Diatribes of Jay: How High-School Teachers Could Help Save American Democracy

For a note on how the New York Times spews propaganda, too, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The 737 Max Disasters
Following is a copy of a message I have sent to Southwest Airlines, via its web-based email system, regarding the recent 737 Max disasters:

I tried to discover the precise equipment to be used on [named] *future* flights and could not. Apparently Southwest doesn't disclose precise equipment data because all of its planes are 737s. But a Google search indicates that Southwest has thirty-four 737 Maxes in its fleet.

After the recent 737 Max crash in Ethiopia, I'm determined not to fly on any Max until the precise causes of the two recent crashes have been found and fixed.

Never before in the history of aviation have two planes of the same brand-new model crashed, with no survivors, in clear skies and good weather, within a few months of each other. Never to my knowledge have two planes exhibited such erratic behavior before crashing, as if the pilots were fighting some mandatory software and lost.

I have fifty years of experience with computer software and systems, as an engineer, scientist, lawyer in Silicon Valley and law professor working in technology-related fields. I'm aware of multiple instances in which software has caused unusual problems that no one anticipated, and that were hard to find and fix.

I don't think I'm a coward. I've flown all over the world. But my professional opinion is that Southwest, by not disclosing which of its planes are Maxes, is subjecting its passengers to a lottery, the loss of which could mean premature death. I have no intention of subjecting myself or my fiancee to such a lottery.

If Southwest’s management is convinced of the Max’s safety, it should disclose which flights use it and let customers decide. If management is uncertain—as any reasonable observer should be under these circumstances—it should ground the Max until the apparent problem(s) is/are found and fixed.

Better to take a small hit to revenue now than become the industry-leading airline that allowed a third (and, one hopes, final) no-survivors crash to kill its customers.

Sincerely,

Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D.
Goodyear Professor of Intellectual Property, Emeritus
University of Akron School of Law
END OF MESSAGE TO SOUTHWEST

Out of fairness to Southwest, I should add that it’s my favorite domestic airline, primarily due to its customer-friendly pricing and flight-change policies. I’m making this message public to put pressure on Southwest and American (the other domestic airline that, according to Google, now flies 737 Maxes) to do the right thing and pressure the FAA to do the right thing: ground these planes until the problem is found and fixed. I have no doubt that eventually it will be, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of another planeload or two of dead passengers.

Principal post follows:

They don’t teach high-school “social studies” or “civics” like they used to. Several surveys have shown appalling public ignorance of the basics of American democracy, including our Bill of Rights. (See also analysis of high-school and college education here.) The situation has only gotten worse since 1991.

Things were different 57 years ago, during my senior year in high school. Not only did we study our Bill of Rights and Constitution in great detail, including the separation of powers. We also had a whole “unit” on propaganda and totalitarianism, which lasted a week or two.

One vivid lesson remains in my mind over half a century later. Our social-studies teacher, whose name I no longer recall, was a dedicated man. He had kept in his own garage piles of Look and Life magazines from decades before. So he could show us, in class, the kind of “news” that real Americans had digested decades earlier, during the First World War.

When I took that class, there was no Internet. There were no cell phones. Xerographic photocopying had been invented, but it hadn’t yet filtered down to high schools. And no mere high-school teacher could afford to take photographs for his class materials and have copies made from the negatives for all thirty students in the class. So our teacher had to haul the original magazines from his garage to our school and pass them around.

One thing he showed us was a bit of propaganda about the Germans during World War I. It showed two human heads in profile.

The top head was labeled “normal” or “American,” or something to that effect. It had the usual bulge extending backward above and beyond the neck. An arrow pointed into that bulge, showing where the “soul” was.

The lower head was a German one, with a Kaiser-Wilhelm helmet. It portrayed a Juncker or Prussian officer, with a stereotypical, ramrod-straight stance and a back of the neck that rose straight up to merge with the back of the head. Here, a similar arrow pointed into empty space behind the head. The caption explained why “Germans have no soul.”

