When the great, white father is black

Timothy Egan in The New York Times explains why the inauguration of Barack Obama raises hopes on the Indian reservations and among tlhe native people generally.

He writes of the hopeless despair that seems to have a chance of being dispelled by Obama's message of hope:

The epic struggle for natives has been to avoid getting washed away by the flood of dominant culture, where Indians make up less than 2 percent of more than 300 million Americans.

That, and the physical toll that losing this big land has taken on them. Indians die younger than most other Americans, suffer from higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, debilitating dietary problems.

Obama has paid attention and acknowledged the Native Americans' subjugated status in America. While American Indians are skeptical and cynical of any politician, they are hoping that Obama can deliver on his promise of change:

But beyond the desire for urgent, fundamental infrastructure help, Indians look to Obama as a powerful narrative. People who were subjugated, with near-genocidal brutality, feel a kinship with people who were first brought here in chains, even though Obama is an immigrant’s son.

Wrapping it up

As many people try to make nice to George W. Bush as he exits office, others cannot so easily dismiss the wreckage he leaves behind. Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post summarizes it up nicely:

President Bush famously asserts that history's verdict on his presidency won't come until he's long dead. But far from waiting until his corpse is cold, the verdict is largely in before he's even left the building.

Some things just aren't gonna change, no matter how much time passes. Here is Bush's legacy, in part:

He took the nation to a war of choice under false pretenses -- and left troops in harm's way on two fields of battle. He embraced torture as an interrogation tactic and turned the world's champion of human dignity into an outlaw nation and international pariah. He watched with detachment as a major American city went under water. He was ostensibly at the helm as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression took hold. He went from being the most popular to the most disappointing president, having squandered a unique opportunity to unite the country and even the world behind a shared agenda after Sept. 11. He set a new precedent for avoiding the general public in favor of screened audiences and seemed to occupy an alternate reality. He took his own political party from seeming permanent majority status to where it is today. And he deliberately politicized the federal government, circumvented the traditional policymaking process, ignored expert advice and suppressed dissent, leaving behind a broken government.

Newspapers are for burning

• This graph from Pew Research shows the trends for where people get their news during the 21st century.

Newspapers are in trouble. The print media have been battling for some years now to survive the competition for readers and advertisers from the Internet. Newspaper chains of five years ago no longer exist in the same form. Few of the major newspapers of the northern Midwest have the same owners they did five years ago, except for those owned by Lee Enterprises, which includes the Rapid City Journal. And Lee stocks are so valueless that they are being removed from trade on the stock exchanges.

Tim Giago, founder of The Lakota Times, thinks newspapers will not solve their declines in circulation until they organize together and stop putting their work on the web. There is no doubt that people don't buy news that they can get free on the Internet. Newspapers are only one of the media to put news on the Internet. People will continue to get their information from from their computers as long as it is free. And newspapers do have a problem with timeliness. This morning's local newspaper carried stories in its first four pages that I saw three days ago from Internet sources.

Contrary to the conventional absence of wisdom, the fact is that newspapers have led the development of using new technology to disseminate the news they gather. However much bloggers may give their notions of the trouble with newspapers, this article in Slate traces their attempts to incorporate information technology into their operations. Bloggers have opinions. Few have actual information. Newspapers that value journalism as a discipline have the edge on accuracy and reliability, and the death of newspapers poses serious threats to democracy.

However, many newspapers do not deserve to survive. In their efforts to keep up with current notions of journalistic fads, they have dummied down their products to compete with cable news, its local versions on television, and Internet news aggregators. The dimmer journalistic lights have followed the alleged standard of writing to an eighth-grade audience and have lowered that to third grade. That rule has never been used in real journalistic organizations which concern themselves with clear, effective writing. Good writing elevates its readers. It does not cater to ignorance, mental laziness, and the celebration of platitudes and the seamy. Some newspapers have contributed to their own demise by dummying-down their content and the level of literacy on which they evaluate news and presentation. The tabloid press, however, seems to be more sucessful at weathering the economic crunch that besets the newspaper business.

