A Matter of Context: Yes, That Float Was Tacky

The world’s first great democracy, ancient Athens, showcased the strength of its government and citizenry by a variety of means, not the least of which was self-mockery. At the Lenaea Festival and later even at the Great City Dionysia, the polis staged rowdy and vulgar satires that left no one free from the scathing wit of the likes of Aristophanes, whose barbs were aimed at everyone from the strategos Cleon (The Knights) to Socrates (The Clouds) to the demi-god Dionysus himself (The Frogs). Variations on the theme appear in other governmental systems as well: the Feast of Fools, for example, or the wide political latitude granted to the court jester.

The phenomenon may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, but a little reflection leads us to the simple fact that the ability to laugh at oneself is a sign of strength, not weakness. This phenomenon has also played out in this country’s fairly recent history. One of the most reassuring moments in the period immediately after 9/11, for example, was when David Letterman went back on the air in New York. But we knew we were really going to be all right when he started telling Bush jokes again.

So there is nothing whatsoever wrong with satirizing American politicians, up to and including President Obama. Except, well…

In Norfolk, Nebraska this 4th of July, a float carried on the back of a flatbed truck showed, in the words of the Omaha World Herald’s Hunter Woodall:

... a figure standing outside an outhouse labeled the “Obama Presidential Library”.…
The figure was dressed in overalls and standing next to a walker outside of the outhouse. The hands and head of the figure were greenish and appeared to be zombielike; the hands were pressed against the sides of the figure’s head. Miniature American flags were atop the float and on the truck.

As one might expect, there were two fundamentally different responses, or rather two fundamentally different sets of responses. There were those, like Gloria Kathurima, who regarded the float as “not OK,” and indeed as “not just political [but] absolutely a racial statement.” Kathurima, who immigrated from Kenya as a girl and is now a naturalized citizen, was, according to the NBC affiliate in Sioux City, IA (about 90 miles to the northeast), “deeply offended.” The station aired an interview with her in which she says, “[Some people were] laughing, some people were pointing, some people were clapping, and that’s when I really became scared. I was thinking ‘What are you guys laughing at? What's remotely funny about this?’ I don't see any sort of policy being argued. I don't see any sort of stance being taken.”

We can argue with the characterization of racism—see Jack Marshall’s piece at Ethics Alarms, for example—but in a town in which whites outnumber blacks by a ratio of about 55:1, an apparently gratuitous insult to a black man who also happens to be the President of the United States does take on a certain distastefulness. Couple that with Kathurima’s daughter’s experience in the local school district—descriptions of the other kids’ not liking her, always wanting to touch her hair: this speaks to an alienation, whether or not inspired by racial animus. Intended or not, that’s going to look a lot like “a racial statement” to a lot of people, especially those with a little more melanin than average in a small Nebraska town.

But even if we discount the racial element altogether, we’re still left agreeing with Jack Marshall’s list of adjectives: “wrong,” “harmful,” “ugly,” “inept,” “unfunny,” and “divisive.” Ms. Kathumira is unquestionably correct that there really isn’t a policy statement to be derived from the display: just contempt for the current President. And here’s where we get to the other group of people mentioned earlier: the ones who approved the float, the ones who laughed—these are not the cream of the nation’s intellectual crop.

But H. Dale Remmich, who designed and built this monstrosity, is a special kind of incompetent. He claims to have had two impetuses for his creation: the “ongoing issues of the Veteran's Affairs administration” and “the government's handling of the Bergdahl scandal.” OK, if you tell me that I’m looking for the former in this float’s satiric intent, I might be able to find my way there with a guide dog—I guess the figure could be taken to be a veteran whose benefits got bound up in VA incompetence. (Remmich claims it was intended to represent himself… why it was so intended is less than entirely clear.) But the Bergdahl case? How in the name of all that’s holy are we supposed to derive that particular meaning, based on this ill-conceived and poorly constructed monument to self-described “political disgust”?

