WWSTBD? Can PR and Marketing Help Save Us?

"Get your shots or I'll whack you with my shovel." Probably not the winning message.

Misinformation and mistrust have poisoned our response to COVID-19, and the dark days are not yet behind us.

Which surge are we in? The third? Fifth? I’ve lost count, but as a deadly, infectious virus again fills our hospitals—largely with unvaccinated people—I wonder how we can be more effective in getting Americans to take this scourge seriously—to do what we need to do to knock this pandemic down.

The science isn’t too mysterious. Social distance. Mask. Frequently test. Be vaxed and boosted. Don’t seek medical advice from political sites or random social media memes. Do your own research—if you have a pHd in science. Otherwise, pay attention to those who do valid research, not the proverbial 400-pound man in his basement. (For the record, I do look like Santa, but I am not 400 pounds—yes, I am writing this in my basement.)

But science is not enough. When it’s not believed, it’s not working. Omicron is highly transmissible and American are highly resistant to giving two hoots. Mandates for large employers, the military, healthcare workers and first responders may help with the vaccination rates, but pushing people who don’t believe also makes them push back harder.

The herd can’t become humanely immune if the herd won’t hear what must be heard.

Granted, we’ve seen massive failures of political leadership. This pandemic has been politicized, which is a costly tragedy. We once had a president who told us to consider injecting bleach, and we have many so-called pundits promoting quack cures and spreading mistrust of those who should be trusted. In Iowa, our governor assures us we will “do the right thing,” when it’s patently obvious too many Iowans would rather just do the right-wing thing, even when it’s wrong.

I find myself wondering, WWSTBD? What would Smokey the Bear do?

Most of use remember Smokey. He reminded us that only we can prevent forest fires. It didn’t end fires—climate change had led to some massive wildfires in recent times—but that old bear did raise awareness and changed behavior in his day.

And Smokey isn’t the only example of a PSA avatar that has done us some good. Remember the “crying Indian” from 1971? That PSA actually helped reduce littering, and fueled an environmental movement that, even if it can be controversial, has led to a cleaner country.

Neither Smokey nor the Native American who was actually an actor of Italian ancestry were 100 percent successful, and neither symbolizes a problem that was completely licked. But problems don’t work that way. Big problems aren’t so much solved as abated, and I would like more pandemic abating.

One thing that I think has been lacking in our anti-COVID efforts is an effective symbol and slogan. We can shout at each other about facts and disinformation, but we need some messaging that hits us on a more elemental level. We need a COVID equivalent of insurance Flo or the Geico gecko. We need a slogan like “only you can prevent forest fires.” (“Only you can knock down a deadly virus?”) We need messaging that is factually accurate but that is also not a dry recitation of facts—something that will play on patriotism, loyalty, doing what’s right, working together. We don’t just need to hear, we need to feel.

Rosie the Riveter needs to roll up her sleeve for a needle.

I’ve been looking at a few COVID PSAs, and they have information and aren’t always terrible, although sometimes they are also plodding and dull. The CDC has a gabagillion videos on its YouTube channel, but none has yet gone viral. Here is a CDC PSA and another attempt from a medical school, followed by an NHS Facebook ad from the UK, which I think does a better job:

 

 

We don’t have a snappy slogan. A compelling character full of pathos. A key, concise, positive message. Something that we should push with a billion marketing dollars to spread a positive, life-saving message.

Get your shot. Wear your mask. Be boosted. Get tested. Fine, but which of those would mean something on a bumper sticker? Those are the messages, but not the means to our hearts nor the memes we would share.

CDC PSA. Fine, but where's Smokey?

Again, OK. But "Proven Safe and Effective" could be a shampoo ad.

I’m not an ad writer, I don’t know what would work. But I see lots of ads for cells phones, promos for shows, snazzy productions for deodorants—my Christmas media wish would be for us to be awash in ads that have more meaning and that could have more impact.

