AMERICA 2.0

2007

The 2008 presidential campaign has already revealed the slim odds that anyone elected to the White House from either party will help bring America back to life, back to its constitution, back to its ideals, back to sanity and back to reasons for enthusiasm and pride in being an American.

The job thus remains a largely non-electoral one, much as it was the first time around and during periodic revivals such as the abolition movement, populist era and the 1960s. The mainstream politics were there, but mainly a reflection of powerful movements that had reached into American hearts and communities and developed a constituency for the politics that followed. As John Adams put it, the American Revolution "was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution."

It is such a communal revolution that is so strikingly missing from the hearts of America today. It is certainly not to be found in Democratic Party front groups like Move On and the Center for American Progress, but it is also missing from the anti-war effort, the healthcare issue and attempts to control assaults on our civil liberties. There are, to be sure, groups dealing with each of these issues but they function often more like traditional Washington lobbies than as forces of broad inspiration. And they lack either the will or the skill to merge their cause with different but compatible efforts, leaving a battlefield that looks more like a series of information booths at a demonstration rather than a united force for good.

Part of the problem is organizational, part a lack of common symbols, part stems from the absence of a common and clear agenda, and part reflects a vacuum of values that are easily identified and shared.

There also needs to be a far greater consciousness of the degree to which traditional American constitutional standards, political agendas and social values have been destroyed. We need to admit that the First American Republic is over and as we flail about in whatever one wishes to call the interregnum - I sometimes call it an adhocracy - our true task is to design, test and produce America 2.0. What follows are some suggestions for the Beta version of a new America.

ORGANIZATION

The liberal and progressive effort is largely dominated by groups modeled on the classic Washington or state lobby, groups that purport to represent a particular interest but do so in a limited fashion, notably excluding effective mass participation.

These groups compete with one another for funding, achieve that funding through niche rather than holistic programs and have little vested interest in joining diverse coalitions. For example, the development director of one such state group described to me the troubles he faced in fund raising because his organization had joined others in opposition to a tax proposal. Some funders clearly did not like this detour from the group's stated focus. You don't need too many experiences like that before you learn to mind your own business. Good for the bottom line; lousy for an effective movement.

There is also the problem that so much funding comes from centrist foundations that use their financial power to tame the groups they support. A covert trade of soul for dollars has increasingly been part of the American liberal story.

Further, the staffs of these groups are part of a professional subculture with its own career rules accompanied by rewards or penalties for observing or ignoring them. While this is no different than any profession, it clearly has an effect on how these groups go about their business, an effect that may be quite at odds with what the organization is supposed to be about.

Finally, unlike the liberal non-profits, corporate lobbying groups are not expected to manufacture pharmaceuticals, run TV stations or drill for oil. They only represent these activities in the political world. Liberal and progressive lobbyists, on the other hand, are expected to carry the whole load, and end up creating the illusion of making something when they are really only marketing it.

Just as our government often reduces the citizen to a mere customer of the state, so such political organizations typically reduce their participants' role to merely signing something or writing a check.

This is not to say that these organizations are wrong or useless. Especially given the complexities of getting legislation and budgets passed, something of this sort is essential. It is only to say that they should be a far less important part of something that is far greater.

Two ways to deal with this problem come to mind. One is an alternative political party. Of late, the most successful attempt has been the Green Party, but as one of those who helped it get going, I confess to serious sadness over its limitations and effectiveness. These failures include:

- An inability to merge politics with organizing and a grassroots movement along the lines of earlier American socialists and populists. The Greens are not unique with this problem. I have, from time to time, asked candidates who are admirable but unlikely to win what they plan to do when they lose. The question tends to shock or annoy, but it is essential to a successful strategy. For example, a campaign that may only attract 5-10 percent of the vote can easily raise notice for various issues that can expand after the election. It can help build strength in communities that might be hard to reach outside of a campaign. It can, in short, serve not just as a traditional campaign but as an alternative form of organizing and one that does not end with election day.

- An inability to make politics a part of the social culture of one's supporters. Television and other technological developments have badly damaged politics' former role as a integral element of community life. Some years back, I tried to address this once in a talk at a conference:

"I rise to interrupt your proceedings - logical, thoughtful, and well constructed though they are - to suggest something oddly subversive: that people only get involved in politics in large numbers when it becomes more than politics, when it is more than a logical, thoughtful and well constructed process, when it is more even than a ideology. They get involved when politics becomes a normal, convivial, exciting and satisfying part of their social existence."

The Greens are ideally situated to revive the non-political side of politics. They are local, sensitive to non-political values and concerns and start with humanistic bias towards their work. But traditional politics is so powerful that it influences how even the non-traditional view their efforts.

- The Greens have over-emphasized presidential politics at the cost of missing numerous local opportunities. While this obsession is understandable, it is not a particular smart way to spend your time and money when you're as small and weak as the Greens - even if it does allow you to bask in the nearly obscene hatred of Democrats for Greens having the gall to act as though they live in a constitutional democracy. After all, the madness of others does not necessarily confirm one's own course.

- The Greens have been unduly rigid in both their approach and their tone, thus making it easy for others to view them as self-righteous prigs. High on the list of good political traits is being nice to others, welcoming them to your cause, making them feel at home. I have suggested, unsuccessfully, that the Greens make it clear that they are not just a party but a home and a salon des refuse for all those trying to make a better world, especially those young who are uncomfortable with the archaic manifestations of liberalism.

- To loosen this rigidity - real or perceived - the Greens could deliberately welcome part-timers, half-wayers and other stragglers on the true path. When I was invited to my first Green meeting in 1993, my instant reaction was, "But I'm not good enough to be a Green." The host, John Rensenbrink, replied like a Tammany Hall pro, "That's all right Sam, there'll be a libertarian there, too." Later, I would describe myself as the chair of the Big Mac caucus of the Green Party because, even with my participation in the birthing, I didn't always feel completely at home.

