I’m not sure how I got on the distribution list of people I know who are upset about illegal immigration, but there I am, frequently getting misinformed screeds against illegals.

Here’s the first of two I recently received (and please do read it):

Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration.

Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely. Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests.

Let’s say I break into your house.
Let’s say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave.
But I say, “No! I like it here. It’s better than my house. I’ve made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors. I’ve
done all the things you don’t like to do. I’m hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).”

According to the protesters:
You are Required to let me stay in your house
You are Required to feed me
You are Required to add me to your family’s insurance plan
You are Required to Educate my kids
You are Required to Provide other benefits to me & to my family
(my husband will do all of your yard work because
he is also hard-working and honest, except for that
breaking in part).

If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my RIGHT to be there.

It’s only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I’m just trying to better myself. I’m a hard-working and honest, person, except for well, you know, I did break into your house.

And what a deal it is for me!!!
I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of cold, uncaring, selfish, prejudiced, and bigoted behavior.

Oh yeah, I DEMAND that you learn MY LANGUAGE!!! so you can communicate with me.

Why can’t people see how ridiculous this is?! Only in America if you agree, pass it on (in English ).
Share it if you see the value of it.

If not blow it off………
along with your future Social Security
funds, and a lot of other things.

If, like me, you receive lots of variations on this, you’ll note the consistent symptomatology:

1. Nameless opponents — in this case, “certain people.” Me, I’m always suspicious of “certain people” who use the phrase “certain people.”
2. Bad metaphor. No, breaking into a house and then refusing to leave is not like slipping across the border. The former is a home invasion, and police take it very seriously; if they get a clear shot at someone who takes hostages, they take it. They have not been known to shoot women, children, and men who cross the border, legally or not.
3. The supposed threat to Social Security — which I will address in a moment.
4. The “demand” that English speakers learn Spanish. In actuality, of its own accord, it goes the other way. Here are the facts: 1/3 of Latinos in the U.S. are Spanish-dominant, yes; but that means that 2/3 AREN’T — half are English-dominant, and half are fully bilingual. For second and third generation Spanish speakers, English becomes dominant.
5. Misrepresentations and outright lies, such as these: “Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration. Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders….” No one protested that Congress was addressing illegal immigration — they were protesting what they took to be proposed measures. From what I understand, almost everyone wants something done, they just don’t know what. As for being angry that “the US might protect its own borders,” again, I haven’t heard of anyone being angry about protecting the borders. I want the borders and the insides protected from all sorts of things, as long as we can retain some sanity about it.

But my real beef with this email is that the wrong people are being targeted. Why go after the iron filings drawn to the magnet, when the magnet is larger and easier to locate? Here was my response:

Let’s try this a different way.

Let’s say you want your house cleaned and painted and your lawn mowed. And you don’t want to pay $20/an hour. So nobody wants to do it. So you and the rest of the neighborhood invite people from far away to come do it for $5/an hour. But then you complain that there aren’t enough $20/an hour jobs to go around, and you try to wall off the neighborhood. Even though you go right on offering $5/ an hour to everybody who somehow gets over the wall.

Now who’s to blame?

I sent that to the entire distribution list and never received a reply.

This next one deals with the perceived threat to Social Security presented by illegal aliens. It helpfully includes a petition so that everyone involved can keep spreading misinformation and forwarding it around the entire internet.

SOCIAL SECURITY CHANGES

It does not matter if you personally like or dislike Bush. You need to sign this petition and flood his e-mail box with e-mails that tell him that, even if the House passes this bill, he needs to veto it. It is already impossible to live on Social Security alone. If the government gives benefits to ‘illegal’ aliens who have never contributed, where does that leave those of us who have paid into Social Security all our working lives?

As stated below, the Senate voted this week to allow ‘illegal’ aliens access to Social Security benefits.
Attached is an opportunity to sign a petition that requires citizenship for eligibility to that social service.

Instructions are below. If you don’t forward the petition and just stop it, we will lose all these names.

If you do not want to sign it, please just forward it to everyone you know.

Thank you!

