By Ralph Keyes

The current discussion surrounding Kindles and other e-book readers brought this to mind. So many assessments I read and hear about these products compare them to “real” books, usually unfavorably. Their resolution is not as good. Their graphics are anemic. You don’t know what page you’re on. Etc. The e-book’s admitted edge in compactness isn’t enough for a real book lover. For them, nothing will replace printed books. They’re irreplaceable; a superb vehicle for delivering text. Instead of asking whether printed books will disappear, we might better ask, “How will writing reach readers in the future?” Conventional books will certainly be one vehicle. E-books will be another. But their form will evolve into something quite different than books-on-a-screen.

Recall how automobiles evolved. Early versions looked like buckboard wagons with engines attached. It was decades before cars began to resemble a new product altogether. Similarly, when it was first introduced at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, television was viewed as an extension of radio (it was even called “illustrated radio”). Early news broadcasters read copy before cameras, looking down at the paper in their hands, as if they were still in a radio studio. It took a couple of decades for television to become a medium all its own.

The same thing will happen with e-books. Today they look like conventional books on a screen. In time, just like cars and television, e-books will find their own form. Their length will vary more than conventional ones; they’ll be shorter on average, with more varied formats, more flexibility, more fluidity, and a wider range of prices. Short stories and novellas are better suited to the e-book format than novels. Articles and essays work better on their small screens than full-scale nonfiction books. E-books might be updated on a regular basis, and perhaps incorporate reader feedback, or author-reader dialogue. The possibilities are infinite, and intriguing.

By Ralph Keyes

I’ve noticed this recently with a number of other older singers, most notably Johnny Cash on the Cash Unearthed CDs he recorded shortly before his death. This singer’s once-dynamic voice was a whisper of its previous self. However, accompanied only by his guitar, Cash sang from within with a poignancy that is almost painful to listen to. The same thing is true of Ralph Stanley on his eponymous Ralph Stanley album, his a cappella songs in particular. Charlie Louvin is another older performer who has recently given us the benefit of his experience if not the singing he was once was capable of on his Charlie Louvin album.

Most recently I’ve been hearing interviews with Levon Helm, the onetime Band drummer, and excerpts from his Dirt Farmer album. In Helm’s case throat cancer adds another dimension to his story and his voice. For years he couldn’t sing at all, and could barely speak. When helm’s voice finally returned, he gave a riveting portrayal of an old blind man pleading to be shot in Tommy Lee Jones’s underrated movie The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Dirt Farmer itself has earned raves. The way Helm sings today is harsh, almost grating, at first off-putting but ultimately gripping in the same way that Cash, LaVette and so many other older singers grip us with their candor.

A Russian writer once said of her constant anxiety that she “had no skin.” Any-thing worth knowing about her was out there for others to see. The same thing is true of these singers.

Candor sure beats craft.

By Ralph Keyes

Another unusually moving moment involved a veteran talking candidly about hearing the nightlong screams and moans of a mortally wounded comrade, wishing he’d hurry up and die so he could get some sleep. The next morning he realized that it was his best friend – shot by accident – who’d spent the night dying. This subject, a Latino, was one of three whom Burns added to two segments under pressure from Hispanic and American Indian groups. That decision has been derided by some, but the results not only didn’t degrade this series, they enhanced it.

The amount of color footage Burns incorporated was a bit of an anomaly. After watching so much black-and-white film of World War II it’s hard to shift gears and perceive that conflict as taking place in color. But this is a broader phenomenon awaiting another post: the degree to which we think of the world before mid-century as being a black-and-white world, with color only entering the picture around, say, the Korean War.

I had a few problems with Burns’s work. Was good film footage in such short supply that he had to re-use some clips two or three times? And was it really necessary to have sonorous music constantly in the background?

But these are nitpicks of little consequence. I don’t share the concern expressed by some that Burns didn’t give his material enough historical context, nor cover adequately the many other countries involved in World War II. That wasn’t his purview. Burns set out to present that war from the perspective of Americans who fought in it and those they left behind. He accomplished this mission magnificently.

