Letters From Home

Over the years, my position on many social issues (that of someone who does know American and world history) has often been sneered at for being “liberal.”  Of course, the fact that someone would sneer in that fashion simply marks that person as uneducated to the extent that he or she accepts without question the liberal-bashing of various media blowhards.  (A thorough education in history is the best antidote for right-wing claptrap.)  It doesn’t bother me.  Thomas Jefferson was a liberal.  Benjamin Franklin was a liberal.  Teddy Roosevelt was a liberal.  Dick Cheney is a conservative.  ’nuff said.

On fiscal matters, however, I line up with the real conservatives, not the neocon poseurs.  The conservatives who are against deficit spending and in favor of zero-based budgeting for all government agencies.  The conservatives who believe that CEOs who mess up should suffer the consequences, in spades.  The conservatives who believe that just because the feeble nobody in the White House got bailed out of every single thing he ever failed at (and that IS everything he ever tried) doesn’t mean he should expect we-the-people to bail him and his cronies out this time.

Jon Stewart played back-to-back clips of Shrub saying “we need to pound Iraq” in 2003 and “we need to bail out these incompetent managers” in 2008.  They’re the same speech.  Today in Congress, according to CNN, Lloyd Doggett from Texas said “Like the Iraq war and patriot act, this bill is fueled by fear and haste.”  He’s right.  Act in haste, repent at leisure!

Hooray for Congress for voting down the bailout.  The deregulated greedheads got their companies into this mess, let them start fixing it by giving up their salaries and perks.  No golden handshake for people who have earned nothing better than a golden shower.

photo credit: Cayusa

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

You may have noticed a common thread running through this series of messages.  That’s not accidental.  Because I firmly believe that the best way to take a stand against ignorance is very simple.

Read.

Read as though your life depended on it, because in a very real sense, it does.  Read the news in depth.  Find a good history book and read that, because if you know your history you’re immunized against claptrap from all sides of the political spectrum.  Nobody can tell you that this, or that, present-day politician is “the best” or “the worst” in history, if you already know what those 19th-century guys were up to.  Nobody can say, as Pat Buchanan did not so long ago, that 1968 was “the most divisive year in United States history,” and get away with it if his audience knows what happened in 1861.

If you have a library card, use it.  If you don’t have a library card, get one.  Make a resolution to visit the library often, and to ask the librarians what’s good to read.  And once you bring your reading material home, of course, read it.

More than 30 years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called “The Ancient and the Ultimate.”  In it, he presents a carefully-thought-out case for the ultimate multimedia device, which even in the wilds of 1973 was not some exotic electronc gizmo or a product of way-out science-fictional thinking.  It was a safe, familiar object, easily obtainable.

A book.

I can’t possibly summarize Asimov’s reasoning on this, but I think he was right.  And I think anyone who reads that essay will understand why he was right.   The essay was collected in a book called The Tragedy of the Moon, which is a collection of essays on various subjects.  You can find it at any public library.  Or, if you really want to be daring, you can order your own copy from Amazon for as little as 89¢ plus shipping.

The great thing about a book of short essays is that if one doesn’t interest you, you can skip to the next one.  And within that same book are two other essays of an eye-opening nature, having to do with social conventions rather than scientific method.  Once you’ve read “The Ancient and the Ultimate,” then read “By the Numbers” to see what Asimov thought about computers and how he predicted they’d affect our world.  And then “Lost in Non Translation” to get a clearer viewpoint about the biases we all share.

Tomorrow starts a new year.  Resolve to take a stand against ignorance.  Individually and collectively, the future we shape will be better if we do.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

One of the best ways to take a stand against ignorance is at the same time the most difficult. We all believe what we believe, and know what we know. And yet, we become more and more ignorant the longer we stick with the status quo. To take a stand against ignorance, one has to be willing to ask one simple question:

But what if that’s not true?

