Nate Knows Nada

Michael Dirda, of the Washington Post, has a fabulous screed about the
recent NEA report on the state of reading in America.  It’s a bit
over the top, but still quite apropos.

[Study author and poet Dana] Gioia thinks it unlikely that any “careful observer of
contemporary American society will be greatly surprised” at this news.
Setting aside the question of whether I’m a careful observer or not, I
was in fact a little surprised: To me, the numbers seemed better than
expected. But then, to my mind, the real literacy crisis has less to do
with the number of people reading than with the narrowing range of
books that Americans actually read.

According to the report, all of “one in six people
reads 12 or more books in a year.” Half the population doesn’t look at
any fiction, poetry or plays, ever. This is, obviously, just pathetic.
Yet how many times have I been in elegant homes where I found lavish
entertainment centers, walls of DVDs, state-of-the-art computer systems
— and not a single book, with the debatable exception of Leonard
Maltin’s guide to movies on video?

…

I wish I could feel more hopeful about book culture,
believe more strongly that something might be done. But we’ve become a
shallow people, happy enough with the easy gratifications of mere
spectacle in all the aspects of life. Real books are simply too serious
for us. Too slow. Too hard. Too long. Now and again, we may feel that
just maybe we’ve shortchanged our better selves, that we might have
listened to great music, contemplated profoundly moving works of art,
read books that mattered, but instead we turned away from them because
it was time to tune into “Law and Order” reruns, or jack in to
Warhammer on our home computer, or get back to the latest clone of “The
Da Vinci Code.” Sooner or later, though, probably late at night or when
faced with one of life’s crises, we will surprise in ourselves what
poet Philip Larkin called the hunger to be more serious.

But come the dawn and our good intentions usually
evaporate. Why persist with Plutarch or George Eliot or Beckett or
William Gaddis when you can drop into a chat room or gaze at digitized
lovelies or go to still another movie? Instead of reading Toqueville or
Henry Adams, we just check out the latest blogs. In short, we turn
toward the bright and shiny, the meretricious tinsel, the strings of
eye-catching beads for which we exchange our intellectual birthright as
for a mess of pottage. For modern Americans, only the unexamined life
is worth living.

When our non-grad student friends come over, they always express some
sort of awe at the number of books we have.  There’s 10 almost
entirely full bookshelves in the house, and we’ve probably got nearly
2000 books on the premises.

And yet, I kick myself at night that I haven’t read more during the day
and in the evening, distracted as I have been by the Internet and CSI or the Simpsons.

So I’m gonna work on my dissertation work and some longer, essay postings in the next little while.  So I will refrain a bit from the shorter posts that I have been at since the DNC.  Which doesn’t mean that I won’t be updating here.  Just not several times a day.

But be sure to come back regularly!

BF, a friend of ours, and I have thought in the past about creating the “Gays who love Laura” fan club.  She’s wonderfully subversive of her husband’s administration sometimes….  When asked what party she belongs to, she’s been reported as saying, “I’m a Republican…by marriage.”

So here she is, talking about the news media:

First lady Laura Bush thinks the news media is increasingly filled with opinions instead of facts, and suggested Tuesday that journalists are contributing to the polarization of the country.

“I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of the media in America,” she said in an interview Tuesday with Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”

“I think that a lot of times the media sensationalize or magnify things that aren’t _that really shouldn’t be,” she said.

“I do think there’s a big move away from actual reporting, trying to report facts,” the first lady said. “It’s in newspapers and everything you read — that a lot more is opinion.”

When her interviewer suggested that journalists were out of sync with most of the country, she said with a laugh: “You just gave me a really great idea. Maybe it is the media that has us divided.”

From Pandagon.net.

More here.  And here.

I found her reading and literature programs in the White House fantastic.  If we all read more, we’d be in less of a systemic political mess than we are now.

I post over at Command Post every
little while.  For those of you who don’t know what the site is,
it’s a place where contributors can put up news items of interests in
the vital questions of the day.

So I posted the bike story from below earlier today over there, and the responses were quite varied.  You should know that the people over at CP take their politics very seriously. 
One guy wondered why Kerry can spring $8000 for a good bike, but claims
to hunt with a very poor double-barrel shotgun.  He suspects
pandering, and I’m inclined to agree (if the fellow’s info is right,
and I have no reason to doubt) that it’s at the very least not a very
good representation.

