Free speech and more free speech: Open letter to the Marion County (OR) commissioners

(Link information updated, below)

This week the commissioners and citizens of Marion County got one of those moments they probably could happily have gone without for a long time: The American Nazi Party joined the local adopt-a-road litter cleanup program, and the signs on that road went up. The public reaction was not a bit surprising to anyone, including the county commissioners themselves; the (Portland) Oregonian continues the story [Jan 2011 note: Unsurprisingly, the original OregonLive.com link is broken; the article by Ron Soble is repeated, apparently in full, at the bottom of this post at Portland Indy Media]:

Sometime early Friday afternoon, the sign closest to the Salem city limits on Sunnyview Road disappeared. Earlier in the week, someone damaged an identical sign about 3 miles down Sunnyview and county public works crews removed it.

The county signs -- among more than 100 in Marion County that mark volunteer efforts to clean up roadsides -- were particularly hard to see during the same week as the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, Schoenberg said.

The county has gotten dozens of complaints about its decision to post the signs.

Sam Brentano, chairman of the Marion County commission, isn't surprised. "We just look stupid," he said. "But maybe we are."

He was against the decision and may ask fellow commissioners to look into ways of tightening applications for groups seeking to adopt a road, he said.

"Everyone has a right to free speech, but I don't have an obligation to promote that right for them," he said. "I'd rather face the consequences."

James Sears, the county's public works director, said he got the application from the American Nazi Party about six weeks ago and consulted the county attorney about posting it. The staff doesn't routinely verify applicants listed on the one-page forms and didn't in this case other than to seek legal advice, he said.

County officials based the decision to go ahead with the signs on court decisions that upheld the free speech rights of the Ku Klux Klan to seek to put its name on a similar sign in Missouri.

The thing about defending free speech is, if it doesn't hurt at least a little, you're probably not doing it right. The test of whether speech is really free is always, alas, whether the speech that offends you most is protected.

So I have mixed feelings about this: If, indeed, the American Nazi Party operates in Oregon (information later in the article casts some doubt on that), it's a pretty sad thing. And seeing them get their names on public roadways at taxpayer expense is pretty unappetizing. Still, it's their right. And that means it's not good that someone -- prankster or genuinely offended community member -- vandalized the signs.

The solution to troubling free speech is not to invent more legal or illegal restrictions on it. Anyone who opposes the American Nazi Party should understand that. The solution is more free speech. With, perhaps, a little wit. So, pursuing one of my own favorite forms of protected speech -- the cranky letter to the editor -- I wrote the Oregonian:

To the Editor:

No matter how offensive the legal activities of a group like the American Nazi Party may strike any of us, the answer is not to shut down their speech, whether by denying them participation in the adopt-a-road program or vandalizing the signs with their organization's name.

The best solution is for the county commissioners to rename that stretch of highway the Simon Wiesenthal Parkway (or, if they prefer, the Rosa Parks Highway ). Put that sign up, put below it the sign announcing that the American Nazi Party keeps the ditches free of litter, and sit back to watch as free speech solves its own problem.

Letter to Senator Boxer

Pursuant to my theory that more people need to become letter-writing cranks:

Dear Senator Boxer:

Thank you for leading the much-deserved challenge to the integrity of Secretary of State nominee Rice. As National Security Advisor, Dr. Rice willingly--cheerfully--collaborated in misleading the American public about the grounds for war with Iraq. She did a dreadful job of overseeing the various government bodies charged with maintaining the security of our nation. And she made it clear, as you said during Senate confirmation hearings yesterday, that she put personal loyalty to George Bush above her duty to the truth--and, one might add, to the American people and to the Constitution.

Creative Google searching did not locate a web site where I can donate--however modestly--to your re-election. But anyone who can make the Senate GOP leadership claim that it's shameful to use the war on terrorism for political purposes deserves my support. I hope you'll send me a link where I can contribute.

Sincerely,

Bill Nothstine

If anyone reading this post knows where one can contribute to Sen. Boxer's re-election campaign fund online, please let me know.

