Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

Nor need one be senescent to note that the middle ground has been continually pressed to the extremes, so that on one edge of what is published we have, from Edna Moisture, professor of gender studies at California State University at Uponga:

To clarify the fascistic class burst of intra-pseudo-transgenderism, one must accept that the other is the object of the actor, and the actor is an apodeictic imagination of the object. In my Transgender and Back: Male to Female; Female to Male—A Study of Possibly Unnecessary Surgery, I attempt to deconstruct the false question of pointlessness in an effort to struggle against the suppressed value distinctions representational as palliatives of detrimentally invisible self-reliance in the mimesis of faux postcolonial dependencia. The extrapositional question is whether Ognitz is correct in her paradigmatic dissection of Eric the Red and Barbara Bush (boldly displacing Caesar and Daffy Duck) as ideal typologicals of the penis theory of the Berkeley rejectionists; cf. Ognitz’s monumental (but flawed) On Apodeictic Self-Identical Being. p. 3, 217.

And on the other edge, from the immensely popular John Geisha, whose books are to airports what kudzu is to the banks of the Tallahatchie:

The boy sat on the swing. He saw a dog. Here, dog, he said. Come here. The dog saw the boy. I can not come to you, boy, the dog said. I am looking at a crime. Oh, said the boy. What do you see? The dog said, I see Walter Cronkite. He has a machete. He is hitting a milkman. He is hitting a milkman with it. The milkman is yelling. The milkman is yelling stop! Oh, the boy said. I will call a police man. The dog was glad.

What used to be the center has been drawn toward such painfully idiotic extremes ever more steadily as the extremes move from strength to strength and the center quietly atrophies. As anyone in publishing can tell you, the last thirty years (strangely, since I published my first novel) have seen a Spenglerian decline. The diminished ranks of those literary readers that remain have swollen with people who read for political gratification, flattery, titillation, or to be au courant and conform properly and efficiently to what they are “supposed” to think. These are the fragile souls who buy a book with an eye to what the other people in line and the clerk who checks them out will think; the narcissists who use literature as a mirror in which to gaze lovingly at themselves or their narrowly defined brethren instead of as a window through which to see the world; and “movement” people who, like self-basting chickens, read to propagandize themselves. Their minds may run in terribly stiff gutters, but they are miraculously ductile when commanded by the supposed authorities they embrace. If you are, let us suppose, a Waponyite, how many books on Waponyism do you need to read past your orgasmic conversion? Why not read a history of France instead, or go on a picnic?

In recent decades the decline of voluntary reading has been Gibbonesque: 18 percent among college graduates in the twenty years ending in 2002, according to their self-reporting, which probably flatters them more than would the facts. Only 45 percent of college freshmen and 33 percent of college seniors read of their own volition. People fifteen to twenty-four—yet another wave of the televisioned American family—spend two-and-a-half hours a day in front of the television (which is always on) and seven minutes in voluntary reading. And when students in grades seven through twelve are reading, 35 percent of them are watching television, listening to music, playing video games, e-mailing, surfing the internet, or picking their feet in Poughkeepsie. Perhaps not surprisingly, according to the definition of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, in 2003 only 13 percent of all adults and 31 percent of college graduates were proficient in reading prose, the latter representing a 23 percent decline since 1992.122

I provide these statistics because they quantify what is obvious even to skeptics, who will anyway say that when people were more literate we had slavery and child labor, and women couldn’t vote. In 1960? It is quite true that when I was a child other children got polio and now they don’t, but this improvement is not a function of the decline in literacy. When faced with the accusation that the machines and new practices of information/entertainment are to a large extent stupefying the culture, their exponents (particularly those who are making money hand over foot) protest that they are in fact enriching it. Apparently, of the hundred chief benefits to humanity, the digital revolution is responsible for a thousand. The force that drove the tobacco companies to claim for at least half a century that smoking is good for health was not the ignorance they now rush to claim but the dollar about which they still don’t want to speak. To assert that the atomization of attention spans, the degradation of concentration, the triumph of the image over the word, the rise of multitasking, the surge of easy plagiarism, the destabilization of citation, and, of course, the various forms of assault upon the independent voice and the incentive to create, are an enrichment is to attempt the same sort of absurd maneuver Adolf Eichmann tried when he brazenly claimed to have expedited the acceptance of hundreds of thousands of Jews into heaven.

Much of this stuff—these games, images, the shakier tools of research as opposed to those that are useful, and the floods of ill-informed and rushed communication—dances around the heart of the matter, which is the ability closely and objectively to analyze and thoroughly understand essential and important texts. My household is bombarded by catalogs that offer material implements that one company characterizes as “tools for serious readers.” That is, special chairs, stands, tablets, blotters, racks, lights, bookcases, pens, diaries, pads, clips, and much