To add your name, click on ‘forward’. Address it to all of your email correspondents, add your name to the list and send it on.

When the petition hits 1,000, send it to comment@whitehouse.gov

PETITION for President Bush:

Dear Mr President:
We, the undersigned, protest the bill that the Senate voted on recently which would allow illegal aliens to access our Social Security. We demand that you and all Congressional representatives require citizenship as a pre-requisite for social services in the United States.

We further demand that there not be any amnesty given to illegals, NO free services, no funding, no payments to and for illegal immigrants.

We are fed up with the lack of action about this matter and are tired of paying for services to illegals.

There were just under 1000 names on the one I received. Some of them were names of people I know. I understand the seeming appeal of the argument, but it requires believing the facts presented (which I rarely do), and the conclusions drawn (which I almost never do). Here was my response:

According to Snopes.com, this thing has been floating around the internet since 2006. I can’t find any record of Congress (or even “the House”) passing this bill, which would of course require Senate passage as well. Moreover, if there were such a bill, I’m sure it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country and we would have heard of it. Rush Limbaugh would be banking further millions off this topic. Instead, the email furthers the perception that illegals are flooding our borders and stealing our jobs. Although of course we need immigration reform and no one should encourage illegal immigration — including every single one of us who indirectly is supporting illegal immigration, whether directly by unknowingly hiring illegals or indirectly by eating crops picked by illegals who are supported by an economic system that depends upon them — illegals are a net plus for the economy, as every single economic study has shown. We need to welcome these people into the system so that entitlement programs — like Social Security, ironically — can be shored up by the income derived by their children. I say that because, in case no one has noticed, in general well-off white people like probably most of us on this email list are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. Our economic well-being rests in the hands of those little ones with brown faces.

Lee

Again, I replied to the entire distribution list. In this case, I did receive one response:

Hi Lee,
Interesting perspective. It shows what happens when folks don’t have all the facts rights.
Take care.”

No, I’m not in favor of illegal immigration. I’m in favor of recognizing that we’ve got a very large labor force already here, and we in essence invited them here. We can try to keep them as a permanent underclass, keeping their kids out of school and forcing their uninsured into clinics and hospitals, or we can come up with sensible solutions that makes a better system for everyone. Either way, they’re probably not leaving. And the day they stop coming will be the day you know the economy is so bad that even George W. Bush has noticed. I vote for fixing the system in a way that makes the most sense.

Primarily, though, I always vote for using your common sense to sift baseless importunity from logic.

Just because I didn’t blog yesterday or today doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about what to blog about. So here are the things I thought about blogging about that I didn’t blog about:

1. That it now occurs to me that counting students, thesis students, workshop members, private dramaturgy clients, and me, I’m knee-deep in 19 different new plays — and exactly one of them is by me.
2. That I’m reading three books — and not at the moment writing either of the two I’m working on.
3. That “John Adams” on HBO leaves untouched the great question: How someone like Paul Giamatti gets someone like Laura Linney. And then leaves her behind for years at a time.
4. That yes, I can do a baked dijon flounder at home and have it come out well — but it will never be the baked dijon flounder at Smith’s Clam Bar in Somers Point, New Jersey.
5. That while Eliot Spitzer is a hypocrite who needed to go, I have to wonder again how many violent crimes could be prevented and how many roads and bridges and schools rebuilt and able-bodied productive non-violent people released from prison to help feed the economy if we legalized prostitution and decriminalized marijuana and taxed them both.
6. That Wizard World was in Los Angeles this weekend and I didn’t go because Comic-Con comes but once a year and Wizard World ain’t it.
7. That the Fed bailed out Bear Stearns, and it was those “free marketers” who cheered. In a free market, failing businesses fail. We had NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard); now we have NIMBA (Not In My Bank Account). By the way, the Fed funds that backed up Bear Stearns came from the Treasury — which means they were tax money. Which means you and I bailed out Bear Stearns. And yet we never got any of those windfall profits. This seems like something potentially more worthy of a federal investigation than call-girl rings.

I’m sure more will follow as I think about it.

