Rubicon

Richard Rorty's legacy of hope

Richard Rorty is dead at age 75. He was more than a philosopher; he was a social thinker. In this era of dysfunctional, amoral government, he left Americans a legacy of hope by reminding us of the intellectual foundations of our political morality and practical accomplishments. Rorty wrote, in his 1999 book Philosophy and Social Hope, of his "hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society," and many of his later essays explored the ideas on which such a society could be built.

Hope is what we chiefly need in the era of George Bush, Osama bin Laden, and their fellow fearmongers. We need leaders who encourage us to broaden the circle of friendship and kinship beyond the usual boundaries, who sensitize us to the suffering of fellow human beings and help us to identify with them—and therefore to reduce the tensions that lead to violence and war. Rorty suggests that this is the best path to take not because it is admirable or moral in some universal sense, but because it is practical; if we have defined our desired goal as a peaceful, egalitarian society, such expanded sympathy is simply the most likely path to achieve that goal.

There exist two main streams of American thought, both optimistic, both hopeful. One is idealistic, the shining city set on a hill. Unfortunately, idealism often shades into a millenarian vision of righteous democratic crusaders rescuing the world from evil forces. At its best, the Marshall Plan, saving Europe from chaos and poverty after World War II. At its worst, the bloody, ethnocentric quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq.

The other dominant stream is pragmatic, the can-do spirit of scientists and entrepreneurs. Pragmatism, too, has a dark side, often shading into an amoral, selfish focus on the acquisition of wealth and power. At its best, medical breakthroughs that save millions of lives. At its worst, corporate excesses that enrich incompetent CEOs and fire loyal workers.

Rorty was a pragmatist, in both the philosophic and political meanings of the word, but he was not infected by the dark side. He revisited the thought of William James and John Dewey and insisted that the measure of truth (and of morality) is the end result of a course of action, not the bright shining ideal that generated that action. As Patricia Cohen puts it in her New York Times obituary, "Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing."

We usually think of idealism (in the political sense) as admirable: a desire to work for a better world. But Rorty argued that idealism is dangerous, because idealists have a rigid, preconceived notion of how the world should look—and their vision is clouded by the language they use, which they often confuse with the reality they wish to describe. It's a common mistake: Bush has his language, and bin Laden has his, and both think their incommensurate words describe reality accurately. But language, according to Rorty, is not reality; it can have only a contingent, socially mediated relationship to what is really happening. Language is rather an adaptive tool that we use to cope with our natural and social environment in order to achieve a desired end.

This is a more radical notion than George Orwell's insistence on truthful, clear language, and it is finally more hopeful too, because it focuses our attention on the importance of open debate and on working toward a common definition of desired social goals. Once we accept the utilitarian nature of words, we can wield them as useful, shared tools rather than as weapons.

Rorty was sometimes accused (unjustly) of being an amoral relativist, but his updated version of pragmatism is just what we need now. It avoids misplaced certainty and self-righteousness, and it encourages communal solutions to shared problems. Don't preach about liberty, it says—tell me how poor people can achieve meaningful lives. Don't preach about democracy—tell me how everyone can share political power.

As a pragmatist, Rorty was clear about the political arrangement he thought was most useful. He wrote, "The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record." It is a radical call for practical hope.

Talking with Persia, spreading out the carpet

Shortly after 470 BCE, following years of triumph as the leader of wartime Athens, Themistocles was accused of treachery against the city. He escaped the death sentence and traveled to Persia to visit his erstwhile enemy, King Xerxes, but they did not speak a common language. So their conversation was translated, often clumsily, from Greek to Persian and Persian to Greek. Plutarch describes what happened next:

[Xerxes] gave Themistocles leave to speak his mind freely on Greek affairs. Themistocles replied that the speech of man was like rich carpets, the patterns of which can only be shown by spreading them out; when the carpets are folded up, the patterns are obscured and lost; and therefore he asked for time. The king was pleased with the simile, and told him to take his time; and so he asked for a year. Then, having learned the Persian language sufficiently, he spoke with the king on his own.

