What are the four most important words in the resurrection of
American popular culture? I know what they are and will reveal them in
time.
What are the most annoying words and phrases we hear on a daily
basis? I know these, too. But again, patience.
The answers relate to my point—no, my manifesto: We need to
rediscover the English language, and literate expression, and
reading.
They’re all under assault by the techno-monster, who waggles a
seductive finger at young minds, at all minds, and whispers,
“Put that boring book down, and come over to my side. I have the
Internet! … I have an iPod, texting, tweeting! … I have a TV with
500 freaking channels!”
And off we go into the digital swamp, total stimulation, all input
all the time, and it requires nothing from us other than sitting
passively on the hind parts and absorbing it.
The consequences are far-reaching. It’s creating a post-literate
world, argues Tom Bertonneau, a literature professor at State
University of New York at Oswego.
In a recent online essay, he described what it’s like to teach
students who’ve maintained a marginal relationship to the printed word
for their first 20 years. Now, in his class, they’re forced to analyze
texts such as Homer’s Odyssey.
One student wanted to write that Homer’s stories took place in the
Bronze Age. Instead, the poor kid repeatedly wrote “the LaBronze
Age.”
This puzzled Bertonneau, until his wife explained the student
probably was thinking of Cleveland Cavaliers basketball star LeBron
James. So we know this lad spends too much time watching ESPN.
Be wary of the tube! If you prize the language, tame the idiot box!
One edition of SportsCenter can seem as long as “the LaBronze
Age,” if you count the cliches: “Yes, Bill, he just couldn’t get …
back on track … and reach the … next level …
because he didn’t have the necessary … skill set … to really
… dial in … the way he did … back in the day. But
… it is what it is.”
What!? Of course it is what it is! It can’t be what it isn’t!
Hemingway’s bell tolls in my brain every time I hear these phrases.
Topping my list is the incredibly annoying my bad, as in,
“Sorry, I backed over your cat. My bad.”
And go ballistic, as in, “You backed over my cat!?! I’m
trying not to … go ballistic … here!”
Under the bus … as in, “Well, I could have thrown the cat
under the bus!”
“Oh, well. It’s all good. Have a nice day.”
I’m convinced these clichés would fade from use if we spent
half as much time every day reading as we do watching the tube—on
average, three-plus hours—and otherwise bowing before the
monster. We wouldn’t have an apostrophe calamity in which, it seems,
the entire population has lost the ability to distinguish between its
and it’s.
We wouldn’t have grammar vigilantes Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson,
Dartmouth grads who traveled the country correcting—sometimes
with, ahem, questionable legality—mistakes in public signs.
In describing his Typo Hunt Across America tour to the Boston
Globe, Deck called such errors a “plague,” adding: “I figured
Steinbeck had his dog and Kerouac had his drugs. I’d have my
typos.”
They’re everywhere, evidence of a culture sinking under the weight
of those who can’t read—Arizona’s functional illiteracy rate is
20 percent, California’s 23 percent—and especially under those
who can read, but don’t.
Fearing I might be falling into an anti-modernist fog, I searched
out smart people who disagree with me.
UA Journalism Professor Susan Knight thinks students are actually
reading more now than they were 20 years ago. “They’re reading a lot on
the Internet,” she says. “Now, whether they’re reading whole books, I’m
uncertain about that.”
Tom Willard has been teaching literature at the UA for decades and
says that while technology has certainly created more distractions for
students, overall, he welcomes its innovations.
“There’s probably more reading now than (Marshall) McLuhan would’ve
imagined back in the ’60s,” he says.
Neither Knight nor Willard believe that blogging, texting, Facebook
and their like have impacted writing skills, good or bad.
I don’t buy it. Look around. Watch students emerge from class. The
first item they reach for is their cell or iPod. What have I missed?!
… Quick! … I need input!
At lunch, they’re not in a corner eating a sandwich and reading.
They’re texting and keeping an ear out for the bing-bang-bong of
their cell, because it always leads onward, forward, to the next …
thing.
Whatever it is, it has to be better!
This need for speed is like heroin—and books are the
antidote.
Think of this through simple time arithmetic, as the novelist Philip
Roth did in a CNN interview in 2007: “It feels like a dying moment for
literary culture in my own country—but you can’t have computers
and iPods and Blackberries … and have time to sit for two or three
hours with a book.”
