As a youth, my four brothers and I had a failsafe method to predict whether a given night’s dinner would be decent or a bust. In the late afternoon, before our father returned from his car wash, we’d take a peek at Mom in the cluttered living room. If she was engrossed in one of the countless books scattered on the sofa that usually meant a burnt chicken or quickie meal of Spam and baked beans. On the other hand, fidgeting with a disappointing Rex Stout story or a best-selling Book of the Month dud, interrupted by long phone gabfests with one of the neighbors gave hope that we might be eating well.
The point is not the quality of her cooking—she had many wonderful qualities, but the rudiments of culinary imagination eluded her—but rather the importance placed on reading in the household. Like most of my friends, even those who weren’t star pupils, the gateway to a lifetime habit of reading usually started at a young age with the funnies, which led to the daily sports or news pages, no-blemishes biographies of sports icons, and finally real literature.
Several years ago, by chance, I encountered a long-ago high school friend on a Boston-bound Amtrak train. Keith never compiled a 3.5 GPA—which was far more difficult to attain a generation ago than today—and as an adolescent he was far more interested in chasing girls and learning to roll a perfect joint, but there he was, drinking coffee and reading a new biography of Winston Churchill.
It’s obviously the same on airline flights. You can neatly divide the generations in two camps; generally, people over 35 are killing time with a book or magazine, while the younger customers are fiddling with video games, watching movies or just staring into space, as if that would shorten the flight. This reality hit home in the late ’80s when my niece and I were flying to Cairo; my carry-on bag was stuffed with books but the only diversion she brought aboard was an extra-long issue of MAD. Mind you, she’d just graduated from a prestigious college in the Northeast.
Last Sunday in The Washington Post, Michael Skube, a university teacher in North Carolina, contributed an op-ed piece that was as accurate as it was depressing.
He’d recently engaged 17 college sophomores in an informal class discussion and innocently asked each who their favorite author was. After an uneasy silence, the common answer was Dan Brown. Skube writes: “The author of ‘The DaVinci Code’ was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.
Yes, it’s a high-pace world we live in today, and the distractions available to adolescents are mind-boggling, whether it’s a new X-Box system, the atrocious Wikipedia, music downloads, instant messaging or compiling that list of extra-curricular activities that make a college applicant stand out to the admissions drone (often not much older than the prospective students) as a teenager who possesses “special” and “unique” qualities. The ability to simultaneously star on a swim team, march at peace rallies and take lessons with a Japanese chef is swell, admirable even, but if kids don’t have the ingrained interest in reading, how in the world are they to function as literate adults? As in being able to compose a comprehensible sentence or knowing the difference between “their,” “they’re” and “there” (for which spell-check is obviously no help).
This travesty, at least to my middle-aged mind, begins at an early age, no matter the quality of a school a kid attends. For example, the summer reading list given to my 12-year son, who’s entering sixth-grade at a competitive and mostly excellent private school in Baltimore, consisted of two “required” books and the “suggestion” to read one or two electives. The mandatory books were saccharine, politically correct stories that were better suited to younger students. But my boy did tackle, and complete, Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, but that not only took a lot of prodding on my part, but a bet that he couldn’t finish it (and write a 1000-word summary for me) within a month. Fortunately, his competitive streak took over and he completed the task, even commenting on Friedman’s dreadful prose style in an otherwise useful book.
My older son, entering the eighth grade in a few weeks, and attending the same school, was required to read A Separate Peace and The Good Earth—again, minor books more suited to young middle-schoolers—and a couple works of historical fiction. Last year, in seventh grade English, he and his fellow students spent an entire semester studying Twain’s Tom Sawyer. It’s not as if this particular school lets its attendees slide by—each of my boys has at least two hours of homework most nights, and Latin is required—but the abandonment of a rigorous reading syllabus drives me crazy. As my mother said on a daily basis, using a once-common phrase, “There oughta be a law!”
Where’s the Trust Buster?
The New York Times doesn’t have a monopoly on dishonesty within the communications industry, but it’s certainly the Microsoft or McDonald’s in that field. Just before the Connecticut Democratic primary earlier this month, the paper’s editorial gave a strident endorsement to self-financed candidate Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman, based on the multimillionaire’s opposition to the Iraq War.
Closer to home, a tepid August 21 editorial (“Hillary Clinton’s Low Profile”) argued that New York’s junior senator ought to accede to anti-war challenger Jonathan Tasini’s call for a debate. Noting that Clinton initially supported the war, and though she’s not as hawkish as Lieberman—straddling the middle for her presidential run in 2008—the same bloggers who slagged the former vice-presidential candidate have criticized Clinton as well.
One might think that a Tasini endorsement is already written in advance of New York’s Sept. 12 primary, given the paper’s self-righteous support of Lamont. But Tasini, who has virtually no money and has been most blacked out by the establishment media, isn’t holding his breath. The Times, a proponent of self-disclosure in journalism except when it applies to its own properties, didn’t see fit in this editorial to mention that Tasini, former president of the National Writers Union, led a protracted lawsuit against the paper and other media outlets, a case (“Tasini vs. The New York Times”) that was ambiguously settled by the Supreme Court in 2001.
The New York Post’s Ryan Sager (an enthusiastic supporter of Rudy Giuliani’s all but certain run for the GOP presidential nomination) spoke to Tasini last week—without mentioning the Times—and the candidate vent his frustration about his lack of financial support from the “netroots” who clogged the Internet with pro-Lamont declarations. “Many progressives fear confronting [Clinton’s] machine—which does take names and does keep lists,” Tasini told Sager. “People are hedging their bets—Washington is a place that hinges on access.”
It’s certainly inconsistent that the Daily Kos, among other politically active websites, is withholding its financial resources in this race, for who knows what a furious Hillary might exact as revenge. Apparently, the Times, which doesn’t see fit to disclose its past association with Tasini, is similarly nervous.
