Letters from an American January 2, 2022
Among the things that she cited today was a piece from the New York Times Editorial Board emphasizing that January 6th last year was the beginning, not the end, of the efforts to subvert the election process.Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now (Paywall)
You:
“Ok, it looks like you just wrote a whole paragraph about how fragile our democratic process feels right now. So what’s the issue from a writing perspective?”
Me:
Let’s start with tone. What I just wrote is a fairly dry statement that I think the United States is in imminent danger of dropping below the minimum threshold of a functioning democracy. I included a couple of references to sources who are more credible and better writers than me. That's all well and good except that this is not something about which I can be, or want to be, dispassionate. I feel like this needs to be screamed from the rooftops. I can’t for the life of me figure out why this is getting less media coverage right now than tributes to John Madden. So how does one convey via the tone of writing “HEY!!!! Pay Attention!!! This is SERIOUS!!!” without actually resorting to overuse of caps and exclamation points? I suppose this goes to the larger question of how one can argue against the lunatic fringe without becoming (or sounding like) another lunatic fringe.
Then there is the issue of scope. Let’s suppose for a moment that I was successful in conveying my sense of urgency about the future of democracy and the rule of law. If you are still with me you have now spent several minutes reading about that issue and my struggles expressing it.
This means that for that same period of time you have probably not been thinking about the state of the pandemic; variants, boosters, vax deniers, super spreader events, and what is going to happen as more and more people decide that they are bored with Covid and want it to magically disappear. Of course, these topics are not unrelated since the entire response to Covid has been politicized from the outbreak. Our ability to respond rationally has been drastically hampered by politicians who are more concerned about making sure their opponents fail than making sure their constituents live.
The same could be said of climate and environmental issues. We are seeing increasing numbers of extreme environmental events
2021 Western Kentucky tornado - Wikipedia,
Colorado Wildfires: What We Know - The New York Times (Paywall),
Cold, heat, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes: The year in weather disasters (Paywall)
but any discussion of what it would take to move the needle dies before it even gets going. The people, companies, and governments that are in a position to do anything meaningful seem to be unwilling to begin the discussion until someone can demonstrate how to make saving the world profitable.
And least we forget, right here in the good old USA (the richest country in the world) we have a huge and rapidly growing portion of our population living at or below the poverty level and cut off from goods and services that the “mainstream” (read top 25%) consider basic necessities. We have a wealth gap the like of which has not been seen since the 1920s (the runup to the Great Depression)
Wealth concentration returning to ‘levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties,’ according to new research (Paywall).
We have a policing, court, and incarceration system that is driven by profit margins and occupancy percentages. We have people who have every reason to fear the very agencies that are supposed to protect them. We have a history of deeply rooted racism and racial inequality that we can’t even talk about for fear of offending some old white guys.
So, Yeah… Scope. All of the topics above, Climate Change, Pandemic, Democracy Hanging by a Thread, Social and Economic Inequity/Injustice, are vital and need immediate attention. And yet somehow this gets less airtime than Antonio Brown taking off his pads and walking out in the middle of a football game.
Which sort of brings me back around to my original question. Does anyone have any good resources on how to scope important topics so that they are manageable and how to set a tone that will get people to take serious matters seriously?
Nope. If i had the answer I'd have put it out there by now. But I think you do as well as anyone at making these points. And better than most because you at least try.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThere has been an ongoing story about the role of racism in NFL's treatment of Antonio Brown.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.insider.com/fans-debate-racial-bias-of-antonio-brown-aaron-rodgers-punishment-2021-12
https://sportsnaut.com/pro-bowl-wr-antonio-brown-directs-racist-rant-at-police-in-florida/
https://ctanzer1.medium.com/the-antonio-brown-saga-reveals-the-twisted-racial-underbelly-of-the-nfl-8e5afdea8f2
Of course, the intent focus on the drama of one celebrity is part and parcel of our lack of seriousness issue.
https://www.si.com/nfl/buccaneers/news/tampa-bay-buccaneers-antonio-brown-quitting-sacrificed-bonus-money
If John Madden had been a great coach 50 years ago, but done nothing public since, we would have heard a lot less about him when he died. The media celebrate media personalities; "We are the news" is easy and self gratifying and it sells.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure there is a big audience waiting for serious writing about serious subjects. Richardson is very good at what she does and reaches maybe a half million people. That may be somewhere near the upper limit of how many people are willing to read 400 words about Viktor Orban.
And if you shout from the rooftops, most people just wonder when the fire department will get the shouting man down from the rooftop.
Try writing about things that are near to you and that you can find words for. They may be very simple things, or very abstract. They may be things few people would find important. Don't worry about that, develop your own voice, in whatever scope makes your hard task of writing manageable.
Very thoughtful and informative post, thank you!
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me as ironic and counterintuitive that a particular cohort of voters have no compunction about ceding their power to elect their own Representatives in response to a perceived but completely unfounded holding that such rights have been undermined.
There's plenty of blame to go for how we got to this point.
We could talk about Australian billionaire media moguls and mainstream and progressive Democrats falling asleep on the watch over the last four decades as State houses turned red, certainly with considerable help from said right-wing media outlets.
However, to your question of how to get people to listen I can only offer that we are now far too quick to mock, shame and belittle those who hold admittedly repellent and fallacious views. The death of expertise that we are experiencing seems to have at its root an inherent distrust of the experts themselves, seemingly born of a perception said experts look down upon those that they are attempting to counsel on how to save lives, our democracy, and preserve the very survival of our species.
To my mind, the greatest problem is that media outlets of all stripes, in my perhaps cynical view, stand to gain the most when we are fighting eachother.
Nothing sells popcorn like a good fight on screen.
David,
DeleteI have to agree with you about the media tendency to make everything adversarial. Part of the curriculum in one of my freshman writing class at UT was
"Everything's An Argument" by
Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz
The basic premise was the tendency to try to present everything as having (at least) two sides and having conflict to make it more interesting. This is often done in a way that tries make the opposing positions sound equally valid or equally supportable even if there is a huge disparity. Examples included things like giving equal air time to holocaust deniers.
I felt like they tried to stretch the premise farther than was needed to try to pad the book, but I think that this is a valid and ongoing issue.