The Poet and Novelist Becomes the Political Analyst

A eye-opening, jaw-dropping, election-day article that atriculates a lot of what I've been thinking and feeling:

On Polling:

With polling, the collective delusion is the belief that the product of polling is the data. Remember, polls are a product that is sold like any other product. That stupid little chart that appears in the corner of every USA Today was not made for the purpose of 'research' and 'data'. It was made just to show a stupid little graph on the paper because USA Today knows that little graphs and charts 'sell' the paper more. Just because information is displayed in a chart or a graph does not make it 'scientific' or a real 'analysis'. But the product was to make the reader FEEL like it was and to sell more papers. The product of polls can and often are the readers. This became much more popular ever since polls became 'news items' themselves (before, polls were only supplements to news tories)....

One thing that is very different about this election is the omnipresence of polls and how polls are the axis around all political analysis is conducted. This has never been the case in previous elections. Real political analysts (meaning not hacks or unprofessional pundits), use historical trends, demagraphical data, and other 'truths' of past elections. Much of this cannot be translated into a chart or graph. It is a myth that analysis is done via math or graphs or computer models. The original economists, for example, used only words and essays. Political analysis is not about math. Political analysis is about people. To analyze politics, you must be able to analyze people. In other words, the poet and novelist becomes the political analyst, not the mathematician and software engineer. Politics is all about people.

It seems no one is interested in studying 'people' anymore. Look at the political analysis currently. There is very little analysis of the current 'liberal' or 'conservative', for example, or the person from Pennslyvania or person from Iowa. In fact, there are no people. There are only numbers. Stark, lifeless, numbers. The problem with leveling political analysis to nothing more than a soup of numbers is that it cannot measure intensity. What does intensity have to do with politics? Well, everything. Intense people are those who vote.

Do You Have Any Standards at All?

Orson Scott Card, Democrat and newspaper columnist, takes local newspapers to task for being in the tank for the Democrats:

...These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
...
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
...
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

Is that gonna leave a mark? Unfortunately, no. The only thing that will change the media in this country is the ongoing, slow-motion collapse of the newspaper industry.

George Putnam has Died

Things I didn't know about George Putnam:

"I detest labels," he once told the Los Angeles Times. "I've been called many things in my career: right-wing extremist, super-patriot, goose-stepping nationalist, jingoistic SOB. And those are some of the nice things.

"But those people have never bothered to determine my background: Farmer-Labor Party, Socialist Party, lifelong member of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], member of the Urban League. I went through the Depression, and my father was reduced to selling peanuts door-to-door . . . I fell in love with Franklin D. Roosevelt. I've been a lifelong Democrat. I'm a conservative Democrat."

Sorry. My head will stop spinning in just a minute.

No Greater Honor

In The Atlantic Robert D. Kaplan describes the process of awarding the U.S. military's highest honor, and reflects on the disconnection between those who serve and those who are served.

Over the decades, the Medal of Honor—the highest award for valor—has evolved into the U.S. military equivalent of sainthood. Only eight Medals of Honor have been awarded since the Vietnam War, all posthumously....

Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith was the ultimate iron grunt, the kind of relentless, professional, noncommissioned officer that the all-volunteer, expeditionary American military has been quietly producing for four decades. “The American people provide broad, brand-management approval of the U.S. military,” notes Colonel Smith, “about how great it is, and how much they support it, but the public truly has no idea how skilled and experienced many of these troops are.”

Sergeant Smith had fought and served in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Kosovo prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. To his men, he was an intense, “infuriating, by-the-book taskmaster,” in the words of Alex Leary of The St. Petersburg Times, Sergeant Smith’s hometown newspaper. Long after other platoons were let off duty, Sergeant Smith would be drilling his men late into the night, checking the cleanliness of their rifle barrels with the Q-tips he carried in his pocket. During one inspection, he found a small screw missing from a soldier’s helmet. He called the platoon back to drill until 10 p.m. “He wasn’t an in-your-face type,” Colonel Smith told me, “just a methodical, hard-ass professional who had been in combat in Desert Storm, and took it as his personal responsibility to prepare his men for it.”

Sergeant Smith’s mind-set epitomized the Western philosophy on war: War is not a way of life, an interminable series of hit-and-run raids for the sake of vendetta and tribal honor, in societies built on blood and discord. War is awful, to be waged only as a last resort, and with terrific intensity, to elicit a desired outcome in the shortest possible time. Because Sergeant Smith took war seriously, he never let up on his men, and never forgot about them...