Imagine the high culture of the Persian court—and its dense, complex, artful language. Imagine yourself arriving in Persepolis 2,500 years ago, an outlander from a distant region the Persians considered barbaric and uncivilized. Themistocles was smart; he decided to learn the language and understand the culture.

When US envoy Ryan Crocker met yesterday with Iran's Hassan Kazemi-Qomi in Baghdad, he expressed no interest in the multilayered history of Iran, and he did not choose to communicate in the subtle Persian language. Instead, he bullied the Iranian ambassador. Speaking in unsubtle English, Crocker accused Iran of arming Iraqi militants and said the US would be "looking for results," implicitly threatening an attack if the results were not what the US desired. Kazemi-Qomi denied the allegations and pointed out that the US presence in Iraq was an occupation. Despite their unfriendly words, both representatives said that the exchange had been "positive" and that they would schedule further discussions.

But it appears to me that the carpets are folded up and the patterns of meaning are obscured and lost. If the American carpet were spread out for all to see, I fear that it would reveal an intention to create an excuse—any excuse—to attack Iran, and that the attack would be without real provocation and would follow no meaningful diplomacy.

It's unfortunate that the Bush administration does not have a diplomat who is able to read the patterns in the Persian carpet and communicate an unthreatening message of peace.

The quotation from Plutarch's Themistocles (29.5) is found in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler (HarperCollins, 2005).

[Cross-posted at Scholars & Rogues]

The czar to end all czars

George Bush has finally found a military officer sufficiently hungry for advancement to become his "war czar." After five more senior generals turned him down, Bush today appointed Lieutenant General Douglas Lute to coordinate the two failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The new czar, who is not even a full four-star general, will have all the trappings of responsibility but little authority, since Bush has promised to press on to victory, whatever the cost. Bush is czar of czars, and Lute will follow his whimsical orders until the president decides it's time to unveil another new "strategy." Then he'll fire Lute, who will have come to represent the old, failed "strategy."

Retired Marine General John Sheehan was one officer who declined the honor, and he explained why in a Washington Post oped last month. He said:

[T]here is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region.… I concluded that the current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically.… These huge shortcomings are not going to be resolved by the assignment of an additional individual to the White House staff.

In short, implies Sheehan, the people in this administration don't know what they're doing, militarily or diplomatically, and they don't know how to ask for help from experts like me. The responsibility for coordinating wars belongs to the commander in chief, who already has in place a chain of command that passes through the secretary of defense, the joint chiefs of staff, and CentCom to the commanders in the field. Creating this new position is merely another way for Bush to shirk his responsibility for coordination. Apparently, these facts do not trouble General Lute.

Naming the position has been as much a problem as finding someone willing to fill it. It was first called "war czar," and that's the catchy title that stuck—it's good for headlines, and everyone knows that old-fashioned Russian-style authoritarianism is this administration's preferred style. But some staffer quickly saw the problem with "czar" in a putative democracy and came up with "execution manager," until some bloggers wondered which politicians' heads were intended for the guillotine. The next name was the imprecise "implementation manager for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," and the final choice for General Lute seems to be the even more unwieldy "assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan policy and implementation."

Language is a tool that can be used to sharpen and convey clear thinking. It can also be used to obfuscate and hide the truth. And sometimes it inadvertently reveals more than a tone-deaf speaker intends to reveal. That's what happened this time to our latter-day czarists on the Potomac.

Update: General Lute was skeptical of the "surge," according to Stephen Hadley. And the Financial Times quoted him in 2005 saying, "You simply have to back off and let the Iraqis step forward. You have to undercut the perception of occupation in Iraq." With this appointment, Bush may actually be preparing a face-saving way to begin real withdrawal.

Six Degrees of Certainty

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales better be working on his résumé. Speaking of the politicized firing of eight US attorneys at yesterday's press conference, George Bush did not say, "There has been no wrongdoing."