For all this, Remmich is an intellectual giant compared to the judges who gave the float an award and especially to parade committee member Rick Konopasek and announcer Wally Sonnenschein, whose mental superiority to a decaying cucumber is not immediately apparent. Konopasek, having just said that floats could and would be denied for being “morally objectionable,” meaning, apparently, that anything sexual would be banned, immediately proceeds to claim that “If we start saying no to certain floats, we might as well not have a parade at all.” Uh, Rick… you are, presumably, saying no to certain floats.

The prize-winner, however, is Sonnenschein, who, it seems, was able to keep a straight face while declaring that “I really don’t see anything wrong with the Obama float and I’m kind of amazed anyone is complaining.” The first part of his statement is no doubt true, more’s the pity. The second part is either utterly disingenuous or ol’ Wally would come in third place in a battle of wits with a corn dog and an anvil.

The fact is that context matters. If this parade has a history of poking a little fun at political leaders, so be it. But no one seems to be defending the float on those grounds, meaning that this year’s entry was probably an outlier: one that should have been denied a spot in the parade for being out of tune with the purpose of the event. Analogously, when Representative Joe Wilson interrupted the State of the Union address a few years back to shout “You lie” at the President, he was rightly rebuked not because his accusation was inaccurate (although it was, at least in that particular moment), or that he didn’t have the legal right to object to the speech, but rather because expressing himself in that way, in those circumstances, was boorish, disrespectful of the presidency (not merely of the President), and a disgrace to his own constituency.

One of the things that stuck in my mind this Independence Day season was the number of friends who rejoiced in the fact that for this one day, at least, we get to cease being members of a particular political party or religion or race or socio-economic status and simply be Americans. Remmich, Konopasek, Sonnenschein and their ilk seek to deny us that unity, and we are all the poorer for that.

Lexiles and the Fetishization of Quantification

A year and a half or so ago, I wrote about an inane report about how the level of discourse of our Congresscritters has generated in recent years. And, of course, there was “objective” analysis, which didn’t have anything to do with renewed fervor for partisan hackery, increasing disregard for the accuracy of one’s statements, or the apparently undeniable siren song of equating one’s political opponents with Hitler. No, the scourge blighting American political discourse was an insidious combination of monosyllabic words and simple sentences.

You see, there’s something called the Flesch-Kincaid score, which bases an objective (albeit worthless) ranking of the sophistication of one’s rhetoric on two factors: syllables per word and words per sentence. The F-K scores are alleged to match up with the grade level of the linguistic sophistication of the piece under consideration. So what are we to make of the fact that Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the greatest displays of rhetorical brilliance ever created, checks in at freshman-in-high-school level? Or that the most famous line from that speech, “I have a dream today,” gets a score of 0.52? You and I, Gentle Reader, see a problem with the methodology.

Not so, however, the hack journalists of both sides of the political divide, who pounced on the alleged “evidence” to show the The Other Guy really is as ignorant as My Side says. Exhibit A, Fox News: “Obama’s SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year.” Exhibit B, The Inquisitr: “Congress Officially Dumber, Study Finds, Republicans in Particular Showing Marked Decline.”

In writing about this pseudo-evidence, Curmie exclaimed, he hoped rhetorically, “Seriously, is there a study that means less than this one?” Alas, someone took that as a challenge. Unfortunately, it’s a lot more serious, as this particular round of pseudo-scientific idiocy actually has consequences.

The concept of “lexiles” has apparently been around for a generation, and I think I knew that but the first I really registered hearing of it was reading a rather foam-flecked article on the New Republic site. Yes, the faux terror of “federal bureaucrats” is hyperbolic at best, and author (and University of Iowa professor) Blaine Greteman casually ignores the fact that the lexiles are only one means of determining “readability” levels. For all that, this is scary stuff, indeed.

Let’s face it. If it is even possible to begin a story the way Greteman does, the supposedly objective criteria being employed are worse than worthless:

Here’s a pop quiz: according to the measurements used in the new Common Core Standards, which of these books would be complex enough for a ninth grader? 

a. Huckleberry Finn
b. To Kill a Mockingbird
c. Jane Eyre
d. Sports Illustrated for Kids’ Awesome Athletes!