Think of all the advances human knowledge has made because someone was willing to take what “everybody knows” or “everybody believes” and start asking questions. Where would we be, for example, if Copernicus and Galileo hadn’t considered the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe and hadn’t asked “But what if it that’s not true?” What if doctors had kept thinking that dirty hands were just fine? What if Martin Luther had never looked in the Bible and started thinking about Church doctrine in a whole new way?

Ask the question. Think about the answer. You might just learn something.

And we should likewise ask questions about our own talents and life paths. What may be “true” for us might not be so for our children. We should never force our children into our own mold. Our children have to know more than we know, or human progress stops. What if Bishop Milton Wright had insisted that his sons Wilbur and Orville follow in his footsteps? What if Abraham Lincoln’s parents had made sure their son was also an illiterate hick? What if Benazir Bhutto’s family had forced her into purdah? Think, again, about all the people in the world who achieved something their parents never dreamed of. It may be an apocryphal story, but Leonard Bernstein’s father is supposed to have groused, “How was I supposed to know he’d grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?”

The minute you find yourself thinking that you know all there is, or that what was good enough for your parents is good enough for your children–that’s where ignorance begins. Take a stand. Ask questions. Take a stand against ignorance.

(note: I have disabled comments on this post because for some unknown reason it’s drawn what my daughter would call a cubic ass-load of spam. If you’d like to send me a comment, please use the comment form. Thanks!)

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

It’s been a really long time since I graduated from high school. My 40th reunion is coming up in 2008. Yes, I’m old.

I don’t know if it’s true any more (my kids have been out of high school for years, too) but in those days nearly every high school had a required course in civics. At my school it was called “Modern Problems.” The unfortunate thing about civics classes is that they were almost always taught by coaches, because there just weren’t enough gym classes for coaches to teach, and besides, the administration had to make it look like they weren’t just hiring the guy to coach football.

And thus, since a lot of coaches were marginal at best as teachers (with apologies to Mr. G. who coached wrestling and was a top-notch physics teacher, too) nearly everyone snoozed through the classes and ignored pretty much everything once they’d regurgitated it on a test.

Which, in retrospect, is kind of a shame. Because there really were a few nuggets of valuable information to be had. One of the most important things we studied in civics class was the topic of propaganda techniques.

Of course, in 1967-68, propaganda was something those godless Commies did to “indoctrinate” their hapless masses. We were supposed to be able to see communist doublespeak for what it was. We weren’t asked to analyze what our own “indoctrinators” were spitting out. Which is also a shame. We could have learned a lot by paying attention to the politicians of the day.

In this day and age, one of the most important ways you can take a stand against ignorance is to recognize when you’re being manipulated. The techniques of propaganda are alive and well, even if they’re called “spin doctoring” or some other phrase today. Once you understand the method, it’s a lot more difficult for the spin-meisters to bamboozle you.

A complete discussion of propaganda techniques is beyond the scope of this short essay, but there is an excellent discussion here. Be patient; sometimes the site takes a while to load. Which is a good sign–people are learning what to look for.

Print that list of techniques out and read over it. Then, the next time you hear Warren Windbag, Barton Blowhard, Peter Politician or whoever “bloviating” on a subject, see how many of those propaganda techniques are being used. The more such analyses you do, the more you insulate yourself from claptrap.

This video is par for the course for my high school years, but if you can get past the laugh-out-loud factor, it actually does present propaganda techniques in a format that’s easy to understand. After all, it was being played in civics class.

Edit: Well, apparently the video doesn’t play nice with my theme… gonna have to take my own advice and learn something new today so I can fix that!

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

When you think about it, we learn least when we listen only to those we agree with. Isolating ourselves in such a comfortable, agreeable environment is natural–but if everyone’s in total agreement and nobody’s willing to start asking inconvenient questions, we isolate ourselves more and more from learning and from the expansion of human knowledge.

Begin paying real attention to the commentary of “the other side.” Don’t just dismiss them with the cuss word du jour and assume you’re not interested in hearing what they have to say. If you won’t go directly to the source, whatever information you might have will be secondhand at best, and filtered through someone else’s prejudices. Don’t you want to make up your mind for yourself? How are you going to do that if you won’t go straight to the source and get the facts for yourself?