Building the Better Bush?

Since the election, as I've watched the quadrennial rite of Democratic self-flagellation begin, I find myself returning from time to time to what William Saletan said at Slate.com a day or two after the dust mostly settled (the article's pithy title: 'Why you keep losing to this idiot").

Saletan suggests that the idea of a president governs and leads through the Jed Bartlet-style grasp of policy is an outmoded concept--a quaint, Enlightenment notion whose time ended not long after Presidents stopped wearing powdered wigs. Following this line, maybe the best the Democrats can hope for is to run someone who's likeable as a personality outside the blue states (sorry, Hillary), and who is above all perceived as simple and uncomplicated. Leave "nuance" (i.e., mastering facts, understanding policy) to the people he'd put in place in his administration.

It reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke (are there any new Woody Allen jokes?)--yes, I'm a bigot, but fortunately, I'm a bigot for the left. Better our talking head with good hair in the White House appointing his advisors than their talking head with good hair appointing his advisors. No one pretends this is a vision, but does it even pass muster as a strategy?

I was darkly amused but not terribly surprised to listen to a lot of the post-campaign Conventional Wisdom about Kerry being that he's just . . . well, dull. (And yet, does anyone think that Bush is a terribly interesting man--well, except of course when he's bombing you?) Somewhat the same was the Conventional Wisdom that Kerry spent too much time on boring old policy issues rather than on what excited voters (the latter would, apparently, include homophobia, fundamentalist pandering, and warmongering, but no matter). Am I the only one who remembers that the exact same criticism was leveled at Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign? Remember his reputation as a "policy wonk" (that campaign popularized the term) who gave long-winded, boring speeches? Who actually loved to sit around and talk about the implications of this particular section of federal code on that particular sector of the economy? Even in a campaign against Bush the Elder, who famously admitted he didn't have much to contribute on "the vision thing," the idea that the president should himself be interested in--let alone understand--how policies work was already considered, by the purveyors of Conventional Wisdom, a faint embarrassment.

And we can take the idea back farther: The real division of image and competence took off under Ronald Reagan. What accounts for Iran-Contra except a president who blithely--proudly--ignored the law, and encouraged and assisted his administration to do the same, because of what he felt was right "in his heart?" Recall that when Reagan finally got pinned down on that whole ugly business, he admitted in the end that it really did "appear" to have been a straight arms-for-hostages deal. But, he insisted, that had not been what he believed; "in my heart," he assured us, he didn't think it was. And America excused.

The only upside of this I can think of is that it laid the groundwork for Clinton to escape impeachment a decade later. In the latter case as in the former, America looked at a man that most people figured had really "done it," but because the economy was good and they liked the man's attackers less than the man himself, they looked the other way.

Back to Saletan: His position is that the Democrats need to build a better Bush--a Bush for the left. He urges the Dems to find someone who would be perceived as just as uncomplicated as Bush (less charitable observers would say "just as hollow"), but whose memes are about the Dems as "the party of responsibility" . . . "the party that rewards ordinary people who do what they're supposed to do—and protects them from those who don't." (Saletan thought it's John Edwards. Good luck.)

Keep that man visible for the next four years, says Saletan, put him through charm school, clear away his main presidential competitors for '08 (sorry again, Hillary), and then run what, in this election, has come to be called a "values" campaign, since that's what the red-state people seem to want. After winning, he can appoint technocrats (Richelieus? Cheneys?) to handle the tedious business of actually running things while the president, as the front man, reassures the country with his "values"--with his "heart," or his "gut," or whatever part of the viscera is politically fashionable by then. (Who knows--maybe even the penis will be exonerated and politically rehabilitated again by then. Peggy Noonan made a pretty good start at it after Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in full flight harness. Anything except the brain, of course. Anything but that.) This Democratic Galatea's implicit promise, like Bush's, would not be "I know what I'm doing," but rather "You can trust my instincts."

