Graphic Intelligence

I got this over at Crooks and Liars. Couldn’t resist.

PS: I’m just fostering dialogue here.

Does Reading Matter?

There’s an interesting op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal called “Does Reading Matter?” I reprint it in full below, as the Journal online is subscription-based. The National Endowment for the Arts released a report on reading that said that the average 17-24 year old in this country spends seven minutes a day doing voluntary reading.

I’ve read these reports before, and for years have witnessed the hand-wringing on the subject. Some implications are clear – people get their information by watching TV and listening to radio, and lately, via their computers. These media are not filtered in the same way as the printed word, and people are much more susceptible to indoctrination via TV and radio than books, which are filtered at the source. Pictures go straight to the brain. Words are filtered, contrasted with ideas, accepted or rejected based on other knowledge and prejudices.

So the logical inference is that people who digest information via reading are better informed than those who do so via TV and radio.

How do we process information, and how many of us process it at all? Frankly, those who are not reading are being manipulated by various media. Can’t be helped. It appears as though very few people have the inclination to pick up a book at the end of a long work day. Most turn on the tube. And they don’t want to be hit with hard issues with complicated resolution. They want the easy stuff. They want to relax, and who can blame them.

It’s a free market, and the market gives them what they want: Damned little to think about. But it leaves our society as a whole subject to the worst sort of leadership – people who use images to control opinions. We leave ourselves open to that when we do not read, filter and process information.

Where does that leave those of us who do read and digest and think about things in any depth? We have some power. We’re in charge of ideas. We advocate for policy, but the mainstream is brought along by the most thoughtless media of all, TV. In the end, it’s not ideas that sell policy – it’s images. The Bush Administration (along with FOX News) is very careful to control images coming out of Iraq. They know that even though words accompany the images, it is only the images that matter. No flag-draped coffins, no dead civilians. That’s how they manage public opinion.

There’s more to it, of course. The primary means of manipulating public opinion is to filter it down via opinion leaders. That’s the same way they sell fashion – people see important people wearing different clothing, and change their own style. It’s the same in the arena of ideas – most people don’t think for themselves. They look up the food chain. TV is a great medium for handing down information. It’s how we elect our presidents.

Are we a literate society? Hell no, of course not. And we were not a literate society when Tom Paine hit the streets with Common Sense. Only a relative few read it, the opinion leaders, and those few made all the difference.

Back to the beginning – does reading matter? Yes, it matters a great deal. But there are now, as in 1776, only a few that can process information and think critically. The rest are along for the ride. Things have not changed much, then to now.

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Does Reading Matter?
November 29, 2007; Page A18
By: Daniel Henninger

Time-pressed Christmas shoppers who visit Amazon.com nowadays see a homepage pushing Kindle. Kindle is Amazon’s “revolutionary wireless reading device.” This ambitious ($400) and ultimately admirable gadget springs from the hopes of Amazon’s visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, whose e-company began with books but in time found that profitability required the selling of things that people prefer to do with their ever-dwindling free time.

It was hard not to notice that Kindle was born unto us about the same moment the National Endowment for the Arts released a report on reading’s sad lot in our time. Amid much other horrifying data, it revealed that the average 15- to 24-year-old spends seven minutes daily on “voluntary” reading. Cheerfully, this number rises to 10 minutes on weekends.

An earlier, equally grim NEA report, “Reading at Risk,” announced the collapse of interest in reading literature — basically books. This newer study widened the definition of “reading” to include magazines, newspapers and online leisure. No matter. Even if the definition of literate life includes persons who spend their seven voluntary minutes with “InStyle” magazine or online reviews of HDTVs, the report still suggests that unmandated reading is heading for the basement.

As someone whose professional hero up to now was Johannes Gutenberg, I’m obviously cheering for Mr. Bezos’s Kindle, whose pages appear in a book-like technology called E-Ink. It must be counted as good news that Amazon’s Web site says the first run of the Kindle machines is sold out. (A spokesman said they won’t disclose how many. Hmmm.) Still, one must ask:

Are Kindle’s early adopters the leading edge of a new literate future, or a small, fanatic band of bookish monks, like those in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s 1959 sci-fi classic, “A Canticle for Leibowitz” (not yet available on Kindle) who preserved books in a post-nuclear apocalypse? Are we in a post-digital apocalypse for serious reading?

