Although agreeing with Gelernter that the auction serves little purpose

Although agreeing with Gelernter that the auction serves little purpose, I can't see burning or cheap necklaces a copy of The Elements of Style just because a terrorist owned it, nor do I imagine the destruction of an old edition of the book would even please Gelernter, one of Strunk and White's many self-appointed modern guardians. In October 2005, one month before his protest letter reached the court, Gelernter published a column in the "Taste" section of the Wall Street Journal decrying as perversions of the classic both the Maira Kalman The Elements of Style Illustrated and the pending performance of an operatic version of the work in the New York Public Library. Making the inarguable point that E. B. White himself would have abhorred these developments, Gelernter blamed the New York intellectuals who would take delight in them at the same time as they would neglect their post-9/11 duty to rally behind the Bush administration, whose unpopular war in Iraq Gelernter volubly supported.1 According to Gelernter, White would be a sound guide for these intellectuals on foreign policy as well as style: White, Gelernter noted, thought democracies should "meddle in other people's affairs frequently, gallantly, and without warning-but with no ulterior motive." Gelernter recalled that in June 1940, with the United States still at peace, White wrote that the president should have "dispatched a destroyer carrying a party of Marines, landed them at a German port, rescued two or three dozen Jewish families from the campaign of hate and shot up a few military police in a surprise movement."

For Gelernter, our foreign affairs and stylistic affairs have cheap pendants been ruined by the same bugaboos that White avoided: "Feminist language, pseudo-intellectual literary criticism, an elite cultural establishment at odds with plain old middle- American patriotism, a politically corrected version of 'The Elements of Style'-they are all connected" ("Back"). This is not the praise that Pearson quoted when it chose Gelernter as one of the thirty-three celebrated writers to extol Strunk and White for their fiftieth anniversary edition; they chose one of the very few passages in Gelernter's essay that does not use Strunk and White to pick some fight. Though Gelernter abhors modernity, his essay in this way seems right in step with it: violence has become the predominant trope through which to understand style. From best-selling books to our own monographs in the field, the language of style is often one with the language of battle. Few can approach the subject without invoking war, fisticuffs, shootings, bombs, and the demise of civilization.

Perhaps this is not surprising. There is nothing really taboo about violence in America. The ability to threaten violence is seen by many as a sacred right that only a gross violation of the social order can take away. In the ability to threaten violence, Americans establish their selfhood. Violence is the ultimate answer to authority, and style is often cheap rings by authorities, or so T. R. Johnson observes in his 2003 A Rhetoric of Pleasure. Johnson began his meditations on prose style by revisiting Columbine and other school shootings initiated by students, and by pondering the motives behind the schoolyard rhymes of the 1970s that imagined in singsong form the kind of violence contemporary students would actually enact.