Smart No More

Let's talk about stupidity -- political stupidity.

Maybe "stupidity" is too harsh a word. I certainly don't mean the charming, they-probably-meant-it-as a joke naivete of whoever named the group which recently conducted a peace vigil here in North Florida, Tallahasseeans Who Believe It's Time to Come Home. Right, that group: the one whose acronym spells out Tallahasseeans Who BITCH.

No, this is a different -- more insidious -- sort of willful ignorance.

The cliché used to be that conservative Republicans were the hard-headed pragmatists and realists who spoke with their brains. Democrats were squishy bleeding hearts who spoke viscerally and simply didn't understand how the real world works.

These days, the cliché has been inverted.

What got me thinking about this was an email message I recently received. It was an email which evidently originated, in the way of most politically inclined email, from an unknown someone in the dawn of prehistory. (He probably painted it on a cave wall.) Not all the names in the chain of recipients had been snipped as the message made its way through the Internet's population. I recognized many of them as those who in the past circulated other emails extolling the folk wisdom of commentators like Mr. Limbaugh and Ms. Coulter.

So I was surprised to read through this message and see that former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca seemed to have many of the same ideas as those familiar names did.

And really, it was a masterpiece of invective along the lines of the tirade from the fictional Howard Beall in the movie "Network": I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!

The title: Where Have All the Leaders Gone? It took to task big business. It reamed Congress, and (as the expression goes) tore a new one for politicians in general. It even -- whoa! -- referred to "some bonehead on Fox News."

My pulse rate rose. Was I witnessing an exciting dawn of clear-headed thinking? Er, no. I was witnessing another cloudy day along the occluded front which passes for way too much right-wing "thinking."

See, while Chairman Lee did in fact write all those things -- they're from the first pages of his 2007 book by the same title -- they're not the ONLY things he wrote in those opening pages.

Carefully excised from the original are (hold your breath) all references to the President.

For instance, the message includes this quote: "On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes."

In Iacocca's book, those two sentences were followed immediately by:

Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day -- and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

I don't know about you, but that is what I call incisive commentary. It sure boosted Lee Iacocca in my esteem. And it's only one of the many passages naming Bush which were likewise stripped from this email message.

What a shame that someone -- an unknown someone, to be sure -- decided that the President needed to be shielded from Iacocca's inconvenient opinions.

What a shame that that someone decided his original correspondents' fragile sensibilities needed to be shielded as well.

And what a shame that none of those correspondents, all down the line, took it upon themselves to actually look into the veracity of what they had swallowed but simply passed it along, clucking their tongues.

What a shame that this is what passes for political wisdom among too many people. None of those I know in the addressee list, by the way, is the least bit stupid. They're engineers, attorneys, business owners, government officials. They're nice people, to boot. People with loving families, with senses of humor.

But man: present them with a political issue and their wits just abandon them. Taking -- it must be said -- their hearts with them.

Great Old Protest Songs Never Die, They Just Recycle (Over and Over and Over Again)

"Eve of Destruction," says Wikipedia,

is a grave warning of imminent apocalypse, and considered by some to be the epitome of a protest song.

Oh yeah. It's all that, and then some.
On one of public TV's recurring orgies of '60s-music-driven pledge drives, last night I caught Barry McGuire (now 40 years older, of course) performing it in a voice which, if anything, is even more drenched in an agony of disillusion than in the original recording. (Time does some things right, especially to some singers' voices.)
The Wikipedia article linked above includes a 30-second sample -- not much. I'll try to give you a little more later, when I'm at a desktop better equipped for audio processing. For now, here are the song's lyrics:

Eve Of Destruction
(as recorded by Barry McGuire, 1965)

The eastern world it is explodin',
violence flarin', bullets loadin',
you're old enough to kill but not for votin',
you don't believe in war, what's that gun you're totin',
and even the Jordan river has bodies floatin',

but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?
Can't you see the fear that I'm feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there's no running away,
There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave,
take a look around you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy,

but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin',
I'm sittin' here, just contemplatin',
I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation,
handful of Senators don't pass legislation,
and marches alone can't bring integration,
when human respect is disintegratin',
this whole crazy world is just too frustratin',

and you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China!
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama!
Ah, you may leave here, for four days in space,
but when you return, it's the same old place,
the poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace,
you can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace,
hate your next-door-neighbour, but don't forget to say grace,

and you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Aside from some of the dated references (Red China, four days in space), the sonofabitch holds up pretty well, doesn't it?
Truth be known, it's a little depressing to consider how readily the content still fits. Are the problems that intractable? Can so many people see, so easily, what the problems are in the first place, be so committed to fixing them, and yet be so incapable of breaking the old patterns?
This is one of the most important things fueling the Obama campaign's success. I have yet to make up my mind about him, 100% (I was an Edwards fan). But the harping by critics on what they deem an inappropriately style-over-substance appeal misses the point. That point is: Enough. We've had enough.
I don't say his opponents should roll over and let him take it without a fight, but I am saying they're supremely misguided. If their cynicism masquerading as "hard-nosed practicality" and "realism" comes to triumph over Obama's strange amalgam of charisma and goose-bumping rhetoric and plain old hope, it's a safe bet you'll see "Eve of Destruction" pop up its desperate head in another couple-three-four decades.