The rigid image could be altered relatively easily. There could be various subgroups such as, say, the Two Thirds Greens (who still vote Democratic for president or senator but agree to support Greens further down the ticket) or the Backyard Greens (who spend their time tending to the substantial local potential for the party, leaving the presidential fracas to others).

If this seems to dilute the Green cause, consider this from the Socialist' own history:

"From the beginning the Socialist Party was the ecumenical organization for American radicals. Its membership included Marxists of various kinds, Christian socialists, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish socialists, foreign-language speaking sections, single-taxers and virtually every variety of American radical. On the divisive issue of "reform vs. revolution," the Socialist Party from the beginning adopted a compromise formula, producing platforms calling for revolutionary change but also making "immediate demands" of a reformist nature. A perennially unresolved issue was whether revolutionary change could come about without violence; there were always pacifists and evolutionists in the Party as well as those opposed to both those views."

If the Socialists could be that wishy-washy it would seem the Greens might loosen up a bit.

I mention these problems as indicative of what can happen when one pursues the third party route. There is nothing irreversible in any of this. At its best a third party in our grossly unfair electoral system can still be the place where the better of the dominant parties eventually go to steal some new ideas, as was true with the Populists, Socialists and Progressives. Certainly the Green Party is well positioned in this regard; on issues like the war and health care, the Greens are much more typically American than the Democrats.

But a truly broad movement would have to include not just Greens, but Democrats, independents and the politically alienated or apathetic. The Green Party would be an important part of America 2.0 but only a part.

If you step back from the issues involved and consider just organizing skill, a remarkable fact emerges. The groups most effective at organizing large groups of people in America these days are not political at all, but churches.

Even discounting for the carrot of promised salvation, a serious organizer can find much to admire and emulate in the way churches go about their business. This is not a new phenomenon. I once heard a public radio account of how a 1920s labor organizer arriving in Arkansas found only two groups that understood how to organize: black Baptists and the KKK. So he used them both in his efforts.

An Alinsky-trained organizer would understand this but the average liberal or Green would be shocked. What the union activist understood about politics is that it's not where you come from, but where you're willing to go that counts. And even the average church is kinder to sinners than your typical political purist these days.

What is the secret of the church approach to organizing, again leaving aside the not insignificant come-on of heaven?

To begin with, at their best, churches are congregations and not merely organizations. Our society has become so bureaucratized that we hardly recognize the difference, but there is a big one. An organization is a carefully constructed pyramid, a congregation is far less clearly defined. One is a bureaucratic system, the other a social one. One is an artificial construct; the other is a voluntary gathering, a swarming in modern terms, around common values and goals.

Finally, organizations pride themselves on adherence to a specific mission; congregations see their role as far more holistic including the spiritual, the political, the therapeutic and caring for those in need even if they are not a part of the group.

Part of the secret of mega-churches, for example, is that they serve as a substitute for both government welfare and normally socially disconnected charities.

But it's not just a skill of evangelicals. You can find it among Unitarians, at Quaker meeting or in a synagogue - the sense that the group represents not only common faith, but a shared community and an obligation to each other. It was also typical of the old political machines such as in the Chicago's 24th ward as run by Jacob Arvey. Said a contemporary: "Not a sparrow falls inside the boundaries of the 24th Ward without Arvey knowing of it. And even before it hits the ground there's already a personal history at headquarters, complete to the moment of its tumble."

What if we were to use secular congregations as one basis for building America 2.0? What if we were to form these congregations just as many churches started: in somebody's living room, around a table or a fireplace? What if we stopped seeking so hard for a structural or ideological solution and developed instead thousands of small congregations of those sharing both national and local, political and personal concerns?

Another aspect of churches is that they have preachers. While churches do have bureaucracies, these tend to be less important than the typical modern corporate or government bureaucracy thanks to personal leadership.

Some may regard this as highly undemocratic, but the fact is that churches tend to be more stable politically than many political organizations. In choosing a minister, the congregation gives its common interests and values a face and not merely an organization or a mission statement. The democracy comes from whether you show up on Sunday, fall away or move on to another church.

When I think back over all the political organizations with which I have been involved, far and away the most impressive in its work, the most emotional in the attachment it attracted and the most moving in its memories was the civil rights movement.

I strongly suspect that a major reason for this was that the movement - consciously and unconsciously - used the church as a model.

This went beyond the large number of ministers involved in the cause or the regular use of churches as meeting places. It affected the language, the music and the rhythm of the movement. And it was a movement in which you recalled its leaders as easily as its organizations. The power lay in that special relationship between a congregation of common believers working with someone they trusted for as long as that trust lasted.

To be sure, liberalism has some of the ritualistic characteristics of a church, but it is more that of a closed sect or a cult than of a welcoming congregation and it lacks the communal network, hospitality and sense of mutual obligation. There are a few contemporary models of secular prachers - Ralph Nader and Cindy Sheehan come to mind - but they are rare just as the sort of spirit, symbolized by rows of people holding hands in common accord and common voice is also rare today.

At that early 1993 Green meeting, we ended standing in a circle and I found myself holding hands with the pony-tailed mayor of Cordova, Alaska feeling a hope I have seldom felt since.

It can happen again, these secular congregations led by prophetic voices, but you don't get them with a grant proposal or some new carefully contrived structure. You have to do it, believe in it, find others who agree, and settle on a place to make it happen.

SYMBOLS

I recently visited the Clearwater Festival with my family. Over 90 performers were there on the Hudson River bank - ranging from Blues and Funk to Cajun and Zydeco. And with the revival music was a clear message of reviving the earth.

I was prepared to be bored, like going to one more political antique show. Instead, I found myself in a place of magic, surrounded by happy, decent and lively people. I felt good about America as I watched a woman singing "Union Maid" and clogging between the verses - as I rediscovered the almost forgotten notion of activism and joy bound together.