Another person had the following to say

Family Circle Magazine runs a COOKIE COOKOFF CONTEST
each Presidential election year by posting a favorite cookie recipe for
each wife of the candidates. This year Laura put up a Oatmeal Chocolate
Chunk Cookie and Theresa put up a Pumpkin Spice Cookie. Visitors to the
website are encouraged to make the cookies and then vote for their
favorite. The contest started in June and in November the winner will
be announced. Last month the word came out that the Pumpkin Spice
Cookies were terrible. And when asked about it, Theresa said it wasn’t
really “her” recipe, someone on her staff picked it for her and she
doesn’t like Pumpkin Spice.

So if Theresa doesn’t like pumpkin in the first place, why would
someone pick out a pumpkin cookie for a nation-wide contest? Hummmmm…

Second, if you saw the film footage of Kerry at that Wendy’s the
other day, the one where he approached the Marines, you might have seen Theresa pointing up to a menu of food items on the wall by the order desk. Theresa pointed to the Wendy’s Chili and asked the clerk what it was?

Yep, those two truly represent the middle class in this country.

My response is this: 

If we can’t laugh at the foibles of both major candidates (to say
nothing of the third party guys), then we’re pretty poorly off. They’re
hilarious as they trip over themselves to show us how ____ (fill in the blank) they are.

Especially since both of these guys and their families are
plutocrats. Neither of them is “in touch” with the middle class,
because they’ve never been middle class in either of their lives. At
their worst, they might have been upper middle class. Both of
‘em are worth hundreds of millions. John Kerry can’t fake being
middle class to save his life, and George Bush’s affect of “middle
class” is only that — an affect and a pretty poor one at that.  My
God, they’re both Skull and Bones at Yale.  It’s hard to be more a
member of the overclass elite than that.

And I really doubt that Laura Bush spends much time baking her own
cookies or that the recipe was really hers at all. (Besides, didn’t we
do this cookie thing last time with Bush v. Clinton?) I’ve spent too
much time in politics to believe that for more than about two seconds.
And Teresa may not know what chili is — but I bet her Portuguese
food is great. So what?

The question for both Laura and Teresa isn’t about food, what they
like or don’t, what they know or don’t. It’s about whether their
husbands can govern effectively.

Apparently, the sort of bike you ride may have something to do with the electoral politics you practice:

ONE of the many differences separating John Kerry and George W. Bush
is their choice of bicycle – not an especially presidential mode of
transport, one might think, except that these are not ordinary bikes.

 Mr. Kerry reportedly pedals an $8,000 Serotta Ottrott, as
high-tech and skittish as a sports car. It is made of space-age carbon
tubing and comes equipped with the patented ST rear triangle, whatever
that is.

Mr. Bush pumps away (often emitting low “hrrr, hrrr, hrrr” grunts,
according to an Associated Press article last week) on a $3,000 Trek
Fuel 98. It, too, is made of carbon tubing, but unlike the Kerry
machine, it has shock absorbers fore and aft. That’s because it’s meant
to go off-road. If Mr. Kerry’s bike is a Ferrari, Mr. Bush’s is a Land
Rover. Mr. Kerry rides on the flat, more or less, and usually on paved
surfaces.

Mr. Bush likes to ride up into the hills of his Texas ranch and then
come flying down. To put it another way, Mr. Kerry is more nearly like
Greg LeMond, Mr. Bush more like Evel Knievel.

The original article even contains pictures of each candidate on their really expensive bikes.

UPDATE: 8 August 2004, 12.08 PM — The Times ran a couple of follow-up letters to the story yesterday.  Read ’em here. 
The real cyclists have some corrections to make to the Times, like
whether or not road racing is as exciting as mountain biking (yes), or
whether GWB is wearing appropriate clothing to really be cycling, or
whether what he’s doing is mountain biking.

And, for full disclosure, here’s what I ride.

This is fantastically interesting.  It’s an interface that puts the current Google News headlines in a visual format, based on how many related stories it has.

Members of the press and the Bush administration political shop have been discussing the lack of a” bounce” in Kerry’s numbers for a couple of days now.  Besides the fact that many of the earlier polls had been started before the Kerry speech, there are other methodological problems that are usually small but which make a difference in a close race like this.

More important than the methods questions: Many of the president’s advisers seem to insinuate that Bush will receive a bounce after his convention.  But with the Kerry numbers essentially remaining steady, it seems reasonable to predict that Bush’s numbers will also.  I’m betting that Bush gets no bounce from his TV show either.

    On the NewsHour
on Friday night, Spencer Michaels ran a focus group of “average”
people, had them watch the Kerry speech from last Thursday, and then
asked them what they thought.  (You can find the transcript here.) 
I shouldn’t watch these things, because they just make me sick, with
the sort of willful stupidity that people — from both sides of the
political divide — say.