This bit of what we now would call “fake news” came from the First World War, not the Second. There were no Nazis back then. Adolf Hitler was still a corporal fighting in the trenches. Before that war started, educated people worldwide had recognized German culture as one of the world’s two most advanced, the other being Britain’s.

Today that bit of wartime propaganda seems crude and primitive. Yet back in the 1960s, even some of us students remembered a pseudo-science called “phrenology.” That fake science taught that you could learn a person’s character and “soul” by “reading” (feeling) the bumps on their head and skull. Phrenology had been all the rage when that magazine issue came out, and the bit of wartime propaganda fit right into it.

After passing the magazine around, our teacher led a lively discussion of propaganda and totalitarianism. With that simple, compelling example, he had shown us that propaganda was and is not limited to Nazis or to Communists, or to the Soviets then threatening us with nuclear extinction.

Everyone uses propaganda. We do, too. We use propaganda and fake news, among many other ways, to demonize and dehumanize our political and military enemies. Our corporations use it to lessen threats to their business models. There, right in front of our adolescent noses, was proof positive, in one of our nation’s most popular photo news magazines, the equivalent of Facebook today. It was an invaluable lesson, recalled lifelong.

Of all the delusions to which mankind is heir, the notion of racial or national superiority is one of the most seductive and dangerous. If you believe that certain people are inferior, even subhuman, you can allow or even goad yourself to do inhuman things to them. You can be inhuman yourself.

That simple idea underlay Nazism, the Holocaust, and every genocide and attempted genocide in history, including those in Armenia, Rwanda and Cambodia. Today it underlies the attempted genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. It also undergirds white supremacy, white “nationalism” and the dangerous notion that we Americans are “exceptional.” Isn’t “exceptional” just the next best thing to “über alles”?

In our nuclear age, this kind of thinking can lead to extinction. Yet education in these matters appears to be failing today.

The irony is that today it’s much easier to gather teaching material. You don’t have to hoard heavy copies of magazines in your basement for decades, as my social-studies teacher did. You just have to watch TV with a video recorder or surf the Web and YouTube. You can even send your students links by e-mail, without actually copying anything.

Fox and its ilk are such target-rich environments. And in this hyper-partisan era, highly paid political operatives, or TV comics, often do teachers’ work for them. Witness this wonderful composite clip of Fox’ talking heads demonizing President Obama and exalting President Trump for doing exactly the same thing vis-à-vis Kim Jong Un.

That clip alone could support an entire hour’s discussion in social-studies class. What, if any “news” does it contain? Is it “news” or “opinion”? What facts, if any, does it contain? Is this the right way to deliver “professional” or “straight” news to adults, or is it mostly adolescent sarcasm and innuendo? What happens when a subculture of American news consumers takes this sort of thing for “facts” and “current events”? How does this differ from the propaganda dished out by all sides during the Cold War and the two world wars? You could use this single clip to begin an entire semester’s college-level course on propaganda, fake news and journalism.

But we’ve got to teach them young. Not everyone goes to college. And therein lies the problem. The 40% or so of us who appear ready to follow Donald Trump’s every illogical and inconsistent whim into the abyss are mostly non-college-educated. So we’ve got to wake them up in high school. We’ve got to immunize them against propaganda as my high-school social-studies class immunized me.

Today gathering material is the easy part. A significant part of political “news” is propaganda, and much of that is simple name-calling, or what I aggrandize with the title “applied philology.”

The hard part is making room in the curriculum. In many states, curricula are preordained, down to minutiae, by school boards bent on totalitarian political control of education. In red states, these boards are often more concerned with downplaying evolution and the Bill of Rights, and furthering religious and anti-abortion indoctrination, than with real education. Even in colleges and universities, required courses on history, politics and government are fast becoming endangered species.

No one ever promised teachers an easy life. We don’t pay them much. But they live and work at the cutting edge of future generations, and they enjoy the delights of working with youth. Accordingly, they ought to be willing to take some risk to do what’s right. If they can find some way to enlighten their students about the reality of propaganda and fake news in our own age, the lives and prosperity they save may be their own, their own children’s and their grandchildren’s.