And if so, does it matter?

The NEA authors posit “greater academic, professional and civic benefits” with high levels of leisure reading. In other words, readers profit, at least in their souls, from time spent with works of the imagination or with books that explain the past. I agree.

Herewith, however, an anecdote that may suggest one reason for the decline. At a Wall Street Journal focus-group session awhile ago, the facilitator asked young professionals, readers of the Journal, about their reading habits. I was struck by the comment of a 30-something woman. “Look,” she said, “I spend my entire day at work on a computer. When I go home at night, I just want to read something.”

She, no doubt, would be one of Leibowitz’s monks. The fact is that many people who used to read a lot today have jobs that require staring at a screen. Smart people work long hours, mostly onscreen, ingesting things like legal documents, commercial leases, prospectuses for initial public offerings, Yahoo headlines and whatever computer engineers read. Then they crawl home at night to play video games or watch season three of “24″ from Netflix.

Rolling your eyeballs across endless snowdrifts of pixels 10 hours a day, even for good money, is tiring. Thus post-pixel reading defaults to absorbing the synopsis on the back of a DVD box. If you can read Angelina Jolie’s name, what else do you need to know?

One criticism of the NEA studies is that they don’t capture the “new” ways people read away from work. This means the Endowment doesn’t validate new pastimes, such as reading text messages on cell-phone screens. Add the input-output of text messaging to the data base of readers and the daily voluntary reading time likely rises from seven minutes to six or seven hours.

Is this literacy? In 50 years, no one may ask.

This is an inventive age, though, so it was inevitable that smart people would devise a response to the flight from literature. French professor Pierre Bayard has written (a book) called “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.” He suggests we skim, rather than read, the classics. A less-suspect fix is the Web site DailyLit.com. It’s a site for people beset with guilt because they don’t “read” anymore.

Select one of their classics, or poetry, and they’ll push five minutes of it to your email box each day at the same hour. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and Damned” this way. The story was fantastically depressing, but the expiation helped.

One wonders if reading’s status isn’t more complex. Unlike 30 years ago, when most of one’s acquaintances could at least talk about Cheever, Malamud, Updike, Plath, Baldwin, Mailer et al., there is no longer a common conversation about literature. Today, it’s come down to one book: Harry Potter. Maybe two, “The Kite Runner.” And yes, a million people will read David McCullough’s grand “1776″ and talk about it. But other than Oprah, the institutional agenda setters and critics that created the common conversation are gone.

Anecdotally, though, there seems to be an amazing amount of real reading going on.

A recent phenomenon on the streets of New York is people walking, amid crowds, their nose in a book. One sees it all the time. The subways are full of people reading books. On just one subway car this Tuesday one saw: “Tales from Da Hood” by Nikki Turner, “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Don’t Know Much About History” by Kenneth Davis. Small book clubs abound, as do book Web sites. There are small presses dedicated to writers “no one” is aware of beyond several thousand loyal acolytes. But they are reading.

It isn’t just books. There’s no common conversation about popular music either; music’s subcategories now are endless and arcane. Other than movies, still seen together in theaters, cultural interests once widely shared have subdivided into many discrete communities.

But the NEA’s broader policy issue still holds: Will people who simply stop “reading” be at a disadvantage? Yes. In the future, I suspect that the adept “readers” will be telling the non-readers what to do. A canticle, perhaps, for the next Leibowitz.
• Write to henninger@wsj.com.

Flat Out Unfair

I set out this morning to investigate Fred Thompson’s new “flat” tax proposal. I could only find Thompson-friendly sources – virtually all are carbon reprints of his talking points. There may be more to learn as it filters down.