So come on, science. Hear me, Joe Biden. Bring it on. Find the right Mad Men.  If not Smokey, Nellie the Nurse. Ashley the Elf who survived Covid? The vax fox? I know I want something even if I’m sure exactly what it is. But when I’m humming the tune of that catchy vax jingle, that may be important progress.

Humans Don’t Always Look Good in “Arirval”

Amy Adams as linguist Louise Banks in "Arrival." That's no human vehicle parked in the background. All images on this post appeared in online news stories or reviews and are credited as Paramount Pictures PR images.

In case you didn’t catch the Amy Adams movie “Arrival” when it came out five years ago, I’ll try to avoid spoilers in this essay about the film. Which seems a bit ironic when writing about this movie, which plays with and twists notions of both time and language. My wife and I noticed the DVD at a sale price, and took a chance on it, and Friday I watched it for the first time. Amy Adams, don't you know. I can watch her read the phone book, I think. She's a bit like Sarah Michelle Geller--in that her eyes to a lot of the acting, too.

What we think are memories aren’t that at all. And what did the word “weapon” actually mean in that pretty ink blot alien tongue? Having just watched the movie for the first time, I feel that I missed a key plot twist that hinges on that word, which, after all, comes close to igniting a world war.

And why did the heptapods (the aliens sure do have feet) come to Earth and give us a language that opens what sounds like a cool super power but that turns out to involve a lot of complexity in choice, fate and pain? Well, that question is partly answered when Abbott (one of the two aliens the Amy Adams character converses with, the other is named, by her future or past love interest, “Costello”) tells her that they will need human help in a few thousand years, but that again raises a whole bunch of questions.

We don’t ever know where the heptapods came from. Did they travel faster than light, or is theirs a different way of viewing reality mean a journey of thousands of years at sub light speed seems undaunting? And that foggy, misty environment that they live in—what is their reality like?

The movie is clever. It plays with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in an interesting way, seeming to suggest that we experience time in a conceptual way that is tied to language, which shapes how we think. That hypothesis, by the way, is useful for understanding language, but not always all that useful for understanding all of human experience. It’s the notion that the nature of our language shapes the nature of our perception. What follows is my opinion (although most of what preceded is also my opinion, a fact you probably remembered)—but sometimes I think people take that useful hypothesis too seriously. For example, I’ve seen people make a big deal out of the supposed fact (I don’t know the language, so I don’t know if it’s actually true) that Arabic has no equivalent for the word “compromise.” Or that Inuit people have a gabagillion words to say “snow.” Or that some color labels don’t exist in some languages.

Sure, those are ideas worth exploring. They shape perception. But they don’t dictate it. If I don’t have a label for “teal,” for instance, it doesn’t mean that my eyes won’t see the color (my visual organs and optic nerves are still very similar to the equivalent organs in most other not-color-blind humans), and thus I may notice the hue even if I cannot name it. I think people from a linguistic tradition that doesn’t label “compromise” probably can, and probably do, grasp the idea anyway. I may not have individual words that differentiate between wet or powdery snow, or snow in the air or on the ground, or snow that has blown—but I can still see and appreciate nuances of snow.

As a writer, I believe in the power of the word. I loved the way Amy’s character Louise quickly concocted a lie about “kangaroo” to explain a truth. As humans, our words are inexact attempts for us to capture and share our experiences, but I also think experience can be “real” when it’s not bound up in a word.

That’s a long way of saying that the time-bending nature of “Arrival” was interesting, but didn’t completely work for me. And the foreboding tone of the movie made it sometimes too heavy—Louise Banks seems disturbed and fearful in her contact with the heptapods, and I wanted a bit more wonder and whimsy. The movie was clever, but sometimes too clever (that Hannah is a palindrome seemed to be emphasized way too much—so is dud).