By Ralph Keyes

Is this contradictory? Only if one puts likeability high on the presidential vita. And we do. With a head of government who doubles as chief of state, we want our presidents to be warm and fuzzy in the Ronald Reagan-Bill Clinton mode. Granted that the ability of such men to win audiences was key to their leadership skills, this is only one talent among many. I thought then and think now that Reagan’s mixed record has been given a historical gloss due to his likeability alone. The same thing is true of Bill Clinton. Had he been a better organized, more disciplined executive, mightn’t the country have been the beneficiary?

We’re nearing the end of two terms of a catastrophically mediocre president who was often said to be the man with whom you’d rather share a beer than either of his Democratic opponents. So what? We’re paying a very stiff price for voting on that basis. In the current Republican primaries, Mike Huckabee is attracting attention with his winning manner, as is Mitt Romney to a lesser extent. Might we again end up with an appealing president who isn’t up to the job?

In England, where the head of government is not the head of state, and is chosen by parliamentarians rather than elected at large, an unusually likeable man — Tony Blair — has just been succeeded by the more sober Gordon Brown. Brown’s flair (or lack thereof) can’t compare with that of his predecessor. Yet he seems a capable man, an effective leader, and one with a far better take on the Iraq situation than that of Tony Blair. Might we learn something from this example?

By Ralph Keyes

Antioch had changed dramatically. Its student body was now heavily pierced and tattooed. Antiochians seemed consumed with gender issues and boundary testing. In the student union I saw a flyer posted for a workshop on “fisting,” the insertion of one’s fist into a vagina or anus.

Soon after we arrived, Antioch’s vaunted ask-before-touching sex policy was enacted. When Saturday Night Live did a hilarious sendup of this policy, few on campus laughed. Like many, I found my alma mater’s approach to sexual activity somewhat absurd, but defended it nonetheless as a well-intentioned attempt to cope with the serious problem of sexual abuse.

If I’d dared to risk looking like a disgruntled alum, I might have paid more attention to things about Antioch that raised my eyebrows. By the early 1990s, its once-packed library was nearly deserted. The campus itself was beyond seedy. Some buildings were crumbling, others were vandalized, and many walls were spray-painted with edgy graffiti. Beer bottles and cigarette butts littered the grounds. Antioch’s president at the time told me that nearly half of its students smoked cigarettes, twice the national rate. Stories of rampant substance abuse could be heard, if one chose to listen. But Antioch and its students have always lived dangerously, so I tried to be tolerant, to look away from things on campus that made me uneasy.

After we’d been in Yellow Springs for several years, my son David and I visited half a dozen colleges that interested him. While David attended classes, I visited libraries, assuming they could tell me something about an institution’s intellectual atmosphere. Upon our return, I noted that Antioch’s own library was literally collapsing, even as administrators’ offices were being renovated. Bricks that had popped from its walls lay outside the library’s entrance. Weeds grew through cracks in its front steps. Some sections of the ceiling inside were water-stained, and linoleum tiles were loose underfoot. The library’s collection was sparse and dated, rich with pre-1970 books and serials, poor on materials thereafter. All of this had less to do with negligent librarianship (library employees are among the hardest working and most conscientious at the college) than with the fact that its library was so low on Antioch’s resource-allocation ladder.

Compared with students David and I had seen on our college tour, Antiochians now struck me as more bizarre than bohemian. Nor did their campus culture seem as understandable as the one I’d been part of from 1962 to 1967. I remembered Antioch as a lively, demanding institution, full of contentious students and professors. Many, including myself, were ardent left-wingers. Others stood elsewhere on the political spectrum. As we understood it, one’s political convictions were beside Antioch’s point. Its emphasis was on thinking for one’s self and keeping an open mind. “Re-evaluate your basic assumptions in the light of new evidence” was a campus cliché. I felt constantly challenged to justify my points of view. But I didn’t assume that reassessing those views would move me left. It might move me to the right, or toward the center, or nowhere at all.

The Antioch Muriel and I returned to did not emphasize that kind of open inquiry. The assumed endpoint was always to one’s left. As a result, Antioch’s emphasis had gone from searching for the truth to propagating the truth, from asking questions to teaching answers. One alum told me of asking a women’s-studies professor at Antioch if she ever assigned Camille Paglia. The professor recoiled, saying “I wouldn’t!” Why not? “Because she’s the enemy.”

