When it comes to media bigotry, follow the money

Yawn. Another mass shooting, this one clearly aimed at Black people and just as clearly mixing in some ugly white supremacy with easy-to-buy killing instruments.

Oh, and a young white male is the villain. Shocking!

Heaven forbid that anyone take any responsibility or that anything substantial will be done. America has "voted" as a society that these frequent mass killings are simply the price the nation must pay for, well, freedom. Abortions are just not "sporting," I guess, while gunning down adults and young children is part of our trade-off for being able to live as we wish.

Video game violence is not the root of the gun violence epidemic, but lonely young males pushing each other to more extreme expressions of violence are likely mixing game violence with the real world. 

America now possesses nearly half of all guns in the entire world, more than one gun per American. We are quite crazy, and we are paralyzed, unable to do anything to reduce gun violence, not to mention rising racist conspiracy theories. Hearts and prayers, everyone.

There is no one solution to be pursued, but there is a clear connection between the rise of FOX News and its increasingly racist underpinnings to at least consider one practical action: put pressure on Fox advertisers to simply spend their ad dollars elsewhere.

Fox may be home to America's most insidious media racists, but the owners of the network value money more than any ideology. No television network is immune to advertisers taking their dollars elsewhere. Forget freedom of speech. If the network starts losing money as advertisers flee, changes will occur. The worst voices will be silenced or modified. 

A TV network is not going to "stand on principal" once the principal threatens financial gains. The same may be true of entire countries.

McDonald's invested billions in Russia and is now selling its franchises, withdrawing its global branding, etc. Many other American corporations have already managed to do the same, at least for now. When in doubt, follow the money.

When corporations buy ad time for, say, the Tucker Carlson show on Fox, they are de facto endorsing his racist, radical views. Corporations can claim that they are doing whatever they can to reach potential customers, but even a highly rated show like Carlson's brings in about 3 million viewers per night. That is a significant number, but still is less than one percent of all Americans.

We need some sort of organization to help people keep tabs on companies that continue to keep the Fox opinion machine running. Then consumers can take action. 

I feel the same way about Twitter, BTW, despite it being dominated by liberal posters. If a large number of people deleted their accounts, the company's leadership would immediately take notice. I see that Musk is holding off on his purchase of Twitter until he is satisfied that their reported total users are not artificially inflated by "bots." 

We should find it quite appealing to consider undermining a multi-billionaire's purchase of Twitter by just not using the platform. Humans love to see the mighty brought low.

Twitter is a cesspool. But so is Facebook. And Fox News? Duh.

My quick research shows that Tucker Carlson already has very few sponsors left, but a wider boycott by American companies might get Fox executives thinking of their future.

Anything would be better than nothing at this point.

Writing and reading from a sense of abundance

Some nice sample sentences from recent papers, courtesy of Frank Bruni and his readers (who nominate their favorite sentences each week).

From Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column on the Supreme Court: “Samuel Alito’s antediluvian draft opinion is the Puritans’ greatest victory since they expelled Roger Williams from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

"Antediluvian" (original meaning "before the Biblical flood") now connotes "old and tired thinking," but helping students understand it combines that connotation with a bit of discussion about the flood, Noah, etc. You don't need to study the Bible to get the point -- and you might be able to use a context clue if you have some knowledge of early American history. But I was thinking I might need another five minutes just to fill in high school juniors about Puritans and Roger Williams. 

Bottom line: Dowd does not write for high school readers, but we can keep pushing those high school readers to expand their catalog of vocabulary and allusions (both historical and literary).

A sports description of note was found in Joe Drape’s vivid account of Rich Strike’s against-all-odds win in the Kentucky Derby. Drape described the winning burst of the winning steed, jockeyed by Sonny Leon, this way: “Leon started guiding his horse through the pack, zigzagging like someone late for work on a busy Manhattan sidewalk.”

You don't need to spend time in New York to understand maneuvering through a busy sidewalk.