Just today I was complaining again about the one unfortunate constant in David Mamet’s otherwise often quite marvelous dramas: the secretly scheming woman. We see it in “Speed the Plow,” we see it in “Heist,” we see it in “Oleanna,” we see it in “The Verdict,” we see it in “The Edge,” we see it again and again; when it’s unclear who the villain is, look to the woman in the cast. Those men may be crooks, but somehow they have better morals than those women whose intention is to emasculate them.

Then this afternoon I came across this piece in the Village Voice, in which Mr. Mamet’s other, less-visible, fault reappears: that of setting up false targets so he can easily knock them down. In this case, he equates liberalism with being brain-dead and attacks liberals for arguments I don’t hear them making.

(And you will note that I use “them” as the pronoun for liberals, rather than “us.” Please don’t think I dislike Mamet’s thin argument because my own group is being attacked. It isn’t. But I do wonder at how negative the connotations of “liberal” have become, when once there was a fine tradition of liberal humanism that cut across the political spectrum on these shores. Where once liberals were strong and proud standard-bearers of the improvability of the human condition, now they are cast as appeasers to tyrants and abettors of the disenchanted and ungrateful. In other words, they seem weak — which may be why the famously macho Mamet has jumped ship.)

Mostly when I listen to liberals I don’t hear a nostalgia for Che Guevara. What I hear is concern over a loss of civil liberties (an issue I would think both conservative and liberal and an issue, therefore, unreservedly patriotic and “American”), a bemoaning of the misconduct and malpractice of government (Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), and a great economic unease as enormous stockpiles of wealth are slushed over to an often incompetent few presiding over the ruin of major corporations while hundreds of thousands suffer from their daily mismanagement. If those complaints are liberal, then statistically we are all liberal. To me, a believer in free markets and friendly relations, someone who chokes up over the founding notions behind this nation and wishes we would get back to them, these complaints are commonsensical.

When liberals attack Rush Limbaugh, whom Mamet almost seems to embrace in this strange essay, surely they recognize Limbaugh as the opportunistic showman he is. (Let us always remember that the cowardly Limbaugh is hiding behind that microphone in his broadcast booth every day; if you were one of the few who saw his short-lived television show and his actual confrontations with a live audience, you will never forget the terror in his eyes and the timidity in his voice.) No, what irks leftists and, well, me about Limbaugh is rather what he represents: the dumbing-down of the dialogue and the debasement of the platform. As incredible as this may seem, many people actually listen to Rush Limbaugh and think he makes sense. Worse, the tenor of how he says what he says feeds an indignation that is misdirected against the sufferers rather than the perpetrators. And that, too, is what Mamet’s essay at times seems to do.

If David Mamet found himself caught up in groupthink and extricated himself, I’m delighted. We should celebrate that; it seems like one of our founding principles. But if he has left behind one groupthink to surrender to another, he hasn’t gone anywhere new.

Here’s another example, a sad one, of why print vehicles are now too slow for news.

The cover of today’s Parade magazine, inserted into my newspaper and probably yours, is headlined, “I Am What the Terrorists Most Fear,” and includes a photo of the interview subject:  Benazir Bhutto, who as we know was assassinated 10 days ago. The subhead is: “Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?”

That now qualifies as a rhetorical question.

Judging from the trailer, which seeks funding for this documentary…

It would be about… small-town America.

It would be about… empty houses.

And a cat on a lawn.

It would be… simplistic, yet enigmatic… like “Good Night Moon”… but less brightly colored.

It would be about… 40 minutes long, with not much happening.

And it would be about… forever… before you saw a nickel in return….

Last week I received a newspaper clipping from my 82-year-old mother back on the homestead in Galloway Township, New Jersey, with a brief note from her also tucked into the envelope. The clip, doubtless from the oft-mentioned “The Press of Atlantic City” (which every native of southern New Jersey continues to call “The Atlantic City Press,” as discussed here previously), reads thusly:

Collector buys valuable comic from attic cleaner

Ellwood City, PA —

Holy collectibles, Batman!

A near-mint copy of Detective COmics 27, a pre-World War II comic featuring Batman’s debut, was recently found in an attic and sold to a local collector.

