aka Ken Smith

February 2023
  February 3
    Things you hear
      You hear once in a while, don't you?, that almost all religions have somewhere in their holy texts a verse that (roughly) says, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A child could easily memorize this on her walk to grade school, and then put it out of mind. Yet you also hear once in a while that this sentence holds sufficient wisdom to renovate the wide world, if only we would take it to heart. After all, lucky us, most of us know some version of it by heart already.
      Let's for the moment agree, can we?, that wisdom that enters the wider world through memorization heads out on its journey nearly empty of value. As Richard Pryor said, "Null and void." And people being people, we often do our best to drain the best things of their value.
      In Tom Sawyer, the entrepreneurial young hero persuades neighborhood children to trade their favorite toys and treasures for the chance to whitewash the wooden fence. Intuiting that there is nothing that cannot be turned into a capital market and exploited for personal gain, he trades those toys and treasures for the paper tickets many of these same children had earned by memorizing verses from the Bible. Having acquired sufficient number of these tickets, representing two thousand memorized verses, he cashes them in for a gaudy Bible. All this from the lad who we see choosing to attempt to memorize a passage from "The Sermon on the Mount" because it contained the fewest words per verse.
      So let's also agree, can we?, that there's nothing that capitalism does not have it within its power to pervert.
      Yet maybe we still admire the wise saying: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." What steps are required to bring meaning back to a sentence drained of value by empty habit and memorization, or corrupted by being transformed into capital?
      How can a person look past the memorized words to something still alive there? For one thing, the verse asks for each person to make a judgment. Activate your brain and heart and ask what you'd want in the way of treatment by others, the verse instructs. We could answer that with more memorized words or, better, we can say, "No, no, I'm going to think this through." We'd have to turn to history, personal and otherwise, to continue thinking. When I've been treated this way or that, or when someone else has been treated one way or another, how did it feel? What did we think about the treatment?
      The sentence demands that a person make a moral inquiry based on human experience, then come to a personal judgment. (Or else find some other memorized answer to cling to. Please don't.)
      And having inquired and made a moral judgment, the sentence makes one more demand: Behave! Do that moral thing yourself, the one you thought up for yourself, based on your own scrutiny of life. Do that very thing. Don't turn back to authorities or rote verses. You thought it through yourself; now go do it.
      So how do we get past the emptiness of memorized wisdom and the corruption into which it sometimes falls? Inquire for yourself into human experience, evaluate for yourself what you find there and what would make you grieve or celebrate if it happened to you, and upon the foundation of your own moral inquiry, go out into the world and act accordingly. This, says the next sentence in the Christian New Testament, this is the essence of the wisdom of all the holy books that have come down to us.
      I turned to this verse because I'm interested not in canonical Christianity but because I'm interested in how words come to life when we use them properly. And when we don't use words properly, they will in time come to excuse our mediocrity and our worst deeds.
  February 2
    The lost elder
      I spent a few hours this morning revising a blog post from the other day, the true story of a family torn by the arrival of Nazi domination in their native Czechoslovakia. The story was told to me by the person who at that time had been the "young niece," the young daughter, of the brother and sister I tell about. After shortening this piece for the time-limit of the public radio broadcast, and otherwise trying to improve it, I recorded it at home and sent it in for broadcast Friday. Full text and audio are now posted on the WVPE website.
  February 1
    The value of second-hand stories
      Some people tell the events of history as witnesses, and their stories are invaluable, often fine-grained and resonant, testifying to the extremes of our human character. In time, these witnesses grow old and leave us. A new kind of witness remains, if we would consider them this way. These are people who heard the stories that the first-hand witnesses told. These younger people can often recall many of the details and even some of the exact words of those stories. And it was in those exact words that those elders tried to name the meaning of life as they knew it. The ones who heard them tell their stories possess a portion of that witness, that elemental ore, in their own memory, and they too should tell the stories before they also grow old and leave. A witness who operates at second-hand like that knows something vital too. We should not wait. When a coin has passed from hand to hand for several generations, the details are eventually rubbed away.
January 2023
  January 31
    Plain to see
      In the years around W.W. II, South Bend had strictly segregated neighborhoods, employment, and schools, plus redlining, restrictions on mortgages, and limited bank loans for property improvements and small businesses. These sorts of restrictions lead to urban decay.
      There were five small areas in town where black folks might hope to find (usually poor quality) housing. One of those was centered around Beck's Lake, a neighborhood routinely used for dumping toxic factory waste for many years. Now it's a superfund site.
      Beck's Lake is still poisoned, and the effects of redlining and layers of segregation are still visible on a casual drive through town.
  January 30
    Fenced by etiquette
      In passing just now, I noticed Emerson sneaking in a quiet warning to those who want to write, a warning about being too timid, too decorous, too well-behaved. Something like this: As people, sometimes we are “fenced by etiquette,” but as writers we must not be. Here is the passage, below. As you might expect, he thought it was normal to use the word "men" . . .
        Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, in "Books," in "Society and Solitude"
      In our slogan-loving, mind-numbing age, you can easily picture the "Fenced by Etiquette" t-shirts and mugs. Of course if it fits on a coffee mug it's only part of the story.
  January 29
    Beyond the private life
      Peggy Orenstein, reflecting on knitting, writes, "Change starts with personal reflection, followed by connection to like-minded others and, finally, engagement in repeated, targeted collective action." It's a theory of activism.
  January 28
    Pretty much the same
      What do I, as a human being, hope for in my life, and for my community and for the people I know best?
      What do people who live differently from me probably hope for in their lives, for their friends and their community?