In promotional pieces, Antioch billed itself as a “progressive” institution. Accepted applicants were invited to share notes on an online message board called “Radical Chat.” Inevitably Antioch’s appeal narrowed to an increasingly esoteric group of progressive-alternative students. When a longtime history professor reminded colleagues that Antioch was a college, not a “boot camp for the revolution,” students began wearing Boot Camp for the Revolution T-shirts. Eventually this became a campus credo.

Antioch was now for those who “got it” — the faithful. It was not for nonbelievers, nor for those who questioned the way business was conducted there. Antioch gave an increasingly cool reception to anyone — townspeople, alumni, parents, even trustees — who wasn’t considered one of us. When a townsman complained about Antioch’s replacing a basement air-conditioning unit with a loud, outdoor one not far from his bedroom windows, a college administrator commented that “sometimes you can’t push Big Brother.” (I’m not sure this administrator realized the Orwellian allusion, which in some ways was worse than if he had.) The college finally resolved this matter by persuading a conservative judge to nullify Yellow Springs’s noise ordinance.

Antioch’s indifference to outside concerns could be seen in the commencement speakers invited by graduating seniors. Those speakers included the convicted police murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal (attracting hundreds of demonstrators, including current and former police officers, as well as widows of slain officers), the former Black Panther Bobby Seale, and — until the interim president intervened — the poseur-professor Ward Churchill. Antioch’s commencement speaker this year was Cynthia McKinney, the former congresswoman best known for wondering aloud if members of the Bush administration had advance knowledge of 9/11 and for slugging a U.S. Capitol police officer.

One byproduct of Antioch’s self-absorption was that it made little attempt to communicate with the world beyond its borders. A strategic plan composed in the mid-1990s did acknowledge a need for better communication but addressed that need primarily in terms of sharing information within the institution.

Friends of the college tried in vain to call Antioch’s attention to its increasingly problematic reputation outside Yellow Springs. There, the most common perception of Antioch was as a place where you had to ask for permission before initiating sexual contact and where criminals were invited to address graduating seniors. Not that Antiochians cared. At the graduation ceremony where Mumia Abu-Jamal’s remarks were played (via a prerecorded cassette), a student speaker said Antioch took pride in being a home for “freaks,” and whoever didn’t get that could “fuck off.”

The atmosphere on campus grew wary, secretive, and suspicious. Antioch had come to resemble a cult more than a college. Faculty and staff members and students were warned not to discuss sensitive internal matters with outsiders. A highly critical accreditation report was put under lock and key with only a scrubbed precis being circulated on campus. This was stamped INTERNAL DOCUMENT — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. Journalists could visit Antioch only when accompanied by a minder, as if this were Moscow University circa 1949. Even as private industry had begun to accept the need for greater transparency, Antioch College grew increasingly opaque.

Antioch’s administrative approach could best be termed “management by wishful thinking.” Budgets too often were based on anticipated donations that didn’t always materialize, and on projected rather than actual enrollment. That approach created internal pressure to manipulate data to conform with desired outcomes. During several years as a financial-aid counselor, Muriel watched fanciful enrollment figures being tossed about. Young Antioch graduates and dropouts who staffed the admissions office worked short days and didn’t always return phone calls. Financial-aid awards were often mailed well beyond the promised date, long after competitive colleges had mailed theirs. Muriel found it a constant struggle to keep her office from becoming too friendly with loan-making banks, a struggle she lost after her position was eliminated. Within months bankers’ logos began to appear on Antioch’s financial-aid forms.
–

Even as entities such as IBM and General Electric were recognizing the need to change their organizational culture in response to painful assessments, Antioch did not. A group of alumni I organized, some of whom were ex-employees, met with one of Antioch’s recent presidents to express concerns about the college’s management. We were treated like interlopers. During the discussion, this president said that one of the main jobs of Antioch’s chief executive was to meet with alumni around the country and “counter” their criticisms of the college. In the midst of an earlier gathering convened to consider how to choose a new president, I suggested that Antioch search outside academy walls — in government, say, NGO’s, or even corporations — for an enlightened, capable executive. This was quickly dubbed “the pinstripe option” and referred to that way throughout the discussion.

