Writer's Block: And the Apple Goes To

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In the Insane but Human category, the award goes to Stuart Leigh Alexis-Jon Horton-Billard the Third. A bright ray of wit, clear vision and common sense in a drab landscape of prep-school stolidity, "H-B" as he was known never failed to meet the day's educational, social or even disciplinary challenges with good humor and kindness. By Mogg's silken breast, I wish there were more teachers like him.




In the Academic Excellence category, Morris Sweetkind takes the Golden Apple. This man, author of a number of books on teaching English at the secondary level, gave me a love of poetry and drama (and even an understanding of some of it - rare accomplishment!) that has never left me.



In the Making a Boring Subject Fun category, the award goes to George Houghton, affectionately known as "The Brother". He had a deep love and understanding of History, and would encourage his students' worthy recitations with such praise as "A diamond!" or "A ruby!". Miserable answers would earn "A zero!" or "A lump of coal!". The more spectacular the success or failure, the more embellished his verbal accolades would become. As silly as it sounds, it made us want to learn the stuff to see what we could get out of him. Add to that the fact that he taught me to love the New York Times crossword puzzle. Tragically, only decades after his passing did I develop a similar fascination for history, but sadly never the mind to recall the minutiæ such as dates and places.

Shepherds to the Sheeple

I discovered recently an article published on Oprah's magazine entitled "The Power of Negative Thinking." It touts the value of "defensive pessimism", or setting one's expectations low enough to avoid disappointment, or to encourage better preparation. Hqiz, thinks I - you're simply giving folks an excuse to feel good about not getting what they say they want. Yet there it is, being promoted by one of the most-watched, most-revered and most-believed people in our society today. Mogg's teeth! Despite being ostensibly dedicated to improving people's lives, that empire touts some of the most addlepated nonsense I have ever heard. Don't get me started on the diet claims.

Which got me thinking - just what constitutes an "expert"? Someone whose opinions should, in certain areas, carry more weight than those of the hairy unwashed? It used to be that the words "expert" and "experience" were closely linked. Someone who had devoted a significant amount of their lives to the study or practice of a certain subset of knowledge, or a certain skill, were considered experts. And, in areas such as sports, or music, it's pretty easy to tell right out of the gate who's an expert and who's a duffer. With knowledge, though - it gets a lot dicier.

I love my friends and my relatives - and, 99% of the things they email me is hqiz. With solemn exhortations to "FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR MAILING LIST!!!", I am warned that if I don't, Madelyn Murray O'Hare will rise up from her grave and delete God from the vocabulary of the English language. Or similar detritus. I have sent them links to Snopes, HoaxBusters and BreakTheChain, I've explained how to verify just about any issue in 5 seconds or less... and the stuff keeps coming. (Pater me da veniam quia peccavi, I have been known to send things along of dubious veracity just because they were funny... )

Some of this can't be chalked up to simple lack of education. One member of my family, whom I love deeply and ferociously, is bright, independent, talented, and dynamic... and it boggles my mind that he convinced that the Apollo 11 Moon landing was a hoax, or that the World Trade Center was brought down by US government agents.

Attributed to various sources ranging from Franklin to Mencken, it has been said that the power of the press belongs to whomever owns one. In the days of William Randolph Hearst, that was certainly true. The advent of cheap desktop publishing put a stake in the heart of that concept, and the internet the buried it in a hermetically-sealed garbage can. Nowadays anyone with access to the net, and something to say, can be heard from Henderson Island to Vladivostok. And that includes me.

So whom does one trust?

In our mile-a-minute, sound-byte society, falling back on reputation borne of long-standing accuracy does not seem to be an option in most cases. No longer can you say "If you read it in the Times, it must be so." The Encyclopedia Britannica maintains a reputation for academic excellence, but information overload has rapidly overtaken such stolid scholasticism - only a fragment of the world's available knowledge is available for the $1150.00 price tag (less, if you're willing to go digital or online subscription).

Wikipedia, for all its shortcomings, is actually a good starting point for researching information that might not otherwise be available in standard reference works, because it is largely self-correcting. Despite the fact that there is a core of editors who believe - mistakenly - that the Wiki world exists for them and not for the user, I often turn there for a broad view of the landscape, before digging further.

It's often good to find out what the skeptics are saying about a given question, because even allowing for their closed-mindedness to possibilities residing outside the realm of scientific verification, most of them adhere rigorously to principles of critical thought and empirical evaluation. From them I have adopted the philosophy that just about anything I read on the internet or in the media is horsehockey until verified by independent research. Sadly, such is often the case. At the very least, the most egregious falsehoods can be debunked by the urban-legend sites I mentioned earlier.

Google itself can be both a blessing and a curse. Despite the company's efforts to refine their algorithms so that searches return the most relevant results, many companies and individuals have developed strategies for manipulating output to their particular advantage. More than anything, Google provides an information buffet which must then be sampled and analyzed for trends, and verified by additional refined searching.

Some folks' minds are made up, and all the facts in the world can't confuse them. Others are so invested in empirical verification that they believe almost nothing, and their world shrinks to a small, barren wasteland of curmudgeonliness. Still others will believe anything that appears in their in-boxes, which is why spam continues to be such a pox on humanity. (PS - If you buy Viagra online, I've still got shares in the Brooklyn Bridge I'd like to sell you.)

For me, in the end, believing what one hears comes down to striking the delicate balance between intellectual rigor and spiritual openness. Saul of Tarsus expressed it well: "πάντα δοκιμάζετε τὸ καλὸν κατέχετε". In other words, be vulnerable. Be open to surprises. Put everything to the test, and hold on to what's good, what will lift mankind, and what will improve the human condition.

The Old Wolf has spoken.