Will I watch “Arrival” again? Yes, I think I will, if existence and time and my life cooperate. It’s not my favorite movie but it was a worthwhile and interesting one, and I’m pretty sure I’ll see details in the next watching that I missed in the first one. I also loved the idea of aliens whose written language has nothing to do with their speech, which made me wonder if there was any meaning at all in their vocalizations, yet again one of those many unanswered questions in the film.

And I respect a movie, especially a science fiction adventure, that doesn’t feel it has to answer all questions and that defies some norms of the genre. It doesn’t rely on too many car chases or breathtaking action scenes—it builds great tension with more subtlety. It has a heroine who never smacks anyone and never fires any weapon, at least as I understand the word even if I still wonder if a heptapod would agree. It’s an alien war drama where war fails to break out out—and where it was the humans and their poor choices and inability to function without clarity that caused the real danger.

Our hero uses her mind and language to save the world. No light saber, just enlightened thought.

Seems human to me. In my life, the most important problems are caused either by mindless microbes or by other hairless apes who irk me—and right now, irksome humans who respond mindlessly to certain microbes.

Obligatory pandemic side rant: I don’t care what “omicron variant” can be rearranged to spell. Potential overlords aren’t dumb enough to leave an obvious clue like that, but silly humans are prone to misinterpret words and forget that the variant wasn’t named omicron for the sake of a sick joke or some secret code; it was just the next letter in an old alphabet. We should respect words, but we can read way too much into them, too. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also means that we can construct reality with language, and we’re sometimes shoddy builders.

Back to this interesting movie. I kind of wish Amy could smile or laugh a bit more. She has a few seconds of “oh gee” facial expressions when she meets the aliens, and I kind of wanted a bit of emphasis on that. It seemed to me that wonder was among the reactions that would be worth exploring.

It was a thoughtful, but perhaps too heavy, movie. “Arrival,” how many stars should I give you? I was thinking three, but that seems too few. You're too interesting for that. How about four? And did you remember beforehand that was what I was going to write?

Getting Ready for 9/11 Speech I Dread

Dr. Joe Hendryx introduces the first event in this year's Fall Faculty Series at MMU. On Sept. 29, Dr. Jim Jacobs, a computer science professor, reviewed events in history that led to 9/11. Jacobs served in the Marines in the decade before, and interspersed his experience with research.

In the Mount Mercy Times, the excellent student editor-in-chief wrote a recent book review of “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” and one point Jada Veasey made in her review is that she finally understands why there is so little fiction about the flu pandemic following World War I.

“As it turns out, living in the time of a plague is terrible, like, absolutely the worst,” she writes, which tends to discourage authors.

Jada and I share high regard for John Green’s nonfiction book.

But the pandemic isn’t all that makes these times so troubling. Besides battling a new virus that is killing far too many, we’re also facing a rising tide of BS.

Which is not a coincidence. It helps explain the lameness of our pandemic response. And that rising tide of disinformation got a boost just as the internet was becoming a huge factor in our lives two decades ago.

MMU Fall Faculty Series 2021 log.

A handful of hijackers, armed with nothing more sophisticated than box cutters, brought down three airplanes on prime targets on Sept. 11, 2001. They struck the Pentagon and caused the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York.

Speculation is that the Capitol, stormed by our own delusional right-wing mobs on Jan. 6 of this year, was also a target, but passengers fought back and the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

Conspiracy is not new to the human condition. John Wilkes Booth didn’t entirely act alone when he gunned down Abraham Lincoln. The shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and brought on both World War I and it’s sequel, World War II, was fired by a young man who was part of a shadowy nationalist group.

We humans conspire all the time. But we also imagine, enlarged and embellish false conspiracy narrratives. All kinds of wild tales grow up around fantastic, unexpected events—and 9/11 was the Mother of all Conspiracy hotbeds.

It spawned an early viral internet video, even before YouTube was a thing, that fed the conspiracy narratives.

And today, we live in a communication environment rife with speculations that seem farfetched to most rational people, but still move millions to believe.