While the current mis-mythology is that print journalism is losing readers--which is true--it is also true that print media are experiencing a growing schism between the intellectual and popular culture. Blogs decry what they call the Mainstream Media, and it is a fact that newspaper circulation even among the most prestigious is declining, but it is also true that people who want excellently written, reliable news, and competently informed opinion are dependent upon organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and with all its financial woes, The Chicago Tribune for relevant, sharply focused, and literate information and ideas. That dependency does cause alarm among the more literate class.

There was and in some cases is an editorial process in newspapers designed to insure accurate, complete facts and competent, clear writing. When a reporter submitted a story, it would first go to the copy desk, which would correct any SPUG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) problems, deal with organizational matters, and look for any omissions or improvements that could be made. Then, before it was set in type, an editor would review the story for newsworthiness, perspective, verified facts, essential background, and appropriate style. If a piece needed revisions, it would be sent back to the reporter or sent to the rewrite desk. Years ago, on some newspapers, all the writing was done at the rewrite desk. Reporters would call in or present their reports, and highly experienced and proficient writers would do the actual writing of them.

Electronics changed that process. Television and radio journalism became largely a matter of stringing sound-bites together. Electronic reports had no time for background, highly informative writing, or full development of news stories. The Edward R. Murrows and the McNeil-Lehrers are considered boring by the majority of listeners and viewers. With computers, newspapers also circumvented the editorial process. Reporters submit their writing to a server. In many newspapers, editors only place stories on the pages and write headlines for them. They do not get involved in actual editing and rewriting. This process cuts the need for editorial personnel and eliminates the many steps of the traditional editorial process.

As a section editor, I made the final decisions about what went into the sections for which I was responsible. However, my copy was reviewed for clarity before being set in type and was pro0f-read afterward. And every morning at 7:15, there was a conference with the editors that reviewed the previous day's edition and planned the work and layout for the day. If there were problems to be noted or improvements to be made, they would be covered at length in these conferences.

In all the conjecture and talk about the demise of newspapers, few comments deal with what journalism is as a profession and the process that establishes editorial integrity and quality. Initially, journalism was a literary art. Journalists prided themselves on being fine and knowledgeable writers. Over the years, journalism schools have become disassociated from departments of English in universities and have become allied with departments of business, marketing, and social science. The emphasis has shifted from reporting facts and a literary quality of writing to measuring and manipulating the audience.

Critics of culture of note that in the last three decades of the 20th century, American culture underwent some severe intellectual and moral failures, which the critics see as the result of a declining literacy. Low test scores in mathematics and science get much press because they are seen as more directly related to competitiveness in the economy, but reading and writing scores have also lagged. The most telling evaluation of the literacy of a culture is in the level of material it consults for information. The Pew graph above illustrates the trend.

Bloggers contemplate the death of newspapers with schadenfreude. They take a joy in thinking that they are driving newspapers out of business and will replace them as sources of news. A number of articles have appeared concerning the prediction that The New York Times will be defunct by May of this year. Some dispute the premise of the prediction. But the financial statements show a possibility that the newspaper business could disintegrate as rapidly as the financial markets. There will be no bail-outs for the news business, however.

The financial state of newspapers is depressing. The literate state of the Internet is deplorable. One of the reasons is that political hacks who tend to dominate the blogosphere think they are journalists. As a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review points out, they aren't. The real danger is that a readership is developing that does not make a distinction between real reporting and careful writing and the representations of fact made by people possessed by partisanship and opinions that demonstrate their warp. To them, facts are something to distort or make up.

There is much good journalism available online, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications that, like it or not, have set a literacy standard that is seldom matched online. Being online brings up another matter besides journalistic quality that does not get mentioned--the efficacy of print on paper. Print graphics is a science. It deals with the formats most conducive for human psycho-motor apparatus to effectively absorb and understand what is read. Newspapers, magazines, and books have an edge for heavy-duty reading, while television and computer monitors suffice for quick, superficial takes on a subject.