The comic is considered to be the second-most valuable available and can fetch up to $500,000. The only comic considered more valuable is Action Comics 1, where Superman makes his first appearance.

Collector Todd McDevitt said the Batman issue he bought is worth about $250,000, but he won’t say how much he paid for it or who sold the book to him.

(We will leave aside for the moment the ongoing aggravation of having Every Single Associated Press Story About Comic Books a) focus on the astonishing monetary value of this seemingly worthless form and b) begin with a badly punned homage to the late and ungreat Batman TV show of, hey, FORTY YEARS AGO. I guess I shouldn’t grouse; by the time AP comes up with a new lede, newspapers will be dead anyway. )

So here’s the touching little note Mom enclosed with this breathless clipping:

Lee,

I’m so sorry I donated the comic books to my group at Elwood school. I never thought they would be valuable some day. But no one was interested at the time and we were planning to move.

Mom

So, there it is. The overdue apology every comic-book-collecting man my age awaits. Do I take any satisfaction from this? No. It was one of the few mistakes Mom ever made — and perhaps the only one.

Except….

As is so often the case, tiny recollections like this sometimes send me off onto a tear. Something about this note strikes me as, well, wrong. As in so many other memories:

• Thinking off and on for about 30 years with regard to the pastor of my youth before saying to my mother out of the blue, “When did you realize Pastor Joecks was gay?” (She said straight off, “I guess we always knew.”)
• Recalling the odd boy who came to play one day when I was 5. I never saw him before or after, but I remember his awkward inability to play; by the time he finally got the hang of it, his mother came to pick him up. I met him only the once, but I remember his name: Tommy Maseitis. So a few years ago, I said, “Mom, remember the time when I was 5 and that boy Tommy Masietis came over to play only he didn’t know how? I never met him before and I never saw him again. Why did he come over? What was that about?” (To which she replied initially, “Why do you do this?” before admitting that Tommy Masietis was brought over as a form of therapy — so that he could learn to play with another boy — because he had nothing at home but sisters and the mother and their pastor (a different one from mine) were worried about him.
• The supposed “missing duck” which I and my friends and my father and his friends all shot at — and saw fall — but could never find again after it absolutely had been put into Gus Weber’s truck. The men argued over who had actually hit it while we boys stamped around and ventured guesses as well, with Gus definitively claiming it as his own. Later it was gone. It took me only a few years to figure that one out: One of the other men who was sure it was his, no doubt my father, spirited it away.

And so on. These all make for good stories sooner or later. Or at the least they reawaken me to the hidden mysteries of life human psychology. So what is it about Mom’s note?

We moved when I was nine years old. We did not have old comics around at the time, at least none that weren’t mine. Believe me, if there were hidden treasures of comic books from the 1950’s and 1960’s courtesy of my older brothers somewhere — anywhere — in our house, I would have found them. Moreover, the idea that “no one was interested” is on the face of it untrue: 36 years later here I am still writing about comic books. I did find a bare handful of treasured comics from my older brothers that I kept for years: a very nice copy of Avengers #1 — which I later sold for $365, at which point my brother Ray tried to retroactively lay claim to it (with no luck); a coverless copy of Avengers #4 (the reintroduction of Captain America); an early issue of Tales to Astonish with Giant Man and the Wasp in battle with the Human Top (can’t remember the issue number — but obviously I could pick it out of a lineup); and the only non-Marvel, an issue of the DC title Tales of the Unexpected cover-featuring Space Ranger and his bubblegum-pink alien pal Cryll. But those four were it. And believe me, I scoured that house — because I was always hearing from my brothers how many comic books they once had. And I scoured that house even though, even back then, my mother was saying, and I quote, “I gave them all to the Elwood school.” (A place I grew to hate by name.)

In my reading of advice columnists, they generally say don’t apologize for faults unfound — you just raise new issues. It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. While I appreciate that my loving 82-year-old mother is trying to erase the guilt of having disposed of those comic books all those years ago, her apology now has me wondering if she doesn’t feel guilty about something far worse.