I suppose it’s futile to say that one way to take a stand against ignorance is to quit listening to “commentators” in the first place. There’s not a one of them, no matter what they might say, who reports without bias. The whole point behind commentary is making pointed comments. And the commentators stay on the air because flocks of people who don’t know any better are sitting there listening and saying “Yeah!”

So, if you’re a fan of Keith Olbermann, give Bill O’Reilly honest equal time (and vice versa). If your favorite newspaper columnists are Rich Lowry, Mona Charen and Thomas Sowell, give equal reading time to Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen. You may well be astonished by what you learn. Years ago, I learned that particular lesson by reading Pat Buchanan’s commentary on the first Gulf War and finding out that he and I were in almost total agreement. If I’d refused to read “the other side,” quite a lesson would have been lost.

There’s a much wider world out there beyond our own little internal “villages” and if we refuse to explore it, we’re no better than ignorant villagers out to do the newcomers in with pitchforks and torches. Take a stand against ignorance–find out for yourself what the other guys are saying.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

One of the most important ways to take a stand against ignorance is to never accept secondhand information. Especially when it comes from someone with an axe to grind, and most especially when it comes from someone with whom we agree.

That seems counterintuitive. But think about it. It’s “the other guy” about whom we are naturally skeptical. If he says something, we say “Prove it.” Our own guy, well, what he says is true, isn’t it? And thus our-own-guy can slip us total hogwash again and again and again, and we never bat an eyelash, never check it out. That’s where ignorance begins.

If your favorite commentator Warren Windbag tells you that his arch-rival Barton Blowhard eats dog food for breakfast, don’t take Warren’s word for it. It’s a certainty that Barton has a web site, and if you take time to check it out, what he actually said was “My girlfriend is on a health food kick, and she gave me this new hippie cereal, and now I know what Dog Chow tastes like.”

If Barton Blowhard says that Warren Windbag buys his underwear at Victoria’s Secret, you can bet Warren’s told a tale about taking his wife on a shopping expedition. Commentators who are opinionated enough, and polarized enough to have polar opposites, are going to be the least reliable sources of information about their arch rivals. And consider–if they’re willing to make stuff up when the other guy’s real story is so easily checked, what might they be handing us out of thin air on other issues of the day?

Skepticism shouldn’t just apply to the claims of people we don’t agree with. We should question the people on our own side just as vigorously. It’s amazing what one can learn by saying “Hey, wait a minute” now and again.

Tomorrow I’ll talk more about the ways we can take a stand against ignorance that is spread by “the media.” (Oh, and here’s a factoid that a lot of people don’t know: “Media” is a plural noun. Media are, not is. And people in “the media” are among the worst offenders when it comes to being grammatically correct.)

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

One of the best times to take a stand against ignorance by looking things up, is when we see or hear something that sounds plausible from a reporter, a columnist or a commentator.

The “Mythbusters” guys have a lot of fun with those things that sound oh-so-plausible but turn out to be nothing but hot air. Don’t let them have all the fun. Start busting myths on your own.

If you regularly listen to people holding forth on current events on the radio, for example, listen to what they tell you, write it down, and look it up. Did your main man Warren Windbag just tell you that it’s snowing in Cleveland? Pull up the Weather Channel and take a look. Did he tell you that Phineas T. Politician just won by a landslide? First thing you ask is “What percentage of the voters in his district actually bothered to vote?” If the “landslide” involves about 10% voter turnout, you’re listening to a grand case of what another guy named Warren called “bloviating.”

The main idea here is, as the song once said, to believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Don’t take a commentator’s word for anything. Those people stay on the air by playing to people’s fears and ignorance. If you’re going to take a stand against ignorance, the first thing to do is start being massively skeptical of anything anyone pushes in the name of “entertainment.” There is no better armor against claptrap than the simple fact that you know better.

Don’t make Google searches your primary source of information, either. Anyone can publish anything on the internet, and if enough other people are ignorant enough, guess what turns up high on the page in a Google search? If you’re going to start looking for the truth on the internet, start with The Straight Dope. As their slogan says, they’ve been fighting ignorance since 1973. Take notes as you listen–write down a few so-called “facts” and ask questions.

