Social Media, Wonk Books, and the Death of the American Mind

Great books need not be written here. They would be useless now.  Literature is dead in America, killed by generations of children not trained to enjoy the written word and language for its own sake, killed by "journalism" that reduced argument and description to "sound bites," and given the coup de grace by the reduction of the American population to cretins who think that the glories and pain of life can be expressed by telegraphic messaging sent and received in tortured little snippets. 

No more will we see the likes of Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner and all the rest of the storied writers' "gang" of old.  Why?  Simply put, there is no reading market for such beautifully polished expressions of the human spirit.  Margaret Mitchell today would not be able to find a publisher.  Remember her?

Books are still published, but they are not real literature.  The books that sell well today are; utilitarian "manuals" on things like cooking, gardening,  and computer science.  Then, there are "wonk books," (fodder for the hyper-ambitious so that they know what to agree with at meetings), celebrity biography, social theorizing and labored exposition for journalists' "insights" on history.

The human soul has been "growed" as a collective organic network in which the collected experience of humanity was recorded and expressed in the form of literary fiction by such masters as Hemingway and Conrad.  In their works the human experience found both narrative and  emotional expression as truth deeper than any textbook could hope to achieve.  This kind of teaching is nearly gone in America.  What is left is to be found in screen plays.  Let us hope that works such as "Inception," "Game of Thrones" or the "Zen" series will carry forward such shreds of human culture as may be needed.  Many universities and colleges that were once centers of learning are changing the emphasis in their English Departments to rhetoric rather than literature.  They believe that reading, writing and learning to do power point are more important than Mark Twain.

As a result of such starvation, the collective American mind is dying.  It is now reduced to subsistence on a diet of supposedly objective volumes of scholarly self admiration thinly disguised as "scientific" works.  Ask anyone you know who is under thirty to recount the history of the United States in broad terms.  Ask the same sort of person to describe in general terms what rough course (direction) an Israeli strike on Natanz would fly and what the appoximate distance might be.  Ask if there are US air bases in Iraq.  Ask.  Ask who were the first five presidents of the United States.  Ask who Dante Alleghieri might have been.  Ask.

The US Army is now trying to prepare itself for some other war in which understanding the locals might be important. Their major thought on the subject revolves around neurology and psychology.

Foreigners!  Save yourselves.  It's over here.  pl

 http://defense.aol.com/2012/09/24/army-brass-abuzz-about-brain-science-predictable-irrationality

 

Comments

[Lord Curzon]

I could not agree more with "It's starts with the parents".

When my son(8), came into this world the first thing I did was remove the television. We do not have one in the house. It gives him so much more time to play and to read, to open his imagination and really lose himself in his books - The Just So Stories, Ted Hughes' The Iron Man, The Wind in the Willows and anything by Roald Dahl and Michael Morpurgo.

I also am a strong believer in audio-books - instead of mindless music on car journeys, put on 'A Bear Called Paddington' and you won't hear a peep, so enthralled is he!

He's now reading The Hobbit, and in future I intend to point him in the direction of the great authors mentioned above.

[YT]

RE: "He's now reading The Hobbit"

Lord Curzon,

Best move you've ever made for him [at present].

I second the collection of works by the honorable Roald Dahl [as staple for children].

RE: "The Wind in the Willows"

I watched the British production as a child, good memories....

[steve]

Whether anyone thinks the literature that was popular in the 60s-70s era was good, or not, my experience was that in greyhound bus station circa 1970, one could find in the gift shop racks writers such as Vonnegut, Heller, Mailer, and Kesey.

And folks riding those buses were occasionally reading those authors.

[Fred]

Now there's an interesting reference. One never seems to know what bits of historical significance will be made on this blog.

[YT]

Kurt Vonnegut was a [real humorous] humanist [& atheist] who portrayed the dystopic symptoms of modern American society.

His works are definitely worth the time & money to procure.

"Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind."

the 'Piano Player' (1952)

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

'Mother Night' ('62)

"Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled."

from 'God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine' ('65)

"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes.

Slaughterhouse V ('69)

Wars would be a lot better, I think, if guys would say to themselves sometimes "Jesus — I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much."

from 'Happy Birthday, Wanda June', a play performed in N.Y.C. (1970)

"The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful."

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2002/09/16vonnegut1.html