That’s why, when reading my mother’s note, I decided that in the passage of time she had connected two separate and previously unconnected incidents: 1) giving all the comic books, which would one day be extremely valuable, to the Elwood school; and 2) moving to Galloway Township many years later when I was 9. I have to believe that. Because to take her note at face value would be to conclude that my mother secretly kept all those comics away from me for years and then gave them to the Elwood school when I was 9 and we moved! And that’s too terrible to consider.

You may have been following the news that Radiohead made its most recent CD release a pay-what-you-will download. The offer expires December 10th, so if you’re of a mind to download it and pay nothing — as I did — here’s your chance. Better act now.

Much has been made in the media of this as the latest example in the wholesale revaluing of things both physical and experiential. In the late 1970’s, vinyl LP’s were about $7.98 (a rather fantastic sum at the time, especially considering the flimsy pressings that often emerged newborn out of the sleeve with scratches and pops); CD’s are now somewhere between $11.99 and $15.98 (or $9.99 if downloaded from iTunes). My first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 (lovingly nicknamed “the trash-80”) with separate cassette-tape player for “bloading” binary files from tape, was $800 circa 1980, while its printer, capable only of printing on four-inch-wide aluminum strips, was another $800. (The machine’s entire database held up to 40 — forty! — names and addresses. Which I could then print on the foil strips if I so wished.) Now, of course, I can communicate with the planet Antares 5 with a handheld device costing under two hundred bucks. Newspapers once cost 25 cents an issue; that is, until they cost $1 an issue; or until they went online, where they are utterly free. In addition to these changes in technology and delivery platform, and all the upset in price scaling and price conception that has resulted, there is an ever-widening margin in incomes as well as offerings to match those incomes. When I’m at Pacific Dining Car, a steak is $45 or more; tonight at Acapulco what would have been a $12 steak was free because of a promotion. A recent think piece in the LA Times detailed some of the confusion caused by these matters in the entertainment industry.

Where I think many commentators have gotten the analysis wrong is in their thinking about this new Radiohead release. In their minds, and, I suspect, in the minds of the band itself, “buyers” (including we who did not pay) have placed a value on the music and acted accordingly. From this point of view, the jury is in: 40% of buyers paid $8 for the download, and have therefore set a price. That is a capitalist perspective — and one I myself would often tend to adopt, being a capitalist. But no, I think that probably 50% of those who downloaded “In Rainbows” actually look a socialist perspective. It goes like this: “Hm. Radiohead: famous, wealthy rock stars. Me: not so much. I’m sending them… nothing.”

I could be snarky and say that I paid for “In Rainbows” precisely what it’s worth — and having listened to the disc three times today, that is indeed my opinion. Someone in their profession who cares about them might introduce them to things like, well, a beat, or the clever way that drums and bass and guitar and voice can often coalesce into that thing called a song. In all fairness, some of these elements do intrude on Track 9, but that’s either an accident or a test to see if the listener is still awake for the conclusion of the album with Track 10. (And no, I do not know the title of Track 9 or Track 10 or of any of the tracks, because I don’t believe any of said titles are sung in any of these songs. At least, not so that I can tell.) Finally, imagine “song” after song with a lead vocal remarkably similar to the piercing whine of air escaping the tightly stretched neck of a toy balloon. By comparison, Yoko Ono was Perry Como.

It’s notable that I arrived at these conclusions after downloading “In Rainbows,” and therefore after having chosen not to pay. It was entirely a socialist judgment: They don’t need the money more than I do. Thus the capitalist analysis flies out the window. Had I thought the band needed the money, I would have acted differently. Had it been a new release by Pere Ubu, so influential in music history but so notable in its tiny corner of the universe for having once sold all of 6000 copies of a release on a major label, I would have paid far more than expected: at least $25, maybe $50. But had it been Pere Ubu, I would have gotten my money’s worth.

According to a report released today by the National Endowment for the Arts, reading in the U.S. is in steep decline. Here’s the story from AP:

A growing crisis in American literacy 

Fewers adults than ever report reading even one book a year, says disturbing new NEA report.