Note that even as Bush's State of the Union nears, we still have no idea--neither does Bush, I imagine--of how he can possibly do all the things he proposes (social security privatization, keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, expanding the war on terror, locking in the tax cuts). How can he hope to pay for it? No idea. Doesn't matter. He has a mandate now. He has political capital, and it's his nature, he reminded us, to spend it when he's got it. Trusting his instincts--horrifying image.

Little about Saletan's idea is attractive to me--I'm never going to go quietly on the subject of dumbing down the presidency. But the more fundamental question for the left remains, doesn't it?

High Ground of Language, continued: GOP mired in the swamp of "privatization?"

For those who just can't get enough of the Bush Administration's "Who's On First" crosstalk about whether a plan to replace Social Security with private retirement accounts should properly be called "privatization:"

Talking Points Memo does the homework, showing some of the GOP working hard to distance themselves from that awful word--just from the word, which had the poor taste to focus group badly, of course, not from the idea of eliminating Social Security in favor of a private retirement scheme. The result, as TPM notes, doesn't look terribly honest.

The High Ground of Language: "Privatization"

This post inaugurates an occasional series about language and politics. One of the tenets of this blog is: If you don't think about language, it will do your thinking for you.

"Orwellian" is an overused term, but it begs to be applied in two bits of wordplay to watch in the excerpts below. The first is skirmishing over the word "privatizing" Social Security. As Princeton economist and NY Times economist Paul Krugman points out in a Rolling Stone interview below, the "P-word" was originally a shibboleth among the anti-Social Security right for their preferred alternative, attractive to them because the "private" theme carried with it the rejection of government--especially the hated Big Government. But when it was found by the Cato Institute (libertarian, but hand-in-hand with the Bush administration on this topic) not to produce the proper response in focus groups, it was expunged--not just from further use, but also from all records of past use. Bush's attempt this week to distance himself from the word that's been proscribed by the official talking points has an almost Abbot and Costello feel to it.

Note also Bush's use of the word "editorializing" when a Washington Post reporter asks about Bush's "privatization" plan--another genuinely Orwellian moment: The ordinary sense of "editorializing" refers to injecting opinion, as opposed to objectively or dispassionately reporting. Bush stands the word on its head: When he chides the Post reporter for "editorializing," he's reminding the reporter to be a docile stenographer, warning not to use language the Right has ruled out of bounds--even if it's accurate and appropriate, and even if Bush himself has used it.

Exhibit 1: Rolling Stone interview with Paul Krugman:

[Rolling Stone:] In selling the idea that there's a crisis, Bush has a lot of powerful words on his side: "choice," "freedom," "ownership society." What words do you have to counter his sales job?

[Krugman:] Scam. Three-card monte. I've been thinking a lot about flying pigs. The privateers are claiming that you can have something for nothing. They're basically saying, "Let's assume that pigs can fly." And when you say, "You know, it's not good to assume that pigs can fly," they respond by saying, "What's wrong with you? Don't you understand the enormous advantage of flying pigs?"

The only reason they talk about how wonderful an ownership society would be is because we managed to win the battle over the word privatization. The Cato Institute - which is the intellectual headquarters for all this stuff - founded something in 1995 called the Project on Social Security Privatization. But focus groups don't like that word, so in 2002 they changed the name to the Project on Social Security Choice. They didn't announce a name change - they just went back and scrubbed their Web site, so there's no indication that it was ever called "privatization."

Exhibit 2: Interview with the President on Air Force One:

The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan?

THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts?

The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been --

THE PRESIDENT: We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions.

The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last year, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes?

The Post: Yes, three times in one sentence. We had to figure this out, because we're in an argument with the RNC [Republican National Committee] about how we should actually word this. [Post staff writer] Mike Allen, the industrious Mike Allen, found it.

THE PRESIDENT: Allen did what now?

The Post: You used partial privatization.

THE PRESIDENT: I did, personally?

The Post: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: When?