Turnover was constant at all levels of Antioch’s administration. “Acting” and “Interim” became virtual job titles. In 2006, as Warren Wilson College inaugurated its sixth president in a century, Antioch installed its sixth in just over a decade (including an interim). A trustee told me of observing over 12 years’ time how little emphasis the college put on job performance, how much on fitting in. After a year of employment, a dean of students returned to the University of Kentucky, having been unable to implement minimal standards of deportment on campus. Students felt this dean did not “understand” Antioch’s ways.

At a meeting on campus, I got a taste of those ways. Even in the midst of routine discussion, students interrupted each other with angry outbursts. Presumably this was part of “calling each other out,” a popular campus pastime (”I’m calling you out as a product of privilege,” “I’m calling you out for wearing Nikes,” etc.).

After getting called out for calling Inuits “Eskimos,” an exchange student from Poland conducted a survey of language taboos among Antiochians. He and a colleague found that anyone thought to have used inappropriate words was liable to be ostracized. One student described being verbally assaulted after she innocently addressed a gay student as a “guy.” Many told the surveyors how fearful they were of saying the wrong thing. “If you say something wrong,” explained one Antiochian, “other people will have no mercy.”

Students were not the only ones being called out. Soon after he arrived on the campus, in early 2006, President Steven W. Lawry was the target an e-mail message from an Antiochian that said, “Fuck you, asshole.” This was not untypical of campus discourse. When the student newspaper asked readers what they would say to a “narc,” answers included “Stop snitchin’ snitches get stitches,” and “Die motherfucker Die.”

Granted, that type of gangsta posturing was simply a variation on, “Mommy, I said ‘doody!’” Still, it made for a hostile, intimidating campus atmosphere. A student’s relatives who visited the campus expecting to find an open and tolerant setting found just the opposite. They later wrote a letter to Antioch’s student newspaper lamenting the suspicion and mistrust they’d witnessed, in the form of insults, name-calling, and profanity. As if to illustrate their point, the same issue of the student paper in which the couple’s letter appeared included this piece of neo-haiku among its “De-Classified Ads”: “Arrogant Schmuck please/Leave if you want to maintain/Your balls. Chop chop chop.”

One summer I showed a friend from Colorado around my alma mater. When we got to the second floor of Antioch’s student union, with its crack-house décor, my friend — a liberal-minded psychologist — blanched. What was he thinking, I asked? “That I want to jump on a plane and go home to protect my daughter,” he replied.

High-school seniors determined to be Antiochians applied to the college despite its uneven academic program, trashed dorm rooms, graffitied walls, crumbling library, and student union that looked as if it had been decorated by John Belushi. Antioch’s appearance may have said Beware to parents, but to a certain type of prospective student it said Awesome. Anything goes! Those whom Antioch attracted reinforced and amplified its nihilistic culture, shrinking even further its institutional reach.

I came to see my alma mater as akin to an overspecialized organism that can survive only in a narrow, protected ecological niche. Antioch College had become the snail darter of higher education. In its not-too-distant past, Antioch’s strong academic program, well-administered campus, and unique work-study plan appealed to applicants with a wide range of outlooks and lifestyles. In its late-60s-early-70s heyday, the college’s enrollment rose to nearly 2,500. By 2007, even as enrollment soared at comparable liberal-arts colleges, Antioch’s had fallen to about 300 students.

Fitful attempts by myself and others to call attention to problems we considered potentially fatal routinely came up against an attitude familiar to anyone who’s raised a teenager: “If you want to help, just send money and butt out.” Eventually I came to feel that donating to my alma mater was a form of enabling, like giving spare change to a stumble-down drunk, hoping he’ll spend it on a bus ride to AA. (For a long time, we designated our donations for the library, until discovering that even funds so earmarked sometimes got used for general operating expenses.)

I began to have less and less contact with Antioch. Going there was just too demoralizing. On rare visits, I was struck by the sparsity of human bodies. Occasionally a student would amble from one building to another, or a small clump could be spotted outside a doorway surrounded by clouds of smoke. Other than that: nothing. Stillness. Antioch had become a ghost campus.

That was what greeted the current president, Steven Lawry, when he came to Antioch from the Ford Foundation last year. Lawry made a concerted effort to right Antioch’s ship, to restore some civility to its discourse and coherence to its management. But by then it was too late: The college was already in its death throes.