By Hillel Italie, Associated Press
November 19, 2007

NEW YORK — The latest National Endowment for the Arts report draws on a variety of sources, public and private, and essentially reaches one conclusion: Americans are reading less.

The study, “To Read or Not Read,” is being released today as a follow-up to a 2004 NEA survey, “Reading at Risk,” that found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year.

“To Read or Not to Read” gathers an array of government, academic and foundation data on everything from how many 9-year-olds read every day for “fun” (54%) to the percentage of high school graduates deemed by employers as “deficient” in writing in English (72%).

“I’ve done a lot of work in statistics in my career and I’ve never seen a situation where so much data was pulled from so many places and absolutely everything is so consistent,” NEA Chairman Dana Gioia said.

Among the findings in the 99-page study:

* In 2002, only 52% of Americans ages 18 to 24, the college years, read a book voluntarily, down from 59% in 1992.

* Money spent on books, after being adjusted for inflation, dropped 14% from 1985 to 2005 and has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s.

* The number of adults possessing bachelor’s degrees and “proficient in reading prose” dropped from 40% in 1992 to 31% in 2003.

An age gap

Some of the news is good, notably among 9-year-olds, whose reading comprehension scores have soared since the early 1990s. But at the same time, the number of 17-year-olds who “never or hardly ever” read for pleasure has doubled, to 19%, and their comprehension scores have fallen.

“I think there’s been an enormous investment in teaching kids to read in elementary school,” Gioia said. “Kids are doing better at 9 and at 11. At 13, they’re doing no worse, but then you see his catastrophic falloff. . . . If kids are put into this electronic culture without any counterbalancing efforts, they will stop reading.”

Publishers and booksellers have noted that teen fiction is a rapidly expanding category in an otherwise flat market, but the NEA’s director of research, Sunil Iyengar, wondered how much of that growth has been caused by the Harry Potter books, the last of which came out in July.

“It’s great that millions of kids are reading these long, intricate novels, but reading one such book every 18 months doesn’t make up for daily reading,” Gioia said.

Doug Whiteman, president of the Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA), said sales of teen books were the strongest part of his business.

But he added that a couple of factors could explain why scores were dropping: Adults are also buying the Potter books, thus making the teen market seem bigger on paper, and some sales are for non-English-language books.

“There are so many nuances,” Whiteman said. “Reading scores don’t necessarily have any relevance to today’s sales.”

The head of Simon & Schuster’s children’s publishing division, Rick Richter, saw another reason why sales could rise even as scores go down: A growing gap between those who read and those who don’t.

Richter considers it “very possible” that the market is driven by a relatively small number of young people who buy large numbers of books. Test scores, meanwhile, are lowered by the larger population of teens who don’t read. “A divide like that is really a cause for concern,” Richter said.

The report emphasizes the social benefits of reading: “Literary readers” are more likely to exercise, visit art museums, keep up with current events, vote in presidential elections and perform volunteer work.

“This should explode the notion that reading is somehow a passive activity,” Gioia said. “Reading creates people who are more active by any measure. . . . People who don’t read, who spend more of their time watching TV or on the Internet, playing video games, seem to be significantly more passive.”

Sounding the alarm

Gioia called the decline in reading “perhaps the most important socioeconomic issue in the United States” and called for changes “in the way we’re educating kids, especially in high school and college.”

“We need to reconnect reading with pleasure and enlightenment,” he said.

” ‘To Read or Not Read’ suggests we are losing the majority of the new generation,” Gioia added. “The majority of young Americans will not realize their individual, economic or social potential.”

I read this — no pun intended — and thought, I’m not sure. In some of the disciplines I follow, such as poetry and comic books, reading is dramatically up. Given that more and more people have direct access to the internet and probably check out news sites while they’re there, I think news reading may be up as well. (Although newspaper reading is no doubt shrinking.) And I also couldn’t help bearing in mind that Chaucer had nine readers in his lifetime, all of them at court, so we’re certainly in better shape than that. And, if we’re counting raw numbers, given the explosion in population (200 million Americans when I was a boy; 260 million now), that certainly equals a net growth in readers. Finally, given that almost everyone in the known universe is writing a memoir or self-help book of some sort, they must be able to read. I say all this while maintaining my enormous respect for NEA Chair Gioia, whose goals are laudable.