The ceremony in the East Room of the White House two years to the day after Sergeant Smith was killed, where President George W. Bush awarded the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Smith’s 11-year-old son, David, was fitfully covered by the media. The Paul Ray Smith story elicited 96 media mentions for the eight week period after the medal was awarded, compared with 4,677 for the supposed abuse of the Koran at Guantánamo Bay and 5,159 for the disgraced Abu Ghraib prison guard Lynndie England, over a much longer time frame that went on for many months. In a society that obsesses over reality-TV shows, gangster and war movies, and NFL quarterbacks, an authentic hero like Sergeant Smith flickers momentarily before the public consciousness.

It may be that the public, which still can’t get enough of World War II heroics, even as it feels guilty about its treatment of Vietnam veterans, simply can’t deliver up the requisite passion for honoring heroes from unpopular wars like Korea and Iraq. It may also be that, encouraged by the media, the public is more comfortable seeing our troops in Iraq as victims of a failed administration rather than as heroes in their own right. Such indifference to valor is another factor that separates an all-volunteer military from the public it defends.

Read the short article. It is well worth your time.

A New National Motto

James Lileks was harrrumphing over the NYT Freakanomics Blog's contest: Create a new 6-word motto for the United States.

(Of course the USA already has a wonderful three-word motto, "E Pluribus Unum," that is, "Out of Many, One."

Mr. Lileks cuts loose:

It was no doubt tendered in good faith, but reading the suggestions is like licking a corroded battery. The latter-day sub-Menckens will always get off the sharpest lines, of course; you can’t draw a laugh with something Grandma might knit on a pillow, and drawing a laugh – or a mirthless snort of appreciation, which counts as a laugh nowadays – is the prime objective. Go on: read. It’s not just a lefty thing; the hard-core Ron Paulites are there as well, luxuriously immersed in simon-pure certainties.

Hundreds of snippets of derisive snark. You can picture the satisfied little grins on the authors’ faces; you can imagine the whole tableau – the computer (which most people in the world will never touch, let alone use, let alone own) the TV in the corner connected to a network that has channels catering to every taste, the iPod stocked with music hoovered up free of charge without consequence, the fridge stocked with food – the light comes on when you open the door, too, unless it’s burned out, and then you go to the store and get another one; they always have another one. The soft bed, the coffee machine, the well-fed pet, the vast panoply of free information and unfettered opinion flowing 24/7 from the internet. You can drink alcohol without being sentenced to death; you can be a girl alone in a room with a man without earning a public stoning; you can stand up in a room and argue for the candidate of your choice without being arrested; you stand in a society that allows for astonishing amounts of freedom, comfort and opportunity. But.

But. Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you’d prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed.

Actually, while lots of them are miserable bile-spew, I found some of them quite funny. Here are a few that stuck me:

“Land of the six word motto”

That’s MISTER America to you, pal!

Enlightenment scientific rationality meets puritan morality (This is the secret to American exceptionalism! -ED)

“Liberals hate it–must be good.”

Everyone hates US; immigration way up

USA - “That hot girl who ignores you”

“50 states, 2 parties, 1 dollar”

“We are the world’s rich uncle.”

“First to the moon and last”

“Home of Hollywood and New York”

“We don’t need no stinkin’ motto!”

“Politically: Representative democracy. Economically: Chaotic meritocracy.”

“If you live here, you’re home.”

Like Ancient Rome, with flush toilets.

“Luckily, our parents left your country”

When pigs fly, cows are jealous.

I Don't Do Comedy

Other than an occasional wry remark, I don't even try. This is why:

This is like watching Steve Hawking goof on about singularities. I'll stick to commenting about my sad life.

Weekly World News

Every time I pass through a supermarket checkout line I see what Hodding Carter III called "The Dark Side of American journalism." No, not National Review, but the tabloids.

I have never spent a penny on these strange papers and never will. I cannot imagine how they stay in business. Not because I think that most people share my scruples (the tabloid's continued success puts paid to that theory), but because as you pass them by you can read the headlines. And from the time or two I've (guiltily) opened the pages and looked inside, the headlines are the publication's best parts.

Years back, Dave Barry supposed that the tabloids composed headlines by reaching into a series of buckets and pulling out a series of names, verbs, and nouns: "Donny and Marie--are--Negros!"*

In the last few years, the old names in tabloids, National Enquirerer and The Star, seemed to have attempted to re-invent themselves as varieties of down-scale People Magazines.

But one paper has bucked the trend. The Weekly World News has apparently walked the Möbius strip of weirdness and met itself. Its new tagline is: "America's only Reliable Newspaper." And in a backhanded way, that may be the only true statement on the page and one of the most true statements in American journalism.

* In that column he announced a contest for the best tabloid headlines. In case you wondered, yes I entered, but lost. I think my entries were too good to win:

• Top Scientists find real-life "Temple of Doom."
• Elizabeth Taylor wants baby; Michael Jackson says, "No!"

Keep in mind this was the early 1980's, before the Space Alien endorsed Ross Perot.