Boehner’s Slush

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“Students and families are struggling in President Obama’s economy. Nearly half of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and laws like ObamaCare have only made it harder for small businesses to hire them. That’s why House Republicans voted to extend current student loan rates and to pay for it by eliminating an ObamaCare slush fund President Obama himself proposed cutting from his budget. It’s time for the president and Democrats in Congress to stop exploiting the challenges facing young Americans for political gain, and start working with Republicans to create a better environment for private-sector job growth.”

Apr 27, 2012, Press Release from the Office of the Speaker of the House, John Boehner

There’s seems to be an emerging consensus that the first presidential election after the Citizen’s United ruling, which unleashed a flood of corporate money, is going to be the ugliest in history. Apparently, if you have an endless flow of cash you won’t use it to educate and inform. I think, then, that we should start keeping track of the key terms of the vitriol. Maybe a little knowledge can diffuse the toxins. Boehner sounded angry and out of control but his terms are clearly carefully chosen to create a particular effect.

First on my list is the term “slush fund,” particularly as associated with the word “ObamaCare,” which has long been a term of art in Republican rhetoric. The two are closely related. “ObamaCare,” suggests that the Healthcare Reform Act is nothing  but the product of a single (Black) man’s power and ambition and not the democratic process; it echos Medicare, too, which “everyone knows” is on the verge of collapse.  This is designed to give these limited market reforms the air of wasteful and dangerous despotism.

It all hints of high taxes and imminent threats to liberty, paranoid mainstays of the Tea Party. The term “slush fund” makes sense, then, because it suggests another truism: absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s an ugly, slithering word that’s reptilian if not evil. It’s a deeply Orwellian trope, too, because Boehner is talking about money designated for preventative care programs, the very programs that will cut medical costs and so help businesses, large and small, while preventing suffering and disease.

The main goal seems to be to give any attempt at reform– the Healthcare Reform Act is by no means a revolutionary act–an ugly, even dangerous feeling. Ironically, this sort of rhetoric is itself a kind of political preventive care, an attempt to inoculate public discussion against the possibility of substantive change.  It’s both tactical and strategic. It’s a tactic to defeat a minor change in tax policy but, more importantly, it’s a long-term strategy for forestalling a feared redistribution of wealth.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing

No Maddows on the Right

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There’s been a little spate of red-baiting going on, perhaps prefiguring the upcoming presidential election, which is probably going to be one of the ugliest in recent history.  I think it started with Allen West’s bizarre claim that the U.S. Congress is full of communists, and now Bill O’Reilly has pipped in, among others, claiming that Robert Reich, of all people, “secretly admires” Karl Marx.  There’s a rhetorical parallel here to the ‘Obama is a Muslim’ charge, in that the accusation isn’t really an accusation, but a sort of guilty–by-association smear, only no one seems willing to say that admiring Marx isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The cold war is over but the smear remains.

I don’t really have any problem saying I admire Marx anymore than I would have a problem with the idea the someone is a Muslim or a Christian or a Democratic Socialist or even a member of the Weather Underground. These are not prejudices, like sexism or white supremacy, that are inherently bad, although there have certainly been bad Muslims, Christians, Democratic Socialists and members of the Weather Underground. I think, though, that Reich’s thesis about the origins of this sort of red-baiting acrimony isn’t correct. I don’t think the problem is that we’ve stopped listening.  I think the stakes are higher: we’re talking about curbing the concentration of wealth.

Doug Henwood, as a side note, is a Marxist who I think is remarkably civil in the face of a lot of nonsense…  Reich, though, is more concerned with us, the so-called mainstream, which he says has become  insular and self-destructive. I don’t mean to trivialize  his ideas, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, liberal or conservative, has much to gain from, say, listening to Rush Limbaugh or anyone on Fox News.  The problem isn’t simply ideological; or, rather, the difference is ideological in the specific sense of being rhetorical.  Rachel Maddow is different from Rush Limbaugh not simply because she believes in global warming or a strong government.

She’s different because she uses language and constructs arguments differently. (Here’s Limbaugh recently on the National Organization of Women. Contrast that to Maddow on Representative Issa.)  Conservative ideology sees rational debate as overly intellectual,  effeminate, and ineffective; it favors a very muscular, pathos oriented rhetoric more like advertising than scientific discourse. It’s easy to find progressive arguments that have taken the path of pathos-based rhetoric too, but it’s less prominent. Conservatives, though, seem to have no other options. There are Limbaughs on the left but no Maddows on the right.

Posted in: Writing

How to Write for our Robot Masters

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I just read a piece in the New York Times called “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously.” According to a recent study, automated software can grades essays with “virtually identical levels of accuracy,” as human graders but at a rate of 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. It sounds scary, and you can imagine the evil administrative imagination dreaming of a college system run by a handful of professors and a legion of robots. Robots don’t want health care and won’t demand freedom of speech protections.

This is also good news to Conservatives who suspect that English professors are not doing anything very difficult. Only it’s not, really, unless you are really cynical about how far we might go in denaturing education. The robots, it turns out, are a little limited right now. Les Perelman (from MIT) sums up the robot’s problems: “[T]he automated reader can be easily gamed, is vulnerable to test prep, sets a very limited and rigid standard for what good writing is, and will pressure teachers to dumb down writing instruction.” That sounds familiar.

None of these things would necessarily be a problem for our hypothetical evil administrator dreaming of electric sheep; in fact, the automated grader seems to be ideally suited for our commercial age. It also sounds like a Republican: “The e-Rater’s biggest problem, [Perelman] says, is that it can’t identify truth. He tells students not to waste time worrying about whether their facts are accurate, since pretty much any fact will do as long as it is incorporated into a well-structured sentence. ” Maybe well-structured sentence is pushing it.

The software is vulnerable to strategies that A students have long used to seduce their harried teachers. It prefers long over short words, sentences, paragraphs,and essays, for example, if for no other reason than counting is one of its strong suits.  It asks that writers stick to the college essay clichés. There can be no sentences that begin with “or” or “and” and no sentence fragments. It’s an awful tool but (call me cynical) I predict that, given our really awful political climate, it’ll be openly used to replace English teachers in 5 years.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Union