The Post: To describe it.

THE PRESIDENT: When, when was it?

The Post: Mike said it was right around the election.

THE PRESIDENT: Seriously?

The Post: It was right around the election. We'll send it over.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm surprised. Maybe I did. It's amazing what happens when you're tired. Anyway, your question was? I'm sorry for interrupting.

Moral: If you believe that Social Security is worth defending, don't give up on the "P-word." Use it--again and again--to describe the Bush Administration's Social Security so-called "reform" plan. Social Security is a public good. Don't let it become a private boondoggle. Attaching the "P-word" to Bush's plan at every opportunity reminds us what's right about Social Security and wrong about the Right.

Influences

I had a copy of a wonderful cartoon by Sidney Harris, of Scientific American fame, titled "Influences." It followed me from office wall to office wall for 20 years, and showed it: The corners had layers of discolored tape and several push pin holes. Reconstructing it from memory, it's laid out in classic "Comedy Rule of Three" structure and runs roughly like this:

Panel 1: A tweedy writer sitting at his typewriter: "Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and of course Eudora Welty."

Panel 2: A woman standing in a classroom: "Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and of course Eudora Welty."

Panel 3: A baseball player leaning on his bat in the on-deck circle: "My first batting coach, Casey Stengel, and of course Eudora Welty."

[Updated 1/14/14: Here's the cartoon by Sid Harris.

Shows how trustworthy my memory is.]

All of which I mention as a tee-up to an article in today's NY Times Book Review, asking several novelists under 40 to identify their influences.

Before reading the article, I made some predictions: First, that I would know none of the writers they interviewed. Second, that I would only dimly recognize the names of about 15-20% of the influences they named. Third, that I would only have actually read (whether I liked or disliked) about 5% of the influences they named.

To be fair, I didn't use my education to become better acquainted with the novel (at least not the novels these people mean), and did so at all only under duress. I didn't read Jane Austen until I was 30, and then--if I'm being honest--probably only because the number of Jane Austen jokes that National Lampoon was making during its salad days left me with the vague feeling I was missing something. Turns out I love Austen, and will today risk a bar fight by insisting that Pride and Prejudice has the best opening sentence in all of English literature. (You can look it up.) But I digress.

Having read the article with a pencil and paper at hand to keep a running tally, I can present the box scores:

Total writers interviewed: 9
Total I'd never heard of: 9
Total influences mentioned: 56
Total I'd never heard of: 32
Total I'd at least heard of: 24 (In hindsight, I set this up wrong, because they mostly mentioned authors, and I was expecting titles. Still, I did better than I'd predicted.)
Of those I recognized, total I'd ever actually read: 11 (Again, faulty construction probably inflated this number: If I'd have had to read the same influential novel the novelist was thinking about, I'd probably have scored much lower, since my fiction reading is known to be eccentric and indiscriminate. But if they mentioned Chekhov and I'd read anything by Chekhov, then that got a mark on my tally. No one mentioned Eudora Welty.)

The influences named tended to fit into one of two groups: There were the Major Influences, who received extended discussion in the article. Of these, I only knew Mark Twain, and the story of the young Russian writer-to-be falling in love with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn--in Soviet-era translation--is wonderful, worth the price of the article on its own. Then there were the Obligatory Other Influences, a string of also-rans mentioned like a dissertation dump-footnote: "Oh, yeah, and of course Greene and Roth and Ovid, yada, yada, yada." I tended to do much better among the OOIs than among the MIs.

What this says to me, alas, is that fiction writing today is people I've never heard of, influenced by people I don't know, writing books I've never read. That doesn't sound good (assuming, of course, that I'm even remotely like the sort of person these authors want reading their writing).

In this age of hyperspecialization and professional self-referentiality, is anybody being influenced by Eudora Welty anymore?