Then I used the internet — and my reading skills — to locate this piece in the New York Times, which quotes a USC colleague who has similar reservations:

The new report is likely to provoke as much debate as the previous one. Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California, said that based on his analysis of other data, reading was not on the decline. He added that the endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores and said that according to federal education statistics, the bulk of decreases in 12th-grade reading scores had occurred in the early 1990s, and that compared with 1994 average reading scores in 2005 were only one point lower.

Something I remember from my childhood in the 1970’s was a widespread sense that children of the time were somehow dumber than our predecessors. (This is somewhat akin to the death of the theatre, which has been happening for 2000 years. Los Angeles has, at last count, 400 theatres.) I look at the astonishing proficiency in new technologies of so much of this generation and I wonder if our assumptions don’t keep us from recognizing these new achievements because they don’t correlate with past experience.

Whatever shape books come in, reading will continue. So will the emergence of new technologies and new storytelling mechanisms. I pledge to you that “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” on Xbox 360 is in some ways an amazing storytelling experience. Yes, the plotlines and characterization are crude, but this is only the start. In the new era — as we also saw foreshadowed in “Myst” and in Dick’s “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” — we will be inside the story. Will this new fiction necessarily be a lesser achievement than, say, Tolstoy’s? Or will we understand that embracing the possibilities of the new forms does not mean that we cannot continue our appreciation of Tolstoy and Chaucer?

Until that day, because of the poor track record of doomsayers, I remain suspicious of “decline and fall” theories.
—————-
Now playing: Pere Ubu – The Book Is On The Table
via FoxyTunes

I guess I’m glad that my good friend Doug Hackney had corrective surgery to his eyes. Doug’s always been a visionary, and we wouldn’t want to lose that.

But describing the procedure at length — and including photos of every gruesome up-close eye-scraping and incision, as you can read here if you’re of strong stomach — brought to mind what we in comics fandom call “injury to eye motif.” Here are some sterling examples:

These comics are highly collectible, and I think we can see why: They prey on one of our deepest fears. And although Doug sadly knows little or nothing about comic books, I think he understands the collective subconscious as well as anyone. Why else tease us with a close-up of his visage looking like something straight out of “X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes?” And who could possibly read his story and look at the photos without flinching? No one. Because seeing is believing.

Here’s the sort of thing that really pisses me off about the Los Angeles Times. Today, buried in a single column on page A19, is a story headlined “Rumsfeld memos reveal musings.”

What is the definition of “musing”? American Heritage Dictionary puts it thusly:

mus·ing   adj.   Deep in thought; contemplative.

n.  

1. Contemplation; meditation.
2. A product of contemplation; a thought. “an elegant tapestry of quotations, musings, aphorisms, and autobiographical reflections” (James Atlas).

What, according to this story originally from the Washington Post, were Rumsfeld’s “musings”? They were memos designed to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran,” and develop “‘bumper sticker statements’ to rally support for an increasingly unpopular war.”

In other words, not musings, not contemplations from an elder statesman. They were the memoranda for propaganda, insidious and dangerous propaganda that brazenly lied about the level of threat to this nation, that brazenly lied about the relative roles of Iraq and Iran, and that ginned up a misguided patriotic fervor in favor of an illicit war.

“The memos, often referred to as ‘snowflakes,’ shed light on Rumsfeld’s brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief.”

Aside from Lee:  I’ll say.

“Spanning from 2002, a year after he took office, to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained Wednesday reveals a Defense chief disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.”

“Disdainful” of media criticism? What media criticism? More like disdainful of the media — and for good reason. No one in power respects anyone or anything as toothless as the mainstream media has been these past endless seven years.

“Rumsfeld produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day.” … “Under siege in April 2006… Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. ‘Talk about Somalia, the Phillippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,’ he wrote.”

Page A19. “Musings.”