      Obviously, the answers are often pretty much the same, except when one group thinks life is a zero-sum game, are afraid of strangers, or believe in divine condemnation of those people over there, that sort of thing. The answers, otherwise, are pretty much the same.
    Pathetic NY Times column by famous writer
      “Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?” Paul Krugman asks this in his NY Times opinion essay. (1/27/23)
      He wasted most of his essay complaining about the bad attitude, the rage, of rural people. I guess watching some of their communities, their neighbors, and their family members experience "economic desperation," as Krugman describes it, isn't a good enough reason, in his mind, for their mood. Even when that economic desperation is desperate enough, as he says, to lead some rural people to "political radicalization," he implies that they need to get their facts straight and stop complaining.
      There is one paragraph in which the Nobel Laureate in Economics mentions place-based jobs programs. Can these make a difference? Krugman says, "Maybe, just maybe." Dazzling analysis, goddammit, sir, no wonder you make the big bucks. (No other forward-looking ideas are suggested.)
      The columnist seems puzzled about how we can ever get these mysterious rural people to think straight and behave. And he seems to wonder why they think of city folks and coastal types as self-satisfied elites. They must look so strange to him when he occasionally looks out at them with binoculars from the limousine.
  January 27
    Public art logos
      If you want people to get out of their cars and walk around your small city's downtown, how about designing a cool little logo that means public art. Spray paint it on the sidewalk at corners, along with an arrow pointing in the direction the pedestrian should walk to get to some public art in the next two of blocks. If most sidewalks don't need a directional sign, because there's no public art in the next two blocks in any direction, you've got yourself a crummy little city, right? Follow up with cool little logos for coffee shops, food joints, etc. Really, the sidewalk at the various corners should be full of these cool logos, if your small city's downtown is doing well.
  January 26
    Site basics
      A friend asked for feedback on the draft of a university website, and I spent a little time reading the front page closely. I noticed the difference between naming something that could be valuable and starting to pin down what its value might be. Lists, then, are one of the oldest and easiest things to build into a website, but that doesn't make them effective. Listing can imply this: "Reader, I'm the authority. If I put it on the list, it's important."
      Informing and persuading is different than listing, even when the information is very brief. The information can imply this: "Reader, you're the one to make the judgment. Here, let us help you get started with some of the basic information you'll need to make your decision." There's a difference in relationship to audience, in respect for the audience's time and judgment, and in the presentation of self. It feels different to the reader than a list often feels.
      A second thing I noticed was that links to other parts of the site should be on a "the more the better" basis. The draft site I was reviewing had a top-of-page tab about health information, so that's good, linking to another area of the site. But in a body paragraph on the front page, health information comes up without a link. Sure, if i've memorized the structure of the web page, I know what to click next, but why not just put the link in right there? Why promise information in a body paragraph and not link to it?
      And third, I couldn't tell if this was going to be a static website or would offer updates, but I couldn't see a mechanism for a return visitor to locate new postings. For that matter, how would I know when I should go back and check for new content in the first place? Life's too brief to be checking static websites on the off-chance that they've added a good paragraph somewhere.
    We'll handle this
      In a q & a session once, I had a chance to ask a U. S. senator about how activists could make their voices heard more powerfully. But maybe I didn't ask the question clearly enough. The senator thought I was asking for assistance on a certain problem. He said, roughly, "Just call my office in Washington and my staff will help." Maybe "We'll handle this" is the normal attitude of anyone who has an ID badge in Washington. That's not democracy.
      People protest, says Charles Blow, when they don't feel they have access to power.
      "Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised." --Herbert Croly (excerpt)
  January 25
    New security team
      New security team on duty at the downtown government office tower. They say the service costs taxpayers about $1600 a day. I went to a meeting there recently and, at the lobby door, I set off the alarm in the metal detector. The guard said, “It’s probably your belt buckle” as he waved me on into the building.
  January 24
    The hunger
      Maybe a decade ago, I walked through the newsroom of our local paper, which has been in business since the time of the Civil War. Half the desks were already empty. Since then, the paper's been sold a couple of times, I believe, and stripped down even further, and in the morning the front page doesn't always even have a local writer covering a local news story. Some pages might as well be from a copy of USA Today, given the bylines they carry. Looks like there are fewer than ten writers there now, and several are covering Notre Dame sports. They say the writers didn't get paid for a few weeks earlier this winter. As a community of a quarter million people, we're in trouble.
      So there's got to be a hunger for local writing. Got to be. Unless more spirit has been drained out of the community than I had guessed. The way forward, however, is not clear to see.
  January 23
    Making a sequence of poems
      I've been reading and rereading a few dozen short poems, trying to figure out how they might cohere into a package that feels like more than just a stack of poems. That shed light on neighboring poems, or at least share a developing mood, that move in some direction and get somewhere by the end, even if that end is more suggestive than tangible. It's not easy to see how such a thing is possible. Some kind of meaningful sequence.
      Good bands make albums that sometimes seem to cohere, and to advance from song to song in a not arbitrary way. It must be possible. But there's no manual, as far as I know. Look at side one of Abbey Road--in what sense does that cohere? Side two is different, but it's hard to explain why this is so.
      Rereading the poems is has been eye-opening. There's a little poem, six lines, about how we can probably count on a sheaf of papers handed down to us to contain something false, essentially a lie passed down to us. Two and a half lines for that idea. Then the proposal that the lies present in every stack of documents must drive some people over the edge, the proposal that for this reason over time people have burned barns and smashed plows out of long-simmering frustration turned to powerless rage. Then a line and a half left to suggest that the poems before you now will also contain falsehoods, so be on your guard.
      So that's the movement of the poem. On rereading I notice that it contains what I'm now thinking of as a rupture of the social order. The façade of social order, the lies woven into the smooth façade, and the rupture the lies provoke from the powerlessness of the people.