    I can’t say I found
Kerry as vague as these likely voters did.  I recall that he gave
some specifics and some generalities.  But I don’t expect a
point-by-point plan.  I’ve got a copy of the Kerry speech in front
of me, as I did when he gave it.  Perhaps that what makes the
difference, but it still doesn’t seem to be solely the platitudes that
this group whined about.  They seemed to want a policy brief, but
if they had gotten that, they would have shut the TV off or they would
have complained that he was too boring.  I think that no matter
what these voters had received, they would not have been satisfied with
it.

    Now, the partisan members of the group —
the ones who seem to be involved in campaigns — were their typical
selves.  Lu Ryden, a committed Republican, said “liberal” over and
over, spitting it out as a distasteful epithet, which it probably was
for her.  Probably a dirtier word that “s***” or “f***”.  And
Iris Winogrod, “as Democratic as Lu is Republican,” could only offer
the idea that the party looked centered and happy.  The same
charge that Lu leveled at Kerry, I return to both of them: Lots of nice
things said, but no substance.

    Then we moved
onto the “independents” and “undecideds.”  Jeff Wheeler, a
self-described “finance guy”, said the Kerry plans don’t add up, that
you can’t only raise the taxes on the top 2 percent and get all the
programs that he proposed.  Jeff also thinks that the economy must
be on its way back up, “because if it wasn’t there would have been a
lot more focus on it.”  I’m not sure how Jeff’s self-described
“finance guy” job makes him an expert on the accounting and funding of
the federal budget, and I wonder if he’s seen any numbers.  But
more importantly, Jeff’s reasoning on the economy and the discussion
thereof (or not) proves extraordinarily faulty.  He reasons that
no mention of the economy means it is good, because if the economy were
bad, they would have mentioned it.  But what he does is to support
his assertion by a lack of evidence.  It’s similar to making the
following statement: “Because I do not see the cancer, it must not be
harming me.”  You can’t actually draw the conclusion.  There
may be other intervening explanations.  Perhaps the Democrats saw
that the war was the issue of greatest concern to address in the main
speech.  Also, since I was there, I can tell these focus group
people that there was almost as much emphasis on the economy and its
performance throughout the convention as there was on the war. 
But not in the way that these voters seemed to want.

  
 The economic focus was partially on the numeric sides of the
policies — unemployment, inflation, trade and current account
balances, and so forth.  But much of the economics of the
convention was in a focus on the specific sorts of people involved and
what the impact of the radical realignment of the nation’s taxation and
fiscal policies has been.  And more important than the aggregate
numbers for the whole country or a specific geographic region are the
numbers that indicate the effects of our fiscal and economic policies
have had for different classes of people.  For example, the
richest twenty percent made thirty times what the poorest twenty
percent did in 1960; by now, that has increased so the upper quintile
makes 75 times what the lowest quintile does.

  
 A couple of the voters complained that the discussion of
economics in America reeked of “class warfare.”  Lots of Americans
seem to believe that any discussion of class whatsoever constitutes
“class warfare.”  And Americans often like to claim that we are a
“classless” society.  Only in the sense that our class is not
determined by our blood ancestry or ontological standing, as in the old
societies of Europe.  But we still have much differentiation in
manner and mores for people, based upon their overall wealth standing:
we still have classes.  The borders are a bit fuzzier than in the
old aristocracies, but they are still there.  But if we speak of
how some people are doing worse than others, how we might want to see
that inequalities in wealth and income are leveled out (because we know
that wealth generally accrues to itself), how we might want to see that
those who do not have natural access to capital can obtain that access
and use it to better their lives, that hardly seems to me to be “class
warfare.”  “Class warfare” seems a vestige of our latter twentieth
century obsession with Communism and socialism, which spoke of class
incessantly.  By invoking the specter of a coming war between
classes, it’s as if we can paint people once again as being “red.”

  
 But only one of these voters seemed to get the problem. 
Large numbers of people remain without jobs or visible means of support
through no fault of their own.  Almost a fifth of America’s
children live below the poverty line.  And just because one
doesn’t know such people personally does not mean that one can remain
willfully ignorant about those who are much less fortunate than oneself.

  
 My overwhelming impression of this group, after the segment was
over, was of a people who are formidably ignorant about what any life
besides their own might be like, Democrats as well as
Republicans.  And if that’s the case, then they’re as culpable for
the state we’re in as either Kerry or Bush.