The only correct answer is “d,” since all the others have a “Lexile” score so low that they are deemed most appropriate for fourth, fifth, or sixth graders.

Kid stuff.

Wow. I was one of the top couple of students in my 10th grade “intensive” English class when we read Huckleberry Finn, and to say it was plenty “complex” for me would be to err on the side of understatement rather than hyperbole. “Complexity” has more to it than vocabulary and sentence structure… you know, like subject matter and levels of ambiguity and symbology and… well, other things that actually matter.

Let’s face it: if you’ve got a mechanism that says that Mr. Popper’s Penguins is a tougher read than Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Graham Greene, you’ve got a system so flawed that it deserves to be promptly shit-canned. Naturally, the Common Core geniuses institutionalized it.

There’s a good discussion by Rider University prof Russ Walsh, in which he references the actual CCSS (Common Core State Standards):

Appendix A of the CCSS defines text complexity. It is very important that all teachers understand this definition because it is useful and empowering. Text Complexity is made up of three dimensions: quantitative, qualitative, and reader and task. Quantitative measures include the useful, but limited “reading level” measures like the Fry Readability Graph and Lexile scores. The CCSS has focused on Lexile scores and has recalculated them to reflect the push for greater complexity. Qualitative measures include such issues as considerateness of text (clear structure, coherence, audience appropriateness), knowledge demands, use of figurative language, vocabulary, etc. Reader and task measures concern themselves with the cognitive abilities, motivation and experience of students.

Walsh does describe the Lexiles as “useful,” but that’s because he’s nicer than me, not because we really disagree. Lexiles are also “limited” in Walsh’s world; more importantly, he “[worries] that simplistic readings of this call for greater text complexity will lead to disempowerment of teachers and inappropriate reading assignments for students.” The likelihood of that happening, from my perspective, borders on ontological certitude.

That’s because the fix is already in. Here’s Greteman again:

As the Common Core Standards Initiative officially puts it, “until widely available quantitative tools can better account for factors recognized as making such texts challenging, including multiple levels of meaning and mature themes, preference should likely be given to qualitative measures of text complexity when evaluating narrative fiction intended for students in grade 6 and above.” But even here, the final goal is a more complex algorithm; qualitative measurement fills in as a flawed stopgap….

… I believe that many educational leaders will hear the call for more complex texts and will try to force teachers to use texts that are simply harder. Remember “rigor” is not in the difficulty of the text, but in the vigor of the instruction. Texts that are too difficult for a particular reader are not rigorous; they are just hard. I also believe that publishing companies, under the guise of the publishers guidelines provided them by the authors of the CCSS for ELA, will soon be on the market with anthologies purported to “meet the standards” that will not meet the needs of many students.

Heady intellectual fare.

In other words: the CCSS folks aren’t going to budge on using their stupid rubric for grades 5 and below, and the expertise of teachers will become subservient to their divinely inspired claptrap as soon as they can develop quantifiable criteria that are merely inaccurate instead of So Freaking Imbecilic That Nobody Could Take Them Seriously. Well, nobody but the likes of The Atlantic’s Eleanor Barkhorn and whoever wrote that headline: “Teachers Are Supposed to Assign Harder Books, but They Aren't Doing It Yet.”

Implicit here is the double-whammy of shoddy journalism: the assumption that anything the corporatists behind the Common Core require is legitimate, and the implicit belief that the problem isn’t bullshit requirements, but teachers’ intransigence. Of course, teachers, principals, superintendents, and school boards have not only the right but the responsibility to reject nonsense like lexiles and to substitute their own… wait for it… expertise. (Anyone who has read Curmie’s page for a while knows my take on the two meanings of authority.)

Of course, using completely nonsensical means to measure literature isn’t new. Well over 2400 years ago, Aristophanes concluded his long farcical confrontation between Aeschylus and Euripides in The Frogs by having Dionysus challenge them to recite their “weightiest” verses. Aeschylus wins every round because rivers are “heavier” than cattle, death than persuasion, chariots than clubs, etc. “Weight,” then, no longer means “profundity of thought or expression,” but rather, “the gravitational attraction or solemnity of the subject matter.” It’s a joke, of course, and the overwhelming majority of the audience in late 5th-century BC Athens would have caught on. Somehow, however, I suspect that there was someone named Βιλλγάτες or Αρνεδύνκαν who saw nothing wrong with the test. It was objective, after all.

The attempt to scientize art got a huge jolt in the mid- to late 19th century, with the rise of naturalism, a movement headed by Émile Zola but ultimately inspired by social Darwinism. Zola, Balzac, and their contemporaries generated some stark portrayals of life as lived, especially in urban areas during the Industrial Revolution. They also propagated some really bad theatre (and quasi-theatre): since art was supposed to replicate life, the ultimate expression of theatrical naturalism was to charge admission to watch an actual butcher carve up a beef carcass. Really. No wonder Henrik Ibsen supposedly described the difference between realism and naturalism by tersely observing, “I go to the sewers to clean them; Zola, to bathe.”

The earnest desire to make art more scientific (Curmie resists the urge to use the phrase “reduce art to the level of science”) also manifested in the work of François Delsarte, best known for his voluminous commentaries on elocution, most especially his System of Oratory. Delsarte writes expansively about virtually every conceivable vocal inflection and gesture, seeking a communication system that is efficient and transparent. In one sense, this is a noble goal; in another, it’s transcendently naïve. The fact is that in life and especially in art, ambiguity is not merely ubiquitous but desirable—and this is true whether we ascribe to the modernist model of artists’ imbedding meaning to be discovered by the spectator or the post-positivist schema in which the artist’s function is to catalyze meaning which is ultimately constructed by the observer. Delsarte was a significant player in the development of modernism; he influenced a number of important figures in theatre history (Steele Mackaye, for example), and he is still highly regarded in much of the dance community. Theatre people today, however, regard him (rightfully, I’d suggest) as the quintessence of wrong-headed reductionism.

This idea that objectivity often creates precisely the opposite result of that which was intended serves as one of the themes of The Memorandum, one of the best plays by the late, great, Václav Havel. Shortly after Havel’s death two years ago I dug up a piece I’d originally written for the Cedar Rapids Gazette back in 1990, and re-printed it on my other blog. I therefore quote myself from 23 years ago:

In The Memorandum (1968), the central character, Gross, heads an unnamed government agency. After authorizing the circumvention of a silly regulation, he allows himself to be half blackmailed, half cajoled, by an amoral underling into approving a new synthetic language called Ptydepe. Said to make communication more “efficient,” Ptydepe mandates that every word must differ from every other word of equal length by at least sixty per cent of its letters. Further, words are assigned to concepts by the relative frequency of their use: the more often a word is used, the shorter it will be. Hence, the shortest word in the language, “ng,” means “whatever”; the word for “wombat” has 319 letters.

I should add that in Ptydepe, vowels and consonants are used in random sequence, so a word with a half dozen consecutive consonants is not uncommon. Moreover, every variation of a conventional word, including whether it’s used in jest, or to surprise the listener, gets its own Ptydepe word—defeating the purpose of language play altogether. Eventually, of course, Ptydepe proves to be an unsuccessful experiment, so it is eliminated… to be replaced not by the perfectly workable normative language that people can understand, but by a new, totally different synthetic language with a completely different but equally inane set of rules.

You see where this is going, don’t you, Gentle Reader? Objectivity for its own sake is inherently idiotic. Eliminating ambiguity provides a false efficiency, but it destroys nuance, and ultimately both language and art suffer irreparable damage. Everybody knows that. Well, everybody but the educationists. They sort of think that an educational system based on the philosophical principles advocated by the Communist apparatchiks in post-Stalinist Eastern Europe is the way to go. How very “American” of them.