A Look Back at 2020

A Look Back at Reading and Writing in 2020

“Perhaps I ought to add a caution about words. I said that words were, metaphorically, fields of force. … It is as dangerous for people unaccustomed to handling words and unacquainted with their technique to tinker about with these heavily charged nuclei of emotional power as it would be for me to burst into a laboratory and play about with a powerful electromagnet or other machine highly charged with electrical force.

“At the present time, we have a population that is literate, in the sense that everybody is able to read and write; but, owing to the emphasis placed on scientific and technical training at the expense of the humanities, very few of our people have been taught to understand and handle language as an instrument of power. This means that, in this country alone, forty million innocents or thereabouts are wandering inquisitively about the laboratory, enthusiastically pulling handles and pushing buttons, thereby releasing uncontrollable currents of electric speech, with results that astonish themselves and the world. Nothing is more intoxicating than a sense of power: the demagogue who can sway crowds, the journalist who can push up the sales of his paper … the playwright who can plunge an audience into an orgy of facile emotion, … are all playing perilously and irresponsibly with the power of words and are equally dangerous whether they are cynically unscrupulous or (as frequently happens) have fallen under the spell of their own eloquence and become the victims of their own propaganda.

“And the defense against the misuse of words is not flight, nor yet the random setting off of verbal fireworks, but the wary determination to understand the potentialities of language and to use it with resolution and skill.”

-Dorothy Sayers, pg. 46-47, Letters to a Diminished Church, Thomas Nelson, Nashville, TN

Weird Journalism

If reality were like Sayers's metaphor above, the world would not exist after 2020, being blown to smithereens by amateur physicists and chemists who had been misusing chemicals and dangerous equipment in the lab–purposefully or naively. (I am not innocent, I have probably blown something up literarily, even in this blog.)

Have you noticed? Journalism has been “weird” for some time. I regularly scan the bigger, most popular news outlets (of all persuasions), but I like to study what they report and how, how they present themselves (do they admit a political lean, or do they insist they are balanced?), and how their readers react. But it seems like all journalists have given in to, and started mimicking the click-bait angling which was once only a tactic of desperate online advertisers. 

The phenomena I observed started before this (misuse of language is as old as language itself), but I noticed a drastic increase in 2016. Writers were using a lot of words–slippery, amoebic words–that leant a definite bias to the topic at hand. These slippery words indicated that the journalists, or the headline writers were twisting the facts they gathered (wooly and thin, or irrefutable and concrete) to construct a reality of their own making: tilting a fact here, hiding one deep in word clutter there, blurring a few, or maybe just glossing over the gigantic, important fragments to focus on minor, dull, tiny pieces. 

For the first few years, I tended to take it all with a block of salt, then eventually my reaction pushed out of my thought into words, "Just because you say/write/think it, doesn't mean it's true." Yep, these journalistic styles have me talking to the TV and computers. 

When you read news articles–anything on the internet, really–watch for these words: “may,” “might,” “could,” “would,” “nearly,” “likely,” “can,” “seem,” and the mother of all slippery journalistic words to sway an audience, “alleged”. If “alleged” is in the title, in a prominent spot, then the writer feels or wants the fact to be false-if you even read about the incident at all. If the word “alleged” is minor and hidden once, then the writer wants the suspicion to be true. 

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

 -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

It seems like so many journalists wanted black to be blacker, caution to be panic, tragedy to be apocalypse. 

I think I know why–and you do, too, no matter where you land on the political spectrum. But keep your eyes open, the journalistic style will probably flip in the next year, into a chorus of laudatory avoidance, a few gentle nips here and there, but overall, not nearly as negatively obsessive, narcissistically reactive and deranged. 

36 Books in 2020

Because COVID restrictions, shut-downs and the general anxiety my emotional tendrils picked up, I read more than my average number of books this year: thirty-six. My yearly books-read count usually comes in at anywhere from fifteen to twenty-four. 

I count audio books in that total, without guilt, because I do not have the time to sit still reading for as long as I used to. I have things I need to do, physically. 

Some highlights:

C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Audio)- A very weird science fiction (before it was called “science fiction”) trilogy about other worlds, space ships and the second coming of Merlin, but chock-full of Lewis’s clear, philosophical reasoning. 

C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (Read)- I read all seven of children’s classics for comfort, because COVID.