Only great readers can be great writers, and when those who don’t
read try to write, the result is what Bertonneau describes as tortured
prose reflecting “dim and cloudy thinking” that will “one day define
the prevailing mental climate of our society.”
He believes schools fail kids by over-fostering feelings and
baseless pride. “I mean to argue,” writes Bertonneau, “that a deficient
but entrenched pedagogy based on ‘progressive’ theories of education
has betrayed students by refusing to grant them the dignified status of
real mentality, of adult awareness, and of literate sensibility.”
The solution is to rebuild the reading culture, one skull at a time.
Remember when your mother sat you down to read Goodnight Moon or
Curious George?
In addition to trying to get you to sleep already, she was teaching
you how to be away from the clamor of … everything,
encouraging you to think independently about the characters in stories,
to laugh at them and root for them, to condemn them and shake
figurative fists when they misbehave, and cheer when they pull through
in the end.
Adults need to do this as much as kids. There’s great benefit to
dropping out for a few hours, achieving a rare state of quiet … in
learning to be alone.
That’s why I believe the four most important words for the
resurrection of the culture are … once upon a time.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.
This past Memorial Day weekend, phrases such as remembering our fallen heroes, price of freedom and protecting the country was repeated over and over as we read the newspaper or watched TV. I myself, as an Indigenous person whose veins carry the blood of the original “Americans,” certainly do not take my freedom for granted. My heroes defended their freedom and country from “white folks” who crossed the ocean in shiploads of disease-carrying criminals, for example, from England. My heroes have names like Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Manuelito, Sitting Bull, and Cuahtemoc.
Beginning with the pilgrims: Indian women, men and children had bounties placed on their scalps. Thieves, who usurped and plundered the earth for gold, silver, millions of acres of forest and species extinction. When I think holocaust, I think about the one that began with the pilgrims and lasted almost 300 years. Max Weber refers to this the “Spirit of Capitalism.”
Clearly, we are a society acquiesced with lies, fallacies that “speak with forked tongues” and overall ignorant of these facts. I am proud to know that my ancestors tried to protect their homeland. Surely, the media would have referred to them as terrorists and “insurgents” who defended themselves from extinction. Removal by Government policies, Presidential Executive Orders; based on avarice, racism, xenophobia and the attitude that the “only good Indian was a dead Indian.”
Lastly, heroes like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan made movies about war, but never went to war, hello? Dick Cheney a perfect example of a coward who received five or six deferments during Vietnam. How ludicrous that he was ready to send your son or daughter to Iraq. Ironically, thousands of Black American’s served the country at the same time their churches were being bombed, were beaten and killed. Finally, Mexican Americans and American Indians before WWII were also denied the right to vote or serve on a jury, service at restaurants (as second-class citizens) segregated from white churches, cemeteries and schools.
I would like to acknowledge and thank my heroes who tried to save their land, languages, culture and religions throughout this great American history. Ignored, denied and excluded from most history books and certainly into the 21st century classroom. This is how we thank my Fallen Heroes legacy and dignity. Less we forget.
Enrique J. Vega
Veteran – United States Marine Corps
Graduate – University of Arizona
Good article Leo, you are right on. I am giving it to all of my grandkids.
Richard A. Winkler
Thank you, Enrique Vega, for providing a different, and also valid, point of view!
Sorry, Mr. Vega, but you are not an “Indigenous” person any more than am I. There is no scientific evidence of the evolution of humans in the Western Hemisphere.
You have Asian roots, mine are European, but our ancestors all came from somewhere else.
Many Europeans came to this continent in bondage, transported in the very ships used to transport Black human cargo. My Irish ancestors were treated no less harshly than yours.
So there are ample grievances to go around, but dwelling on the past is pointless.
There’s a reason academics don’t agree with you, Mr. Banks. It’s because they know what they’re talking about. They’ve done research. And most linguists would of course disagree with you, since language is anything but dead. The online world provides a whole new universe of language relations. New ways to say something: that’s what you’re really afraid of. Reading is not lower now than it was 30 years ago. Technology has not damaged book sales in any measurable way. The chief irony of this article is that I READ it ONLINE. That’s right, text can appear in many different mediums, none of which is objectively better than the other. You’re just another old man scared of the future. Here’s something for you to read up on: ephebiphobia, the fear of youth. And yes, I found that online as well.