The New York Times Spews Propaganda, Too
In my earlier essay on how to save real news in America, I cautiously touted the New York Times as a trustworthy source of real news. But I also noted briefly that it, too, can fall into propaganda. This Sunday morning (March 10, 2019), the Times published an example so crude as to bring into question my personal decision to subscribe.

The story made the lower front page of the print edition and had the headline “Centrist Democrats Squirm as ’20 Rivals Tilt Left.” (The headline differs in the digital version; it’s less hysterical.)

Here, verbatim, are the story’s first two paragraphs:

“DES MOINES — The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.

“Two months into the presidential campaign, the leading Democratic contenders have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced leftist ideas on health care, taxes, the environment and Middle East policy that would fundamentally alter the economy, elements of foreign policy and ultimately remake American life.”

Wouldn’t this be a marvelous subject for discussion in a high-school civics class, on the theme of distinguishing real journalism from propaganda?

First of all, these two paragraphs are the lead paragraphs of a story in a newspaper. So what’s the “news” here? Where are the facts? Is the “sharp left turn” that Dems are allegedly taking a fact? Is the risk of the Dems “careening over a liberal cliff”? Is this “news,” or is it commentary and analysis masquerading as “news”? Is it an editorial brought to the front page?

It gets worse. If the “news” of this story is that some moderate Democrats think this way, you as reader might think that subsequent paragraphs would name and quote them. No. Instead, the story continues with three paragraphs about Bernie Sanders and his “democratic socialist” agenda, quoting him liberally. The obvious purpose is to identify his platform with “[t]he sharp left turn” named in the story’s first four words and the risk of “careerning over a liberal cliff.” The part of the story on the front page of the print edition does not mention a single name of a “moderate” Democrat.

In newspapers, placement is all. How many readers of the print version will turn the 20 pages needed to read the rest of the story? How many will even read down six column inches on page 21, to where the story, for the very first time, presents the key issue in relatively neutral and accurate terms:

“Do Americans simply pine for a pre-Trump equilibrium, less chaos and more consensus, or do the yawning disparities of these times call out for a more transformational administration?”

And what about the substantive issues (belatedly) under discussion, identified in the second lead paragraph as “health care, taxes, the environment and Middle East policy”? The story begins discussing them about a column-foot down on page 21. There it grudgingly admits that “Mr. Sanders’s platform—Medicare for all, free college tuition and an aggressive plan to combat climate change—has grown in popularity, according to polls.”

What it doesn’t say is that, except for the Middle-East policy, each of these proposed policies has captured decisive majorities of the American public—including narrow majorities or substantial minorities of Republicans and conservatives—in consistent polls, depending only on whether “Medicare for All” does not wipe out private insurance.

But enough analysis of this single story! A good high-school class in civics or journalism would find it more subtle than, but fundamentally indistinguishable from, a similar treatment by Fox.

A cool, intelligent reader, plodding to the end of the full-half-page story, could glean the proper conclusions in proper perspective: (1) voters are tired of waiting for things they have wanted by clear majorities for years; (2) the vanguard of the Democratic party is with them; and (3) some political operatives and moderates are worried whether the majorities and that vanguard can beat Trump.

That’s the essence of the story. In the words of Jack Webb from the classic mystery show Dragnet, that’s “Just the facts, ma’am.” Yet a casual reader glancing at the Times’ front page in a newspaper vending machine, on the way to work out at his gym, where the TV over his treadmill is hard-wired to Fox, would conclude that the Democratic party has gone all Lenin and Trotsky.

Could all this definite but subtle shading have something to do with the fact that the Wall-Street and property-development oligarchs who own Manhattan and (indirectly) the Times just want taxes to stay low and government expenses to go down? Or could it be that, since the story has two bylines, the Times assigned two reporters with opposing views to co-write the story, and the right-wing author beat the left-wing one all to hell?

Links to Popular Recent Posts
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here.
For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here.
For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here.
For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

Diatribes of Jay

10 March 2019

How High-School Teachers Could Help Save American Democracy

The 737 Max Disasters

The New York Times Spews Propaganda, Too

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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