Capital Letters Si, Capital Punishment No

You know I have that problem with authority. I don’t mind things like red and green lights that ease the flow of traffic and keep people safe, but now that I think about it, why red for stop and green for glow and yellow for I’m changing so be careful now you know, and why those specific colors? And maybe now I am getting testy. But now that I contemplate it, I note that red is kind of a universal color for danger, as in that fire is out of control, and green is always nice because it means it has probably been raining lately and the crops are doing well, and yellow is plumb in between the two.

You know normally I praise everything urban and look down my nose at rural things, but one thing that bugs me is the way whenever they give the weather here they get glum when predicting rain and all smiley when they predict a sunny day. Myself I would think that farmers are generally happy to see those rain clouds. I have this image in my head of some dust bowl farmer in a battered straw hat looking up at the clouds and holding out his hand to catch a drop of rain and smiling that wrinkly smile that one gets from spending all that time out in the sun.

The urban guy however, feeling a drop of rain on his salon-styled hair, is all like, “Oh fuck, now I have to go back and get my goddamn umbrella, and I’m already late,” that’s the way city folk are, always in a hurry, always crabby, cursing the gentle rain that makes his gentle rural cousin smile, because now his humble crops will grow and when he takes them to market there will be money enough for little Mary Ellen to get a new pair of shoes, so she can go to the big dance down in Bartlesville where all the soldiers go, and maybe she can make some young service man smile, and embolden him to defend this great country of ours.

Where were we? Oh yes, the stoplights, devices that make sense. Unlike capitalization which makes me no sense, just a bunch of arbitrary rules that constrain the free expression of thought because you have to pause every now and then and think, should I capitalize this or that, and for what? It doesn’t make the meaning any clearer, it doesn’t follow any logical pattern, it’s just rules for the sake of rules, something a bold young rebel such as myself eschews.

But of course Beagles doesn’t mind them, Beagles the good boy who respected his parents while the rest of us hooligans ran wild in the streets. Beagles who thanked the wrinkled guy in the battered straw hat for letting him dance with his daughter in her spiffy new shoes, and even though he was never able to guide her into some little dark nook away from the stern eyes of the chaperones, he still went off to war to defend his country, even if that only meant getting into bar fights with the soldiers of our allies.

Well there I am getting crabby again. Well those vagaries of language, they just get to me. What about all those rules for titles? If we just capitalized all the words, arbitrary as that might be, at least it would be consistent. But then those fascist Masters of the Language want us to leave out the articles, unless they come at the start of the title, but what if it precedes some mighty noun, like The Lord? Surely you wouldn’t write a title like this: So Sayeth the Lord. 

And prepositions, they are left out too, even though they are energetic actors pointing out actions, while the adverbs and adjectives, the slow-witted sycophants of the pompous verbs and nouns are given the full cap treatment.

Oh the Injustice, The Social Injustice, I don’t see how Beagles can tolerate it, now that he has become a lefty and rails at the injustice of sure and swift punishment for bread thieves and fain would allow them to keep their heads while the poor bakers stand by with empty shelves while he dances a lively two step with the farmer’s daughter to the tune of “Capital Letters Si, Capital Punishment No.”