Whatever the format, there is an audience, however much in decline, for a high standard of reporting and writing. Many newspapers may die. Those people looking for quality writing and excellence in reporting will be served somehow. The real danger in the demise of journalism is in the expansion of the culture wars, which are somewhat in remission. Other countries have experienced class warfare between the educated and the ignorant and resentful. Our country developed because of a vigorous press striving to examine the best that is thought and expressed. It has from the beginning moved toward the acquisition of education and literacy.

The death of our best newspapers may well signal the end of that movement.

Huffington repudiates "debunking" of Al Gore and climate change

Three writers, David Roberts and Kevin Grandia, and A. Siegal, have responded to the post I cited in "Hacks, hoopleheads, and outright doofs" and demolished the arguments that Harold Ambler used to show that Al Gore is wrong. Arianna Huffington issued a statement repudiating Ambler's post:

Harold Ambler reached out to me about posting a critical piece on Al Gore and the environment. We are always open to posts that present opinions contrary to HuffPost's editorial view -- and have welcomed many conservative voices, such as David Frum, Tony Blankley, Michael Smerconish, Bob Barr, Joe Scarborough, Jim Talent, etc., to the site. We have featured also countless posts from the leading lights of the Green movement, including Robert Redford, Laurie David, Carl Pope, Van Jones, David Roberts, and many others -- and I myself have written extensively about the global warming crisis, and have been highly critical of those who refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence.

When Ambler sent his post, I forwarded it to one of our associate blog editors to evaluate, not having read it. I get literally hundreds of posts a week submitted like this and obviously can't read them all -- which is why we have an editorial process in place. The associate blog editor published the post. It was an error in judgment. I would not have posted it. Although HuffPost welcomes a vigorous debate on many subjects, I am a firm believer that there are not two sides to every issue, and that on some issues the jury is no longer out. The climate crisis is one of these issues.

The attacks on Gore among the regressives is a residual hatred because they know he garnered more votes than George W. Bush in the 2000 election and because most people know that W. became president and launched a war through chicanery. The denial of global warming and its human causes among the regressives is more reflective of their attitude toward science. They don't want to give up their belief in alchemy--that gold can be made from lead---and that human personality is made up of the four humors--blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. The intellectual stance of the regressives is called uncreative anachronism.

Hacks, hoopleheads and outright doofs

"Hacks, hoopleheads and outright doofs"

The late semanticist, university president, and U. S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa talked of the burgeoning media which produced a blizzard of words in which people get disoriented and lost. South Dakota's Nicholas Black Elk envisioned a society experiencing an explosive disintegration when words lost the objects they were moored to and were dissolved by the miasma from the linguistic decay of people imposing their subjective notions onto words. Hayakawa proposed that the U.S. declare English as its official language. He said bi-lingualism is fine for individuals, but not for countries, which need to conduct their business in precise, unambiguous terms. Hayakawa understood the problem of people exchanging words in the same ostensible language but having different meanings for the words flying back and forth. It is the lesson of the Tower of Babel but all in the same language. The fad of deconstruction in English departments was a belief that language inevitably disintegrates, and there isn't a hell of a lot that can be done about it.

Other semanticists acknowledge the problem with the deterioration of language to the point where no objective meaning is possible, but do not think that declaring an official language can reestablish a language as the effective currency of thought and expression. They point out that people who are familiar with more than one language generally have a more precise understanding of denotation, connotation, and nuance, and that English has become the dominant language of the world because of its inherent grammatical capability of absorbing new information while maintaining the original referents of its words. This constructionist camp thinks the antidote to total disintegration of language is an intensification of education in literacy. The study of language and language arts, with rhetoric as a major component, will allow the language itself to re-establish its semantic reliabiity.



The effectiveness of words, as is true of democracy, is a matter of human will. People decide to either consult arbiters of meaning, such as dictionaries, or not. In a democracy, people decide either to respect and to honestly evaluate differing opinions or not. In either case, when they decide not, communication ends and interminable noise begins. People who respect language try to maintain its precision and reliability. People who wish to impose themselves on the rest of the world deconstruct and destroy language.