Atlas Shrugged (64hrs.), then The Fountainhead (32 hrs.) by Ayn Rand (Audio)- That’s a lot of hours of Ayn Rand. Before reading her, I thought I would hate her writing and its underlying themes. I expected to find them selfish, cold and individualistic. I have a few major disagreements with Rand’s philosophy, but … she has a point. Her illustrations of the damage socialistic and communistic fixtures can have on the human soul are dynamic. Exaggerated? Maybe. Dramatic? Yes. I find her incredibly interesting. Her Fountainhead  is definitely green–I could tell it was written when she was young, and more idealistic. 

One Shot, One Kill by Charles Sasser (Read, e-reader)— I like to improve, when I can. Improve my mind, my health, my understanding, my intellect. To improve, one must know in what area one is deficient. I am deficient in patience and I am keenly aware of this. I was listening to a history podcast of the Cold War which included a vignette of Carlos Hathcock, AKA, WhiteFeather, who was a sniper in Vietnam. His feat of taking three days (or was it four?) to crawl, undetected, the better part of a mile through low brush, to hit a target in the middle of a field (no tree cover) illustrated a patience and discernment that I envied. I wanted that kind of patience (and courage and …. fortitude and, while I’m asking, I’d like to be that kind of marksman, too). 

I bought and read One Shot, One Kill, primarily for Hathcock’s story, but it was a compilation of U.S. military sniper stories. It explained that, in the gun of a general soldier, bullets are incredibly inefficient and inaccurate, statistically speaking (think Stormtroopers’ marksmanship). That’s why we need snipers. Snipers are sure shots, and–pardon the colloquialism–badasses, in very good and sometimes bad ways. 

Some Lowlights: 

The Decameron (28 hrs.) by Giovanni Boccaccio (Audio)-Plague literature, because COVID. But uuuugh! The introduction was good, gave a little insight into what happened in Italy around the 14th century Black Plague years. The body of the work is the story of how ten rich young people fled to the country from a plague-ridden city for ten days, each person telling a story a day. Some of the stories were okay. Most were storified overtly lewd jokes. Which is okay, but story after story after story of bawdy adultery, abuse, etc and so forth, got old. It kinda sounded like stories teenage boys would tell, except a little more stylized and informed. 

Eragon (16 hrs.) by Christopher Paolini (Audio)- If you’ve read The Lord of the Rings, any Harry Potter books, any Narnia Chronicle books, or any classic fantasy books, you will hate this. This book will entertain young folks who have never read any of the above, because it is just a frappe of all the above and a few more. And it is essentially un-edited (aka, long, over-written, too. many. words., with ham-fisted and clumsy literary technique) and essentially self-published by the author’s parents’ self-made publishing company. But kids seem to like it. And Paolini wrote it when a teen–I’ll give kudos to that fact.   

And then in December when bleakness closed in, an angel of light appeared to usher out my literary year. I found … 

Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian

“You’re lucky this author is dead ‘cause I would marry him if he weren’t,” I said to my spouse when just few pages into this book. “Well, at least I think he is … dead. It wouldn’t be the first time I put someone in the grave who wasn’t there yet.” (I tend to have an errant perception that all very good writers are old and dead.)

In this 224 page, easy reading book, Mr. Mitchell rails against sloppy, obese, inflated, imprecise writing, as well as the teaching of such inferior stuff, and the acceptance of anything but precise and correct language. He also has some very good insight into the power of language as communication, writing, reading, human perception, reality and the way we understand it. He understood that poor and misleading communication, taught and used, hurts society as a whole, over time.

But don’t mistake him for the equivalent of the over-serious, tight-hair-bunned, bespectacled grammarian teacher bleeding all over your darling composition because of misplaced comma. I laughed through this book. He is sarcastic, but serious; silly, but insightful; insulting, but understanding; gravely cautionary, but optimistic. 

“The great masters of social manipulation use language.”

“Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen.”

“The term that means almost anything means almost nothing.” 

“A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. … But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become the meditations of the heart and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.”

If you want to understand a little better, of how people achieve agendas with words, I highly recommend this book. I plan to read all of what he wrote. I still have a lot to learn about language, in mechanics and art (as illustrated in this writing). And though it was written in 1979, most every word rings true and relevant to 2021. 

Here’s to a better year in every aspect, to more books read, more words written, more knowledge gained, and a little more wisdom! 

Happy New Year!

Photographs copyright b.satanek or a.satanek