Another good source for myth-busting is Snopes. This site busts rumors, urban legends, and all that nonsense that shows up in those emails your friends insist on sending you. Before you blindly follow directions to forward some alarmist email to everyone on your list–see if it’s anything even close to the truth.

Make a New Year’s resolution to stop believing everything you hear–especially if it comes from someone you agree with. I’ll discuss this in more detail in an upcoming post.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

To get back to a theme of a previous post, why should any of us bother with “hard copy” reference materials when it’s so easy to look stuff up on the internet?

Yes, I know. Most of us dropped the whole idea of “looking things up” as soon as we got out of school, and most of us said “Good riddance!” as well. Unfortunately, our teachers taught us all kinds of things they never intended to, and the notion that looking things up is sheer drudgery and totally without relevance to the real world is a sad legacy of our years of education.

The main problems with internet reference resources have to do with content and space. Wikipedia, for example, is an extremely popular site for “looking up,” but the content of a Wikipedia article can be altered by anyone with time and an axe to grind. So is what you’re reading a fact or just someone’s opinion? Who knows?

Likewise, web page content tends to be digested down to fit on one or two screens. It’s tough to get all the relevant information cut down to that size (I’m reminded of Billy Joel’s line “It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long–if you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05″). I’m amused by the fact that I edited this post down quite a bit to make it shorter and easier to read. We internet writers know the consequences of blithering on too long.

And yet–people who won’t look things up are far more likely to be snookered by some “entertainer’s” fast talk and plausible sounding hooey. To take a stand against ignorance, we need to be willing to start looking things up again.

It’s easy to buy a package like Encarta, or the electronic version of the Britannica, which have both expanded over the years to become multifaceted reference works. And that’s a good place to start building your own reference library. Software takes up a lot less space than books, and many people just don’t have shelf space to spare. But that’s not the universal answer. Software enyclopedias suffer from the same shortcomings as web pages and help files–the articles are short and don’t go into a lot of detail.

To get more out of the material, one should add a few “hard copy” books as well.

One of the best all-in-one reference books I’ve seen is the New York Public Library Desk Reference. It even costs less than a copy of Encarta. And it’s a fascinating book in its own right. Once you get started looking stuff up in there, you’ll likely find yourself reading it easily just to learn more about stuff you might never have heard of otherwise. What better way to learn something new and take a stand against ignorance?

Take pride in having your own reference library at hand. It may be the smartest purchase you ever made.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

I know a lot of us have spent time laughing at that hapless beauty-queen contestant who flubbed the dub trying to answer a question about why so many people can’t find things that really should be obvious on a map.

The problem is not so much that one poor girl got totally flustered, but that so many people can’t find stuff on a map! That’s been shown again and again to be true, and it’s a form of ignorance that we should, collectively, be ashamed of, especially since it’s so easy to fix.

Get a map!

Of course, the most obvious question is, with so many fabulous “map” web sites out there, why on earth should anyone use anything else for geographical inquiries?  Heck, you can click on Google Maps or Google Earth and find the most obscure corner of the world instantly.  Who needs more than that?

We all do.  Because when all is said and done, if you let Google Maps do all the work for you,  you still won’t know how to find anything on a map for yourself.   Not to disparage the wonder of those web sites–I use them all the time–but there is something about looking at a physical map and doing a little brain work to look locations up that pushes back the boundaries of ignorance a bit.  Try it and see.

If you don’t own any maps right now, start with a road-atlas book for your country. That way you’ll have the advantage of both knowing where you’re going and knowing where things are. Next time the news tells you there’s some big flapdoodle somewhere in your country, get out your road atlas and look that place up. They all have easy-to-use indices in the back.

The next step is to get a map of the world. The National Geographic has some dandy ones, and they are not terribly expensive. Same thing applies: Hear about something in some other country somewhere–look that country up on your map. If you have space to display the map on the wall, so much the better, because it’s a lot easier to see where things are if the map can be spread out and positioned for good viewing. Of course, this may mean that you can’t use the directory on the back of the map to locate things easily.