Mobil, Bush, and the Empire of Faith

I was re-reading Ron Suskind's notorious NY Times Magazine article from last October, about the Bush administration and its "faith based," rather than "reality based" way of approaching the world, and why the Bushies feel that gives them the high ground. The money passage is excerpted here:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

What's interesting to me is that the unnamed "senior advisor to Bush" makes the same case--in almost exactly the same language, even, if you ignore the quasitheological spin--that a top-brass fellow from Mobil made, in a different context, back in the early 1980s. I'd attended an academic panel in which several colleagues talked--none too kindly--about Mobil's corporate advocacy strategies (which at the time involved such shocking and hitherto unprecedented tactics as "op ed" pieces in the Times and extended "Fables for Our Times" during "Masterpiece Theatre" on PBS.) The fellow from Mobil's name escapes me these long years later, but his point (delivered in an almost neighborly tone when he joined several of us for a post-panel luncheon) has stuck with me: "We're a moving target. Write about us all you want. By the time you write about us doing X, we've moved on to doing Y."

There are several layers here: One is that there a lot of people out there who continue to believe in the gap between those who "act" (Big Oil, the Bush conservatives) and those who merely "study" those who act (academics, the "liberal media"). A second layer is that American anti-intellectualism--and the quintessentially Bushian strain that flourishes today--lives for and exploits that gap. Probably someone with a little determination and two different colored highlighters could overlay a Red State/Blue State reading on all that, as well.

I'm not a big believer in the whole Red State/Blue State dichotomy; I don't think it's shown anything that matters, or that lasts (can I be the only one who still remembers the Barry Goldwater 1964 TV ad that fantasized about a giant handsaw separating Florida from the rest of the US?) I think the popular and electoral college numbers from 2004 are too slim to constitute the sort of seismic shift Karl Rove hopes for. And yet, there's something there . . . . It may not squarely overlay electoral politics, but it's . . . something.

George Lakoff and Me

For a while now, I've been writing more about politics and political discourse, and for a wider audience. The question was bound to turn up eventually, and it did: Where am I, vis-à-vis George Lakoff, Berkeley professor of cognitive psychology and newly emergent theorist for the progressives?

The short answer is, Lakoff and I are headed in much the same direction on many issues. That shouldn't be surprising; I first read his Metaphors We Live By and began publishing articles, chapters, and books drawing on some of the same ideas, about 20 years ago.

Taking one step back though, I'm not drawing from him so much as he and I are both drawing from some of the same theoretical/philosophical traditions. Although he's at pains to bill himself as a cognitive psychologist, we're tapping into ideas that gained currency in the early-to-mid 20th century, putting out roots into the modern disciplines of rhetoric, communication, composition, philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, political science, and linguistics, but really stretching back some 2000 years, in a fairly clear but winding path. Very little of what Lakoff builds on strikes me as original; his distinction is that he's written a lot, he's written some things that aim to be the cyclopedic study of their area, he's associated with one of the few progressive think tanks, and he's been able to make a highly visible turn into political discourse.

This take is based on my reading of his quick-and-dirty-for-the-election Don't Think of an Elephant, as well as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, on which Elephant relies.

Here's where we see eye to eye:

I agree with the emphasis Lakoff puts on the strategic importance of language and its ability not merely to persuade in a given situation, but to create and sustain one's worldview. Shared reality and shared language go hand-in-hand. Or, to put it in the words of a 1970s textbook I worked with, 'the choice of words is a choice of worlds.'

Like Lakoff, I watched with professional interest and political dismay throughout the 1990s as Newt Gingrich and his creation GOPAC, and Frank Luntz, somewhat later, and others less visible, have marshaled the basic principles about language and metaphor to advance a right-wing political agenda. I share with Lakoff a strong desire to find a way to harness these principles in the service of left/democratic/progressive politics.

Here's where we part ways:

Lakoff is at pains to remind us he's a cognitive psychologist. My sense is that several things are going on there. First, as Lakoff's surely aware, the opinions of almost any brand of 'scientist' are harder to argue with. Second, he's got a turf-staking agenda, grounded in academic politics, requiring him to position what he's doing in the principles and language--in the worldview, really--of the academic discipline of cognitive psychology. That's partly the result of his professional habits of thought, and partly a symptom of the realpolitik of academic life. I don't have that kind of agenda; I just want what works.