You don't find it much in modern politics. There's a stiffness, an artificiality and the assignment of potential activists to a passive seat in the audience. A few elite performers instead of large numbers of unskilled voices. A message rather than conversation. Watching Live Earth on TV rather than wandering around the Clearwater Festival.

Symbols are more than marketing or PR. The symbols we use define not just a cause or its image but signal our relationship to it. Among the missing:

- Even with a broadly despised war, there is no simple icon like the 1960s peace symbol.

- There is no hand greeting like the "V" sign or a special hand clasp.

- There is no color associated with supporters of a new America.

- There is a stunning silence. The disappearance of easily recalled tunes in popular music has taken sound away from our collective lips, leaving a silence that "like a cancer grows."

- There is a lack of art of literature that clearly reflects the collapse of the First American Republic, or our present political purgatory - what Eric Budon of the Animals has called "the endarkenment."

We are in a terrible moment of our history yet we have left its iconization to the same forces that caused all the trouble in the first place. As we start to think about America 2.0, retrieving control of our symbols should be near the top of the list.

AGENDA

One has to go back to the Great Society to find a time when Democrats knew what they were doing and how to describe it. The Greens have an agenda, but it is complex and undifferentiated. Meanwhile, the GOP has happily gone about oversimplifying life to God and gays, abortion and Al Qaeda, and the left still can't figure out why it's losing.

Quick: describe the progressive agenda in a few sentences.

If we can't do it, how the hell is the media and the public meant to know?

The point here is not to define the list, but to argue the need for one. It might be both broad as:

- Changing our foreign policy so fewer people want to kill us for it

- Adding morality to our commercial affairs and restoring economic progress to all Americans, not just for those at the top

- Providing single payer healthcare

- Saving the planet from further ecological destruction

And it might be as specific as:

- Instant runoff voting

- Ending credit card usury

- Shifting public budgets from cars and planes to buses, bicycles and trains

I might not even agree with these lists tomorrow, but it only took 70 words and you already have a pretty good idea of where I'm coming from, which is more than you can say of the major Democratic presidential candidates.

How to devise such a list on a mass basis is an interesting problem worth discussion and consideration. During the last presidential campaign I suggested a major conference of progressive organizations to devise a short agenda but with so many groups looking so inwardly at their own roles and budgets, this may prove impossible.

Another way would be a common polling system on progressive web sites and blogs or surveys by standard polling organizations.

Whatever the system, a brief, clear and strong consensus is essential and long overdue.

VALUES

Just as progressive goals are lost in the mush, the same could be said of values. In fact, there may be less consensus possible than one might imagine. How do you get the Manhattan liberal to worry about and respect the drought-stricken Montana farmer? How do you get well-off gays to concern themselves with the urban poor? How do you get women's groups to recognize the degree to which non-college educated young men are the ones really in the rear these days? How do you blend the liberal, the populist, the civil libertarian and the green?

One thing is for certain: we don't know because we haven't tried. One way to start is to commence talking about it, finding common ground, testing who we really are and what we have in common.

A few questions to start the discussion:

- Can urban progressives find common ground with non-urban Americans?

- Why have the values of populism and civil liberties become less important among liberal agenda?

- How do we form debates so the door is open to gather supporters and not chase them away?

- Why isn't community - including local control - more important to the progressive movement of the day?

- How do we foster the idea of reciprocal liberty - I can't be free unless you have your freedom - rather than having freedom defined by purists on either the left or the right?

Ten years ago in my book, The Great American Political Repair Manual, I outlined some values that I thought were central to what I called a cooperative commonwealth, such as:

- We seek to be good stewards of our earth, good citizens of our country, good members of our communities, and good neighbors of those who share these places with us.

- We reject the immoderate tone of current politics, its appeal to hate and fear, its scorn for democracy, its preference for conflict over resolution, its servility to money and to those who possess it, and its deep indifference to the problems of ordinary Americans.

- We seek a cooperative commonwealth based on decency before profit, liberty before sterile order, justice before efficiency, happiness before uniformity, families before systems, communities before corporations, and people before institutions.

- We should tread gently upon the earth and leave it in better condition than we found it.

- The physical and cultural variety of human beings is a gift and not a threat. We are glad that the world includes many who are different from ourselves by nature, principle, inclination or faith.

- We must protect the right of others to disagree with us so we shall be free to speak our own minds.

- Our national economic goal is the self-sufficiency, well-being and stability of our communities and those living in them.

- Ecological principles should determine economic policies and not vice versa.

- The first source of expertise is the wisdom of the people.

- Individuals possess fundamental rights that are inalienable and not contingent on responsibilities assigned by the state. These rights are to be restrained only by a due concern for the health, safety, and liberty of others and are not to be made subservient to the arbitrary and capricious dictates of the government.

- Citizens should participate as directly as possible in our democracy

- The media should inform citizens and provide a means by which citizens may address government rather than serving as a vehicle by which members of the government and elites tell citizens what to think.

- Power should be devolved to the lowest practical level.

-The Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions have deep permanence and are not to be manipulated or abridged for political gain.

- Politics dependent on corporate financing and lobbyist influence is corrupt, anti-democratic and unacceptable.

- Simplicity, conservation and recycling should be central to our economy, our politics and our lives.

- Individual privacy is paramount and not to be subservient to the needs of the state.

- Individual rights are manifestly superior to any granted corporations.

- Our elected officials are servants and representatives, not rulers.

- We need more community more than we need more things.

- We are citizens and not merely taxpayers.

- We own our government and are not merely its consumers.

Change it, rewrite it, scrap it, but put something down that explains to us and others what it is we value.