      So now I'm looking at the other poems. None of them are about lies in manuscripts, none of them are about uprisings and burning barns. But maybe some of them are about the lies in the calm façade, maybe some of them are about the occasional ruptures of social order.
      If I can find these, I might start to have poems that could become more interesting when placed near each other in a sequence. To make a quick example, there's a handful of these six-line poem that are, one way or another, about individuals who can't manage as well as they might like to assert their protest against unjust circumstances. For the moment I see those as being related to the more blatant breakthrough, destructive and self-destructive thought it is, of burning the barn. So maybe the sequence of poems is going to be, in part, about whether and how people manage to assert their own voices in society. Not sure, but that's a more concrete idea than what I had a day ago, which was next to nothing. Fingers crossed going forward.
  January 22
    The tailor, his sister, their mother, in Nazi times
      I have left a pebble on her tombstone more than once, but we never met. The other day, in the office, a friend and I slowed way down, retold each other what we knew of that part of her story, to try to understand how this played out for her. We knew that her brother was a tailor. His clothes were dazzling, sharp lines, fabrics pressed, symmetries and curves and elegance. His face was alert and alive. He'd pull a hard candy from behind his niece's ear. The thought of him doing so, and handing over the candy, made her smile seven decades later.
      After the Nazis came into Czechoslovakia, the family must have been careful, must have been reading the tea leaves and pondering their choices and their chances. He never came home one night. The family figured out later that he'd been criticizing the new rulers, thinking he was among friends, but he was mistaken somehow.
      There was no sign of him, and then there was. A man's body, beaten to death, thrown in the river. Tradition called for the observances and the burial to be prompt. The next day his sister boarded a train north to a town where their mother lived in an old folks home. She would deliver the terrible news.
      It's one thing, and it's more than enough, to take the news of a son's death to an aging mother in a home. It's another to bring news of murder, and another still to bring news of the kind of murder. The keen violence, and the hatred and the domination of an entire people that the murder implied, as so many other things did in those days too. It's another thing to bring that sort of news.
      Perhaps she might have talked herself into softening the circumstances in the telling to their mother, and even to herself. Yes, these were bad times, but maybe this was just a bad seed or two that her brother had run into. An exception. Maybe she talked herself into this version of the truth, who knows, but if she did, that version of the story would soon enough disintegrate before her eyes.
      Upon arriving at her destination, she took herself to the old folks home. It was empty, no elders, no caretakers, no sign or note, nothing. She went from door to door on the block, knocking. Some doors, nobody would answer--they pretended not to be home. A couple of doors, opened a few inches. Her question, Where are the elders from the home? To that, a shrug, quickly turning away, closing the door. One or two accepted a slip of paper with an address from her. Please send a letter if anything is known about the elders missing from the home.
      She turned back to the train station and headed south toward their river town. If she had by chance talked herself into thinking that her brother had been unlucky, had run into a couple of thugs, now the story would not hold. The threats were not accidents and bad luck in an angry, hateful time. The threats were comprehensive. Anyone might disappear now. Nobody was safe. The idyllic farm fields passing at the train window might as well have been poisoned. There would be no harvest sustaining enough to matter, to have a hope of healing in this new kind of world.
      At the end of the train car, the door opened. In the shadow there for a second, a man in uniform. Was this someone coming to take her ticket or someone coming to take her life. In the first flash of any new human contact, now and going forth, she would not know. Each time a new face appeared, now and going forth, she would not know.
      My friend and I pieced together this understanding from what we knew of her story. There is a great deal more to tell, a lot more is known, and from what is known more can be deduced and understood. Her daughter in her eighties remembered her mother, the sister of the tailor, as struggling with depression much of her life. At the end of the war, when most of the family's survivors starting looking for a new country to settle in, she remained behind, waiting for the return of their elderly mother, looking for traces of her path if any traces remained. None were ever found, but given where they were living, odds are the journey took her towards Theresienstad, and from there toward the death camps in the east. Eventually, she gave up waiting and looking and rejoined family members in North America.
      I never met her, but I have heard enough of her life story and have deduced and understood from there more than enough. When I walk through the gates of that cemetery, I pass through a patch of pebbles that are meant for our use. I admire the tradition of placing a pebble on a gravestone as a part of a cemetery visit. Look around you, see the work of reflection and remembrance indicated by all these humble pebbles on stones as far as you can see. At the entrance, I pick up several, mostly for people I knew and respected, and one for her, who I have come to know this way and who I never met.
  January 21
    Propaganda is
      We usually think of propaganda as language meant to deceive, don't we? And then we go looking for signs of falseness. But if we shoot a different slant of light through the topic and think of propaganda as language meant to disrupt, corrupt or paralyze the social order, a further part of the mechanism of propaganda might come into view. Language meant to distract? Meant to confuse? Meant to bog down the system? Meant to create incidents that are themselves treated as news, and to ride a wave of self-propagating waves forward into the sunset? Language meant to make a bold or subtle clearing for the operations of power?
      I think a case can be made that some types of political language are meant to challenge the social order, are meant to incite and propagate fresh thought through the social order. Thought that holds more complexity in the public eye in order that something may be changed. I would rather not call this kind of language use propaganda. Another word?
  January 20
    Art and conscience
      According to @MonaEltahowy, Nina Simone said that two kinds of consciousness were raised through her music:
        You must now come to see us, and see our life circumstances.
        You must now know that we see you, and the part you’ve played in shaping our life circumstances.
      During the civil rights movement, the evening news might show video of sheriffs loosing their dogs on protestors or on people lined up to register to vote. In those cases, the first of Simone's two kinds of consciousness were evoked in many places across the nation, historians tell us.