For example, many believe:

• The Chinese government developed the virus for COVID-19. In China, the corresponding lie is that the Americans did it. We don’t in truth know the origins of this virus, and the lack of transparency by an authoritarian government isn’t being helpful. I don’t know that China did it. I don’t know that they did not. Nobody, except those potentially involved, yet does, and in the unknowing is fertile ground for uninformed certainty.

• Donald Trump had the election stolen. He didn’t. He lost in 2020 by about the margin he won the race by in 2016. The persistence of this particular false narrative, and its fervent backing by too many Republicans, is an existential threat to our democracy based on a fake conspiracy theory.

• Insert X false narrative about the current pandemic. Masks don’t matter. Vaccines aren’t safe. Microchips from Bill Gates. Whatever. This pandemic seems to breed false claims faster than a flexible respiratory virus morphs into new variants. Both the infection and the lies surrounding it are proving hard to fight.

So, I’m going to tackle this big topic next Wednesday night as part of the Mount Mercy University fall faculty series called “9/11 Twenty Years Later.”

I don’t exactly know what to expect. I thought Dr. Jim Jacobs gave interesting context to the whole 9/11 event, and I feel like I’m sort of looking at it from the other side—how that event has reverberated in our information and disinformation cyberspace.

Dr. Jim Jaobs speaks Sept. 29.

The towers weren’t the only thing that seemed to fall on 9/11. Our very trust in ourselves and in reality seems a bit more fragile, two decades later.

Sadly, I’m mostly going to describe the problem. I don’t have a solution, but then again, I don’t know how to end the pandemic, either. Plagues and pandemics can linger for years, but don’t last forever. Maybe there’s some hope that the public may tire of the nonsense, that “doing your own research” may come to mean actually using some discretion on which sources you’ll believe rather than tuning into the alt-universe of lies.

I hope the presentation, called "Conspiracy, Myth and Misinformation," goes well. But I’m writing, not about the pandemic, but about something that does not make me happy, and that I don’t really want to be writing about.

Jada, I feel your pain. But I hope to see many people next Wednesday at 6 p.m. in Flaherty. If the pandemic makes you worry, make sure to join in via MMU’s YouTube live-stream.

Not every internet video feeds the disinformation monster.

Uniting Our City Under a New Banner

From Cedar-Rapids.org, city web site, the new Cedar Rapids flag.

I am not really a flag person, but I like the new Cedar Rapids city flag, unveiled by the city on Sept. 18. Symbols have some importance--I wrote on this blog earlier about Mount Mercy's new Fall Faculty Series, and each series has been unified in its communications by a series logo.

When Mount Mercy College became Mount Mercy University some years ago, the unveiling of the U's new logo was a key feature of the big announcement.

Some flags cause consternation. The Nazi banner is illegal to display in Germany. Here in America, it's just in incredibly poor taste, although it, like the battle flag of the Confederacy, at least serves so the rest of us can quickly identify the most awful people among us.

And now we have a new flag, meant to represent the Cedar River, the land, some flood control and our protection via star-wielding ninjas.

Although, to me, the nice new flag also vaguely looks like it could be from some obscure Central or South American country. Perhaps my city has appropriated the proud national banner of Val Verde.

Another image from city web site--the new flag flies.

And thus, we have a new civil symbol. I’m not sure it was an important project during a pandemic, but I do think the green-blue, end-of-island shape is attractive. It replaces a city flag designed by the 1960s that was rather dated (see image in Gazette story in link in the first paragraph).

And whatever you might think of this proud new symbol of an OK small city, I think most of us could agree it’s far superior to our other prominent civic symbol—the toilet brush of five seasons. Five. Why five? Four seasons and a fifth one to scratch your head and wonder.

Wikimedia commons, image from Eric James. The "Tree of Five Seasons," which never looks like a tree.

So what do you think of the new city flag?

How We Frame Memories of 9/11

Plumes of smoke from The World Trade Center twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. From Wikimedia Commons via flickr poster Michael Foran.

