford to go to the hospital, and so I passed it at home, not knowing until the end what it actually was. (I thought I was delivering Satan’s baby through my penis.)
I had my second kidney stone seven years later, in Paris. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and after looking at my options in the phone book in the phone book, I took the metro to a hospital in the 15th. Two minutes after walking through the door, I was in a private room. Delicious, mind-numbing drugs were delivered to my blood stream by way of a tube and life was beautiful. I was in the hospital for four hours, and as I was leaving, I asked the receptionist how I was supposed to pay.
“Oh,” she said, “We’ll send you a statement.”
“But you never even asked me my name.”
“Really?”
A few weeks later I got a bill for the equivalent of seventy dollars, this because I’m not a French citizen and am therefore not entitled to free care.
I got my third kidney stone a few months ago, while on a lecture tour of the United States. The hospital I went to was in Westchester County and the service was outstanding. Maybe I arrived at the slowest time, but, like in France, I was waited on immediately, and the doctor and nurses could not have been more pleasant. Again I was there for four hours, though this time the bill came to five thousand eight hundred dollars. Not including medicine.
I’m completely fascinated by the health-care debate going on in the United States, especially by posters of Obama with a little mustache drawn on his upper lip. Is that what Hitler is really known for, his health-care plan? To quote Bill Maher, “I haven’t seen this many pissed-off old white people since they cancelled ‘Murder She Wrote.’ ”
Now I live in England. I’ve just been granted Indefinite Leave To Remain, which allows me access to the National Health Service.
LAURIE ISRAEL: So we are left with the question that is not being answered clearly in all the media accounts of our national Healthcare debate: what is causing our health care to be so expensive and inaccessible, and what can we do about it. We need clear, hard-nosed facts and statistics and numbers, not ”spin” and politics as usual.