GETTING DOWN TO IT

One thing is certain: the major political parties, their lobbying groups and think tanks are not going to be of much help. These groups will subvert any new dream and drag it back to the establishment's agenda much as the Democratic Party and groups like Move On have done with health care or the Brookings Institution has done with smart growth.

And just concentrating on necessities - such as ending the Iraq War or stopping Bush's assaults on the Constitution - won't lead to a new America either, essential as these issues may be. We must learn to distinguish between survival and creation and give each its due. These days we seriously shortchange the latter.

Finally, we must remember that change does not require a license. It traditionally has come from the unanointed, the unprotected and the unexpected. We need to create thousands of secular congregations, charettes for a new America and communities of hope and invention - and then bring our discoveries to others so they can share.

In the end, the only solution to a failed America is a new America. And there's nobody who can do it but us.

USA TOMORROW

After many months of research and development, the Progressive Review is pleased to report the first details of its forthcoming daily newspaper: USA Tomorrow.

The design of a daily newspaper is the result of - among other things - tradition, market surveys, the prejudices of the owner and the editors' attempt to figure out what these prejudices are. It can be, by consequence, a product that nobody really wants. To correct this, we have come up with a set of principles for a new newspaper that represents a revolutionary departure from current journalistic practice, to wit:

The front page will be almost entirely devoted to news. News is defined as something that has happened, something that is happening or something that is going to happen. News is not what someone said about what is happening nor what someone perceived was going to happen nor what the editors thought the impact of something happening would be on its readership.

Stories will have to get to the point within the first paragraph or two.

Opposition to any policy will be reported on the same page as the main headline and not on the jump page as is now commonly the case. In fact, jump pages will be eliminated where possible and no story will jump more than two pages. Editors know that few readers turn to the jump page, which is why they bury so much good stuff there.

Next to any story about pending legislation will be a box listing what the bill actually does. This data is increasingly considered extraneous in contemporary journalism.

Early in any story about a proposed policy will be some indication as to who is likely to be helped and who is likely to be hurt if it is approved.

The exception to hard news on the front page will be one or two stories selected for their human interest or literary quality. Throughout the paper will be stories that are funny or interesting even if not newsworthy.

All perceptions (including those excised from the front page and those typical of op-ed pages) will be published in a section called Perceptions. Space will be given based on a rigorous analysis of the perceptiveness of previous perceptions. This is unlike the current situation in which people are allowed to perceive based solely on their position or fame rather than actual prescience. Letters to the editors will thus compete on a equal basis with paid columnists.

Somewhere towards the back of the paper will be several pages devoted to quotations, official and otherwise. This section will have something of the feel (and small type size) of the classified section. Since highly ranked persons can easily be solicited for quotes by e-mail, this improvement alone, if widely adopted, could free up several hundred Washington reporters for actual news coverage in place of several hours at lunch with an assistant secretary of state in order to obtain a ten word print bite.

Journalists will be encouraged to think of themselves as part of a trade and craft that sometimes rises to an art -- but which is never a mere profession. They will be gently reminded that British journalists call themselves "hacks."

Reporters will be expected to know how to write. The submission of databases with transition sentences will no longer be permitted.

Perhaps most controversial will be USA Tomorrow's gossip section. It will surely be attacked by other papers as "sleazy, supermarket tabloid journalism." But the section will be premised on an incontrovertible fact: the powerful in Washington and elsewhere thrive on gossip. Why should the American people be denied access to the same information used daily by their leaders and journalists?

The obituary department will be staffed by good writers who will be encouraged to remember that it's the subject and not their copy that is supposed to be dead.

There will be a section called Style With Class: Unlike the Washington Post's Style section, the tacky -- as well as most of the rich and famous -- will be excluded. Those featured will have to have some admirable qualities rather than just being notorious. The egregious, outrageous, and avaricious who make up the better part of lifestyle sections will be relegated to a new section called Can You Believe This?

News that affects ordinary readers will be removed from the business and real estate sections and put in the front of the paper where it belongs.

There will be heavy use of news photos. In particular, the use of a sequence of photos to tell a story will be revived. People will once again be given a chance to reflect on news images rather than just having them flash subliminally by on TV.

There will be a labor section as least as big as the business section on the premise that there are at least as many workers as there are corporate executives among the paper's readers.

The sports section will resume telling people what actually happened during athletic contests. Salary negotiations, athlete attitude problems, and random downloads from the cortex of sports columnists will be printed only on a space available basis.

There will be no editorial page. As a sop to the editors, however, one or two signed editorials will be permitted. If they don't get better quickly, however, these, too, will have to go.

WORDS AND MEANING

1981

I learned the other day that I had survived more than two decades as a writer without ever fully understanding what a predicate was: My ten-year-old explained it to me. I was glad he understood it, but I wondered whether he still would when he was forty-one and how many times he would get to use the information between now and then. I am wondering again for now, a few days later, I have forgotten his explanation.

I don't fault his teachers for instructing him on such matters, because it comes as part of a package that also includes the foundation of good writing, which is to write, writ, and write again. They are always writing something at that school: poems, interviews, ads, news articles, book reports, lists. If they happen to pick up a bit of arcane knowledge about the structure of language along the way, there is no harm. It's like the baseball fan who remembers who played first base with the Red Sox in 1946.

I know there are people who feel the decline of the American language began when we could no longer remember what a predicate was. Esquire gives space regularly to a column predicated on predicates and such - a pleasantly stuffy series by John Simon who weighs his words with all the care of a deli owner measuring pastrami for a sandwich. People like Simon and Edwin Newman are fun to have around; it's nice to know that there is still a chance to make a living maintaining standards, but the truth is that they are not going to save the language or reverse our semantic senility. They are museum curators inviting us into quaint restored rooms of our linguistic heritage, but, like it or not, we are never going to live that way again.