There has been a lot written lately about Real Madrid's "magical soccer season." NYT sports writer Rory Smith wrote that it’s not “too florid, too ethereal, to suggest that Real Madrid does not so much beat teams at soccer as overwhelm them by harnessing some elemental force.” He went on to add, “At times, it resembles a form of alchemy, the transformation of a succession of base metals — a smattering of garlanded veterans, a couple of raw hopefuls, a coach with an expressive eyebrow and an easy charm, a team with no recognizable, cogent plan beyond a pervasive sense of its own destiny — into something precious.”

This extended description is over the top, which is not unusual for soccer writers. It's not a sport that fits into neatly timed pieces, and a large percentage of enjoyment for true fans is found in things beyond final scores, or scores at all -- which can be quite few. 

Soccer commentary often reads as poetry, and the top players create poetry with their actions on the pitch. This physical poetry happens throughout sports, of course, even in brutal American football, but perhaps it's all that time needing to be filled while teams battle for midfield position that allows for announcers to stretch their descriptive powers a bit.

A casual soccer fan such as myself might note that a team having no "recognizable, cogent plan" seems like what all soccer teams share. Goals can be quite sudden but often one team is far superior to another and still only wins by one goal... with that goal resulting from a long series of choices and mistakes and unrelenting pressure. Discrete plays are not part of the soccer experience, other than "set plays" and penalty kicks.

Even in this short passage, I would need to review vocabulary like "florid," "ethereal," "alchemy," "garlanded," and "cogent." Dedicated readers may have encountered all those words in various novels but none of those are words teens normally rely upon in daily conversations. 

We could also work on getting clues from context, as with the simple appositive "the transformation of a succession of base metals" supplying lots of help for "alchemy." Students would need a nudge to recognize "garlanded," I would think, as even the modern Olympics do not feature garlands placed on winners' heads. 

And a quick discussion about the root of "cogent" and a more common term like "recognize" would be worth a minute. 

When I was just starting as a teacher I would wonder how to fill a class period. Once I discovered that kids could learn a lot of vocabulary and content from simply analyzing some cool sentences or paragraphs, I wondered how I could possibly fit everything in each day.

It's so much better to have an overabundance of material.

Honestly, we just don't care that much about children

Baby formula shortages are in headlines across the nation, while the Supreme Court is prepping a decision that states will quickly use to "force" more births. 

I know these two news stories don't connect directly, but the timing is perfect... perfectly awful.

Also in the news lately are analyses that show how well America now treats its senior citizens (well, if you can overlook letting thousands of them die due to them being confined to homes) as opposed to the youngest Americans, particularly children.

In 2019, the 8.9% poverty rate among individuals aged 65 and older was lower than the 9.4% poverty rate among adults aged 18-64, and the 14.4% poverty rate among children under 18 years old. The pandemic may have made all those numbers a bit worse.

I would never claim that getting old is a cake walk, and everyone has their complaints, no matter their age. But we live in a country that is OK with one in every seven children living in poverty. That likely means they don't get enough good food, that they don't have important opportunities to read and learn, and that they are insecure most of the time in terms of housing, education, and nutrition.

The major reason seniors aren't in poverty is the combination of social security and Medicare, of course, not booming 401Ks and pensions. Neither of those social programs is perfect and the long-term financial support for both is in question. But the U.S. has created a sort of "floor" for our oldest citizens and that support pays off in high rates of voting among seniors and better lives for the retired. 

More people vote when they see a direct connection between the government and their ability to eat and pay rent and afford medicine, etc. Children can't vote, and maybe that is the main reason politicians don't spend much time developing programs to greatly reduce suffering of children. Seniors vote. They see clear cause and effect.

You would think that earning the votes of the young parents of those children would be an effective motivator for supportive laws but the birth rate is way down and those who are bearing children tend to be from lower income groups. Many young parents are too overwhelmed to follow politics or vote, so they can be safely ignored... and both parties bear some responsibility for this.

Just as the pandemic revealed all sorts of ugly truths about capitalism, the baby formula shortage is doing the same. Creaky supply lines. Concentration of ownership (there are only three companies that produce most of America's formula supply). Inefficient distribution systems. Greed of store owners and formula manufacturers. People hoarding formula, just as they did with toilet paper early in the pandemic. Strange government regulations that keep European formula from our shores merely due to some labeling issues (European formula is often superior to American, but those darn labels don't quite cut it). Families forced to drive for hours on the hunt for formula while gas continues to rise in cost... while the cost of oil is decreasing (but it's just too complicated for non-oil executives to understand, I guess). 