      And evoking the second kind? I'm not sure. It seems likely that talk of white privilege and structural racism is meant to do that work, but things like that provoke huge resistance.
      In the first case, people seem prepared to say, "Yes, we see you and the circumstances of your life. Those are not acceptable. Our society should do something to change those circumstances." In the second case, people do not always seem prepared to say, "Yes, I am implicated, I help to create or maintain those unacceptable circumstances, I do nothing to prevent them, I share responsibility and I have to change."
      You hear stories about people who are transformed by an experience of witness. People who refuse to pay a portion of their taxes, the part they estimate, for example, that goes to arming the nation's armies and fleets for warfare in small, distant countries. But it's not nearly as easy for me to see the second part of Simone's theory in action as the first.
    Dying for a Trump lie
      The thought crossed my mind that Trump's lies about 3-4 million fraudulent votes having been cast in the 2016 election might have actually cost people their lives. Here's my thinking:
        Bad actors elsewhere in the world know that the U. S. sometimes puts pressure on them to lay low, to cool it, to cease and desist. They also know that the U. S. is fully capable of looking the other way, intentionally or unintentionally giving them the green light for their predations on the people and economy of their region.
        Seeing Trump stir the U. S. media and population into chaotic waves of angry discourse over his provocations and pronouncements, and seeing nobody find a way to shame him or shut him up in those years, some of those bad actors elsewhere in the world might rightly have assumed that the U. S. media and political system would be fully distracted by Trump and his backwash for years to come.
        If so, those bad actors would reasonably interpret that as an opening--intentional or accidental--and they'd get back to doing the devil's work more boldly, more often, even in the light of day.
        Once they remembered how much they enjoyed their jobs, these bad actors would probably see a need to kill regional opponents who tried to restrain and inhibit them. Some of the bad actors would likely have some of their opponents killed, knowing that the U. S. was busy with Trump's intentional distractions.
      And thanks to that line of reasoning, if there was actually a way to check those uncheckable facts, I'd be willing to bet money on this: Trump's hogwash about the 3-4 million fraudulent votes in 2016 election almost certainly cost some people their lives, and cost others their hard-earned money, in other parts of the world.
      His lies and our country's inability to do anything about them. Our institutions, feeble and teetering.
  January 19
    Hall of disrepute
      If there were a Hall of Fame, a Hall of Shame, a Hall of Disrepute for world leaders, a few of the leading candidates for inclusion were active in the 1930s. The poet W. H. Auden wrote several poems about the ones everyone knew about in those years. The shortest of those poems, "Epitaph on a Tyrant," ended after just six lines. Still, he managed to pin down a good number of the most common traits of a tyrant, or a would-be tyrant, traits that we recognize in some politicians to this day.
        The tyrant wants everything to be just so. To be perfect, at least as the tyrant defines it.
        The tyrant tells pretty stories, too simple to be misunderstood. The tyrant's poetry is meant to be chanted back to him in a great loud auditorium.
        The tyrant is very good at human psychology, and how to turn it to his advantage.
        The tyrant loves weapons, and weapon systems, and how they can be deployed.
        The tyrant gathers sycophants around him, people in fancy clothes who laugh loudly at all his jokes.
        And finally, make sure you know what you're getting into if you plan to make the tyrant angry or unhappy.
      Auden packed information like this into his six-line poem, crystalizing in one memorable, memorizable little packet a guide to a very dangerous type of human being. The basics are distilled there.
      Lots of people don't like bookish poetry, which is very sad, since poetry and any of the arts are part of our inheritance as human beings. We're entitled to live enriched by the emotions and insights of the arts. They help us us grow larger in spirit and more daring and committed in daily life.
      And lots of people say they don't understand or enjoy the poetry you find in books. I blame myself as a former English teacher for some of that. Now it's payback time. I'll bet you a nickel you'll understand Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant" when you read it aloud in a moment. And I'll bet you another nickel you'll be moved by this six-line poem.

        Epitaph on a Tyrant | W. H. Auden

        Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
        And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
        He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
        And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
        When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
        And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

      Now, while I have your attention, let's make a date to talk about Shakespeare sometime. He's part of our entitlement, our inheritance as a human being too. He knew so much about us, and he knew how to make it sing.
  January 18
    Shibboleth
      In the Book of Judges 12: 5-6, during a war, one regional group seized a ford of the Jordan River. When people asked to cross the river there in order to escape the war's turmoil, army guards listened for differences in accent and singled out for death any refugee from the opposing group. They killed anyone* who pronounced the sh- of shibboleth as an s-.
      In the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo presided over a similar sort of massacre, instructing his troops to single out for death those who could not pronounce the Spanish word for parsley in an approved way.

        Trujillo’s attention to the details was spectacular.
        He taught his murderous goons which laborers
        to spare by the uptown way they rolled their r’s.
        We learn a melody of vowels at mother’s breast;
        consonants tap out the rhythm of our vernacular
        in love songs, but a tyrant may not be impressed.

      Yes, human life can be beautiful, but a tyrant may not be impressed.
      Other episodes like these over the centuries appear in the Wikipedia article on shibboleth. No need to know the other person when a simple surface trait of culture is in plain view.
      ___________
      *The death toll at the ford is reported to be 42,000.
  January 17
    The edgy Dr. King
      A friend writes that rituals can empty out their meaning, or grow lazy where once they were provocative. He suggests listening to Dr. King's speech on the Vietnam War, and see if that doesn't help reawaken our sense of the daring King, the one who poked the conscience of the nation. It's not the familiar phrases heard so many times until they have become slogans that keep a nation awake, it's the specificity of analysis and provocation. It's the particulars that still have a chance to speak, instead of inspiring sleep.