I don't deny there's a problem. There are people who right now are simplifying textbooks to compensate for the growing sub-literacy of college students. This town is awash in words that people have written, many of them unnecessary or indecipherable. Congress recently considered legislation affecting what it called "unitary hograising structures" when it could have said "pig pens." A research firm in North Carolina, asked to study how schools could combat illiteracy, told the state board of education, "The conceptual framework for this evaluation posits a set of determinants of implementation which explains variations in the level of implementation of the comprehensive project." DC's school superintendent speaks fervently of the need for "self -actualization" and thinks he's saying something.

I would submit, however, that the solution does not lie in drawing up the wagons around purity. Much as John Simon would prefer that we not use "hopefully" the way we do, it is the sort of argument that quickly convinces modern mumblers that preservers of language are elitist fools, not worth the bother .

Rather, I think, we should accept the fact that language is culture and art and that there is no reason for it to be more static than any other aspect of culture and art. The question is not whether we say it the same way as our grandparents, but whether we understand each other and whether we say things that offer enlightenment, entertainment or emotion. The problem is not that language is changing but that the changes reflect other alterations in our society that are less than desirable. The problem is not that our grandparents would not understand us but that we don't understand each other.

Bureaucratese is the preeminent example. It is constantly berated, yet it survives because we fail to recognize that we're dealing with politics and not just words. Bureacratese is bad not only because it sounds bad, but because it accurately articulates what many bureaucrats are about, namely obfuscation, indecision, and carefully padded prevarication. Bureaucrats don't talk like that because they were poorly taught; their language honestly reflects their mission. That's what we I should be fighting. Better language will follow a better bureaucracy.

Next to bureaucrats (and I lump Ph.Ds, sociologists, consultants and people writing grant proposals as their fellow-travelers), the worst damage is done by the media. The media comes second only because its evil is occasionally mitigated by contributions to idiomatic expression. In an era when we all sorely need something in common, we should not begrudge being able to share at least "We do it all for you." No bureaucrat ever added anything useful to the language, but advertising not only regularly replenishes our supply of cliches, it provides an ever-changing source of humor.

The press used to contribute to language as well, but you hardly see a good Time Magazine neologism any more and typically the new words the press does bring us are ones devoured unquestioningly from bureaucrats trying to deceive it. In recent weeks, for example, the press has, without a whimper, accepted the notion that "mandatory conservation " is a perfectly acceptable synonym for "rationing." There was a day, sadly far gone, when reporters would have ridiculed any bureaucrat who tried to get away with that. Perhaps reporters no longer notice because they, too, are joining the bureaucracy.

The press and advertising are part of what is known as the "communications" industry. And here lies the rub. One writers has observed that communications does not necessarily have anything to do with words at all. After all, animals communicate. One of things that separates us from them is our supposed ability with language.

But the media is willing to settle for communications. How fitting. Because the basic task is not to get us to think, which requires language, but to get us to feel. Feel like having a Michelob. Feel like we've understood the world from the evening news. Feel like using the right shampoo will bring us happiness. Feel like we're saying something when we're actually engaged in a sensory transmission as primitive as a robin's chirp.

The current sensory obsession of America is phenomenal. Layouts become more important than the articles they announce. Packages become more important than the contents. Backgrounds become foregrounds, feelings become ideologies, and what you sense overwhelms what you see and learn. I think at times that our cat should be allowed to vote. She arches her back when a dog wanders into the yard; she purrs and paddles her paws when she is content; she feels and she communicates and don't say nothing. She is the modern American hero. Warren Beatty with fur.

Except for one thing. For all our sensory glut - mood drugs, mood music, mood therapy, mood theology , mood government - we still have this curious ability to talk and write. So while some feelies mercifully boogie themselves away wordlessly in the disco dens, others think it unfeeling not to use this ability on others. Thus they write and talk. And about what? Their feelings, of course.

The feelies are all around us. They go to psychiatrists or group therapy to share their feelings and then rush out to tell others what they told their psychiatrist or therapy group. They come up to you at a party and move instantaneously from their name to a detailed report on their emotional EKG. They tell you that you are having trouble expressing yourself or that you're not being honest with them, though you may only be waiting for a break in their monologue. They write books about how love, success, and salvation all depend upon communications yet they rarely provide any information or idea worth communicating.

It makes me think I should get out of this writing business. If expressing oneself in words is really that easy, why am I revising this page for the third time?

Why do I have to say, "I don't know" when everyone else seems to? Maybe words are just harder for a writer. Someone else can say, "I'm really getting into soup these days" and expect it to be accepted as a statement of culinary fulfillment of the highest order. I can't help but see them doing the backstroke through a bowl of Campbell's Cream of Tomato. If I had been given a recipe or anecdote, the assurance of involvement would have been more convincing, even unnecessary, but the style in some quarters to day is for language to be used for confession and profession as though that sufficed without further elaboration.

Words can mean many things, and once off the lip or on the page they gain a life of their own, with meanings that may not coincide with the author's intent. So you try to be careful, to think about what you say or write, what it means to you and what it might mean to someone else and then you end up like Jack London who said, "It is the hardest thing in the world to put feeling, and deep feelings, into words. From the standpoint of expression, it is easier to write a 'Das Kapital' in four volumes than a simple lyric of as many stanzas."

I find I have a bad reputation. In conversation I fumble around a lot, starting sentences and then dropping them in the middle, like I would on a typewriter, mentally crossing them out with silence. It amuses and frustrates my friends. I think I know what the trouble is. I have discovered that when I am speaking formally, to a group or on the air, I am much more fluent than in personal conversation. The reason is simply that I don't generally say anything on these occasions that I haven't tested in the research & development section of my mind. I mainly repeat myself. In other words, I don't really think.

But in an informal situation, I try to think and talk at the same time and my tongue sputters, my mind keeps back-spacing and well-intentioned sentences turn truant. This is especially true when I try to say how I feel about something.