Hayakawa posited that people speak in two forms of language: the language of reports and the language of judgments. In the language of reports, they try to picture the objective realities we experience in common. As in the song from the Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, the language of reports begins with "do you see what I see?" In the language of judgments, people give us only the maps of their mentalities. And when the judgments are not formed from a rigoroous and thorough examination of reports what we find is ignorant presumption and decadent stupidity. In the field of rhetoric, forming judgments is a methodical process of surveying the reports about human experience. Both Hayakawa and Black Elk saw an end to communication when judgments displace information as the primary business of language.

People do have opinions and attitudes. They express them relentlessly. In this country, the right to express opinions is a basic freedom. Often, however, when exercising their right of free speech, people forget that other people have the concomitant right to choose whether they wish to listen, to dismiss other people's opinions as irrelevant nonsense--or to exercise some other critical judgment about what they hear. And when their opinions are rejected in some way, some souls howl and whine about their right to free speech being abridged.

That gets to the matter of blogs. I am often called an anti-blogger. Some assume an element of hypocrisy is involved because I criticize blogs but I blog myself. And as I have said repeatedly, I am not anti-blogging. I think that the Internet has the potential to be a huge boon to human commmunication. But it also has the potential to be used largely to exchange ignorance and misinformation and false witness. A large portion of blogs is devoted to the ignorant presumptions of their authors. Blogging is largely an ego-driven activity in which people labor under the delusion that their precious little attitudes and opinions are valuables that the world is waiting to receive. They are exercises in verbal masturbation, not productive intercourse. Some are devoted to maligning others. They are mean, petty, and display mentalities possessed of ill will.

Most news media go through an editoral lprocess in which the great editorial nurse smacks down the erectile ego with a wet towel, or a grizzled old editor asks a reporter to show him the verifications and attributions of facts, or tells a columnist basking in preciousness to demonstrate his thinking, not his opinion of himself. Such concern about the integrity of reporting and reasoning is not much practiced in the media anymore and never was much of a consideration among bloggers.

Of the blogs that try to carry a heavy news component, The Huffington Post is an example. But even some of its contributors flail away at their overheated egos on occasion. One example is a young man who presumes to debunk Al Gore and his campaign on global warming.

He enumerates points where he thinks Al Gore is wrong and begins by claiming that the term "climate change" is a redundancy. He claims that change and climate are synonymous. Climate is always in a state of flux, he states. Therefore, the term "climate change" is nonsensical.

First of all, the term is one in which climate is a nominal adjective used to modify the noun change. Secondly, one of America's best descriptive dictionaries, The American Heritage, gives these definitions for climate:

1. The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind that characteristically prevail in a particular region.

2. A region of the earth having particular meteorological conditions: lives in a cold climate.

So, certain regions have characteristic climatic features.

Then that same dictionary defines change when used as a noun:

1. The act, process, or result of altering or modifying: a change
in facial expression.

2. The replacing of one thing for another, substitution: a change of atmosphere, a change of ownership.

3. A transformation or transition from one state, condition, or phase to another: the change of seasons.

In other words, "climate" is the prevailing meteorological characteristics of a region--or the globe itself--and they may change to other prevailing characteristics. "Climate change" is a perfectly grammatical, semantically valid term. The young man's claims of redundancy are specious and grossly, grammatically ignorant. He gives not an accurate report of concepts he tries to discuss, but instead the malformed designs of his mentality.

The young man does, however, what is very common among blogs. He does not use words defined by informed consensus. He makes up his own definitions and then discredits other people who do not subscribe to his definitions. This deconstruction of the language for the purposes of maligning and impugning other people is the reason people find blogs of no intellectual merit, a matter of intellectual decadence in many cases. But the dissemination of malignity is the very purpose for which some blogs came into being.

Some of the decadent blogs are the products of malformed egos, of otherwise inconsequential people who have found in blogs a medium for self-adulation and self-promotion. It is the kind of puerilism that contributes nothing constructive to the language or the culture. Other of the decadent blogs were created precisely to spread ill will and wreak destruction upon the language.

