Some of the best sentences leave the easy path. Some shatter a calcified notion. Some jostle the complacent who have not asked for any such thing.#
Various writers try to get at this essential act; schools usually don't help young people explore it. Here's a small sampling.#
"Of course the justness of a word sometimes resides in the precise degree of discomfort it inflicts." --Tim Robinson, "A Crystallography"#
"The innermost formal law of the essay is heresy." --Theodor Adorno, "Essay as Form"#
"Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating." --Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own#
In this clip from The Newsroom, Sloan Sabbith presses her news producer to give high-profile coverage of Republican shenanigans--refusing to raise the debt ceiling. It makes a dramatic fictional scene. #
But near the end, Sabbith describes real politics accurately--it takes time for people to notice and understand an issue, time to decide to act, time to form alliances, time to make their concerns public, etc. The speech is a mini-primer on political process, or a portion of it.#
Any form of journalism that doesn't take into account the time needed for political understanding, engagement, and action is either oblivious to the workings of politics, satisfied with insiders running everything, or indifferent to the quality of decision-making in the nation. #
The insights linking politics and time in the closing section of Sabbith's dialogue are vital.#
Vaclav Havel's long essay, "The Power of the Powerless" (included in a multi-author book of the same name), spends about half its pages explaining the exact kinds of power the rulers of Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia had in their possession, how they used it to dominate their society, and how it all worked. The last half proposed that even the most powerless of the citizens under that government may have had a certain kind of power, if only they knew they had this power and knew how to use it. But what I want to point out is this:#
On the very first page Havel says that we are accustomed to hearing the political system and the opposition described using certain words, but that these are not the words the citizens would choose. These are not the words that make the most sense to the citizens suffering under the regime. These words don't explain it right.#
And why not? Because they aren't the words the citizens themselves use; they aren't the ideas the citizens themselves use to explain what they witness and experience.#
And so Havel begins his potent essay by trying to clear the air of words that other powerful people use, and begin to create a space for fresh thinking based on what the less powerful people see and know.#
I take this as a cautionary lesson from a very thoughtful political giant of the previous century:#
Don't let powerful others foist their idea-words on you. Those words have the biases, the preferences, the self-serving justifications of the powerful woven into them.#
Be suspicious of language you are accustomed to hearing.#
The author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, says that the authoritarian contingent of the Republican party is within reach of its goals, even without further violent protests. #
"The authoritarian movement growing inside the Republican Party that threatens not just the country, but with climate change, the world. The question is: Why is it not helpful to have mass violent rallies right now? It’s not helpful because the movement, the fascist social and politic movement, is winning. They’re changing the election laws in state after state. You want rallies, look at the anti–critical race theory and anti-mask rallies at school boards all over the country. That’s what we should be looking at." #
The principle here is essentially that the institutions won't defend themselves, and that those we need for a meaningful democracy--more than a facade, more than a hollow shell--may already be deeply compromised.#
Recall Timothy Snyder's little book about protecting democracy, where the second item on his bullet list of essential kinds of activism is to choose one institution that you have some affinity for and work hard to protect it. Because they're going to come for that institution, if they haven't slipped in the side door already.#
Some of the best sentences leave the easy path. Some shatter a calcified notion. Some jostle the complacent who have not asked for any such thing.#
Various writers try to get at this essential act; schools usually don't help young people explore it. Here's a small sampling.#
"Of course the justness of a word sometimes resides in the precise degree of discomfort it inflicts." --Tim Robinson, "A Crystallography"#
"The innermost formal law of the essay is heresy." --Theodor Adorno, "Essay as Form"#
"Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating." --Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own#
In this clip from The Newsroom, Sloan Sabbith presses her news producer to give high-profile coverage of Republican shenanigans--refusing to raise the debt ceiling. It makes a dramatic fictional scene. #
But near the end, Sabbith describes real politics accurately--it takes time for people to notice and understand an issue, time to decide to act, time to form alliances, time to make their concerns public, etc. The speech is a mini-primer on political process, or a portion of it.#
Any form of journalism that doesn't take into account the time needed for political understanding, engagement, and action is either oblivious to the workings of politics, satisfied with insiders running everything, or indifferent to the quality of decision-making in the nation. #
The insights linking politics and time in the closing section of Sabbith's dialogue are vital.#
Vaclav Havel's long essay, "The Power of the Powerless" (included in a multi-author book of the same name), spends about half its pages explaining the exact kinds of power the rulers of Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia had in their possession, how they used it to dominate their society, and how it all worked. The last half proposed that even the most powerless of the citizens under that government may have had a certain kind of power, if only they knew they had this power and knew how to use it. But what I want to point out is this:#
On the very first page Havel says that we are accustomed to hearing the political system and the opposition described using certain words, but that these are not the words the citizens would choose. These are not the words that make the most sense to the citizens suffering under the regime. These words don't explain it right.#
And why not? Because they aren't the words the citizens themselves use; they aren't the ideas the citizens themselves use to explain what they witness and experience.#
And so Havel begins his potent essay by trying to clear the air of words that other powerful people use, and begin to create a space for fresh thinking based on what the less powerful people see and know.#
I take this as a cautionary lesson from a very thoughtful political giant of the previous century:#
Don't let powerful others foist their idea-words on you. Those words have the biases, the preferences, the self-serving justifications of the powerful woven into them.#
Be suspicious of language you are accustomed to hearing.#
The author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, says that the authoritarian contingent of the Republican party is within reach of its goals, even without further violent protests. #
"The authoritarian movement growing inside the Republican Party that threatens not just the country, but with climate change, the world. The question is: Why is it not helpful to have mass violent rallies right now? It’s not helpful because the movement, the fascist social and politic movement, is winning. They’re changing the election laws in state after state. You want rallies, look at the anti–critical race theory and anti-mask rallies at school boards all over the country. That’s what we should be looking at." #
The principle here is essentially that the institutions won't defend themselves, and that those we need for a meaningful democracy--more than a facade, more than a hollow shell--may already be deeply compromised.#
Recall Timothy Snyder's little book about protecting democracy, where the second item on his bullet list of essential kinds of activism is to choose one institution that you have some affinity for and work hard to protect it. Because they're going to come for that institution, if they haven't slipped in the side door already.#