The Thompson “flat” tax is fairly simple and not very well thought out – he doesn’t know how much it will cost the treasury. But here’s how it would work:

We would have a choice of paying taxes using the current code, or his flat tax. With the flat tax we would be offered a $25,000 standard deduction, plus a $3,500 personal exemption, so that a family of four would not pay the tax until it earned $39,000. Then the tax would kick in – 10% on incomes up to $100,000, and 25% thereafter.

There’s more to it, of course, but that is the nitty gritty. How they call a two-tiered tax a “flat” tax escapes me. But that’s not the only problem.

Thompson, like every other candidate in either party save perhaps Dennis Kucinich, is blind to the payroll tax. That’s the tax that in a sneaky way takes 14.2% of everyone’s earnings up to $102,000 (2008), and 2.9% thereafter. It’s a regressive tax, and it applies only to wages. Dividends and interest and capital gains – the kind of income wealthy people are more likely to have – are exempt from it.

The payroll tax is a cash cow. The most recent year for which I have numbers, 2004, shows that the government raised more money from the payroll tax than the income tax, even though payroll taxes applied only to the first $87,900 of wages at that time. Thompson kisses the ring on the hand that feeds him, and slyly ignores this tax.

Here’s the Thompson proposal in full disclosure mode:

Family of four depending on wages: Income up to $39,000 taxed at 14.2%, income up to $102,000 taxed at 24.2%, income up to $139,000 taxed at 12.9%, all income thereafter taxed at 27.9%. He creates a donut hole between 102 and 139.

Family of four depending on passive income (interest, dividends, royalties, capital gains): Income up to $39,000, no tax. Income up to $139,000, taxed at 10%. All income thereafter taxed at 25%.

Thompson maintains the basic unfairness of the current tax code – he double-taxes wages while giving passive income a pass. It’s a push in the ‘right’ direction – in the idealized conservative world, all taxes would be paid by wage earners, none by owners of capital. They are pushing us in that direction – in 2008, the initial tax on dividends and capital gains is 0%. Zero.

The idea behind this is, of course, trickle down, aka feeding the sparrows through the cow. I’m not sure they really believe in that, but it’s a nice bouquet of flowers that hides an ugly bride. It’s a way of making the little guy pay the freight. Since it is so inherently unfair and indefensible, there’s no real justification for its implementation. So the best thing to do is what Fred Thompson has done. Ignore it.

When given a free hand to implement their will, conservatives have pushed for “reforms” at the point of a gun. They reimposed private health care on Iraq, and installed a flat tax of 15%. In that country they could have their way. Paul Bremer was a dictator. In this country it’s not so easy. But the essence of the Thompson plan – that wages should be taxed twice while all other income is tax only once, if at all, is an unacknowledged part of our system. No ‘credible’ candidate wants to change that basic structure.

And Thompson is no exception. His candidacy is going nowhere, but his flat tax has legs, I’m sure, in Catoland. Watch out for it. It’s a new version of the current regressive system dolled up to look like something else.

Not the Gringos!

From Carlos Mencia on proposals to build a fence on the Mexican border to keep out immigrants: Who the hell do you think is going to build it?

Lions for Lambs (A Movie Made by Sheep)

The title of the movie Lions for Lambs is based on comment by a German General in World War I – he admired the British troops who were dying in the trenches, and held their officers in contempt. The movie tries to honor our troops while condemning the current crop of wars, politicians, and media.

The title, Lions for Lambs, is therefore an oddity – the movie pretty much gives our military a passing grade. Soldiers and their commanding officers come off very well – dedicated and brave and decisive and on an honest mission. The movie uses real military equipment, possibly on loan. Whenever that happens, the people making the movie have to submit the script to the Pentagon for approval. Maybe this script was approved in that manner. Just guessing – I can think of no other reason for a movie with an anti-war message to be so kind to the military. But there’s not a lot of hardware. That’s a thin point.

The movie is based on two discussions and some combat – a United States Senator with a journalist, and a professor with a student, and two former students of that professor who are really in the fight. The dialogue is intense – the Senator is doing a hard-sell. So is the professor. The Senator wants the journalist to participate in a propaganda effort to re-sell the war in Afghanistan, while the professor wants the promising student to engage in real life rather than just join for the fun and money. The two soldiers are in it for real, and have only each other. All the words are meaningless for them.