Today is Sept. 4, which means the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States is one week from today.

The 9/11 events were so big that “9/11” is all one has to say and everyone knows you don’t mean any Sept. 11—you mean that Sept. 11.

The world didn’t exactly change 20 years ago. The forces that attacked my country that day had been at work for some time—indeed, there had previous bombing attempts to destroy the World Trade Center. But that September day, sunny and beautiful in Iowa, at least in my memory, was still a pivotal day.

From the FBI's web site, FBI.gov, a timeline of Sept. 11, 2001.

I have a little trouble picturing myself at 43. I was already greying—did I still have some dark hair? A man in his 60s has a little trouble picturing the world of the 40-something year old. Much in my life has remained the same, and much has changed.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I had a son in elementary school. My oldest daughter was nearing the end of high school, but was adjusting to a large public school—Linn Mar High School—after her first two years of secondary education had been at a tiny Catholic High School—St. Mary’s in Storm Lake, Iowa.

We had just bought a house in Cedar Rapids. The next year would be financially a little dicey for us, as we owned two houses. But both my wife and I had jobs, she at the birth center at Mercy Medical Center (where she would become the nurse manager in a few years), me at the start of a new career. I was fresh out of the world of journalism and into the world of academia, less than a month into my new job teaching at what was then Mount Mercy College.

A hole in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. Defense Department image by Cpl. Jason Ingersoll, USMC, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

That Tuesday, I was buying tires for our van. I was at a tire shop near Lindale Mall that morning, and it was a very strange morning. Very few people were out, and I was the only customer at what would usually be a busy shop. I think six guys were working on replacing my tires, each taking 2-minute shifts or so before they traded off—the rest to join me in the customer lounge, watching TV. Special report from New York, a plane has struck the World Trade Center. Then, another. The Pentagon. A planned second attack on Washington, D.C., ending with a crashed plane in Pennsylvania.

I can’t recall a lot from that day other than the sense of shock. I was teaching a class that fall that I’m teaching this semester, too—CO 280, Writing for Public Relations. It was an afternoon class, I think, and I scrapped my lesson plan.

We rearranged the room in a big circle. And the students and I just talked about it, the big news of the day.

My wife and I visited the Newseum in Washington, D.C. during spring break, March, 2015. This is a ruined TV tower that been atop the World Trade Center on display at that museum.

And here we are, almost 20 years later. Two decade of grappling with new realities, of questioning what freedom means, of foreign wars and increasing polarization at home. The internet existed in 2001, but way back then we didn’t carry it around in our pockets and we still watched big events on a chunky, square TV in the customer lounge of a tire shop.

I am just starting to look into it, but I don’t think our current era of struggling with fakery on social media is unrelated to 9/11. That day shook America to its core, and became one of those improbable, shocking events around which wild conspiracy theories swirl.

Another image from that 2015 visit to the Newseum. A wall of headlines reporting 9/11 attacks, from an era when news media mattered more than social media.

Partly, of course, because it was the result of a shadowy conspiracy, and unpacking it is a process historians will be tied up with for decades.

What does it all mean? A lot, and I’m glad that Mount Mercy University will spend some time grappling with this key world event.

Every year, faculty at MMU designated a topic for a series of public discussions—the Fall Faculty Series. I am proud to have helped start this with our first series in 2014 being on the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.

This year, the Series has a very simple title: 9/11: Twenty Years Later.” Five faculty members, including me, will give free, public Wednesday talks, all of which will start at 6 p.m., and all of which will take place in Flaherty Community Room in Basile Hall.

Logo of 2021 Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy University.

Here is the schedule, the topics and the speakers:

• Sept. 29, Precursor Events: At War before 9/11, James Jacobs, associate professor of computer science.
• Oct. 6, Conspiracy, Myth, and Misinformation, Joe Sheller, associate professor of communication & MMU Times advisor.
• Oct. 27, Heroism and Sacrifice after the Attack, Norma Linda Mattingly, associate professor of education.
• Nov. 9, Fear and Trauma after 9/11, Dennis Dew, associate professor of psychology.
• December 1, Reflections of a Muslim-American Immigrant, Ayman Amer | associate professor of economics.
  