Update 2019-02-15:
The Internets being what they are, none of the original means I'd provided to listen to the song now work reliably -- or at all -- anymore. So why don't we do this the easy way: here's Barry Maguire on Youtube.

Subway Ad Semi-Colon Rocks News Media

Funny article in the New York Times yesterday and today (updated with an entertaining correction). My favorite parts (separated in the original by a couple of paragraphs):

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
...
One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

An even longer sentence. Heh. The Times writer had fun writing that, I bet.

The Things that We Notice, The Things that We Don't

Mrs. FLJerseyBoy and I were watching some old "Seinfeld" reruns recently; these included the episode which ended Season 7 -- the episode entitled "The Invitations." This episode is famous, justifiably, as the one in which George's fiancee Susan dies from licking the flaps of the cheap wedding-invitation envelopes which George has insisted are "good enough." The envelopes, it so happens, are cheap because their glue tastes funny and isn't very strong, requiring lots of licking. That bad-tasting glue is also toxic, and hence Susan's demise. (Characteristically, George is nowhere in sight while Susan is working on the invitations.)

The audience reaction to the Big Event was so strong that it swamped attention to a Lesser But Still Notable Event, namely that Jerry had apparently found his perfect girlfriend. (This was something like the 135th episode of the show, with nearly as many girlfriends -- who almost never lasted for more than an episode -- so a perfect girlfriend was a big deal indeed.) The girlfriend in question, Jeannie, was played by actress/comedienne Janeane Garofalo. And what made the character perfect for Seinfeld's character, as he felt, was that they were so much alike.

Here's the scene where they meet. Jerry is absentmindedly walking in the street, when he is almost hit by a car; this stranger -- Jeannie -- pulls him to safety:

Jeannie: Hey! Hey! Look out. (She pulls him back.) OK! Are you okay?
Jerry: Yeah! Thanks. Oh! My God you saved my life!
Jeannie: Shouldn't there be some kind of reward for that?
Jerry: Oh! Thank you.
Jeannie: You know you should be a lot more careful crossing the street like that, otherwise you could die. If that bothers you.
Jerry: Well I...
Jeannie: You see (points to his collar)? To me this is a waste.
Jerry: What?
Jeannie: The shirt you got on under your sweater. It sits for three weeks in your drawer, waiting to come out. And when it finally does, it sticks up only half an inch out of your collar.
Jerry: I'm Jerry Seinfeld.
Jeannie: Jeannie Steinman.
Jerry: Hey! Same initials. How do you like that?
Jeannie: I like it.

As writing, this is great. It takes just a few seconds to establish that you could simply interchange the two characters' roles and even their lines. Not only can they complete each other's sentences -- they match each other's very personalities. Jeannie's abrupt dropping of the subject (that Jerry miraculously is alive and uninjured) for the sake of some trivial, superficial observation about human nature: that's classic "Jerry Seinfeld," the character.

A couple days later I came across this poem by Robert Frost, one with which I wasn't previously familiar:

A Considerable Speck
(Microscopic)

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink,
When something strange about it made me think.
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt—
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn't want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.
I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

That's the core of it, eh? "I have a mind myself and recognize / Mind when I meet with it in any guise. / No one can know how glad I am to find / On any sheet the least display of mind." It's not just encountering someone similar that speaks to us; it's encountering their words.

A college professor with whom I was close once counseled me, in a letter, about my stupid, self-absorbed concern that my younger brother might at some point grow up to outshine me in people's estimation -- that I would come to be known as his brother, rather than the other way around. Heck, I reasoned, he was not only smart as a whip but he was athletic to boot, and I'd never been seriously interested in participatory sports. Therefore, wasn't it obvious that people would come to---

My professor's exact words are long gone now but I never forgot the gist of them:

I know [she wrote], because I've been told, that the ability to run and jump and score goals is a sign of intelligence and character. But I know, because I've seen it and felt it and watched it happen, dozens of times over, that the ability to write proves it.

(My brother, by the way, is -- like most of us in our generation -- no longer an athlete. But he is still smart as a whip and every day shines in ways that I couldn't hope to, professionally and personally... just as I do in ways that he can't. We do love each other.)

And then, for some reason, having encountered both the "Seinfeld" episode and the Frost poem within a couple days, and having thought -- apparently at random -- of my professor's words, I started to think about (get ready for the thud of an anticlimax) right-wing broadcasters and columnists, who these days far out-shout the whimpers of the "biased mainstream liberal media." What makes these idiots so successful?

What makes them successful is two-fold:

• They can honestly (much as I hate to admit it) write. Not only can they write "correctly," in complete sentences and with proper punctuation. But they're also skilled in manipulating the symbols of patriotism, of Old-Testament godliness and sanctity, of other virtues originating decades or even centuries and millennia ago. Thrift. Hard work. Ruggedness. And so on.
• They employ that gift with language in ways that their audiences wish that they could, while asserting the substance that their audiences believe to their core. They are like their audiences (at least, their public faces are), but even better.

Ain't language a wonderful thing? I had this Big Idea for a novel, years and years ago. The Big Idea was that God turns out to be language. It's ubiquitous, we are not fully human without it (sorry, opposable thumb). And boy do we pay it tribute, every day, every waking (and nearly every sleeping) minute.