So when Lakoff has to explain what he means by "frame," one of the key concepts in his recent writings, he moves quickly to ground it in 'the cognitive unconscious,' and to define it very broadly--so broadly it starts to become everything (and nothing):

A frame is "an image or other kinds of knowledge."

Words are defined "relative to" frames.

"Frames are mental structures that shape how we see the world."

"You can't see or hear frames. They are part of what cognitive scientists call the 'cognitive unconscious'--structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access: the way we reason and what counts as common sense."

"Framing is about getting language that fits your world view."

If you keep it vague, I don't have much objection to most of that; but when you read it more carefully you realize that everything comes back not to language and behavior, which we can observe, but to cognitive unconscious structures, which we can't. I don't find that useful or convincing. That's his professional neurosis; this is mine.

Lakoff believes he's got the question of how liberals and conservatives think sorted out (and again, notice that he's grounding it in how they 'think'--what's inside the black box--not on how they talk or behave). Conservatives tend to orient themselves in terms of a cognitive structure he calls 'the strict father." Liberals tend to work within a cognitive structure he calls 'the nurturing parent.' (Everyone has the capacity to process using both structures, but conservatives rely more heavily on one, liberals on the other.) Both are worldviews--we might also call them master metaphors or archetypes --that play themselves out in our language and action, specifically political policy.

I don't dispute the existence of these master metaphors, although I'm not interested in locating them in the structure of the brain. But I do insist that it's not really that simple--I don't accept that there are only those two, that they're the two (and only) all-encompassing worldviews. I think we draw from a range of worldviews (or whatever), built with the materials our culture gives us (shaped, yes, by the limitations and preferences of cognitive structures), and we assemble them into something workable as we live our lives. Because I don't think the ideological landscape is as cut-and-dried as he paints it, I don't have as much confidence in the strategies Lakoff recommends for leftists, and I'm not alone in thinking that he's not there yet, although his ideas are not without possibilities.

And as a cognitive scientist, Lakoff's more concerned about explaining the mechanisms by which all this works, and less concerned about the ethics of this or that linguistic/political outcome. If he's troubled by the ethical problem of using the techniques of Gingrich, et al, without stooping to their level, I haven't seen much evidence of it. For me, that's a serious problem because I begin by placing high value on democratic processes and free expression per se. So I'm not interested in creating strategies that end up offering high-voltage language as a substitute for thinking, however well grounded scientifically those strategies may be, and even if they're used to advance "my" side of political issues. Strategies that cut off the possibility of discussion (as many of Gingrich, Luntz, et alia, aim to do) are not what I'm looking for.

Reduced Bulwer-Lytton

The organizer of the Little Lytton Contest, described here, definitely gets it. Which is to say, of course, that they agree with me: For years, the winners of the "official" Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have usually written a long, long, self-consciously tedious sentence, with a sudden reversal in the last five words as if the writer simply popped a blood vessel at the wrong moment. They telegraph the joke like a bad prizefighter.

By contrast, what we remember as Bulwer-Lytton's most famous opener, which earned him this notoriety (rightly or wrongly), was a brief seven words: "It was a dark and stormy night."

The truth of the matter, however, is a little more complicated. Those seven words were just an independent clause that began a much more complex sentence:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Yet, the reason Bulwer-Lytton gets lampooned today is not that long-winded second part; it's the first quick stroke. In fact, most people who get an easy laugh at Bulwer-Lytton's expense (a generation of readers of the comic strip "Peanuts" knew it as a running gag in Snoopy story lines) wouldn't recognize the whole sentence if it rattled their housetops or fiercely agitated their scanty flames.