The Cat Steals the Show

Disney poster, from Wikipedia.

Have you seen the 2008 Disney animated movie “Bolt?” I had not until a 5-year-old grandson picked it to watch on Friday night (his usual movie night) of last week.

The movie started with an improbable, over-done action sequence, and I was worried I had agreed to an empty experience like “Penguins of Madagascar,” a movie I intensely dislike.

But, no. The improbable action sequences were part of a show inside a show—in the movie, Bolt is a TV star dog who acts sincere because he doesn’t know it’s an act. It’s a “coming of age” film in which the child star, in this case a dog, learns the hard truth that he’s just a normal creature.

And the nice truth that being a normal creature can be a beautiful thing. Bolt is lost and trying to get back into his media bubble, and bullies a cat named Mittens to aid his journey.

Mittens, it turns out, is the true star. She knows Bolt’s world is fake. Mittens is a con cat, she’s been fooling pigeons into paying her in a protection racket based on the potential use of claws that she doesn’t even have.

It is Mittens, the lost, feral cat, who must teach Bolt how to become a properly domesticated, and thus happier, dog.

Flickr stream of  Cthomasuscg: Rhino, Bolt and Mittens, three main characters of the movie "Bolt."

I ended up loving the movie (and Mittens). I thought it great because it’s a child-friendly glimpse into the reality that media you see is not actual life. The fourth wall is torn down and the fictional nature of entertainment media is laid bare.

There are media stock characters, to be sure. A “director” too caught up in his artistic vision who finds he must please “Mindy from the network,” who he had belittled on first meeting. It turns out, it’s not the art, it’s the business that has the power in showbiz.

I was slightly disappointed that Bolt and his girl end up retiring from showbiz—I would have preferred that Bolt learn he’s an actor and be willing to continue acting—but I still thought that the movie worked both at the level of entertaining a 5-year-old, and pleasing a media professor in his 60s by illustrating key media realities.

And now, to me, Mittens is my favorite Disney princess.
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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Delivered papers around campus Wednesday morning--first edition of MMU campus newspaper of the year. Looking forward to having a work study student do this!

 

After two decades, it is apparent that the Afghan military we built to hold the country together was unwilling to resist an Afghan extremist faction taking over Afghanistan. I’m no expert in either military strategy nor in foreign policy, but this does not make President Biden look good.

Nor, to be fair, does it make the younger President Bush look good. Nor Obama. Nor Trump. Two decades of no end point were not enough for us to achieve the impossible goals that we never articulated anyway—although there is also a saying that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Just ask the British or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Bad as it is to walk away from 20 years of money, sweat and death, the comparison with Vietnam ignores how much bigger an impact that conflict had on America. We lost almost 2,500 American service people in Afghanistan. Tragic as that is, about 17,000 American service people died in 1968 alone in Vietnam, and in the decade that we were engaged in combat there, well over 50,000 American souls were sacrificed.

In both wars, the people of the country where the battles took place paid a much higher price than we did in lives and destruction, something we ought not forget, either. And, as a wiseass man once said, one of the great lessons of history is: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” See “The Princess Bride.”

Anyway, to me, the decline of the Pax Americana is only tangentially related to Afghanistan. What we face, more fundamentally, is a crisis of discourse—a tendency to ignore unpleasant facts that don’t coincide with our point of view. We have culturally long downplayed the value of education, and now we’re reaping the rewards of a post-literate culture.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. (Too many movie references, sorry. Thank you, “Cool Hand Luke.”)

And it partly is a result of the decline of the American newspaper. In pre-social media days, Walter Cronkite would report the news to America—and CBS in that era was often influenced by sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post. It was the Post that pursued the Watergate scandal, and CBS that eventually started to pick up the story, too.