He did not say, "There has been no evidence of wrongdoing."

He did not say, "There has been no credible evidence of wrongdoing."

Bush said, "There had been no credible evidence of wrongdoing." In other words: "Until the last couple of weeks it looked like Karl Rove had been able to sweep all the damaging evidence under the rug and shut up all the people who know what really happened, but now all bets are off, and I haven't appeared in the same room with my good friend Al for a long time."

As the truth about this shameful episode becomes ever clearer, we can soon expect Bush to say, "I am not aware of any credible evidence of wrongdoing."

And a few days later, he will say, "I was not aware of any credible evidence of wrongdoing. I act as a CEO president who delegates unimportant matters like this to my subordinates, and I was not in the room when it was discussed."

Kyle Sampson did what Gonzales ordered him to do. Gonzales followed the strong advice of Rove. Rove acted with the knowledge and approval of Bush. In the words of Brad DeLong, "The cossacks work for the czar." Bush's loyal underlings do the work that Bush wants done. Sometimes he has to tell them explicitly, and sometimes they are able to infer his unspoken desires.

The Gettysburg Slides

Edward Tufte has been writing for years about the contagious stupidity of PowerPoint presentations. Those hierarchical arrangements of bullet-point phrases, he says, trivialize data, degrade meaning, and turn everything into a simple-minded sales pitch. They provide speakers with a false sense of saying something significant, and listeners with simplistic slogans.

Earlier this year Tufte published a second edition of his incisive 32-page essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within"—the Stalin-statue photo is on the cover. He has written several important books—including The Visual Display of Quantitative Information—on the clear presentation of dense, complex ideas; and he has applied his insights to typical business chartjunk, to NASA decision-making, and to Colin Powell's 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council on Saddam Hussein's imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

But Tufte never applied these insights to the Gettysburg Address. For good reason: Abraham Lincoln did not conceive it as visual information, but as a brief spoken eulogy (without slides), and its power derives from its pure verbal and rhetorical clarity. In just 272 words, Lincoln memorializes the dead, places the Civil War in a historical context, and describes the ideals that must now motivate his listeners. It is dense information, presented simply, but without being leached of its complexity.

Peter Norvig has imagined what might have happened on November 19, 1863, if Lincoln had used PowerPoint at Gettysburg, and the result is very funny indeed. Check it out here.

Then return to a different universe of discourse, and read Lincoln's words aloud. Slowly.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Seven score and three years later, these words send chills up my spine. Is this why we're fighting in Iraq? In Afghanistan? What words do you have for us, Mr Bush? Or do you have only a constantly changing list of bullet points?

A hat tip to Matt Yglesias for the Norvig link.

Triumph of the Dixiepublicans

Once upon a time, racist white Southern politicians were all members of the Democratic Party. Now most racist white Southern politicians have migrated to the Republican Party, and they have completely taken it over, a development epitomized by Trent Lott's reemergence in the Senate GOP leadership. That takeover has been a long time coming. Now, with last week's midterm elections, almost every moderate Republican has been driven out of public life, and Southern reactionaries run the party. As a result, the purged Republican Party is likely to find itself in the minority for decades.

From 1932 t0 1968, the Democrats had a Big Tent, which included segregationist Dixiecrats (as they were called), along with blacks and big-city unionists and Midwest farmers and populist Northerners, all together in the New Deal coalition. The Solid South was the foundation of Democratic power, and anyone who wanted to win in the states of the old Confederacy ran for office as a Democrat.

The first cracks in the Democratic coalition became visible in 1948, after Harry Truman integrated the armed forces and then ran for reelection on a civil-rights platform: Strom Thurmond led a rebel group of Dixiecrats against Truman and won 39 electoral votes in the deep South that year. But most white Southerners returned to the Democratic Party, and the Big Tent held together until the sixties. That's when Lyndon Johnson enacted the Great Society programs, intended to eliminate poverty and racial injustice.