  January 16
    Ways to practice
      I used to ask students to illustrate and test an idea they chose from one reading against the contents of another reading. Whether they did this well or not so well, they were trying for original analysis when they did this. How do the anecdotes in Reading 2 illustrate what the ideas of Author 1? How does Reading 2 push back against those ideas? Given what you've seen as you've illustrated and tested the ideas from one reading against the content of another, where do you stand on the value of those ideas?
      That was a classic assignment in the kind of writing course I learned to teach at Rutgers, and in many ways I never stopped making that kind of assignment. But at Iowa we learned how to create other kinds of writing activities. Some were rhetorical, such as adapting an argument you made in your last paper so that it might work well with a new readership, which is a practical kind of assignment: practicing the practical. Other assignments were formal or stylistic, such as writing about an experience in short or long sentences, in balanced or cumulative sentences, in a formal or informal voice, etc. These assignments were often a kind of play with the tools of the writer's craft.
      Some assignments were conceptual. Write about a time you found yourself at one of life's forks in the road. What were the choices, and what do you think was down each of the paths offered there? Why did you choose left or right? What difference came of that choice.
      In creative writing, we might practice writing under restrictions. Write a poem that includes a color, the name of an old friend, an aroma, an act of kindness or theft. Writing that assignment would make you think about topics you wouldn't ordinarily write about, and you might surprise yourself doing that.
      So many ways to practice, so many things to practice, more than I've listed here, if you like that sort of learning. They add up to confidence and fluency, I think, if you keep at it.
  January 15
    Buttigieg as propaganda target
      In the car, sliding around the radio dial, I heard one of the fast-talkers going on about Pete Buttigieg, former mayor here in South Bend and now a member of the Biden Cabinet, Secretary of Transportation. The monologue was very light on particulars and long on character assassination. So, I thought, somewhere in the far-right media planning center they've decided that Buttigieg is a threat and the populace's attitudes toward him need to be tuned for future use. Low-information, high-attitude radio attacking a public figure pretty much has to be called out for what it is: propaganda.
  January 14
    The story we'll be remembered for
      All around us, we have movies about superheroes and the like, but Rebecca Solnit notes that in this time of crisis, "The rescuers we need are mostly not individuals, they are collectives – movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society." I guessed the other day that most of us turn to the resources of the web, the most breath-taking tool of our age, not for collectivity but for our solo work and play. Perhaps the most iconic image of citizenship in our time will turn out to be the isolated individual, seated, in headphones, controller in hand, facing a fancy screen and playing a fantasy shooting game. That's not a good enough story to tell ourselves about the good life or the life of a citizen contributing to society. But lacking a better one that we can share, the solo dude practicing his shooter game might be the story we'll be remembered for.
  January 13
    Moby Dick and Tár
      (Spoilers? Pretty sure, yes.) In Moby Dick, a monomaniacal leader chases after his glory, dragging everyone else along with him on the journey and into the depths of the sea. Melville tracks not just his crazed quest but also his effects on those around him. In Tár, a deeply selfish person with a seemingly profound connection to symphonic music mainly follows the musical genius into depths of her own creation, with occasional asides to notice how her energy disrupts life around her.
      Neither of the two of them come close to the kind of self-knowledge that might heal them. In the long book, there are other rewards for the reader besides watching a doomed, fixated quester go about his business. In Tár, it's mainly the portrait of the symphony conductor.
      The film is an opportunity for brilliance for the central actor, and I'm pretty sure she lives up to the role. It's an unlikable character, though, in a film with an unpleasant and perhaps familiar insight. Some character traits tempt people to grasp for what they should not want, should not have, and in time they destroy themselves.
      So, within the narrow path the film has chosen for itself, it's powerful and you can think about it. But like the claustrophobic gray hallways in the posh Berlin apartment where the genius lives, I'm not sure I want to walk there.
  January 12
    Essential fluency
      I don't remember any teacher ever mentioning the idea of fluency. I'm sure different fields describe it in different words, but I'm talking about writing or doing leatherwork or baking, whatever trade or craft you have in mind, and keeping your hand in, not letting yourself get rusty, practicing your chops, whatever you'd like to call it, pretty much every day, so that the machinery stays well-oiled, the joints don't ache, there is a flow of music or words or engraving or whatever it is, and you're able to see what you should see, move as you need to move, to practice the craft. If you practice every day, you build fluency, no matter what word you'd rather use instead of fluency.
      And I don't remember teachers talking about that. Maybe coaches did, not sure -- the coach of the high school team I was on sat at a desk in a dark part of the room, with an old-style desk lamp arced over his book, and during our practices he made his way through the Bible a page or two each day, from end to end during the school year, I recall. So we practiced, but he didn't talk about practice in terms like fluency. He didn't really talk about the sport much at all.
      But fluency and its synonyms are all around us, in every honorable field, and probably in some dishonorable ones as well. No matter what the field, we have to know how to build fluency. We should probably talk to young people about this essential life skill.
      Essential? I bet any foreign language teacher would say so. If you aren't fluent, you can't really claim to speak the language.
      Or maybe we should talk to young people about the difference between being a dabbler and someone who builds fluency in a field. Then we should ask them what field they'd like to explore right now, not years from now, after graduation, with fluency as a short-term goal. And help them do it.
  January 11
    The fork
      For the web, a fork in the road. Down this way: people who know how to organize companies have a chance to get rich luring people into silos. Down that way: software writers and users who know how to organize themselves and their tools have a chance to work and create in an open place.
