The question is, does news still exist? I don’t know. For the news to work, that is, news that purports to generate discussion or analysis, such as Nightline (no need to link to that) or Hardball (no need to link to that either) the screen needs to be broken into two section, one for column A and one for column B.

Pick an issue: say its politicians who refuse to give testimony under oath. Who’d want to do that anyway? Once the issue is determined, then the A and B columns need to be filled from the A and B pool so that a head can be dropped into the prefab columns. Today, news is considered simply quoting what people who find their way into the news say.

Today A said this. B responded this way. We’re trying to figure out to whom we should give more quotetime. Obviously, that would be the White House, because, well, it is painted white after all.

My wife insists, and I agree, that this sort of technique demands no thought from the principles involved. A can simply respond from the script that’s been flying around, as can B. There’s the republican script; there’s the one for the democrats. No need for an actual expert anymore. All A or B have to do is maintain script-composure. Any sort of independent thought could really give the anchor a start, i.e., he or she would have to come up with an actual thought in response to either A or B.

I have to admit to knowing nothing about the sport of curling. But apparently my sister, Cathy Floerchinger, and her Alaska rink know plenty. From the Fairbanks Daily news-miner:

Another national championship banner will be going up at the Fairbanks Curling Club.

The Steve Shuttleworth rink of Fairbanks worked overtime for the second straight day to capture the USA Curling Mixed National Championship title by knocking off the two-time defending national champion Brady Clark rink of Washington on Saturday at the Caledonian Curling Club in Mankato, Minn.

Shuttleworth, third Susan Carothers, second Peter Lundquist and lead Cathy Floerchinger became the first Alaska rink to win the mixed national championship since the tournament’s inception in 1975.

Congratulations!

No wonder the echo boomers distrust news. Mr. Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a couple of posts on the issue of reporting. I’m less interested in the politics, more interested in the competence. What happened to the “watchdog,” regardless of who’s in office.

Regarding the Richard Clarke issue, CNN has been leading into airs with the quote of Clarke’s that the president has done “a terrible job” on terrorism. Why is this “the quote” to quote from the 60 Min interview? I keep coming back to the Record monograph I cited and described below. What Clarke is going to say, said differently, is not knew. It hasn’t, as far as I’ve seen, been “studied” on the news as a matter of serious strategy–forget the politics and who’s attacking whom. There are too many attacks, so many it seems that all the press has time for. Now the press is going to start chewing on its own tail, blaming itself for who screwed up on reporting about WMD, and maybe rethink how to cover the White House. Talk strategy, talk analysis, talk study, and the airwaves go dead. This is not good.

We have Clarke on 60 Minutes saying one thing. We have Condoleeza Rice saying another at the Washington Post. Isn’t it fair to ask that some team of reporters try and figure out who’s telling it straight, rather than airing the partisans on television? We already know what they’re going to say. What the communications director of the white house is going to say in response to Clarke “isn’t news.”

In the British Literature sequence we (me and those who come to class) talk a lot about the idea of order, as we do in other courses. Tennyson’s Idylls can be read as a narrative with this structure: chaos (the world is broken and fractious)–>order (Arthur draws those factions into a unified whole)–>chaos (Arthur dies, the world becomes incoherent).

Terrorism is an agent of disorder or emblematic of it. But can the response also lead to further discord? Here’s what Jeffrey Record has to say on the issue from a monograph entitled Bounding the Global War on Terrorism (pdf) published by the Strategic Studies Institute:

Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Husseins Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it.

Additionally, most of the GWOTs declared objectives, which include the destruction of al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist organizations, the transformation of Iraq into a prosperous, stable democracy, the democratization of the rest of the autocratic Middle East, the eradication of terrorism as a means of irregular warfare, and the (forcible, if necessary) termination of WMD proliferation to real and potential enemies worldwide, are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As such, the GWOTs goals are also politically, fiscally, and militarily unsustainable.

Record focuses on three aspects of the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism): our ability to ascertain the threat, “the scope and feasibility of its objectives,” and sustainability issues (2).

The language we use to “define” or objectify threat is interesting and significant in the sense that discourse is a guide to framing ideas and responses to them. There’s always a logic behind the attempt at coherent description and explanation. Record writes,

American political discourse over the past several decades has embraced war as a metaphor for dealing with all kinds of enemies, domestic and foreign. One cannot, it seems, be serious about dealing with this or that problem short of making war on it. Political administrations accordingly have declared war on poverty, illiteracy, crime, drugs–and now terrorism. Even political campaign headquarters have war rooms, and war is a term used increasingly to describe bitter partisan disputes on Capitol Hill. War is perhaps the most over-used metaphor in America.

The logic lives behind the word war and the context it assumes, depending on what war brings to mind–Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Herodotus, Sun Tzu. As the judge claims in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, War is God.