Richard Nixon took advantage of the ire of many racist voters to ride a "Southern Strategy" to victory in 1968, and over the following  decades Republicans became the dominant party in the South, first in presidential voting (as Nixon and Reagan conveyed a whites-first message), then moving down the ballot (with defecting representatives and senators like Thurmond). The process culminated with the radical congressional realignment of 1994, led by Newt Gingrich, and the last traces of moderate Republicanism were purged in this year's election.

Racism in the South can no longer be promulgated overtly, since for decades most Americans have found direct appeals to racial discrimination unacceptable. Therefore, politicians use code words to communicate their support for white supremacy, and the code words have shifted over time as their intent became clear to nonracists. First it was states' rights (the Dixiecrat Party was officially called the States' Rights Democratic Party), then law and order, opposition to welfare and school busing and affirmative action, and most recently support for low taxes and small government.

These latest euphemisms for racism are the most dangerous, because many Americans genuinely do not understand their racist meaning. "Low taxes and small government" mean, in Republican practice, low taxes for the rich, small government for social services with big government for the military-corporate complex, and enhanced power for business owners against workers (with no governmental intervention). The direct effect of this class-warfare strategy is greater discrimination against blacks, Latinos, and other minorities. In short, racism.

As racists have migrated to the GOP, the heirs of Abraham Lincoln have been purged. After last week's election, liberal Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, are few and far between. As Thomas F. Shaller writes in the New York Times:

[T]he majority of defeated House Republicans were purged from the liberal third of the G.O.P. caucus. Ten of the 28 most liberal Republicans lost, including four of the top 12: Jim Leach of Iowa (No. 1), Nancy Johnson of Connecticut (No. 3), Simmons (No. 7), and Charlie Bass of New Hampshire (No. 12). Sherwood Boehlert of New York, sixth on the list of most liberal Republicans, is retiring from Congress, and the Democratic candidate won the race for his seat.

In their place we have Trent Lott back as the Senate minority whip—the Mississippian who in 2002 praised Strom Thurmond on his 100th birthday:

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.

"All these problems" clearly refers to the decline of white supremacy, the platform on which Thurmond ran in 1948. Lott is "proud of it," proud of being racist and sorry that the rest of the country is not as racist as he and his Dixiecrat hero. Following this inadvertent truth-telling, Lott lost his Republican leadership position, since George Bush knows that in the 21st century "low-tax" racism is easier to sell than the overt variety. But now Lott is back, chosen by his fellow Republican senators as their number 2 leader.

And it's not as though Lott has learned anything in the last four years. His obliviousness extends to Iraqis, too, as he recently made clear:

Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.… I always had trouble understanding -- Iraqis look like Iraqis, and Americans look like Americans.… Methodists, Baptists and Catholics live in my hometown. They all look the same to me, they all look like Americans.

Any Jews in Pascagoula? Any Muslims? And what about the blacks in Lott's hometown—does he really think they have rights and opportunities equal to the whites?

George Bush's party is Trent Lott's party is Strom Thurmond's party—the Dixiepublicans.

Bush Lexicon on Interrogation

Additional Newspeak definitions:

• alternative methods: torture
• professionals: torturers
• Geneva Conventions: suggestions
• clarify: repeal
• outrages upon personal dignity: death or organ failure
• habeas corpus: indefinite detention
• accountability: prison for low-ranking professionals
• new interrogation law: get-out-of-jail card for high-ranking professionals
• compromise: what Bush wants

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Border Wall

George Bush looked uncomfortable last night as he read a few palliative words into the television camera. The text concerned immigration—but the subtext was, first, about Bush's waning political strength and, second, about whether the Republican Party will ever again receive a single vote from a person of Hispanic descent.