Owners of production continue to get richer. Rising hourly pay can't keep up with the corporate greed all around us, and people just get frustrated and angry.

They will likely vote for anyone who is not currently in power during the midterms this fall. Their reasoning may be as simple as "hey, it can't get worse, and I need to do SOMETHING to show my pain and anger."

Right now, it's hard to blame people for their irrational voting.

'One size fits all' solutions generate so much hypocrisy

Jeff Maurer’s guest essay in the New York Times seemed perfectly timed, as the semester is ending and I see continuing calls for "forgiving" some or all student debt racked up over the past few years.

My thought was that this effort seems to favor the upper middle class or even wealthy, since they tend to be the ones paying high-priced universities and piling up debts. 

The Democrats have been choosing "let's be quick and get that money out there NOW" over more targeted programs that would support Americans who really need help.

I felt the same way about those Covid stipends last year. Kathleen and I received $4,000 total, I guess to help us pay bills and in turn stimulate the economy. We are not wealthy but we certainly did not need that cash infusion. Some of it went toward a college fund, and that account has lost about 20 percent this year so far... so hooray for investing!

That four grand would have been far more effective in the hands of a couple with three kids making less than $50,000 a year. Are we claiming that smart people in our government can't figure out how to add some fine tuning to support during a crisis? 

Honestly, is it simply impossible to get support to those who really need it, like middle class parents with young children? Republicans have the same kinds of "slap a label on everyone," BTW, as with the abortion bans... with many states banning even rape victims or endangered mothers from the procedure. 

Republicans, of course, positively revel in their cruelty and harshness, while Democrats perhaps bend a bit too far the other direction. Printing money has produced some level of inflation, though the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine may be even more important. But it all adds up.

Banning all abortions, for whatever reasons, guarantees hypocrisy as those "holier than thou" Republicans will carve out exceptions for their own daughters and wives. I have no firm evidence for that beyond common sense and decades of watching rich people break the rules. So many privileged people preach the sanctity of the heterosexual marriage until daughter Jenny comes out as a lesbian. Suddenly, the issue is much more gray. Who knew?

But shoveling money into accounts of people who really didn't need it is a symptom of what Maurer perceives to be the Democratic Party’s “image problem” focused on Democrats’ vulnerability to certain negative criticism about student loan forgiveness.

“Republicans,” he wrote, “will portray us as fancy little Fauntleroys ensconced in our twee nursery of upper-middle-class desires, deaf to the needs of the struggling masses.” He hypothesized: “The case study will be some tragic dweeb who took out $400,000 in loans to get a Ph.D. in intersectional puppet theory from Cosa Nostra Online College and who wrote his dissertation about how ‘Fraggle Rock’ is an allegory for the Franco-Prussian War.”

And he ended his lament with a plea to party leaders that they not “let the notion that Democrats are singularly focused on the needs of pampered, navel-gazing pipsqueaks who won’t drink coffee brewed using fewer than 26 steps be indelibly burned into people’s brains.” 

Was Maurer exaggerating for effect? Duh. But there is a truth at the heart of the jokes: The 87 percent of Americans who have NO student debt have serious -- and warranted -- doubts about whether their tax money should go to support people whose lives began on second base, if not third. 

Even an Iowa farmer with only a high school degree might think that helping a young person who could never have been able to afford further education without loans might fit the definition of charity and following the traditions of Christianity (which they all seem to claim). But giving tax money to society's "winners"? That just confirms their suspicion that the game is rigged.

Let's tamp down the hypocrisy from all sides, with everyone looking to score political points and few caring much about real people trying to live real lives.

BREAKING NEWS: there's an 'expert' opinion for every possibility

Monday was May 9, and that was the day many experts warned us to expect something dramatic or horrible or escalating... or something from Putin and his thugs. Nothing of note happened.

Elon Musk announced yesterday that once he is the sole owner of Twitter, Donald Trump will be welcomed back. Experts predict the end of the Republic and present all sorts of worst-case scenarios. When those things don't happen, no one will spend much time going back and reassessing those expert opinions. If they do happen, there will be more immediate concerns.

