Category: Passages

Machiavelli tells the oligarch who takes over a society with a custom of liberty: You must destroy that society. If the oligarch does not trash the society's institutions of liberty and isolate the citizens from each other, the memory of liberty will motivate them to cast out the oligarch. From the early pages of Chapter V of The Prince.

One of the powers of composing on WordLand, I believe, is the ability to inform WordPress pretty much instantly which of your RSS feeds you'd like a post to belong to. Or to more than one RSS feed, as well, if I'm reading the clues properly.

I've described this too compactly to reflect the working-together of the two software tools. I'll try to pin down better language.

In the final pages of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, small groups of people take responsibility for protecting particular things that they believe must survive if their world is to someday recover its better self. They organize in small groups, with each group committing to a certain focused task. In that dystopian society, each task is dangerous.

For me as a reader, this is one of the most moving passages of the novel. The commitment, yes, but also the planning and judgment. What will give us a chance to rebuild a humane society, they have asked themselves, and they've formulated answers and divided the work into manageable chunks and gotten to it.

We Americans tend to be satisfied if we get around to voting. Now, the present crisis is probably only a more extreme version of the crisis of alienation and disempowerment that many people have been enduring for decades, but anyway, now we are all telling each other to stay informed, to show up and speak up. That's all good. But in Bradbury's novel, more seems to have happened among dissenters. They've decided upon priorities, made judgments about goals, and in practical ways they've divided the work. As a result, they each have focused tasks there in those final pages. They not only know who they oppose and who are their allies, but they also have a vision for the new society and a particular job to help build it. You get the impression that defining conversations have been underway that are now guiding the opposition in practical ways.

What would be an example of that sort of division of tasks today? Let's say, for example, veterans affairs and the policies that belong to that national agency. There's somebody on a campus somewhere who could make a list of seven very knowledgable people who could form a little agency. They could commit to keeping up with their field, which they do anyway!, and taking turns posting links to any news articles and thought pieces. Each one of the seven could post one day a week: every Monday it's Tom's turn, every Tuesday it's Jane's, etc. Every day of the week there would be a very knowledgable person sharing the latest things that folks who care about veterans would want to know. Maybe they'd also post on opportunities for becoming involved in activism, ways to pressure the right elected officials, and so forth.

The seven of them would become the national news agency for veterans affairs. Something like that seems do-able.

Another example would be a small crew of tech folks who advise and support the web publishing needs of a handful of small teams like the seven who are doing the veterans work.

Writing in 1936 about one group of purveyors of propaganda in our society, E. B. White said, “Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.”

So that’s a little theory of the workings of propaganda. There must be many others out there in the world that would help us think clearly about our media and our politics. It’s not a black box, or doesn’t have to be. Name the parts of the mechanism, see what lubricates the gears, point out relentlessly where it’s in operation around us. Describe the alternatives and the practices that would support them.

The quotation comes from a brief note called “Truth in Advertising,” published July 11, 1936 in The New Yorker, but surely he’s sketching the workings of more than just advertising. By the way, Mr. White was just a few years away from writing Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web.

The deal we Americans generally try to make with the world is not having to know, or seem to know, or be seen to know, and not having to spend time with anyone who will call us out for knowing.

As a result, we can't have certain conversations, can't even stand to know these conversations are underway. There are just too many things we don't want to acknowledge in words, in newspapers and magazines, even in movies.

As a result, we can't think and talk very deeply about ourselves. When we describe ourselves, we might as well be talking about a cartoon drawn by a child in an idle moment in second grade.

Not wanting to acknowledge the world, we surely can't acknowledge our own character in the world.

That's our pathology.

See, for example, Anthony Bourdain's 2014 account of the space Mexico fills in the psyche of the United States.

See, for example, James Baldwin talking in The Fire Next Time about his fellow Americans as a people trapped in a labyrinth of attitudes, unable to renew themselves at the fountain of their lives.

And today Timothy Snyder writes, at the end of a long post on "Antisemitism in the Oval Office," that "Our eyes have to be open to what we do not wish to see."