It’s a good idea, but didn’t work for me. For one, the movie oddly chooses the Afghanistan conflict as its focus. Afghanistan is supposedly the good war. We’re supposedly focused over there. Supposedly we’re after the people who did 9/11, so we can all get patriotic about it. But in choosing this propaganda-friendly war, they take a pass on Iraq. If a movie that wants to be hard-hitting starts out by pulling its punches, how can I trust it?

Casting is a problem. I can’t take couch-jumping Tom Cruise seriously. As I see him strutting about as a Senator, I can only think that Otter from Animal House didn’t choose gynecology after all. Meryl Streep is subdued as a journalist, falling under his spell. She’s always superb, but I don’t trust her as a wimp. For once I looked at her performance and didn’t buy the character. She was just acting. Robert Redford as a professor? A little too smooth and polished – more like a software salesman than an academic.

Maybe this movie would have worked with less notables in the starring roles. Maybe it would have been believable. This could be what happens when producers have unlimited resources to promote limited ideas.

The movie did work in once sense – it hammered the news media. Perhaps that’s why it is getting such poor reviews in that media. Streep’s character goes back to her boss and complains that the Senator wants only to engage her in propaganda. She talks about the massive media failure in the attack on Iraq. Boss man lays it out for her – she’s 57 years old, has an invalid mother, and no career alternatives. She’s either going to do her job and sell out, or fall hard on her sword and be unemployed. She makes the only rational choice available.

The bad media point is emphasized again at the end, when we see the Senator’s propaganda line in a news scroll at the bottom of a screen where a news anchor is talking about the latest Hollywood divorce. It’s a strong finish – real news is only incidental, and it’s manufactured anyway. Nicely done.

Lions for Lambs is a movie that wants to hammer home some important points, but it fails in the wielding. And a very odd thing – for a movie so dependent on dialogue to sell its point, it seems impotent when it comes to spelling out the military mission in Afghanistan. We see the kids believing and dying, but we really don’t know why.

And that’s what I took home with me – man, if they can’t sell Afghanistan, how would they ever do Iraq? Maybe that’s why they backed off. We’re in an age when Strawberry Statements don’t work – it’s still not cool to be anti-war. Maybe the movie is trying to be smart and subversive. If so, it fails, because in the end, it is selling war and damning the news media that sells the war. It contradicts itself.

Carnival Barkers

We suffer great indignities due to that annoying pest that drives our consumer economy – advertising. It pops up in our faces, sneaks up behind us. It’s subversive and in-your-face all at once. Broadcast TV is useless because of it – I watch very little on regular channels due to the high volume of ads. Commercial radio is a cruel joke – current ratio, so far as I can tell, is twenty minutes of ad content per hour. All of it annoying.

Ah, the marketplace. What a beautiful place, full of carnival barkers yapping in our ears. There’s no peace, no respite, unless you go to those places where you pay extra for content without ads. One such place is the movie house.

But wait! We went to a movie yesterday, and endured a full five minutes of ads before the trailers began. Advertisers love it – we’re a captive audience, and they have no shame. We can only get up and leave the theater, and few do that. Most of us just grit our teeth and endure. And advertisers know something we don’t – they know that mere exposure to ads is effective, even if we don’t like the experience. I’m a little more ad-resistant than most – I refuse to buy products whose ads are annoying. I don’t drink Coke, would never buy a Chevy, and … wait …. what’s this?

Yesterday, after the pre-trailer ads, they unleashed yet another indignity on us – a four minute music video. It was for the National Guard. Kind of funny, really, as we were at a movie that was mildly anti-war (Lions for Lambs). The ad is aimed at young men and women. They’re looking for fodder to send off to Iraq, but the video made it appear as though the Guard spends its time rescuing kids from hurricanes.