The blizzard of words is often detritus blown about by the winds of egotism. While the print media is in a state of decline because the Internet has changed the intellectual climate, it is also more essential than ever before to have a criticism of literature and language that discerns between the self-serving language of judgments and the communicative language of reports. Our educational institutions, as the language constructionists insist, are being charged with teaching the elements of valid grammar and the qualities of true literacy as they never have before. The evaluation of the effectiveness of our schools will not be determined by average scores on standardized tests but by the level of literacy on which our culture operates. A new way but also very old way of assessing education is being promoted, and it will emphasize integrity and competence in the use of language.

As Proverbs says:

10:14: The wise lay up knowledge, but the babbling of a fool brings ruin near.

And,

11:12: Whoever belittles another lacks sense, but an intelligent person remains silent. 13. A gossip goes about telling secrets, but one who is trustworthy keeps a confidence. 14. Where there is no guidance, a nation fails, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.

We'll see which way the blogs go on.

Have yourself a somber little New Year

I joined a fraternity when a student in a private Lutheran college. Instead of "hell week" the fraternities had "help week," during which the pledges assumed tasks that would help the community. Among other things, my pledge class painted the interior of a Salvation Army dormitory for the transient and homeless.

During the holiday season, we helped distribute food, clothing, and human kindness to the needy. This was a coordinated project of many agencies--the Salvation Army, Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities, etc. I was accustomed to doing this. When I was still a toddler my mother took me along to distribute food and gifts for her women's church group. I recall vividly visiting the homes of Mexican immigrants in the area with their meticulously swept dirt floors. Trying to be of help and encouagement to those in need was the major focus of the season, but such efforts were not limited to the holidays. Duing the late years of the Depression, there was always a transient sitting on our back steps eating the scrambled eggs my mother turned out. Our house was designated in some way as a place where food was always available for the asking. My grandmother said that one of those men could be Jesus Christ checking out the household's Christian hospitality, and, so, our families always kept extra eggs on hand to feed the hungry.

One holiday season a crew of my fraternity brothers were working around the clock to deliver food, clothing, and attend to the needs of people when one of the project coordinators warned us about wishing people merry Christmas and happy New Year. He said that when people have been reduced to receiving charity and have uncertain prospects for the future, being wished a merry Christmas and happy New Year is an impertinence. Christmas is a time to demonstrate peace on earth and goodwill to all people by showing them respect and concern, not by assailing them with empty expressions of good cheer which have a phony and presumptuous ring from their perspectives. Let your actions and demeanor convey the message of Christmas, he said. And so, our merry band was very circumspect about how we greeted people and about making merry in front of people who had little reason to be merry.

The South Dakota blogosphere was mercifully restrained this year in its holiday wishes. From those bloggers who spend most of the year maligning other people and expressing ill will, the words "merry Christmas and happy New Year" are obscenely malicious. Their real message is for hatred on earth and ill will toward some people. With a man dressing up like Santa Claus and shooting down nine former in-laws in California, with Hamas sending rockets into Israel and Israel striking back with massive attacks, and with thousands of our citizens losing their houses, their jobs, their retirement investments, and much hope for the future, holiday wishes are a presumptuous indignity. It is not a time for mouthing inanities; it is a time to contemplate the actual delivery of peace and good will and to decide if you believe in the message of of Noel enough to mean it.

For those who mean it, the word of hope and good will has to be made manifest to mean anything. Customary good cheer is not a nice treatment to people who are the casualties of venal executives and stupid bureaucrats.

One poster on the blogosphere occupied his Christmas with posts contending that liberalism is a mental disorder. His definntions of what identifies liberals had nothing to do with the political philosophy, but were the hate-based stereotypes of the kind that is associated with the N word. What is perturbing is that this blogger claims to be an "educator." I was struck by the intelligence and generosity of spirit, and coujd not but wonder what kind of education he delivers. At least he didn't make any mouthings like merry Christmas.

There are so many workers who need decent jobs, children who need genuine educations, and poor who need encouragement and opportunity, I decided to withhold holiday wishes until such a time as they seem possible to those many people.