So, the third step would be to buy a world atlas. Again, you can get one from the National Geographic, but the Reader’s Digest has put out a good one for years, too (doesn’t seem to be available from their web site at the moment, but I’m sure you could find one in a good used-book store). The atlas will have maps of the world that are much more detailed than a wall map, and an index to show you where each country and city can be located.

Ideally, we should all have globes, too, because it’s a lot easier to figure out where those other countries are in relation to each other and in relation to our own home towns if we can see them on a globe, but globes are more expensive than maps and there’s the problem of figuring out where to put the globe. They are decorative and you can buy a nice stand to put your globe on, but not everyone has the space, the money or the inclination for that. Our family bought a big globe at a grade-school auction years ago. Sure, the map itself was way out of date (in fact, it was current as of my birth year, which made me wonder why the school had hung on to it for so long) but on the bright side, that meant I got it for $5. And I can always consult my atlas to see what the political boundaries are these days. The land masses themselves look the same.

So, if someone asked you to find Afghanistan on a map, or a globe, could you do it? If not, then that’s something to take action on as soon as you can. Don’t put yourself in that poor beauty contestant’s shoes. Don’t be ignorant of where you are in the world.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

It may seem paradoxical, in light of the previous entry’s suggestion that one may take a stand against ignorance by watching more TV, that today’s suggestion is: Stop relying on radio, television and/or the internet as your primary source for news and current events.

By their very nature, such media can’t provide background, careful analysis or in-depth reporting. There just isn’t time. People get bored. The advertisers won’t go for it. Broadcasters aren’t journalists, they’re entertainers. You know the drill.

But in the end, it’s mostly true. There is no time in a half-hour show to explain the buildup to this or that current event and put things in perspective. A “personality” who does commentary on the news of the day isn’t going to stick around long if he or she doesn’t entertain the audience (usually at the expense of actually informing them). Advertisers have to consider what will sell, and extend or withdraw their support accordingly.

The result is that people who rely on broadcasters to tell them what’s what, are likely going to end up as #1 on YouTube trying to explain why nobody can find anything on a map.

The first and best thing one can do to take a stand against this kind of ignorance is to subscribe to a weekly news magazine called, appropriately, The Week.  This is no ordinary news magazine.  Its stories are short and well written.  But what makes this magazine stand head and shoulders above any other is that its staff incorporates news stories from a huge range of other publications, and in any controversial issue includes multiple voices from all sides.  There are also excerpts from newspapers and magazines published around the world, so the reader can see exactly what other people think.   “The Week” doesn’t favor any particular point of view.  They do report all sides.  There’s no better way to look at the issues and make up your own mind–and learn something in the process.

In addition, if you’re not a regular reader of daily newspapers, now would be a good time to start.  Newspapers may report the same stories the TV newscasters do, but a newspaper can give you more.  A TV story has to be cut short to fit in the time available.  A newspaper can give you what Paul Harvey calls “the rest of the story.”  Newspapers are not as free of editorial bias as “The Week,” of course.  But they do reflect the sentiments of the communities in which they are based.  And, of course, if you disagree with the paper’s point of view, you can always write a letter to the editor and tell them why.  There’s not much chance of getting your letter read on a newscast, but if you can write a coherent sentence, you stand a good chance of getting published in the paper.

As for getting information from the internet–well, you can find both the best and the worst here.  The ecstasy and the agony of the internet both come from the fact that anybody can post anything they want.  You can find information that comes from the most highly respected authorities in any field, and you can find a lot more information from wackos with axes to grind and tinfoil hats.   And it’s all right there at the click of a mouse.   We can easily find ourselves so overloaded with conflicting points of view that we end up knowing no more than when we started out–and being a lot more confused thereby.

Take a stand against ignorance by refusing to accept the sound-bite or the sound-byte version of any story.  Get the big picture.  You might be astonished by what’s being left out.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites