palewire

Pop quiz.

Name the controversial black pastor, once allied with a charismatic young presidential candidate, who called America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” before decrying how, in a “madness” fed by the “immense profits of overseas investment,” the country “poisoned the international atmosphere” by falling “victim to … deadly Western arrogance” and propping up a foreign government that is “singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support?” He’s also noted concern about America worshipping “the God of Hate” at “the alter of retaliation.”

Maybe you’re thinking of Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor whose provocative sermons have recently caused problems for his highest profile congregant, presidential contender Barack Obama.

Well, that’s wrong. The answer is Martin Luther King Jr., who said all of those things in an April 1967 speech in Riverside, California. You can read and listen to it here.

Now you can start drawing distinctions between King’s form of dissent and the more highly publicized snippets of Wright’s technique. And that’s fine. I could make a list myself. But my point here is that King wasn’t always the meek and mild voice he’s often portrayed to be today. Though I think the way forward pointed to by King, and echoed again last week by Obama, is still well captured by the voice of Langston Hughes, who, grievanced as he was, envisioned the possibility of a more perfect union to come:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath– America will be!

The graphic down there is called a word tree. Pop in a word (I’d recommend something simple like “I”) and hit enter. Sort of fun, right?

If you visit the new link I’ve added to the sidebar, you can play around with a dinky Web toy I made this afternoon. It’s a series of tag clouds that report the words most frequently found in reviews of this year’s indie hype monster, Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible.” It’s hardly revelatory — and a long toss from scientific — but it can still make for a bit of fun.

If nothing else, it’s clear that the band’s lead singer, Win Butler, is getting more attention that his mates. And a bit interesting, though hardly surprising, that the band’s debut album, Funeral, played pretty high in most reviews.

How about how often “war” makes its way in?

I made the hypecloud using a free application developed by a bright guy named Chirag Mehta. You can check that out here. Mehta has done some cool stuff with it, particularly an excellent cloud that displays the most commonly used words in presidential rhetoric since the founding of America.

I just counted my way through Steve Weinberg’s annual list of journalism books published in the media trade magazine IRE Journal. Altogether it amounts to 231 titles. One reason Steve Weinberg should be everyone’s hero is that he’s probably already read a huge stack of them.

Me? Yeah, I’ve only read five. That’s just over 2 percent of the total (2.5 percent if you let me sneak in James Fallows’ repackaged magazine articles, which I totally swear I read in their original serialized form in The Atlantic).

It’s no surprise that after you lump George W. Bush, Karl Rove, the recently deposed Republican Congress, Iraq, Osama and the 2004 election into one big red pile, it easily tops the list of most commonly recurring topics. Deservedly so, I would say. I won’t feel like an informed citizen until I’ve cracked The Looming Tower and despite all I’ve already picked up in newspapers, magazines and elsewhere, I’m still interested in learning more.

I can’t say the same for topic number two. Ranking in with seven appearances on Weinberg’s list, it’s yet more scary stories for the sheltered secular humanist in the family.

• Believers: A Journey into Evangelical America
• Body Piercing Changed My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock
• The Devil is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringe
• God and Country: How Evangelicals Have Become America’s New Mainstream
• The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America
• The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Cultural War
• Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism

And that’s not even counting omissions like Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, Chris Hedges’ Losing Moses on the Freeway, or Hedges’ early 2007 follow-up—this one tops them all—American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

I know I’m painting with a broad brush. I’m sure much of it is quality work, but the shrill tone wears on me. The overheated eagerness in journalistic and left-wing circles to distinguish oneself from the Bush administration and unfashionable elements of its constituency (see the preening fixation with the now notorious “reality-based community” quote), grants any use of the right-wing’s alarmist rhetorical tactics a special whiff of hypocrisy.

And, to me, a lot of this stuff about the impending Christian overthrow of the Constitution is packaged in exactly the same language as all the right-wing noise about the liberal conspiracy to destroy America. Look no further than Ann Coulter’s Godless, Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and, my latest favorite, Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

It’s possible that I’m missing the severity of these supposedly dire conflicts. Yet if things were grave as we’re told, I’d like to think the threat would be more apparent. As far as I can detect from my own experiences combined with observations gleaned from sources that I trust, both sides here have gone a bit overboard. But I guess that’s what people think will sell books. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, to torture a phrase, the barbarians are at the gate (or the crusaders, depending on your politics). You tell me. My intention isn’t to be dismissive.

And not to get too intense about it, but if two strongly opposed sides can each get away with labeling the other fascist without any clear contradictions, that means the battle George Orwell took up in 1946 has failed to progress much at all. In his essay Politics and the English Language Orwell wrote:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another…

…One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.

I’ve considered myself a foot soldier in the battle for better baseball thinking since my undergraduate years, a fight I can’t claim much more participation in than a somewhat mean-spirited eagerness to challenge conventional wisdom and rankle old folks by mocking television commentators and deriding the myth of the “leadoff hitter.”

While I’d already read Moneyball—easily the most provocative book to hit baseball in my lifetime, though perhaps not as a significant to the larger culture as Juiced or Game of Shadows—I couldn’t resist picking up the latest paperback reissue late last year when I saw it included a new afterward by the author, Michael Lewis.

What a blast. Lewis’ response to the baseball establishment’s irrational and foolhardy rejection of his findings carry enough force that, to a hometown fan like myself, reading it feels nearly as good as watching the Cubs seal a tight game by racking up a half dozen runs in the top of the 10th inning.

But, beyond that, what most captured my mind on this run through Lewis’ paean to the Oakland A’s and Billy Beane wasn’t any of the empirical arguments that have earned his subjects so much respect. Instead it was a rhetorical tool more familiar to the school of literary folk wisdom that has dominated baseball for most of its history—exactly the crowd most threatened by the book’s implications.

Here, on pg. 222, Lewis uses a favorite device of old-school sports writers, the metaphor, to illuminate his hero’s data-driven approach to evaluating pitchers.

His reduced circumstances had forced Billy Beane to embrace a different mental model of the Big League Pitcher. In Billy Beane’s mind, pitchers were nothing like high-performance sports cars, or thoroughbred racehorses, or any other metaphor that implied a cool, inbuilt superiority. They were more like writers. Like writers, pitchers initiated action, and set the tone for their games. They had all sorts of ways of achieving their effects and they needed to be judged by those effects, rather than by their outward appearance, or their technique. To place a premium on velocity for its own sake was like placing a premium on a big vocabulary for its own sake. To say all pitchers should pitch like Nolan Ryan was as absurd as insisting that all writers should write like John Updike. Good pitchers were pitchers who got outs; how they did it was beside the point.

Clear, effective writing. I dig it.