For us, what began as a dream ended as a nightmare. Rather than being able to help our alma mater grow and flourish, Muriel and I witnessed its collapse. This was excruciating, like watching a beloved relative decline, lose memory, and ultimately go mad. Most dismaying was how few of those involved were willing to acknowledge Antioch’s dysfunctional condition: not the administrators, the faculty members, the trustees, nor local journalists, who swallowed whole Antioch’s repeated assurances that things were in hand and on the uptick. As recently as September 2005, Antioch’s interim president told a reporter that the college was “on a straight road toward fiscal vitality.” That’s why so many were so shocked when its Board of Trustees announced in June that Antioch College would suspend operations in a year’s time.

I’ve been asked often whether the demise of my alma mater surprised me. It did not. I was startled and alarmed years ago, when it became apparent that Antioch was driving off a cliff. I braced myself for its impending disintegration. But Antioch’s slow-motion decline felt worse than its sudden collapse. When loved ones age and fail over an extended period, their departure can come as a relief. After years of sadly watching my alma mater self-destruct, that’s how its actual demise felt: less a shock, more a relief.

Ralph Keyes, Antioch Class of 1967, is author of The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (St. Martin’s, 2004) and, most recently, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (St. Martin’s, 2006).

Reprinted from the Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 46, Page B8 July 20, 2007

By Ralph Keyes

The danger is that less and less distinction is made between truth and lies, to the point where they have a rough equivalence. This is post-truth. In the post-truth era, borders blur between truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction. Deceiving others becomes a challenge, a game, a habit. Research suggests that the average American lies on a daily basis, often multiple times. These fibs run the gamut from “I like sushi,”to “I love you.”

“Lying has become a cultural trait in America,”one pollster concluded. “Americans lie about everything – and usually for no good reason.”

What motivates the casual dishonesty that’s become pandemic? Why do so many, even those with no apparent need to do so, feel a need to puff up their personal history? This question arises every time prominent figures are unmasked as fabulists: businesspeople, politicians, journalists, scholars, judges, military officers, police chiefs, beauty queens, New Mexico’s governor, the head of the United States Olympic Committee, the manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Branches are grafted onto their family trees. Unearned degrees show up on their resumes. Purchased medals appear in their display cases. Thousands of non-veterans say they fought in Vietnam. Scores more pass themselves off as Ground Zero rescue workers.

We can only understand the motives of such dissemblers by examining the sea in which they swim. Trends ranging from Joseph Campbellian mythmaking to therapeutic non-judgment encourage deception. There is much incentive and little penalty for improving the “narrative”of one’s life. The increasing influence of therapists, entertainers, politicians, and lawyers, with their flexible code of ethics, contribute to the post-truth era. So do postmodern relativism, Boomer narcissism, the decline of community, and rise of the Internet.

As the volume of strangers and acquaintances in our lives rises, so do opportunities to improve on the truth. The result is a widespread sense that much of what we’re told can’t be trusted. From potential mates to prospective employees, we’re no longer sure whom exactly we’re dealing with. Deception has become a routine part of the mating dance. Personnel officers take for granted that the resumes they read are padded. No wonder private investigation is a growth sector of the economy.

Post-truthfulness builds a fragile social edifice based on wariness. It erodes the foundation of trust that underlies any healthy civilization. When enough of us peddle fantasy as fact, society loses its grounding in reality. Society would crumble altogether if we assumed others were as likely to dissemble as tell the truth. We are perilously close to that point

By Ralph Keyes

Is bigger actually better? Not necessarily. True there is irrefutable evidence that taller men are paid more, have enhanced mating options, and excel in certain sports. But there are other activities in which larger bodies are penalized. They don’t fit so well in space ships or Formula One racing cars. The lower center of gravity of smaller bodies better suits them to skiing, diving, martial arts, and soccer. In a broader sense shortness is the ecologically preferred size. Not only do smaller people consume less food, energy and fabric clothing, they produce less trash and emit less carbon dioxide. Among the causes of global warming, one might include the increased size of many nationality groups. There is clear evidence that smaller people live longer than taller people. A San Diego engineer named Thomas Samaras has made this case for years, most recently in his co-authored 2007 book Human Body Size and the Laws of Scaling. One reason is that smaller bodies are more likely to survive car crashes. According to one study certain cancers are more prevalent in taller bodies. We do know that the bigger the body, the less likely it is to survive a famine.