More experts proclaim the end of any ethical or moral authority for the Supreme Court after the politicized leak of an early draft of the abortion ruling. They may be right, but how would we measure the total decrease other than in poll takers quick responses to survey questions? And some experts predict a backlash that might help more progressive politicians while others predict that the backlash won't happen.

The pandemic will come roaring back this fall, according to several health experts, and other experts support learning to live with the ongoing virus issues. Perhaps both arguments will end up being true.

Stubborn inflation, particularly in gasoline prices, means Democrats are doomed in this fall's midterm elections. Much of this is due to people demanding Biden "fix" everything that bothers them, whether he possess that power or not. Some is due to a sort of "road rage" that some of our neighbors feel toward Democrats... merely because of their political party.

The thoroughly political and radical Supreme Court majority will continue to uphold the uniquely American "minority rule" traditions, where the Electoral College grants incredible power to obscure politicians from places like the Dakotas and Wyoming while states where the vast majority of Americans live are not fully represented.

Donald Trump is the kingmaker of the Republican Party, or he is not. It depends on the state and on the candidate, evidently. Experts are eager to chime in, of course.

Books about the Trump years continue to land regularly, sparking temporary outrage and lead to... nothing. 

Evangelical churches are in crisis, with some people looking for something a bit more "Christian" while others look for even wackier, more rabid pastors to feed their anger and fears. On the other hand, fewer and fewer go to church regularly. And even fewer bother to join the association or give money.

"Forewarned is forearmed," as the old saying goes, so I understand our tendency to speculate about the future and find ways to prepare ourselves for whatever may come. But how many times do our so-called experts provide any meaningful help for society, much less convince large numbers of people to act in "better" ways? 

If you live on your phone and spend hours each day in your chosen "bubble," how could you NOT be depressed, angry and pessimistic? No institution is doing well by people. No one can be trusted. The world is a giant conspiracy designed to harm us, for mysterious reasons. 

How could high school students not be angry, on some level, at least, and feel uncertain about what the future holds for them? 

Congratulations to educators, particularly media advisers, for simply hanging in there and doing their best with a "bad hand." 

I often wonder if we might all benefit from just keeping our nose to the grindstone, so to speak, doing our little bit each day to make our classrooms, communities, and world a tiny bit better. 

Do we really have much choice?

We can teach great writing one sentence at a time

Tip of the hat to Frank Bruni's weekly blog feature titled "For the Love of Sentences" for today's selection of recently published work that has been brought to his attention. Sharing small chunks of great writing is a great class starter or in-class modeling for young writers.

I used this sort of approach for AP Lang classes -- not just journalism courses -- and found that I could work on vocabulary development as well as syntax development... and even get kids thinking about current events and people in the news.

From a George Will column on Missouri Senator Josh Hawley: “Nimbly clambering aboard every passing bandwagon that can carry him to the Fox News greenroom, he treats the Senate as a mere steppingstone for his ascent to an office commensurate with his estimate of his talents.”

My quick analysis: Did we really need "nimbly"? We often talk about avoiding adverbs, but "clambering" could certainly mean clumsy or hurried. All rules need exceptions. Students need to know what a "bandwagon" means here (a rhetorical fallacy involving people joining just to join) and would need to know that a "greenroom" is a place for TV guests or theater actors to prepare before going on stage. "Commensurate" is a sophisticated way to say "equal to" and would not be a word most students use often. 

I also note that although this column rips Hawley, there is no blatant negative language here. Will leaves it up to readers to make inferences and he never "writes down" to a lower level.

To pivot to The New York Times, here’s Wesley Morris on the cosmetic signature of the basketball star Trae Young, who sports a “magnificent unsolved mystery” of a haircut. “I’m calling it a haircut. But that’s the thing about Young’s hair: cut where? How? This is hair so rich with paradoxical intrigue that a season of ‘Serial’ wouldn’t be unwarranted. It’s thin yet full, short and long, wet but also dry, seemingly ‘young buck’ despite seeming geriatric too, an optical illusion of barbering. There’s a fade, a part and bangs. It’s simply not a haircut. It’s a Michael Crichton novel.”