Traditionally, we know that war is about armies and battlefields, gas and blood, uniforms and medals, heavy metal, terror, and as Tim O’Brien would say, lots of walking or “humping.” It’s the thing that kings and states do. “Yet,” as Record would put it, “terrorist organizations do not field military forces as such and, in the case of al-Qaeda and its associated partners, are trans-state organizations that are pursuing nonterritorial ends. As such, and given their secretive, cellular, dispersed, and decentralized order of battle, they are not subject to conventional military destruction” (3). Through much of the first part of the monograph, Record details current administration rhetoric from documents such as the National Security Strategy and National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, concluding that the documents “conflate” the threat by equating terrorist organizations with rogue states. Record writes,

Unfortunately, stapling together rogue states and terrorist organizations with different agendas and threat levels to the United States as an undifferentiated threat obscures critical differences among rogues states, among terrorist organizations, and between rogue states and terrorist groups. One is reminded of the postulation of an international Communist monolith in the 1950s which blinded American policymakers to the infl uence and uniqueness of local circumstances and to key national, historical, and cultural differences and antagonisms within the Bloc. Communism was held to be a centrally directed international conspiracy; a Communist anywhere was a Communist everywhere, and all posed an equal threat to Americas security. A result of this inability to discriminate was disastrous U.S. military intervention in Vietnam against an enemy perceived to be little more than an extension of Kremlin designs in Southeast Asia and thus by definition completely lacking an historically comprehensible political agenda of its own.

One more quote may serve to lay a little more down about the order/chaos focus I’ve been trying to brick up here.

The chief problem with this GWOT goal, however, is that terrorism is not a proper noun. Like guerrilla warfare, it is a method of violence, a way of waging war. How do you defeat a technique, as opposed to a flesh-and-blood enemy? You can kill terrorists, infiltrate their organizations, shut down their sources of cash, wipe out their training bases, and attack their state sponsors, but how do you attack a method? A generic war on terrorism ‘ails to make the distinction between the differing objectives of those who practice terrorism and the context surrounding its use,’ observes Robert Worley. ‘Failing to make the necessary distinctions invites a single, homogenous policy and strategy.’ Again, one is reminded of the lack of threat discrimination that prompted U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War.

There’s much more to Record’s work than I can get into here, but the fundamental question continues to come up and will keep coming up as we grope for order: how to fight, how to think, and how to use language to understand.

It was wonderful to be able to catch up with some friends this week. Thanks to Allie and Sarina for taking the time to visit with me. You’re welcome any time.

I’ve been gearing up for lots of land work.

Every semester appears to get busier and busier, but who can know, since the last one is gone into the past. I like to ask this question: where is the physical yesterday? Anyway, the students are busy, too: I’ll have papers coming in next week for four out of the five courses I teach. Hopefully the texts will be in order–documentation, organization, and that the processes have been at work, the ones that aren’t under my control. The best college work is the kind done outside of the teacher’s control, the kind that people do on their own time and using their own mental resources, their own powers of synthesis.

Consider British Lit. We swing into Mill’s On Liberty this week and continue the revenue of ideas.

What does Mill mean by Liberty, since it will have to be defined and continues to go through the paces of the art and practice of definition. Liberty to do what? Is Liberty an action, a state of being, an interdependency, a thing that people want or don’t want? Is one in “Liberty” or does one do “liberty”? Is it an illusion given answers to the former?

The definition matters.

Freedom of movement, because we have legs.
Freedom of speech, because we have vocal cords.
Freedom to think, because we do.

Diane Greco has some good thoughts on Comp Studies. She writes:

At first it seemed odd to me that the field of composition would even have theoretical developments. A writing classroom really isn’t a laboratory; it’s not controlled enough. Neither is any observation of a writer’s process. Even if you have a writer explain every single word she writes, as she writes it, you are only getting one person’s process. And presumably there are as many writing “processes” as there are writers. Even so-called “basic” writers will differ significantly (meaning, in a way that precludes generalization from one writer’s experience) in how they go about putting words on paper. Not to mention how artificial the experimental set-up is — if I had to write while explaining myself to myself, I doubt I would be able to write very much or very well at all.

She goes on to discuss three major writing theory camps: cognitivists, expressivist, and social constructionist. Here’s the zinger, though. She writes, “. . . I think maybe these ‘theoretical developments’ are necessary and important — but not for what they tell us about writing. Rather, these theories are important because they’re the stories composition teachers tell themselves about what they’re doing.”

I like this. I’d claim the narrative goes deeper though into a string of theories that are very difficult to work into a syllabus, especially given time and what we assume needs teaching: a little research, a little documentation, a little style, and a little argument or exposition. Sometimes I read College English and invariably put it down, wondering “Haven’t I seen this before?” and go instead to the stories in Confrontation.

Various approaches to writing can give context, but it will always be a loaded context. The desks, the chairs, the blackboards are all in the same place. Ultimately, it’s school, a version of mind.

My favorite approach to composition studies is still progymnasmata tailored to writing. Writing in this case becomes performance.

It seems that Spinning and I share a common enjoyment of Willie Nelson.

She, however, has seen him up close.

Hats off to Neha and Susan for their work on conferences and group work. This leads to a question: where is the school?

Are they learning more by having to scramble for speakers and get people where they need to be, or in their courses? I don’t know. But they’re both building things that other people will use, break, and judge. Is the essay and the requisite work for such things enough: the little writing tasks that will be read by the teacher and marked on, the things that are stacking up in my office that noone wants to come by and grab?

Anticipation, planning, speaking, writing with the risk of laughter. Tough skills to get across in the arbitrary 15 week semester.

Where is the real school? What would William Blake say?

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (MH&H).