According to the contemporary mythology this means I am either repressing my feelings or, worse, don't have any. This presumption confounds me. If pushed or tired, I'll just go along and spit out an appropriate cliche. This seems to satisfy others, but not me, for my inarticulateness stems from a difficulty in translating non-verbal sensations into the limited vocabulary of our language. It is not that the feelings are not there or that I am trying to suppress them; it is just that I don't want to misrepresent them. This is why, I think, we need music and art and hugs and caresses. For these I am glad that words do fail us. I don't need a word for everything.

I probably take it too far. It's partly a liability of my trade and partly the result of a Quaker education. Quakers are one of the few groups that still respect silence. I've also spent many months in Maine where they tell the story of the tourist, befuddled by the quietude of the town, who asks, "Is there a law against speaking here?" "No," was the reply, "we just don't believe in talking unless it improves upon silence." Such a standard is cultural treason these days. We are expected to communicate whether we have anything to say or know how to say it, leaving our language like a field that has been reaped too often without being sown or fertilized. It is not enough to witness a tragedy and say simply, "Oh, my god!" We are expected talk it out, explore our feelings with others, express our grief verbally - and the more wordily the better .

There was a time when one might take a long walk in silence alone or with a friend, meditate, pray, or just cry. But that will no longer suffice. We might .try to comfort a person in some tangible way, perhaps only by one's presence or touch. But today these seem lesser ways of expressing feeling; now we judge feelings by their linguistic form.

I looked up "silence" in several collections of quotations. I found some apt phrases, but then I noticed something more interesting. My Bartlett's, first published in 1882, had more than two-thirds of a page of its tiny type index devoted to silence and its variations. H.L. Mencken's "New Dictionary of Quotations," published in 1942 and a much more selective volume, still had two pages of quotations dealing with silence. As with Bartlett's, silence generally met with approbation. Then I came to "Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Times," published in 1977. There was no category for silence. Silence is clearly not an idea for our times. It has been replaced, in both a technological and cultural sense, by communications.

I don't deny the worth of talk nor do I doubt that many say less than they should, but I remain skeptical of the general assumption that if we talk long enough, truth and joy will flow like water, and of the tendency to blame the problems of world and the people in it on "a failure in communications." We are, after all, something more than bipedal citizen band radios. To so emphasize verbal expression denigrates the true variety of our senses, feelings, and opportunities for expressing them. An arm around the shoulder may be as true a profession of friendship as some hackneyed phrase. The spinning of a blues lines on the keyboard may relieve pain as much as the weaving of words.

Yet we persist in the faith that more and better communications will save us. The evidence seems weak. I live in the communicating capital of the world, where talking and writing are not only the major profession but a major recreation and we need 25 times as many psychiatrists per 100,000 residents as in inexpressive South Dakota. The availability of information about alternate routes to self-expression has soared in recent years, but so has the divorce rate. The social restraints on saying what one thinks have declined, but so have familial and community ties and public safety. Is social intercourse better than fifty or a hundred years ago? Personal relationships? Our understanding of each other?

We babble on in the hope that by saying enough we will say something right. It is actually more than a faith; it is an addiction. Words have become a drug, not to cure by occasional use, but to sustain by constant injection. Whether one is a teenager mesmerized by the tube or a senator mainlining testimony at a hearing, we increasingly need a verbal fix to get by. It is not by accident that some radio stations have switched from music to an "all-talk" format; words have become the atonal Muzak of our times.

So we not only say it badly but we say too much, and with language being so abused by the bureaucracy, the communicators, the hyper-feelers, and other word junkies, I can hardly take the criticisms of a John Simon seriously. He is the passenger on the Titanic asking for another ice cube in his Scotch. The ship is sinking and he wants us not to split infinitives? Hopefully, there's a better way than merely getting people to use hopefully correctly.

The right course is not to restore to language its antiquated rules but its reason. Many of the old rules are inherently unreasonable and make the logic of English worse. If they are forgotten so much the better. On the other hand, there are rules that should be remembered and reinforced. Among them are these:

Language should have a purpose. It should edify, argue, demonstrate, delight or sadden. Meaning should reign over grammar. Just because we are able to speak and write doesn't mean we have to, As someone once said, what this country needs is more free speech worth listening to. Accumulating verbiage without regard to its content is more likely to lead to indigestion than understanding.

Language is a creative tool, not a piece of office equipment. Too much language today sounds mechanically assembled. In the case of word-processing this has become literally true. Phrases and paragraphs are stored to be retrieved and recycled constantly. One no longer needs to create, but only rearrange. If it begins to sound the same, it's because it is.

It is all right to change the language, but do it for the better. I try to avoid such inflammatory language as "chairman" but I similarly try to avoid, at all costs, its approved alternative, "chairperson." I find that an ugly, inhuman word. I don't mind being one of the people, but "we the persons?" No way. I think people who call me a person are dehumanizing me as much as if I called them a broad. I can't really explain this except that when someone says "person" I don't see any faces, but with "people" I do. "People" are friendly, but "person" is a cold, analytical word that calls up visions of those silhouette characters on population charts and I suspect whoever came up with it in its modern context of being like that. So what I do is duck the issue: "Mary Jones, who chairs the committee, said. . ." or "Mary Jones, chair of the committee." I was relieved to find that Bella Abzug, when recently relieved of her chair, called herself "a chair" which is, after all, a perfectly good word that has been around for years albeit without much currency. There are often words in our linguistic attic that we can dust off and use in a new context when some present phrase becomes cliched or objectionable and many times it is far preferable to do so then to attempt to coin a new one.

