Dear Mr. Milbank,
Kudos!
While I had thought it impossible to exceed the vapidity of your Washington Sketch entitled "Is it wise to be so smart?" from the May 30 edition of the Washington Post, your recent Sketch from June 28th, awkwardly entitled "Bill Had His Al, and Hillary Might Have Her Bill" has heroically triumphed!
Once again our intrepid reporter finds himself assailed by speeches in which "words such as "fissionable" and "Abrahamic dialogue" were invoked." How vexing! Yet all was not lost. At least the "speech was in a gilded ballroom of the Willard hotel, where waiters served roasted chicken and orzo salad at tables decorated with blue hydrangeas coordinated with the candidate's blue pantsuit." Thank goodness, at least there was something coordinated and appetizing about this miserable and tedious excursion.
Yet all was not well in Versailles! Some poor souls actually had to endure the indignity of "plastic boxes containing tuna sandwiches and bags of potato chips." "Balanced on their laps," no less. Quel damage!
And what a speech it was! Detestably it "occupied nine single-spaced pages and had the warning "3,325 words" at the top." The odious speech "lulled the crowd of 200 into utter silence. Eyelids drooped. Listeners shifted in their seats." How vexing. How utterly tedious! I am sure it was very tiresome indeed for our intrepid reporter. Why, don't they know you could have been out playing tennis instead. How discourteous! How unsolicitous!
I do wish to thank you for enduring this in our stead and reporting only the kernel of the tiresome ordeal and sparing our delicate sensibilities from the inexhaustible details. What could one possibly need to know about a speech which "laid out this great policy, a lot of intricate detail, to a bunch of policy wonks?" Why simply the highlights, darling, such as these "bon mots:" "I revert back to the Nunn-Lugar initiatives, which have been underfunded," and "the IAEA naturally has the lead on nuclear issues," and "there are at least six major reasons why Iran is strategically significant."" In fact, "He could be heard to utter phrases such as" these. No need to bother us with what those six tiresome reasons could possibly be. At least we were served up a few delectable "bon mots," the most appealing of which was no doubt the long denied "in conclusion."
My esteemed Mr. Milbank, once again, the Nation owes you a debt of gratitude for sparing us the noxious details of what are clearly boring policy speeches that last the entirety of "a detailed, hour long discussion." How can our poor brains be expected to retain focus for an entire hour? It is simply too ghastly. It defies time itself. "Tonight? This afternoon." The mind boggles.
Please do yourself a favor and get out of this business before it damages your health.
Admiringly yours,
V. Publius
Friday, June 29, 2007
Dana Milbank is a simpleton
Dear Mr. Milbank,
I am still trying to wrap my brain around your recent offering "Is it
wise to be so smart?" from the May 30 edition of the paper.
Apart for your kooky imaginings of Iowa hog farmers, references to the
great thinkers of our age, like "Schwartz from Germantown" and
thinking Abe Lincoln is somehow "esoteric", there really wasn't much
of the actual Gore book presented. In fact, I think you were able to
summarize (incorrectly) the whole thesis of the book in about one
sentence. Here it is: "The Bush administration has manipulated the
facts on the Iraq war and a range of other policies, the public has
been easily manipulated, and Americans watch too much television."
Brilliant!
Would you like to see how a real journalist might do it? Someone who
is literate perhaps?
Someone who knows the difference between Adam Smith and Thomas
Jefferson? Someone with a nodding acquiantance with learning or
history or facts? Well, here for the record is Jonathan Alter over at
Newsweek:
"Gore starts from a trenchant premise that our means of processing
information and finding rational solutions are badly corrupted by
television, a theme he has been exploring since college. Without any
misplaced nostalgia for a pre-TV age, he argues that the "marketplace
of ideas" that grew out of the rise of the printed word and the
Enlightenment has been largely supplanted by a medium best suited to
stoking fear, which is, he notes, "the most powerful enemy of reason."
The human mind, Gore writes, is now nearly hard-wired to respond to
emotional but fundamentally trivial human-interest stories on TV."
(Or apparently also in the Post.)
You can read the rest here, and you should.
Isn't it amazing the way he organizes words so that they form coherent
thoughts? And that the thoughts he writes actually have something to
do with the book he is discussing?
You may need to consult a dictionary for some of the difficult or
"erudite" words, like "trenchant", "premise" and "supplanted". You
should not feel ashamed to do so. Writers should know what words
mean. Also, "medium" here refers to a means of conveying information,
not something of middle size.
But you will eventually get the hang of it. Keep trying.
Trenchantly yours,
V. Publius
P.S. I cannot possibly improve on Jonathan Alter's review of The Assault on Reason, however, I would like to quote just one brief passage that occurs on page 248:
"I believe that the viability of democracy depends upon the openness, reliability, appropriateness, responsiveness, and two-way nature of the communications environment. After all, democracy depends upon the regular sending and receiving of signals -- not only between the people and those who aspire to be their elected representatives but also among the people themselves. It is the connection of each individual to the national conversation that is the key. I believe that the citizens of any democracy learn, over time, to adopt a basic posture toward the possibilities of self-government. ... My generation learned in our youth to expect that democracy would work. ... Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not."
Crass, self-centered, pedantic, smug, erudite, and esoteric
or
cogent, clear, straight-forward, prescient, compelling and principled?
I ask you.
