Category: Passages

E. B. White wrote a remarkable essay about visiting the winter rehearsal headquarters of a big circus. He sees something quietly remarkable there, and sets out to preserve the memory of it in his sentences, saying: “As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost. But it is not easy to communicate anything of this nature.”

In the end, knowing that he may have failed at the task, he notes that at least “I have discharged my duty to my society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.”

The essay is called “The Ring of Time” and can be found in Essays of E. B. White, in The New Yorker archive, and elsewhere.

When certain politicians say something is common sense, they mean that it makes sense to them, and should to you, without being examined or discussed. Which means they don't intend to show why it might make sense. So in calling something common sense, what that sort of politician means is that people who agree with that sort of politician's ideas will surely agree with this idea, and no further elaboration is required. Why go on and on? It's just common sense. Surely you agree with common sense, don't you? And it's just common sense not to let anyone sense that you don't agree with common sense.

What does a social media post — in this case a brief YouTube talk — look like when it goes far beyond the "It's bad! They're so bad!" approach of many op-eds and social media postings? In an earlier posting, I suggested that they offer p_attern recognition, instructive historical cases, and techniques for action_. Beyond "it's bad!" is an event that needs to be understood as part of a pattern. Then we need to see parallel cases that can help us think about our options going forward. And then we need concrete, specific action items that have a chance of making a difference. That's a rich, powerful posting whether it's on the op-ed page, on a blog, or in a YouTube posting.

Tad Stoermer reaches for this kind of posting, this kind of analysis and useful action-oriented advice. In one recent episode devoted to the cancellation of Stephen Colbert, Tad Stoermer discusses:

1. A brief discussion of how top-down silencing works.
2. What’s at stake now for Colbert. (details)
3. An argument that other, more important things are at stake behind the Colbert news.
4. Congressional appropriations process is being trashed.
5. Gutting NPR, PBS, etc., as the real top-down power play here, not the threat to a famous person.
6. An avenue of truth is eliminated: that’s real silencing. Colbert will be back somewhere.
7. Power of fiction for protecting bad governments. Public media as a threat to their fictions.
8. We need parallel institutions to stand up when systems are captured or destroyed by bad government. Don’t beg for access from tyrants, create alternate information pathways.
9. Examples of this process of creating parallel institutions from history: US revolution: Committees of Correspondance, patriot-created networks. Anti-slavery had information circulating. Underground news in Nazi Germany.
10. Free press is a precondition of functioning resistance.
11. Colbert is not the central issue. He’ll land somewhere.
12. Now rebuild public media, liberating it from corporations and parties. Examples given quickly.
13. Build an institution they can’t touch. Use it. Improve it, make it vital for resistance.

14. That’s the work now.

Stoermer''s brief video gives us concrete analysis and action items. He offers us a chance to start thinking, Yes, there's a struggle ahead, but we are now more fully armed with understanding about how power and resistance both work.

After a strong, detailed analysis of how "Trump's Big Bad Bill Will Kill Americans," authors Jeremy Barofsky and Pamela Herd offer this brief action paragraph:

If the bill’s impact is clearly disseminated and its supporters pay a political price at each implementation step, there is real hope that the worst effects to the nation’s health may not come to pass. By organizing in response, based on evidence, a brighter future with better health and enhanced economic security can become reality.

I suspect that they are correct about the steps they recommend: 1) organize in response to the threat, 2) in speech and actions based on the evidence clearly disseminate the bill's impact, and 3) make the bill's supporters pay a political price at each implementation step.

I also suspect that most Americans don't know how to do 1), 2), or 3). Very handy for the current administration . . .

But I must say that many op-eds and social media posts don't even bother to attach a final paragraph of that kind to their argument about a current event.

On the web, it would not be difficult for writers to include links even inside brief lists of action items: links to people who've shown how to do what needs to be done, for example. Links to accounts of activism that break down the action items into a more detailed toolkit of active citizenship that has a chance to succeed, for example. Links to people doing the work on a particular issue right now and clues about how to learn from them and affiliate with them.

Write pieces that take advantage of the web and of the web's power to link. Write and publish in web-savvy ways. We're crazy not to.

We're crazy not to. We're crazy not to. We're crazy not to.

In this crisis, there are only two kinds of social media posts, two kinds of op-eds in the world.