Bush was walking a tightrope. He wanted to reassure his wacko nativist base that he would never let any brown person sneak into the US illegally, and that he would harshly condemn those who already have. He wanted to reassure all immigrants that they are part of the migratory tradition that has made America great, and that they are welcome to stay if they speak English, pay a big fine, and (from now on) act white. He wanted to reassure his corporate base that a pool of underpaid, exploited workers will continue to be available, and that the additional red tape will be worth it.

These goals are incompatible—at least as understood by the various constituencies—so Bush had to cloak his meaning in imprecise language and obfuscation. As Matt Yglesias wrote last night, it was a speech filled with strange disconnections:

Well, I think we "learned" two things tonight. One -- the president is in political trouble. Two -- the president is oddly averse to the truth. As Kevin Drum notes the main elements of the plan are to deploy the military to the border without calling it "militarizing the border," to launch a guest worker program without calling it a "guest worker program," and to offer amnesty to illegal immigrants without calling it "amnesty." The rhetoric's so slippery that I couldn't tell if [he] was endorsing the idea of a wall across the border without saying the word "wall," or if he was opposing the idea while trying to avoid saying so clearly.

Despite his obscurantism, Bush's inflections sometimes revealed more than he or his speechwriters intended. After saying the border should be "shut to illegal immigrants, as well as criminals, drug dealers and terrorists," as though he were talking about the Canadian border and the San Francisco airport and the port of Boston (as well as the Mexican border), he added, "I was the governor of a state that has a 1,200-mile border with Mexico." He tried to say that sentence as though it were merely one example among many; but if that were true, his voice would have risen—"with MEXICO"—to mark the introduction of a new idea. Instead, his voice trailed off, with a downward inflection, indicating that he had all along been talking about Mexico, and only Mexico.

Our neighbor to the south is, of course, precisely what Bush was talking about, and everyone knew that, whatever he may have tried to pretend. The absurdity of thinking otherwise was made clear by a CNN story, broadcast after the speech, about the casual attention paid to the Canadian border in Minnesota. The reporter visited an unstaffed border station, where anyone who crosses is supposed to stop and call the Border Patrol on the phone that's provided. Now that should deter those Thunder Bay terrorists! To say nothing of the nefarious construction workers from Winnipeg!

As for militarizing the southern border, a development Mexican President Vicente Fox is not delighted with, Bush (as usual) distorts the truth and denies his own responsibility. He says the National Guard is needed to back up the Border Patrol, but it was his budget priorities—reduced taxes and wars of choice—that left the Border Patrol underfunded and understaffed. As Michael Hedges of the Houston Chronicle reported last year, he even reneged on a promise to add 2,000 officers annually:

Officially approved by Bush on Dec. 17 [2004] after extensive bickering in Congress, the National Intelligence Reform Act included the requirement to add 10,000 border patrol agents in the five years beginning with 2006. Roughly 80 percent of the agents were to patrol the southern U.S. border from Texas to California, along which thousands of people cross into the United States illegally every year.

But Bush's proposed 2006 budget, revealed Monday, funds only 210 new border agents.

Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press checks a few more facts:

He asserted in his speech that "we have apprehended and sent home about 6 million people entering America illegally" over five years. Indeed, deportations rose sharply.

But overall apprehensions fell for three straight years before rising in 2004 to 1.1 million, still well below the 1.6 million caught in the last year of the Clinton administration, 2000, and in several years before that.

Bush tried to reassure listeners that the National Guard will not be stretched too thin with border deployments, saying, "We have enough Guard forces to win the war on terror, to respond to natural disasters and to help secure our border." That was incautious of him. In one sentence, Bush reminded everyone of two of his managerial disasters, the Iraq War and the response to Katrina, and associated his immigration proposals with these debacles. Don't worry—we'll do this just like Baghdad and New Orleans!

The inept speech probably convinced no one. The Minutemen and Tom Tancredo think Bush wasn't severe enough, American employers are uneasy that they will lose a cheap workforce, and immigrants (especially Hispanic immigrants) are concerned that they will remain in a second-class status or perhaps be deported. As for American workers, Bush did not even try to address their needs, except to the extent that he thinks of them all as nativist bigots.