      Academics who take an interest in the web tend to think of it in terms of being a public intellectual. Of being a single person speaking from a position of expertise. They like the reach of a popular web voice, if they can get it, but they miss the part about organizing.
      Bannon types know that nothing is easier than drowning out the single voice of a person, public intellectual or otherwise. And the reach and staying power that might be achieved by organizing people together, and using good tools to do so, is not what most academics try for.
      Users who enjoy the open spaces of the web -- that's one thing. Software writers and users who organize themselves and their tools to create and work in the open spaces of the web -- that's another thing entirely.
      Just as academics tend to think the solo public voice is the special thing the web offers them, my hunch is that most users of the web tend to think freedom to read and roam is the special thing that the web offers them. No organization, no affiliation, no chance for power.
      When voices of academics or other web users aren't organized, the masses of information and garbage of the web washes over them, and they become as powerful as they would be if they remained silent. And the powerful love the silence of others.
      People may remember that web links are about organizing information, but we tend not to remember links also open up our chance to organize ourselves.
  January 10
    The death of a word
      Used to be that an idea was called "simplistic" if it simplified something to the point of being reductive, if it distorted something in the process of trying to express it simply, or if someone had accepted a far-too-simple understanding as adequate when it was not. Calling something simplistic was a negative judgment, not a neutral description. Calling your friend's idea simplistic was an insult.
      Nowadays people use that word to mean simple or really simple. In today's USA Today Network article about choosing plants in a time of climate change, Sarah Bowman writes, "Planting a tree may seem simplistic, but there is a lot that goes into picking the right one . . . ."
      In earlier times, when newspapers had more substantial editing in place, and when the meaning of the word had not yet become blurred by language change, someone in the newsroom would have crossed out simplistic and replaced it with simple. Planting a tree may seem simple. But language change is usually irreversible, and there will be no going back. The two words are now synonyms of the blander (but useful) word simple. The concept once carried by the more critical of the two words, simplistic, can no longer be expressed in American English by a single word.
      There's a phrase in the opening lines of Beowulf, the epic poem from a thousand years ago, that is mostly made up of words that have been entirely lost from the English language. Spoken aloud, it sounds roughly like this: "hoo the athelingas ellen fremedon." It probably meant, roughly, "...how the nobles their mighty deeds had performed." So Ellen was a pretty special word in English a thousand years ago, but exactly what it meant to the folks in the feasting hall is likely out of our grasp. Something in the neighborhood of mightily or mighty deeds, but what was mighty to them?
      The materials of culture and meaning, expressed in artifacts and woven into the brain pathways of living people, are profoundly transient.
  January 9
    AI and good writing
      Frighteningly good essays? That's what one report says. It seems to me that the ChatGPT software is able to produce a list of something’s general traits. But it is unable to address a precisely worded question with a careful and relevant line of thought. Compared to a line of thought, a list is unsophisticated.
      One clue to the lower level of writing skill in an essay organized as a list: you can change the order of paragraphs and likely not weaken or strengthen the essay. List paragraphs don’t contribute anything to the nearby paragraphs. Lists say, “Here’s one thing. Here’s another.” Lists say, "These things belong on this list, but other than that fact they are not yet interesting to talk about in relation to each other." (Like a grocery list.) Lists are agnostic about meaningful relationships, about cause and effect, about contrast, about gray areas.
      But in essays that work out a line of thought, a paragraph makes possible the thinking presented in the next paragraph. A later paragraph can be more specific, more speculative, more convincing, more subtle, etc., because an earlier paragraph has opened a conceptual space for further thought. In a line of thought, transition words like "but" claim a meaningful relationship between one paragraph and the next.
      It’s impressive that software can produce accurate list paragraphs and a run of grammatical sentences. But that’s the most sophisticated thing I’ve seen out there so far. In an important work meeting, the team member who can only produce lists will soon be fired.
      If teachers ask students to write essays where a list is a decent answer, rewarded by a decent grade, then there’s going to be a lot of plagiarism. Teaches can ask better questions than that, if they don’t have too many students, too many papers to read, too much intrusion by reductive state standards, etc.
      Intelligence that stops at listing isn't very intelligent, whether it is artificial or otherwise.
  January 8
    Blogging at work
      The NY Times article this weekend by Jordon Teicher about engineering firms asking tech people to write blog posts for the company's blog confirms what bloggers probably know. If a post sounds like it was written by the PR office or sales staff, nobody will want to read it. If a post talks about the work the tech team actually does, what's interesting about it, how problems get solved, what the workplace is like on a day to day basis, and especially if people share what they've learned doing the work, then a reader is being given something real and valuable. The articles suggests that people look at posts like these to help decide whether they'd like to work at the firm or not. For example, do the posts show that team members have first-rate, up-to-date gear to work with, or not? Honesty and empathy were mentioned, and that makes sense too. There's already enough writing in the world that keeps our shared humanity at arm's length. Who wants to live like that forty or fifty hours a week?
  January 7
    Normalizing the extremes well underway
      I was working on a new poem about a progression of things becoming normal. Not sure it will be any good, but the progression seems important to write down somewhere. Everybody in one wing of the society having guns becomes normal, and everybody in that wing taking up rhetoric that presents the other wing as traitors becomes normal, and you hear about groups training for paramilitary encounters that they expect will be coming--that becomes normal too. Guns in place, justifying rhetoric in place, training in place, expectations in place, all normalized in one part of society. What's holding them back at this point? Not sure much is.
  January 6
    Lies of the ignorant overlords
      I've been tinkering with this one off and on for a couple of weeks. I may keep revising, I don't know. I don't have a title yet. The six-line rhyming form comes from Auden's tiny masterpiece, Epitaph on a Tyrant, which packs more punch into the final two lines than most poems manage in a dozen.