Language should be enjoyable. Children, untrained in the somber ways of their elders, recognize this instinctively. They love riddles, puns, jingles and nonsense rhymes. They also love slang. For example, this year at our neighborhood school things are either "decent" or "gross" (there is no middle ground, apparently) and the foibles of a classmate risk identification as a "spaz," a somewhat infelicitous derivation from "spastic." It will be different next year, no doubt, as indicated by a parent who had asked the definition of "decent" being told, "It's slang for cool.' To have slang for slang is a sign of vibrant verbal culture. Adults, of course, have slang, too, but it lacks status unless discreet and colorless as in the overuse of the word "really." If you attended college you are not supposed to descend into slang, although it is permissible, and even at times demanded, that one use a particular form known as jargon. Speaking of the "learning process" and calling someone a "muther" are not as different linguistically as they are indicative of a chasm in social class. Ironically, educated jargon thrives on its meaninglessness; uneducated slang often spreads because of its apt descriptive quality.

Recognizing that we all use words that someone invented should encourage us to try a little invention on our own. While jargon has given us plenty of words we don't need, there are still many things for which we could use a word, but don't have it. Here are just a few possible entries I've created for a really modern dictionary:

A worthbanger could be someone who beats you out of a job or a promotion. Delapse could be the sleep that occurs after you turn off the alarm clock. Cibility is asking someone to have lunch with you sometime when you don't really mean it. Two marathoners at a party engage in joggon. A floid is the absence of anything good to watch on TV as in "There's a floid, let's go to the movies." A snefflehugger is an unreadable photocopy. A bureaucrat who tells you something can't be done because it's never been done before is being precautious.

A day with high pollution levels is fenquid. A lackout is the time spent waiting for the plumber to come. And so forth. I'm still searching for a good word to give to one's ex-wife's mother's ex-husband. If we are going to change the language let us do so to suit our own, rather than institutional needs, and in a spirit of imagination and playfulness, rather than permitting the changes to become unnecessary additions to the tedium of our lives.

We should write for the ear and not the eye. We live in an auditory rather than a literary age and I'm not sure that is entirely a bad thing. Given the cultural dominance of television and radio, we can not in any case do much about it. Further, the formal style, once the mark of a literate writer, has been co-opted by government, academics, corporations, and law firms. It is now mostly bad writing and even if you do it well it puts you in bad company. Besides, if you wish to break through the verbal barriers of these aforementioned powerful institutions, matching style will never work. You break the barrier by speaking and writing informally and colloquially, thereby reminding the recipients of your words that they are humans as well as professionals. They may cave when faced with this revelation.

There is nothing wrong with simple and colloquial speech. The ear is a good judge of language. It doesn't like ugly sounds; it shuns needless complexity; it invites directness. We should, I think, be forced to listen to everything we write.

Finally, we should remember that language was created so people could talk to each other. Much language today is obviously not directed to anyone, but to institutions and machines. Much is used like a night light, to keep us from being afraid of the silence.

Words have better purposes. The major evil of institutionalized and automated language is that it is not human. There is no reason - no matter how complex our thought or exalted the context - to speak and write other than as one human to other humans. This means speaking and writing directly, logically and with spirit.

Such rules seem far more important than how we use "hopefully" and where we place our prepositions. With their application, our language might even flourish again. At least it would survive.

WORDS AND CRUELTY

2004

Listening to Diane Rehm the other morning as she and her panelists turned the horrors of Abu Ghraib into just another matter of politics, policy and process brought to mind the question: what if the prisoners had been Jewish and the time 70 years ago and the place Germany? How would Diane Rehm have handled that story?

It is not just our arguments, but our words, that reveal us. For example, the panelists --- two from the Washington Post publishing empire and one a rightwing law prof and sometime adviser to Donald Rumsfeld (though passed off merely as being with the Council on Foreign Relations) --- clearly did not like the word 'torture,' with Newsweek's Michael Hirsh favoring "these techniques." Rehm even had a hard time with another word, referring to "the scandal --- if you will."

They likewise discussed the Geneva convention against torture and other abuses as though morality were simply a matter of international legalisms --- with humans permitted to engage in any act not prohibited by specific mention on paper of the particular cruelty or status of the victim. Thus, if you were not in the protected class of combatants then, one gathered, it was fine for Donald Rumsfeld to do what he wished to your genitals or your mind.

Diane Rehm is not alone. Here is a truly remarkable example from another icon of the Washington establishment, Jim Lehrer, as he was interviewed by Chris Matthews about the failure of the media to critically analyze the basis for the Iraq war:

Lehrer: The word occupation, keep in mind, Chris, was never mentioned in the run-up to the war. It was liberation. This was a war of liberation, not a war of occupation. So as a consequence, those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.

Matthews: Because?

Lehrer: Because it just didn't occur to us. We weren't smart enough to do it.

Just how smart do you have to be not to realize that when you invade a country successfully, you're going to end up occupying it?

But again, Lehrer was not alone, Antonia Zerbisias writes in the Toronto Star that "I did a quick Dow Jones database search on 'exit strategy' for the first three months of last year and came up with 316 references --- the vast majority of them referring to Saddam's exit strategy for avoiding war and/or being killed or captured. Not very scientific, of course. But it indicates that, while the media cheered U.S. troops going in, few thought about getting them out."

In Washington these days, morality is defined not by philosophy or principles but by restrictive words written by lawyers and ambiguous phrases concocted by public relations experts. Politicians, their academic groupies in the think tanks, and the media accept these words and phrases with little question. Thus justice becomes not a matter of broad decency but of narrow definition and indefinable euphemism.

The problem is the one that Edgar Alan Power described: "By ringing small changes on the words leg-of-mutton and turnip, .... I could 'demonstrate' that a turnip was, is, and of right ought to be, a leg-of-mutton."

For example, for centuries ordinary people have known exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary found it described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.

In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official.

But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time a few years ago when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give you a receipt.

The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," or "the appearance of a conflict of interest."