This would go in my collection of great descriptions, but it's also full of allusions both current and dated. Do students still read Crichton novels, with their convoluted plots and sometimes scifi themes? Are students familiar with podcasts like "Serial"? It is also fun to discuss the oxymorons in that list of paradoxes that all seem to apply to the athlete's unusual locks.

A class discussion of this would benefit from a photo of Young on a screen so the non-NBA fans can get a clearer view of what is being discussed.

Then there is the difficult sentence: "It's simply not a haircut." Word order could be discussed. What happens if we rewrite this as "It's not a simple haircut"? Or "It's not simply a haircut?" Or what about tightening to "It's not a haircut."? Is anything lost or gained?

NYT columnist Bret Stephens observed that Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people “have reminded the rest of the free world that a liberal and democratic inheritance that is taken for granted by its citizens runs the risk of being taken at will by its enemies.” 

This sentence reminded me that freedoms are never guaranteed forever and that apathy tends to allow the zealots some room to cause trouble. This is true for freedom of speech, voting rights, being able to use the bathroom of choice, and so many other things students may take for granted.

Finally, In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay came out against Major League Baseball’s efforts to speed up extra-inning games: “Why does baseball need to be like everything else? Why must it cave to the modern attention span? Baseball is played without a clock. There’s no horn or buzzer or countdown. It is what it is. It ends when it ends, like a pizza, or a State of the Union speech.” 

I am not a fan of "it is what it is," which seems like a fad phrase that defies logical definition. "A rose is a rose is a rose," wrote Gertrude Stein in a poem, and it has forced literature students for many decades to struggle with teasing out meaning. And Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous, "Love is love is love is love" speech is constantly quoted. What if we simply deleted that sentence? Would anything be lost? Or is it part of the rhythm of the language?

The "kicker" is the final sentence, which references what is often thought of an example of long, meandering speech, the State of the Union address. After all, it is a report and could easily be shared with the nation as a sort of memorandum. Do we need all the pomp and circumstance involved?

Notice that I offer many questions and few answers. Answers are up to students here.

I don't know who said it, but I like it

Apologies if my taking last week off from this blog caused a disruption in your life. My life was overwhelmed by dozens of final white papers and technical reports and oral presentations (on video) as the semester wraps up. It's not over, as this is the actual finals week for both CSU and Metro... but the bulk of work has been completed. 

Not surprisingly, last week did not see any slow down in news and scandals and atrocities and all sorts of negative information. Maybe it's best not to return to all those things.

This week doesn't look calmer. So any hint of some way forward is welcome. Yesterday's sermon at church included a very cool quote from St. Augustine, the incredibly prolific writer (we have over 5 million words from him) who died about 430 CE. 

Here's the quote: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

It's a compelling view of how hope works (and hope was the main focus of the sermon) and I came home and did the quickest search online to see if I could learn more about this view, about Augustine, and about any context that might help me better understand.

And here's the thing: Augustine did not write this and no one really knows who did. I am relying, of course, on Augustine scholars who have combed his writing (in Latin) looking for where he might have written this. No scholars have found any versions of these words.

Well, that's disappointing, though I have no plans to steal any thunder from the minister who shared the quote or go down the rabbit hole of "fake quotes" -- there is a plague of them on social media.

After all, I like the sense of the quote, though it would be nice to have the added ethos that referring to one of the most famous thinkers in history on our side. In fact, I'm going to use the quote, whatever its true origins, as the starting point of a sort of pep talk for high school media students that I am developing.

The pandemic has been tough on everyone, but young people in particular, as far as I can tell. They lost a sense of connection and purpose. They lost an expectation of steady progress and a sense of safety. 

Lots of classroom teachers are noting a growing apathy, an acceptance of a grim fate and a "less than" future among students. It's not everyone. Nothing ever is. But the teachers themselves often share some of this idea of their lives being a bit less than they hoped and about wondering whether there is a clear point to this whole education exercise.

It sounds healthy to me to be OK with some righteous anger. The related step of using courage to try to make some changes can be what provides us all with the energy and purpose that keeps the anger from turning to despair and lack of hope.

Once the hope is gone, the progress is gone.