      Lies of the ignorant overlords, the clowns,
      their fantasies and spreadsheets, they’ve
      forgotten who they pledged once to serve.
      Street-corner children in disjointed lives,
      like trees untended in unimproved towns,
      school dismal, toys just sticks and knives.

  January 5
    The labyrinth around us, II
      In his powerful speech to the Ukrainian people on New year's Eve, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke of a labyrinth, a labyrinth of illusions that have been disintegrated in the last year. Zelenskyy uses this 17-minute speech to name for his people what he believes has replaced the illusions. It's a sense of self for individuals, communities, and nation, composed of terms given meaning by the specificity of the year's events. The speech grounds a set of ideals in the particulars of that history, and it invites the Ukrainian people to organize their thoughts and emotions around those ideals as they are defined and illustrated in recent events. Like Baldwin, Zelenskyy sees the risk of illusion all around us, a people fooling itself with an inadequate understanding of its circumstances and its character. And like Baldwin, he sees the chance, perhaps every day, to replace the illusions and attitudes with something they've named and chosen for themselves. To rename themselves for themselves, and in the world's eyes, with thoughtful, clear-headed intention.
        See the overview of the speech by James Fallows. (Free subscription might be required, not sure.)
      It's not something we see very often in the political speech of our country. Lyndon Johnson gave a speech in the 1960s about the way poverty grinds a person down, acknowledging a reality that we tended to look away from. He gave another speech before Congress in which he accepted the language of the Civil Rights Movement and brought it into the center of American life, rejecting our complacency about racism and poverty and committing the country to change, saying from the podium in Congress, "We shall overcome." The activists were doing the work of changing the language about race in America, and he helped speed up that change by acknowledging and amplifying their words. He said, in effect, that their words and their understanding was now the central understanding for our society. It was a moment of acknowledgement and renewal at the fountain of our shared reality.
      A people can name themselves or be named by others or by the inherited rote formulations of an imperfect and even cruel past. One reason why the Breitbart & Bannon power-play method of intentionally filling the media space with mistrust, falsehood, and garbage is so dangerous, is that it puts off, perhaps forever, the moment when we choose to look and think clearly, puts off the chance for a moment of renewal.
      Old words, old formulations are what got us into the trouble we're in today.
    The labyrinth around us, I
      In the early 1960s, in The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote of a labyrinth of attitudes and fears that prevented the United States from casting off its racist ways, from fear and greed keeping the reality of our circumstances at arm's length, preventing us from seeing clearly our circumstances and our failures. Yet reality is always here, ready to teach us if we dare look its way, Baldwin suggested. In those eloquent pages, he said that we might renew ourselves at the fountain of our own lives. We might always do so.
      In our idle thoughts, our stock phrases, our words to friends, our media diet, our social posts, we are always in our near the labyrinth of attitudes belonging to this moment in our culture's history. We are always threatened by the rote language, the deadness of stock phrases and the attitudes behind them, the ease with which they appear to account for our experience. And we are always within sight of a possible exit from the labyrinth, within sight of the fountain of renewal promised to those who look hard enough at experiences for the stock words to grow pale and fade away. A time follows when we don't know what to say, but describing the world begins again, the fountain of language and arts has a chance to grow strong and offer us renewal. This is always within our reach, if we dare to do the work.
      So Baldwin says, the labyrinth of attitudes is always there, and the bracing fountain of reality, of renewal is always there as well. We wake up each day with the choice before us. As individuals, as families, as communities, as a nation or even a world. Every day a choice.
      Walking out of the labyrinth requires naming the world another way, using new words that honestly, not glibly, recognize suffering and cruelty, bravery and dignity and hope. Doing so usually requires naming the particular acts of particular people, in essential moments of their lives. It is not in any way adequate simply to say the big words, the slogan words, the noble words. These words, without the specificity of people's lives to animate them, are little more than propaganda.
      In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway's narrator rejects the speeches comprised only of the big words. he is repulsed by these speeches by World War I politicians when he places them in his mind next to the particulars of certain particular places where people suffered and endured or did not. He struggles to name the experience of war more truly. That war, with the modern improvements in weapons, with poison gas and barbed wire and trenches, with artillery shells reaching across the no-man's land for hours and days, that war, he said, was like the stockyards in Chicago if nothing was done with the meat after the slaughter. No use or redemption. That was his formulation of the reality of trench warfare.
      In World War II, magazines sent reporters and photographers to the front, but they softened the stories and pictures they printed in the beginning. In time, first pictures of combat areas began to appear, and writers like Ernie Pyle worked out ways to tell stories that respected the grief and suffering of soldiers. They stopped protecting the friends and family back home from hints of the reality their loved ones were suffering at the front. They nudged the society away from the glib words of wartime patriotism toward a fuller sense of reality. You might see a soldier smoothing the uniform back in place around the fatal wound of a fellow soldier he respected. You might see past the dirty uniform and unshaved face of a soldier, the effects of living outside for weeks at a time, you might see past that now to the eyes of a twenty-year-old, barely an adult now but exhausted and cramped with fatigue and with the weight of what he had seen and felt and feared, looking in the eyes like an old man who still carries great burdens in his heart. The country let some of that reality in for a time later in the war. We started numbering World Wars in those days.
      Not surprisingly, much of the literature and art of the twentieth century has been about despair and chaos. Think of Picasso's painting of the aerial bombardment of Guernica, for example. Even in more ordinary places, we see it, for example in the 1960s TV show Combat, which occasionally used twisted methods of visual storytelling developed for The Twilight Zone to evoke the mental torture that sometimes overpowered the defenses of soldiers during World War II.