Also, unlike the Bulwer-Lytton Contest entries, it wasn't a joke, even unintentionally; it probably didn't even sound that bad to the people who read it in 1830. (Lord knows there are modern opening lines that are just as dreadful. Will our descendants see parody contests for Tom Wolfe or Nirvana in the year 2170?) Like his stuff or not, Bulwer-Lytton--who also wrote "The pen is mightier than the sword"--had a gift for phrases that cut to the point, and for that alone he should probably be remembered better.

Which is why it's good to see the Little Lytton Contest recognizing such triumphs of literary hit-and-run as these:

Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.

In 3010, the potatoes triumphed.

The pain wouldn't stop, and Vern still had three cats left.

Say what you like, is there a man jack among you who wouldn't at least be a little curious to see what happens next in a story that begins like that? Simpler is usually better.

Along somewhat related lines, Salon.com had an appreciation of Dave Barry this week, after he announced he's going into indefinite retirement from the humor column biz. The author brought out two points that apply here: (1) Barry usually put the funny part as the last word of the sentence, although his sentences weren't usually that long. (2) Barry usually put the funniest sentence at the beginning of the paragraph. That must mean something.

Enjoy. But be quick about it.

Debating the Electoral Results

(I'm back from holiday hiatus, and on the case.)

Truemajority.org is on the case too: Their members got an email this afternoon, regarding the congressional vote to ratify the 2004 election results. When Congress reconvenes to ratify the electoral college numbers on Thursday, Conyers (D-MI) is going to stand in the House and call for an investigation. If one Senator does the same, it automatically triggers debate on the electoral outcome before the results can be ratified.

(For background, go here.)

You'd have to be pretty naive to think that will change the overall outcome, but it may give some support to the people who still want to fix the system and think it can be done.

Although I'm behind the general idea of getting people to contact their representatives on important issues, I'm not a big fan of TrueMajority's specific method: Basically you click a couple of clicks and they send a form email saying the right things, with your name at the bottom, to your Representative and Senators (that info on you is already in Truemajority's database). Trouble is, politicians pay a whole lot less attention to a big stack of form letters than a small stack that are obviously individually written, regardless of the topic and content. Paraphrasing Woody Allen: astroturf for the left is still astroturf.

The point is this: Ask your Senator to join Conyers in challenging the Ohio count. Explain that the system is running very badly, and Congressional debate can certainly advance the cause of clean elections without worrying about triggering some Constitutional crisis. (Of course, if you want this to trigger a Constitutional crisis, I suppose you can always mention that, too.)

My advice is to take 10 minutes to put this into your own words and send it to your Senators yourself. This one's kind of big.

You can find your Senators' email addresses here. Many of them are themselves form web pages (savor that irony later), requiring you to fill in the blank with your personal information, select a subject from a drop down menu (which almost certainly won't include 'Election Reform,' so you'll probably have to look for 'Other'), and then cut and paste your message into the message window provided.

Hey, it's 2005: Make a resolution to pester your representatives a little bit more this year. If you're worried they'll start a file on you in DC, relax--they probably already have.

Here's what my Senators (Wyden and Smith) got from me. (And remember, don't just copy and paste mine, either--do your own work! If you copy mine, not only will yours be astroturf, but you'll convert mine to astroturf after the fact, too.)

Dear Senator:

When Representative John Conyers stands to challenge the voting tally from his state on Thursday, January 6th, I urge you to join him from the Senate.

The accounts of voting irregularities in the 2004 general election are too widespread and too well documented to be dismissed as "conspiracy theories." American voters are cynical enough already; if they begin to take it for granted that "the fix is in," that fair and honest elections are a thing of the naïve past, that rigged elections are
the norm, and that those who cause it will go unpunished--or even be rewarded--the damage to our system of government may be irreversible.

I have no illusions that congressional debate over the ratification of the 2004 election will overturn the Bush re-election. But widespread concern for the integrity of our electoral process must be treated with the respect it deserves, not dismissed as fringe and partisan scandal mongering. Using the ratification vote on Thursday to bring these concerns to national attention is an important step.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

William Nothstine