Respected colleagues I worked with for years before I retired from the university were talking in a cluster in the hallway about the surveillance and censoring of academics now underway in the land. Alarming, frightening, everyone agreed. Not much of an idea about what to do next. Keep your heads down? Look for quiet strategies? Change the words you use to avoid being turned in by emboldened fanatics?

Plenty of sophistication on hand, but not much political imagination or experience. it's a regional public university being slowly stripped down by state authorities to job-training only, not there yet but that seems to be the goal, and certainly no commitment to arts and humanities. The people with the greatest stake in the campus, the regional taxpayers who probably still hope to have a solid institution of higher education for their children and grandchildren.

Does it ever occur to faculty to reach out to these neighbors who have the most to lose if the public university is hollowed out? To seek a dialogue with them? To see them as potential political allies? Generally speaking, I don't see faculty having that kind of political imagination.

So it was a grim conversation in that circle of colleagues in the hallway. Keenly aware of what is happening, nothing much to suggest about how to resist. It's a great shame, since a regional public university has a beautiful mission of service to the people of the area, especially those who are not wealthy enough to go away to posh colleges or maybe even to stop for four years of full-time course work right after high school. 

It's a class-divided society, and certain things are too good for a swath of our fellow citizens. That's how it seems, anyway.

Carrying a camera makes visually interesting things more interesting. Carrying a camera makes interesting things more visually interesting.

Work to see. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtains, the Wizard commanded. Some effort goes into creating the illusions, and if they're well enough designed and we're well enough trained, nobody needs to speak the Pay no attention line. We pay attention properly, as intended, through indoctrination and long habit. I say this typing away at a window table in a hotel's restaurant, where there's no drop ceiling: the structural elements over our heads are painted flat black, the air tubes and the lines the overhead lights hang down from a dull black space you have to work to see.

Steve Martin said people always ask him how to get powerful people in show business to notice them. He said they tended not to like his answer. He would say, Be so good that they can't afford not to notice you.

Book of quotations in the hotel room. Johnson said, I am disinclined to speak poorly of a person behind his back, but I understand that the fellow is an attorney.

Skillful use of suspense in that sentence, plus you don't know it's a joke until the final word.

Abandoned Cold War Places, page 79: "Prague has more than 800 underground shelters able to hold over half a million people." For a few days, anyway. The photo on the facing page shows what was probably a radiation decontamination room. Well, there's a floor drain, anyway.

In a one-minute clip on Instagram, Andy Cato explains that paying customers and voters may very well not understand an insider's term, an expert's term, such as regenerative agriculture, even though a great many people would like streams to be clean enough to swim in, birds and bees thriving so that nature in general can thrive, and food choices becoming part of the climate solution rather than part of the climate problem.

They just don't use the insider's jargon, not yet, and maybe they never will. So latent in wide swaths of the population is most of what is needed — agreements so near the surface, waiting to be summoned — and if the insiders and experts would communicate not just for other insiders and experts but for a wide population of thoughtful people of good will, they might get somewhere.

Insider language pulls rank. It blows off huge portions of the potential audience. It scuttles the political chances for important things. Insider language is either thoughtless, or it flows naturally from people who think that they are the best and know the most and should be heeded no matter how poorly they explain themselves to most of the population.

It's sad to love one's profession so much that one doesn't have time to learn to to communicate its powers and its beauties widely. It's short-sighted.

But the insider's club tends to work that way, eh?

I caught a couple of minutes of a Fox News broadcast earlier today. They were floating the idea that political leaders who oppose Trump are the kind of sickos who don’t want America to heal.

So that's name-calling, isn't it? Instead of addressing the merits of an opponent's argument, float the innuendo that this kind of person is surely a sicko.

Not to mention that the Fox broadcast offered no support for the idea that the activities of one party are the only path to healing a broken nation. Just sliding on past that gap in the argument, I see. No substance there, just the chanting of slogans and conclusions.

These are some sly tricks, but they are not the only elements of right-wing media activity that are essentially propaganda.