      Yet when it comes to some things, we avert our eyes. We accept the labyrinth. We defer the chance for renewal. Nevertheless, Baldwin suggests, the exit from the labyrinth is always there, the fountain is always there, if we choose.
  January 4
    Inside game, outside game, long game
      Recalling his work with and in the face of Dr. Anthony Fauci during the early years of the H.I.V.-AIDS crisis, Peter Staley shares some lessons of activism, including having to push hard on institutions that are at least nominally charged with helping to solve the crisis. Staley also comments explicitly on the importance of having people with H.I.V. on all the committees guiding the medical research. Patient advocacy, having a seat at the table and a meaningful voice in the conversation, and not just one voice at one table, as well as pressing hard on institutions from outside and insisting that progressive changes not evaporate at the end of one person's term in office--these are some of the lessons in Staley's remembrance of Dr. Fauci's work in those years.
  January 3
    The Democracy™ brand
      Propaganda is language intended to deceive people, meant to enrage them or make them docile. Seems we could all agree on that. But a couple of years ago the tallest building in town was renovated and renamed, and suddenly at the top floor the words Liberty Tower appeared, visible from afar. I imagine that the new name pleases some people, but it had a nagging effect on me. It felt like an empty gesture, perhaps, as if saying patriot words or painting them big on a building was in itself meaningful. It felt empty, or too easy a gesture. It felt like a step in the direction of patriotism being expressed endlessly. Like singing the national anthem between every inning of a ballgame.
      I'm sure some liked the change, so why did it strike me that way?
      It seems to empty important language of specificity, maybe, empty it of meaning, make it rote, make it maybe into an unsanctioned and thoughtless ritual, make it a form of language indoctrination. Make people feel the need to stand at attention most of the time? I'm not sure. But it felt both empty and indoctrinating to me.
      And so I'll add to my opening sentence: Propaganda is language intended to deceive people, meant to enrage them or make them docile, language meant to turn important words into shallow rituals, language meant to fill the air with unquestionable generalities, meant to degrade public discourse and muffle or stifle the harder discussions we need to be having.
      It's branding masquerading as democratic practice.
      Paint a patriotic word high on the nearest tall building and see what you think?
      PS. A passing thought, probably not original, is that enraging people can be a way of making them docile because it turns their attention away from the role the propaganda-maker has in maintaining an oppressive status quo. It's can be a distraction meant to stop thinking, yes?
  January 2
    Denunciations
      On a wall in a museum in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I read a list of things artists try to accomplish in their works. I didn't write down the list, but from memory I'd say it included things like making something beautiful or capturing the spirit of a people in their time and place. But one word stood out and I am sure I remember it precisely: Denunciations. Before visiting San Juan, I had read that the museums were more political than we often see up north, and this turned out to be true, I'd say. When there are things worthy of being denounced in the history of a people, some artists will take on the role, along with the other roles of the artist from the more expected parts of that list. On three brief first visits to two small and one medium-sized museum, I saw quite a number of historically conscious and critical works. Many works were beautiful, fresh, sometimes shocking, and in literal content and in moods and styles and other quieter ways, it felt like a great cultural silence was (for me, the naive visitor) being ended. This felt good and challenging and implied personally having operated for long periods in a too-narrowly imagined cultural, artistic, and spiritual realm. And there was a lot of beauty that was inflected in fresh ways that seemed deeply connected to the region of the Caribbean.
  January 1
    Political parties as capture tools
      When a government agency or function that oversees and guards against the excesses of a particular industry has been infiltrated and dominated by figures from the industry, essentially ending the regulatory function and replacing it with the sham appearance of oversight, they call that regulatory capture. A section of the Wikipedia article on the subject suggests, for example, that the Federal Communication Commission has been captured by the media industry that the FCC is meant to regulate. As a result, you might expect to see larger numbers of radio and tv stations owned by smaller numbers of companies, and increased difficulty for smaller start-ups and for companies attempting to broadcast the voices of underrepresented groups. This progression would serve monied interests and would degrade the quality of democracy, demoralizing and alienating citizens as a result. It's such a destructive process that it deserves more attention in society, in the writing of columnists, bloggers, and reporters.
      The destructive process called regulatory capture applies to political parties more clearly than we tend to say. Our recently deceased representative to the U. S. House, Jackie Walorski, was a deeply faithful party member and classic sort of back bencher, I thought. Her social media streams mentioned many events she attended in parts of the Ind.-2nd House District where you'd be pretty sure the audience was already made up of her fans, and next to no events where she's come into the city and speak with Democratic voters. In that sense she seemed to understand her service in the House as service to her party, not service to her district. In a country deeply gerrymandered to serve party interests, especially in Indiana, gerrymandering captures legislative function for a political party, serving as proof that our parties enjoy thinking of themselves as mechanisms of state capture. So much for democracy.
      (Paragraph 1 revised from a 12/31/22 posting.)
December 2022
  December 31
    Captured government
      When a government agency or function that oversees and guards against the excesses of a particular industry has been infiltrated and dominated by figures from the industry, essentially ending the regulatory function and replacing it with the sham appearance of oversight, they call that regulatory capture. A section of the Wikipedia article on the subject suggests, for example, that the Federal Communication Commission has been captured by the media industry that the FCC is meant to regulate. As a result, you might expect to see larger numbers of radio and tv stations owned by smaller numbers of companies, and increased difficulty for smaller start-ups and for companies attempting to broadcast the voices of underrepresented groups. This progression would serve monied interests and would degrade the quality of democracy, demoralizing and alienating citizens as a result. It's such a destructive process that it deserves more attention in society, in the writing of columnists, bloggers, and reporters.