The Senate was not convinced, either. Today it rejected an amendment by conservatives to implement harsh security provisions and forbid any kind of amnesty for the estimated 12 million immigrants in the country illegally. But many more votes will occur before a bill is approved, as Joel Havemann and Michael Muskal write in the Los Angeles Times:

If the [Senate] majority holds together through what is likely to be days of debate, the Senate would pass a more liberal immigration overhaul than the House has already approved. That would set the scene for a battle between the two houses over the shape of the first major changes in immigration policy in two decades.

Bush's speech may not affect that battle. He has already lost the battle for credibility.

Tierra de Libres

Now that George Bush is no longer running for office, and therefore no longer seeking votes from Spanish-speaking American citizens, he has decided to encourage the ignorant nativist exclusionists in his party by assuring them that in this country everybody should sing in the God-given language of English—especially when you're singing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Back when Bush was seeking hispanophone votes, first for gobernador and then for presidente, he bragged about his fluency in the language of Cervantes. (Or was it the language of Cantinflas, that Chaplinesque Mexican actor whose film persona was famous for speeches that, "while sounding gloriously informed, signified absolutely nothing"?) Bush read prepared speeches, sang songs (including "The Star-Spangled Banner"), and occasionally even subjected himself to broadcast interviews in Spanish. But now that he wants to show the true colors of patriotism to his Minutemen supporters and sow hatred against immigrants, he sends out spokesbot Scott McClellan on Thursday to say:

The president speaks Spanish, but not that well.… I'm saying that not only was that suggestion absurd, but that he couldn't possibly sing the national anthem in Spanish. He's not that good with his Spanish.

The truth is likely somewhere in between. In fact, according to the Spanish wire service Agencia EFE, Bush speaks Spanish poorly, "but with great confidence." Come to think of it, that sounds very much like the way Bush approaches his whole job. He runs the US economy poorly, but with great confidence. He deals with other countries poorly, but with great confidence. Iraq, Iran, torture, the UN, global warming, trade deficits, budget deficits, Katrina, healthcare—all managed very poorly, but with great confidence.

Of course, that's the way he speaks English, too. So part of the problem is that Bush doesn't have the linguistic tools (in any language) to do his job well; but he also lacks the linguistic tools to figure out that he is not doing it well, that his confidence is misplaced. Joan Ryan, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle about how male and female brains develop in different ways, points out that boys "are more likely to find themselves in altercations because they have poor external language to hammer out a solution and poorer internal language to mediate their impulses." Bush's brain has never developed past this boyish adolescent stage, so he is always spoiling for a fight. Lacking the words to form complex thoughts (internal language), he falls back on the rigid authority of received ideas. Lacking the words to negotiate diplomatically with an adversary (external language), he resorts to threats, bullying, and unprovoked physical attacks. He's linguistically disabled, and therefore very dangerous.

But back to the Spanish. If Bush were capable of grasping shades of meaning, in whatever language, he might understand that when it comes to the national anthem, the Spanish "Nuestro Himno" contains more friendly and inclusive words than the warlike English "Star-Spangled Banner." In one, we have:

Sus estrellas, sus franjas,
la libertad, somos iguales.
Somos hermanos. Es nuestro himno.

Its stars, its stripes,
liberty—we are equal.
We are brothers. It is our anthem.

In the other, we have lines like these:

And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air…
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just…
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

In English, it's all about struggle and courage and war and triumph. In Spanish, there's a lot more emphasis on equality and brotherhood; the triumph is there, but we succeed by creating community rather then by smashing opponents. Well, maybe Bush does understand the difference, and the English version is more to his liking, precisely because it is more bellicose—better to sing while invading Iran.

As for myself, I think we should all start singing it in Spanish rather than English. The tone is more in keeping with the inclusionary, hopeful strain in American history. It sounds less like a call to war and more like the egalitarian ideals of Langston Hughes:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.

And that's something I could march for.