One topic that merits further exploration is the extent to which sex roles are influenced by relative size. To a greater extent than we’ve ever considered gender bias may be an artifact of size bias. The average American woman is four inches shorter than the average American man. Since we routinely connect size with strength (”big and strong”) it follows that — stereotypically — women as a group are less strong than men as a group. I emphasize stereotypically. When clingy dependency was the ideal, so was five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue. Even though the physical height gap between men and women has not narrowed, the taller-stronger look is now considered desirable on both sides of the gender aisle.

But how much is this simply a matter of fashion? As in basketball, tall people have a pronounced edge in cultural esthetics. To the American eye, more height is certainly preferable to less height. Alas, based on no evidence, our height-biased eyes include even those of the erudite smallish columnist Paul Krugman.

By Ralph Keyes

Value-sharing has become an important demarcation point across the entire social spectrum. It’s not just a matter of electoral politics. At Antioch College, my alma mater, students, faculty, and administrators alike are recruited on the basis that they “share our values.” The result is a highly charged progressive-alternative atmosphere with little room for genuine debate, let alone empathy for unapproved points of view. This atmosphere characterizes many another campus. That’s one reason why the rise of education — thought to be a broadening, civilizing influence — has actually made for increasingly bitter political fissures. As columnist David Brooks has called to our attention, the better educated the voter, the less likely he or she is to split a ticket. Those with college degrees are more rigidly ideological than counterparts who didn’t go beyond high school.

Even high school — the best opportunity most Americans have to be among a cross-section of other Americans — is less and less diverse. The rise of magnet and charter schools enhances this trend. Military service, another occasion when drafted men were among other men from many walks of life has given way to a professional armed force which involves a small fraction of self-selected, relatively homogenous soldiers.

As a result, more and more Americans grow up in settings where they have fewer and fewer opportunities to get to know those unlike themselves. Developers trumpet “lifestyle communities” in which diversity gives way to common interests, outlooks, and values. Websites appeal to ever more narrow constituencies. So do magazines, radio stations, and cable channels. American society as a whole is increasingly segmented on such lines. There is less and less need to rub elbows with those who have different views. That’s the way we like it. The appeal to “values.” therefore, is part of a broader social cleavage along lines of income, taste, and world outlook. It reflects a growing neo-tribal tendency to huddle in enclaves of “us,” of “our kind,” for protection against “them.”

The question seldom considered is why so many Americans feel such a strong need to associate primarily, if not exclusively, with their own kind. What inner needs are being met here? My own hunch is that as ties of ethnicity and geography weaken we look for other ways to bond. Many of those who are hungry for a sense of community find it among those who we think “share our values,” in special-interest groups especially. These groups continually butt heads. The greater their conflict, the more unbreachable becomes the gulf between them. Republican strategist Richard Viguerie says it is far easier to organize voters on the basis of what they’re against than what they’re for. This in turn reinforces both the sense of belonging and the tendency to polarize on a fissure of “values.” That term is a misnomer, however, a euphemism for lots of other polarizing factors. When hearing the word “values” in a political context, don’t think morality, or ethics, or even good character. Think lifestyle, interests, and whether one drives a Prius or a Hummer. That’s where the fissures really lie.

By Ralph Keyes

At any given moment we seldom have more than half-a-dozen bulbs burning. That’s because, by choice we have always lived in smallish homes. Our current house is about 15% the size of Gore’s Nashville mansion, and about 7% the size of John Edwards’s compound in Chapel Hill. Unlike them we have no second or third home of any size. Even with our disgraceful use of incandescent bulbs, therefore, we consume a tiny fraction of the carbon-emitting energy produced by these global-warming zealots.

I’m sure it makes Al Gore feel good and look good to propose that we all stop using incandescent bulbs. Presumably he and Tipper use only fluorescent in their primary, secondary, and tertiary homes. If Gore really wanted to help save the planet, however, he might consider setting a good example by moving to a smaller home that consumed less energy in the first place.