That’s the essence of advertising, by the way – lies. It lies about everything. It has to. The truth doesn’t sell. Try selling the Guard by showing a disillusioned kid in a 130 degree desert. Trying selling a Chevy when Toyota makes a superior product. Try selling a high fructose corn product based on dietary advantages, or smelly male perfume based on real female response. Try selling a sloppy hamburger with greasy fries for what they really are … crap. Doesn’t work. Advertising has to lie to be effective.

I turned to my wife about half way through the National Guard video yesterday and said “This is really pissing me off.” Doesn’t matter – advertising loses its impact as people age. I’m no longer in their demographic. They need fresh faces, kids, who grow up exposed to thousands of hours of ads, who can’t escape it at school, who, ultimately, have to fight our wars for us.

The schools have done their part. The kids are dumb and indoctrinated. The movies are merely adding the finishing touches.

Target: Iran

Victory of the Loud Little Handful

by Mark Twain

The loud little handful – as usual – will shout for the war. The pulpit will – warily and cautiously – object… at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.”

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men…

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger” (1910)

Passover

Making the rounds:

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt……If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”

— Thomas Jefferson, 1798 letter after the passage of the Sedition Act

Homer Simpson v. God

From The Wall Street Journal Best of the Law Blog, 11/21/07:

In the mood for a little contracts? How about some employment law? Or maybe a dose of Homer Simpson? For all three, let’s take a trip to the Potter Stewart U.S. Courthouse in Cincinnati where the Sixth Circuit court of appeals issued this decision today. At issue: Whether an employee’s mere act of continuing to report for work after the effective date of her employer’s arbitration program constituted acceptance of a valid and enforceable contract to arbitrate all employment-related disputes.

The court said that indeed, an employee’s knowing continuation of employment after the effective date of the arbitration program constituted acceptance of a valid and enforceable contract to arbitrate. Judge Boyce Martin disagreed. “A unilateral contract is one where an offeror ‘reasonably expects to induce action of a definite and substantial character’ from the offeree,’” wrote Judge Boyce. “Implicit in this understanding is that the offeree is aware of the significance of the act performed. Without a signal that she understands that a contract is being made, how is one to know if she has truly accepted?” Judge Boyce footnoted this with the following:

Homer Simpson talking to God: “Here’s the deal: you freeze everything as it is, and I won’t ask for anything more. If that is OK, please give me absolutely no sign. [no response] OK, deal. In gratitude, I present you this offering of cookies and milk. If you want me to eat them for you, please give me no sign. [no response] Thy will be done.” The Simpsons: And Maggie Makes Three (Fox television broadcast, Jan. 22, 1995).

According to his bio, Judge Martin is 72 years old. We would be mighty impressed if the footnote came from him, but we suspect the handiwork of a clerk. Either way, thanks for brightening the Law Blog’s, and hopefully our readers’, day.

I would easily trust my fate to a judge who knows Homer well enough to cite him.

A Nation of Shills

I’ll never understand this. At the coffee shop I frequent, they sell bumper stickers. The name of the place is “The Daily”, and the bumper sticker says “Drink Coffee Daily; Drink Daily Coffee”. Price: $2.00.

Question: Why would I advertise for you, even for free? And my god – why would I pay you to advertise for you? Do you think I’m that stupid?

I have taken off the dealership decals off our cars when we bought them. They come off easily when they are fresh – you just use a Tuffy pad. I asked the dealership not to put a decal on the last car we bought – they did anyway. I made them take it off. Then they gave us bright yellow temporary cardboard license plates to drive around advertising the name of the dealership. They came off that very day. I don’t wear T-shirts advertising any business – I once wore running shorts that said “Montana”, and I own a cap that says “Cooke City” – that’s as far as I go.

I see cars with product names plastered in the windows – the names of rock bands, for instance. I see clothing with manufacturers’ emblems pasted all over them – North Face and Nike and Kelty. I see shoes with a big “N” on the side. Are we so commercialized, are we so inured to this that we voluntarily become shills for profit-making entities?

I offer The Daily Coffee Shop a deal: You pay me $2.00 per day to put your bumper sticker on my car, I might consider it, but only if you supply the muscle to take it off when I am tired of it. That’s the only way I’ll advertise for you.

On second thought, never mind. Do your own advertising.