The Verbs of King James

The blogosphere is full of excellent writers and clear thinkers, and one of them is Ezra Klein, the Wonk with a Wink. Yesterday Ezra named three of his favorite writers, with especially warm words for Lance Mannion, whom he praises as "easily the finest prose stylist you're likely to read in a day." Lance is indeed very, very good—thoughtful and amusing, spinning well-crafted essays with amazing regularity.

I especially liked his attack on bad technical manuals, titled "A four year old child can do this. Go out and get me a four year old child." In a previous incarnation, I was a corporate manager who insisted vainly that Hewlett-Packard's ten thousand manuals shall be transformed into clear, readable prose, and I sympathize with Lance's frustration. Few manual writers remember the Golden Rule of Technical Writing, "Write unto others as you would that others write unto you," especially when the subject is not your reader's area of expertise.

But Lance the prose stylist would do better to remain within his area of expertise, which is Modern English. Thees and thous and their attendant verbs constitute a foreign language to him, and lo he goeth astray when he doth essay thereto. Perhaps anyone who did not grow up with the King James Bible ringing in his ears or the speeches of Shakespeare chiming on his tongue is a bit adrift with Early Modern English, but it's really not that complicated. I am, thou art, he/she is. I speak, thou speakest, he/she speaketh (to thee). Even the Wiki wizards have a handle or two on the appropriate voices and conjugations. But Lance does have his fun, and as always he is fun to read:

One of these days I'm going to buy something that needs to be put together and I will open up the instruction manual and fall back amazed as Moses by the burning bush.

I don't expect it will be the voice of God speaking to me, exactly, but the voice of some technical writer addressing me in language as clear and direct as the Lord used with Moses when He instructed him to go to the Pharaoh and say Let My People Go.

Insert Tab A into Tab B, will spaketh the technical writer, and Lo!  Tab A will inserteth itself thusly, just as the badly-drawn and microscopically-scaled diagram showeth.  What's more, I will know exactly what Tab A is and what it is supposed to doeth once it has been joinedeth with Tab B.

That day is as far away as the Second Coming, I fear, and though I may glimpse the Promised Land, I may not enter it with you, as I have sinned like Moses who struck the rock twice---I have whacked Tab A with a hammer a hundred times to force it into Tab B.

RTFM, the prophet said, but how often does that actually help?

Instruction manuals are written in code or Tagalog translated into French translated into Russian translated into Japanese translated into English by computers programmed by monkeys.

Seemingly.

Say not seemingly. It is! Or nearly so. In fact, some real-world manuals in this era of globalization are written in Japanese by engineers, then translated into English by non-native speakers, then translated into a great variety of languages from that imperfect vessel—and as the meaning is poured from one to another to the next, spillage occurs, and whatever survives in clarity is often lost in accuracy.

But if Moses, speaking his words of technical Ancient Hebrew through the scholars of King James, were to bring his Early Modern English down from Mount Sinai, he might then utter Lance's third paragraph in a truly commanding voice. Yea, verily, he intoneth:

Insert Tab A into Slot B, speaketh the technical writer, and Lo! Tab A doth insert itself like unto a cloven tongue, just as the badly-drawn and microscopically-scaled diagram showeth.  Thus saith the Lord: thou wilt know exactly what Tab A is and what it doeth once it hath been joined with Slot B.

There are other estimable writers too who slip, straying into realms they know not of. Why, I myself… but enough. Let me mention only the extraordinary Tom Engelhardt, who while driving into the Berkeley hills last month to interview Mark Danner, noticed a full moon overhead in the late afternoon—an astronomical impossibility (even in Berkeley), since a full moon must be in opposition to the sun. That's 180 degrees or so, on the other side of the sky. As Horace said, "Sometimes even the noble Homer nods"—though it was probably only when he was singing outside his core competency, something about the wine-dark Tab A.

No matter. Ezra the prophet, Lance the man, Tom the dispatcher, read them all. Thou shalt have profit thereof.