The first kind says that something is horrible. No shortage right now, for example, of op-eds and posts saying that it's horrible that top-down political pressure may have caused the cancellation of the late night political commentary of Stephen Colbert. Essentially:

"It's bad! The people who are doing this are bad! Bad!"

The second kind extracts a revealing pattern from the experience. Pattern recognition. The second kind locates techniques for making a useful real-world response. For action. This sort of thing:

The powerful have particular techniques for silencing the Fourth Estate. This is how we think they are using them right here and right now with Colbert's parent company. And here are concrete examples from history of essential work-arounds. For resistors to power, the specific principles for concrete action in urgent cases like this are . . .

True enough — most op-eds and social media posts don't take the time to include any of that good second-kind *stuff** that would earn them real honor in the world.** But some do. Here's one concrete example of Tad Stoermer posting that way.

And yes, you caught me making a third kind of social media post, the kind that divides the world into two kinds of this or that.

*_Pattern recognition, instructive historical cases, and techniques for action_.

**That's why most social media posts and op-eds are utterly forgettable. (But do not have to be.)

An Italian this-date-in-history site gives the impression that a certain day in July of 1997 was a notable moment in the development of blogging. With software development, maybe it wasn't so much a certain day as a certain period of time, but what do I know?

Living on borrowed time now in the United States puts writer Brett McNeil in the mood for listening to the Stooges.

The nagging rasp of electric guitars suits my mood too, as I'm reading Black Earth, a Timothy Snyder book about the intentional experimental disassembling of nations and public order in eastern Europe, carried out by the Soviets and the Nazis in preparation for the worst things people were able to imagine for the lawless place that they had now created.

Also, I'm dipping into A World Apart, an account of two years in the Gulag, where author Gustav Herling says, "I became convinced that a man can be human only under human conditions." It's a stunningly straightforward standard for judging times and places where people have had to endure, isn't it? Choose, say, this section of that big city today and take a close look, I find myself thinking.

Also trying to stay in the habit of linking to indie bookstores rather than to empires when I link to a book.

Recommending a book to a friend? Send a link to an indie instead of an empire. For example, Prairie Lights Bookstore.

Right now I'm reading Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, in which Timothy Snyder tracks Hitler's method: dismantling nation states as prelude to carrying out his deeper purposes:

Prepare by filling the media with chaotic propaganda, draining the blood from civic institutions, then gutting them, militarizing law enforcement, normalizing violent methods of policing, leaving individuals and groups increasingly with no protection and no recourse, for example — all of which set things up for what he really wanted to do.

It's a method, which makes me think that our common representations of Hitler are a bit very-bad-guy cartoonish, while his methods are specific and powerful and can pop up in recognizable ways any number of times and places.

Blogger, poet, activist, and memoirist Stephen Kuusisto has portrayed America as a laboratory, a place where experiments are run on large groups of people. After reading his new post, in that spirit, I thought of one experiment America has been running for decades: How long can you bring tens of thousands of rural people into poverty and isolation, and how low can you make them go, before they rise in protest?

But Kuusisto, who I know from college days, often focuses on lives lived here by the disabled. (See if you can read his moving and instructive first memoir, Planet of the Blind, or his new book of poems, Close Escapes, without learning quite a bit on the subject.) Part of a recent blog post goes this way:

America is a biopolitical nightmare, one might call it a laboratory for the subjugation of human beings. This is why people in the United States can’t have diversity though they talk about it. Diversity without biopolitical awareness, without recognizing the role of the state in determining which bodies have or do not have value is just fluff. When will the Americas become a laboratory for freedom? I wish the wood cutter would wake up.

At the end of the blog post, Kuusisto shows how to tell in a flash exactly what bodies America values. Just check to see what bodies are being policed, he suggests:

Policed bodies are inherently devalued bodies. Black Lives Matter. Disabled Lives Matter. Women’s Lives; Migrant Lives—but not so much in the breech. ICE raids are what happens while we were busy making other plans. Apology to John Lennon ’s ghost.

The lab experiments are ongoing all around us.

“No more 1000 page bills passed overnight and signed into law the next day,” writes Dave Winer. Far-reaching items added and passed without being brought into the light of day for public consideration. That’s how the national Republican Party likes to do business.

The Indiana Republican Party, having carefully gerrymandered themselves an unchallengeable supermajority in the Statehouse, works exactly the same way. No need for anyone else’s opinion in the legislature. Clear evidence of this in the most recent legislative session.