I am still trying to wrap my brain around your recent offering "Is it
wise to be so smart?" from the May 30 edition of the paper.
Apart for your kooky imaginings of Iowa hog farmers, references to the
great thinkers of our age, like "Schwartz from Germantown" and
thinking Abe Lincoln is somehow "esoteric", there really wasn't much
of the actual Gore book presented. In fact, I think you were able to
summarize (incorrectly) the whole thesis of the book in about one
sentence. Here it is: "The Bush administration has manipulated the
facts on the Iraq war and a range of other policies, the public has
been easily manipulated, and Americans watch too much television."
Brilliant!
Would you like to see how a real journalist might do it? Someone who
is literate perhaps?
Someone who knows the difference between Adam Smith and Thomas
Jefferson? Someone with a nodding acquiantance with learning or
history or facts? Well, here for the record is Jonathan Alter over at
Newsweek:
"Gore starts from a trenchant premise that our means of processing
information and finding rational solutions are badly corrupted by
television, a theme he has been exploring since college. Without any
misplaced nostalgia for a pre-TV age, he argues that the "marketplace
of ideas" that grew out of the rise of the printed word and the
Enlightenment has been largely supplanted by a medium best suited to
stoking fear, which is, he notes, "the most powerful enemy of reason."
The human mind, Gore writes, is now nearly hard-wired to respond to
emotional but fundamentally trivial human-interest stories on TV."
(Or apparently also in the Post.)
You can read the rest here, and you should.
Isn't it amazing the way he organizes words so that they form coherent
thoughts? And that the thoughts he writes actually have something to
do with the book he is discussing?
You may need to consult a dictionary for some of the difficult or
"erudite" words, like "trenchant", "premise" and "supplanted". You
should not feel ashamed to do so. Writers should know what words
mean. Also, "medium" here refers to a means of conveying information,
not something of middle size.
But you will eventually get the hang of it. Keep trying.
Trenchantly yours,
V. Publius
P.S. I cannot possibly improve on Jonathan Alter's review of The Assault on Reason, however, I would like to quote just one brief passage that occurs on page 248:
"I believe that the viability of democracy depends upon the openness, reliability, appropriateness, responsiveness, and two-way nature of the communications environment. After all, democracy depends upon the regular sending and receiving of signals -- not only between the people and those who aspire to be their elected representatives but also among the people themselves. It is the connection of each individual to the national conversation that is the key. I believe that the citizens of any democracy learn, over time, to adopt a basic posture toward the possibilities of self-government. ... My generation learned in our youth to expect that democracy would work. ... Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not."
Crass, self-centered, pedantic, smug, erudite, and esoteric
or
cogent, clear, straight-forward, prescient, compelling and principled?
I ask you.
Bravo Mika!
As a frequent Morning Joe viewer, all I can say is "Bravo!" to correspondent Mika Brzezinski for her principled refusal to talk about Paris Hilton on Morning Joe. It is a credit to MSNBC that such reporters exist and are allowed to express their distain for the obvious trivia and pointlessness that pervades many so called "news" broadcasts. She should receive the Medal of Freedom, she has won a great victory for freedom of the press, particularly freedom from trivia. At this critical juncture in American history, when crucial decisions are being made with little or no public input and awareness, there are many more important things to be discussed. It will go down as our everlasting shame that while Rome burned, we fiddled. Bravo Mika!
Monday, June 4, 2007
Prime Cuts
On Page 118 of Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, we read;
"We know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against [the] Cheney Energy Task Force, by the odd combination of the conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, that one of the documents that was receiving scrutiny by the task force during ... [the run up to the start of the war] was a highly detailed map of Iraq -- showing none of the cities, none of the places where people lived, but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarcating blocks for promising exploration -- a map that, in the words* of a Canadian journalist, resembled a butcher's drawing of a steer with the prime cuts delineated by dotted lines."
* "Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields" July 17, 2003. www.judicialwatch.org/IraqOilMap.pdf
Which put me in mind of:
"On the wall a chart shows an outline of a steer, like a map covered with frontier lines that mark off the areas of consuming interest, involving the entire anatomy of the animal except only horns and hoofs. The map of the human habitat is this, no less than the planisphere of the planet; both are protocols that should sanction the rights man has attributed to himself, of possession, division, and consumption without residue of the terrestrial continents and of the loins of the animal body."
Italo Calvino "Marble and Blood." Mr. Palomar. Pg. 77.
"We know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against [the] Cheney Energy Task Force, by the odd combination of the conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, that one of the documents that was receiving scrutiny by the task force during ... [the run up to the start of the war] was a highly detailed map of Iraq -- showing none of the cities, none of the places where people lived, but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarcating blocks for promising exploration -- a map that, in the words* of a Canadian journalist, resembled a butcher's drawing of a steer with the prime cuts delineated by dotted lines."
* "Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields" July 17, 2003. www.judicialwatch.org/IraqOilMap.pdf
Which put me in mind of:
"On the wall a chart shows an outline of a steer, like a map covered with frontier lines that mark off the areas of consuming interest, involving the entire anatomy of the animal except only horns and hoofs. The map of the human habitat is this, no less than the planisphere of the planet; both are protocols that should sanction the rights man has attributed to himself, of possession, division, and consumption without residue of the terrestrial continents and of the loins of the animal body."
Italo Calvino "Marble and Blood." Mr. Palomar. Pg. 77.
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