Right now it cuts against the grain to suggest that developments in American life offer reasons for hope. But positive signs are around us. We just need to notice.
Virtually every opinion poll suggests that Americans are in a funk. And most have good reasons. Natural disasters have wreaked havoc in the southeast. Young “Dreamers” may be forced to leave the only country most have known. And the President is still in the thrall of a segment of voters motivated by the seemingly permanent stains of dreary nativism and victimhood. Even so, here is a short list of thriving features of American life we can still celebrate.
The rot in the high canopy of national politics conceals an understorey of vibrant American mayors.
Politico has identified a large crop of effective city leaders good at finding the kinds of workarounds that a hapless member of the U.S. House might never grasp. They include big city mayors like Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, Marty Walsh in Boston, and Jackie Biskupski in Salt Lake City. “Blue city” majors are good at looking for progressive solutions for urban challenges. But even in “red”Utah a moderate Republican who happens to be a lesbian can win office and tackle difficult issues like homelessness. More journalists should follow Politico’s lead in identifying the posible sources of our salvation in municipal leaders. If we are smart we will make use of their talents for a future and essential nation-rebuilding.
Our music is better than our politics.
The beacon of American democracy has surely been dimmed by it’s inward turn. There can be no surprise that international polls suggest that far fewer members of other societies want to emulate our politics. Not so our music, which remains as popular as ever in many corners of the globe. It’s wonderfully routine to hear jazz in Paris, big bands in Copenhagen, or country music in Spain; the singers and songs as are as safely as suggestive and universal as ever. American Ariana Grande was performing to thousands of fans in the English Midlands when a suicide bomber attacked the young crowd. Her international tour was following a well worn trail of transformative performers who have been accessible bridges to others. On recordings performers like Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Whitney Houston, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Paul Simon retain devotees everywhere. American pop, jazz, R and B, and rap continue as models to young performers everywhere. Though it strikes me that we underestimate Latin American influences in American music, the powerhouse industry centered in Los Angeles, Nashville and New York remains an ambassador to other cultures in ways our politics cannot match.
The ideal of cultural inclusion that was envisioned but never seen by thought-leaders like Dr. King or Harvey Milk is now the norm for most younger Americans.
One of the pleasures of working with younger Americans is to see their easy acceptance of peers with different histories and backgrounds. It’s surely an indicator that the racial and other resentments being fed by this administration will eventially yield to their better instincts. Women will hold more political offices. The monoculture of wealthy white males who now dominate two of the three branches of the federal government is going to change, eventually reflecting our shifting demographics and a youth culture giving us hints of a post-racial world.
We have seen a resurgence of national political journalism.
Whatever the fate of the Trump administration, its unpopularity with better educated voters has fed a vibrant revival of the American news business. Online subscriptions at The Washington Post and the New York Times have increased dramatically. Opinion journals that were withering away a few years ago have suddenly become go-to sites. Politico, TheAtlantic, Slate, Vox, The Guardian, ProPublica and even the Wall Street Journal have taken on investigative assignments that make up in clout what they may lack in more conventional measures of audience size. Even CNN seems to have finally found its footing after shameless over-coverage of Trump appearances in 2016. Except for a core captured by fantasies of fake news, American investigative journalism is cool again.
The military has again emerged as a leader in human rights.
The services were the first large segment of American society to fully integrate racially. That was in 1948, at least 15 years ahead of universities and other institutions. More recently it has become clear that full acceptance of women as well as gay and trans members has evolved into full tolerance and acceptance of all in uniform. It has been heartening to hear military leaders at the very top push back against Presidential statements that cast suspicion on individuals who may be Muslim or gay. For example, last month 56 retired generals and admirals signed a letter noting that a proposed ban by the Trump administration on transgender members of the services would “be disruptive and degrade military readiness.” The current defense Secretary seems to agree, putting the question under review rather than simply implementing it.
These are all hopeful signs. It cuts against the grain right now to believe that developments in American life offer reasons for optimism. But the reasons are there. We just need to look.
The high threshold implied in the word “invention” explains why writers block, speakers freeze, and the rest of us may fumble through even a simple response.
Sometimes we can be surprised by a word that pulls us up short. We didn’t expect to see it on the page. Such a moment came to me as an undergraduate dutifully slogging through the words of the important Roman rhetorician and statesman, Cicero. He noted that creating a message to be presented to others was an act of “invention.”
That’s it. For 50 years I’ve puzzled over that term. You might suggest that I ‘get a life,’ but my sudden annoyance was triggered by this less-than-obvious word summing up a communicator’s obligations. I wasn’t ready for a term that seemed to scale up a process that seemed like it should be less onerous. Bach or Edison might have been the creators of “inventions.” And give Tesla and Berliner their due. But surely writers and speakers can get by with a lot less. It seemed like overreach.
Bear with me a moment. There’s a useful lesson here.
Most of us think of language and its various forms are already “out there.” I was certain that good lines of argument or amplification came from prior forms that were adapted, borrowed, or recycled from other sources. And there is a sense in which this is true. But the Latin “inventio” implies more. The idea sets the bar higher. Indeed, the original term sits there on the page as something of a taunt: it begs us to believe that an effective speaker or writer is on the hook for engaging in a full-fledged act of creation. It turns a communicator into an originator rather than a user, an active agent rather than a pliable imitator. After all, invention was presented not as a minor idea, but the term that would represent the most important of the traditional five “canons” of rhetoric, along with arrangement, style, delivery and memory.
Are creative word-workers really in the business of innovating their ways through the world, like so many garage tinkerers who have given us gadgets we didn’t know we needed? To be sure, inventio is sometimes translated from the Latin to mean “discovery,” or the process of “devising” a “stratagem” for a suitable verbal response. It turns out that Latin doesn’t a have rich vocabulary in this area. Even so.
Lest you think we’ve drifted into the realm of counting angels on the head of pin, the challenge Cicero laid down is real. We confront acts of invention every time we sit in front of an empty sheet of paper or a blank screen. Some kind of situation requires an appropriate response. It might be a death in the family, a note to explain why we can’t attend an event, or—at the other end of the scale—an explanation of a guiding principle in American foreign policy. Cicero’s point is that the best response to the question “what can I say?” should be more than a paste-up of another’s ideas.
Fluency requires bending words to the peculiar social circumstances that lie before us.
This explains a lot. The high-engagement threshold of invention accounts for why writers block, speakers freeze, and the rest of us fumble through a simple response that we wish we could retrieve. The hard truth is that off-the shelf comments usually don’t work very well. Ideas meant for another time and audience often sit dead on the page.
The lesson coming from this single word is hard for my students to grasp. To be a writer means committing to an innovator’s level of engagement. Good writing is work. Knock-offs of written or spoken prose are easily revealed as the counterfeits they are. Fluency requires bending words to the peculiar social circumstances that lie before us: a task unsuited to the intellectually lazy.