Another example is the remarkable redefinition of money to mean speech. You can test this one out by making a deal with a prostitute and if a cop comes along, simply say, "Officer, I wasn't giving her money, I was just giving her a speech." If that doesn't work you can try giving more of that speech to the cop. Or try telling the IRS next April that "I have the right to remain silent." And so forth. I wouldn't advise it.

The verbal blanding of the brutality in which the Bush regime has engaged is a form of acquiescence and even encouragement. Further silent support of official cruelty can be found in the broad media refusal -- save a few exceptions such as the New York Times' Fox Butterfield -- to report parallel violent mistreatment of those in domestic prisons.

You don't just need techniques and instruments to torture. You also need the right words to justify it. Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches non-violent communication, was struck in reading psychological interviews with Nazi war criminals not by their abnormality, but that they used a language denying choice: "should," "one must," "have to." For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy."

Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache --- 'office talk.'" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, 'Why did you do it?' you say, 'I had to.' 'Why did you have to?' 'Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'"

Just like "those techniques" at Abu Ghraib.

RESURRECTION IN A PEW

2003

The memorial service for Gene McCarthy ran a bit long, considering it was a tribute to a man who had once suggested reducing the number of commandments from ten to four. And it was disturbing to see Bill Clinton shamelessly delivering a tribute to a man of integrity, especially one who had once suggested, as a reform, that "we fire all the Rhodes and Oxford scholars and everyone from Arkansas." But then there was also Peter Yarow singing and the moving memorials and the brass section of the National Symphony and, most of all, the guy sitting next to me in the National Cathedral pew.

With pleasant earnestness he had turned to me before the service and asked, "Tell me, what did he do? He ran for president, didn't he? And was he a senator?"

I was stunned, wondering what had led him to enter the cathedral in the first place, but straight forwardly described McCarthy's experience in 1968.

The man was interested and noted, "I wasn't here then but I just liked the way he stood up for the truth."

A light clicked. "You were in Vietnam," I said.

"Right. It really screwed you up. Every day you thought you were going to die. I'm still screwed up."

During the service, my neighbor made copious notes and took photos with his camera.

At the end of the service, I shook hands and said I had been glad to meet him, adding, "Was it worthwhile?"

He smiled. "It was unforgettable. I feel alive again."

LETTER TO A SPOOK: BUT YOU DON'T KNOW ME

I don't know for sure that you're out there at all, but from what I read and hear there's a pretty good chance, so I thought I would pass this along.

You may be tapping my phone, scanning my e-mails and collating my other electronic ephemera, but you don't know me.

Any writer can tell you this: you don't reveal character or describe an individual by just dumpster diving for data. Your efforts are not only intrusive, they're ineffective as well.

An individual is a product of experiences, some of which - though influential - may have been lost to memory, some of which - though searing - may never be mentioned again, and some of which - though exhilarating - may lack the words to describe them.

You are eavesdropping only on my front to the world. If I am down, I try not to bring my friends down with me. If I am mad about some public act, I try not to bore my friends too much about it. If I am mad about some private act, I try for the calm and restraint I do not feel. If I am really happy, I often lack the words to express it well. And if I have been given something, I try for gratitude even though I have no idea what to do with the damn thing.

You do not know my dreams, my fears, my stupid excesses of doubt, or how I alternately rebel against, resent or am resigned to the entropy of aging. You do not know how sad I am about the world that the people you work for will leave my children and their children. You do not know that I do not like vinegar, have never read Joyce's "Ulysses," sometimes fall asleep while waiting my turn in a board game, never watch football, or that two of my uncles were killed in wartime service to our country and another never smiled from the day of his return from the front to the day he committed suicide. You do not know that my utopia would have, above all, no need for dentists as well as using "This Land is My Land" as our national anthem.

If you were to really know me, you would need to hear hundreds of stories, visit hundreds of places and meet hundreds of people. Only a few of them are listed on my credit cards.

But you are not only misinformed. You are also a thief. You are stealing my privacy, my civil liberties, my peace of mind and the incalculable pleasure of not having to worry about what someone else is doing to you. You are also a vandal. You are throwing rocks at the Constitution, scrawling graffiti on our national conscience, wrecking our reputation and scratching the face of America.

And still you do not know me.

I don't know you either but I suspect you are earnest and were attracted to your dubious trade by its romantic and macho aura, recruited by the excitement of being a spy. Deceived by your employers, however, you have ended up just another technician in the dismantling of the First American Republic.

I believe you sincerely believe the contrary but I wonder about some things. For example, how many courses in American history did you take before embarking on this task? Did you ever read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography? Do you know who Thomas Paine was? What do you think Patrick Henry meant when he said, "Give me liberty or give me death?" Would you have tapped his phone, too?

And what about those who rebelled against the law to win rights for slaves, for women, for workers? Many of them broke the law. Were they bad Americans because they sought to become full Americans?

Do you know what the Palmer raids were? Do know why good Americans stood up to Joseph McCarthy? What did Woodrow Wilson mean when he told a group of new citizens "You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race." What are some of those principles? Did Wilson know what he was talking about or should he have been under surveillance, too?

If you have a hard time with these questions, maybe you're in the wrong business. You're judging people without knowing the rules of the game. You're determining who is a good American without knowing what that means. You're mistaking loyalty to the ambitions of a particular set of politicians at a particular moment as loyalty to a country, its land and its people.

But even though you are a thief and a vandal, and even though I suspect you don't know enough about America to judge me fairly, I'll make a deal with you.

You come out of your hole long enough to meet me someplace over a drink or over dinner. I'll tell you my stories and you tell me yours. No interrogation, no tape recorder, no probing into each other's private business. Just two Americans sitting and talking about what it means to them to be an American.

If you don't take this deal, I'll think of you not only as thief and vandal but as a coward as well.

If you do take this deal, you'll probably discover that we're both pretty good Americans, but that you've been wasting your time, and that you may even want to find a new job. [2005]