Well, I don’t want to be a Luddite. The cortex (a “Firefly” reference, what a great name for the internet) may spread lies too quickly, but it does open the world to many more voices. What’s wrong is that the audience isn’t doing well in knowing which of those voices to listen to. In ancient history (say, the 1990s) there was a vibrant newspaper industry that served as the information algae of the media ocean. And today, that medium is in rapid retreat. The base of the info food chain is drying up. A general economic crisis more than a decade ago knocked the newspaper business model off kilter, and the days when the Penny Press model worked are not coming back.

There are recent signs of that decline in my corner of the world. The Marion Times, a weekly paper that served the largest suburb of Cedar Rapids ceased publication this summer. The Gazette is now that community’s primary newspaper news source. And The Gazette is in decline, too. This summer, delivery of the paper to my house became sketchier, as the paper shifted to “driveway” delivery, which will be fun to cope with this winter.

And more recently and importantly, the paper decided to shut down its press. Mary Sharp wrote a long and interesting feature on the move, see link earlier in this paragraph.

Despite owning several daily papers, The Gazette’s local parent company apparently can’t keep that giant, expensive machinery going, and our paper will now be printed by The Register in Des Moines

Why the neighborhood gets to see me in my PJs, paper on the driveway. The horror.

And so, it goes. The world turns.

Not all the media trends today are negative. The New York Times recently reported it has reached a subscription level of 8 million. I’m sure that rating number would embarrass Tucker Carlson, but still, old school journalism is, for some players, growing—at least online.

Online—the Wild West. As Americans, we can’t even agree that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, although it’s clear he did. Some significant portion of our population would rather listen to its own crazy echo chamber than tune into the factual universe. Rachel Maddox calls it Earth 2, and it is Earth 2 that is causing America to lost its spirit.

At the university where I teach, my student editor wrote a column in the first edition of the student newspaper this year stating that Mount Mercy University is lucky to still have a print paper. 

She’s right, although we’re also trying to transition to be a more online source. The problem is, once online, will any students pay attention to us?

Special early issue of MMU Times paper.

Of course, do they pay attention to us now? It’s a bit depressing how “reading” has become so old school among young adults who aspire to be college educated.

Post-literate. Not illiterate, just too busy, too amused, too self-indulgent to bother.

But there is hope. Even if it is the world where a jackass like Tucker Carlson shouts anti-Cronkite nonsense in too many ears, there are 8 million New York Times subscribers and growing. And it was a student, a young American adult, who recognized the value of what a little newspaper on a little campus contributed to that campus culture.

Editor of MMU Times making mages for the issue of the paper that came out this week.

Just today, I received a sweet message from a former student. I had posted on Facebook (the modern town square) that I was distributing the first edition of the school paper, and she let me know how much the paper meant to her while she as in school.

This is what she wrote:

Hey Joe!
I was thinking yesterday while doing real estate photos how much the newspaper and you believing in me helped me be able to do this job 🙂 I have social anxiety that was way worse in college. But having events to go to, having friends on the newspaper really helped me face that fear. Just wanted to say thank you 😊 Hope you’re well!

I am well, thank you. I think I would feel more well if I felt a bit better about the state of our democracy. Seeing Afghanistan collapse didn’t feel good—but it’s not the heart of our darkness.

Rating “The Anthropocene Reviewed” by John Green

There is a lot to like in a new book by novelist and vlogger John Green. His newest work is not a novel, but a collection of nonfiction essays, some of which appeared in a podcast that has the same title as the book: “The Anthropocene Reviewed.” (The Anthropocene is an idea of a geological age named due to the way in which our species has reshaped the environment of our home planet.)

There are also some things to not like. I don’t always agree with him, and dislike a few of his reviews. He manages to extract meaning from an opening sequence of “Penguins of Madagascar,” which is cute of him to do, but I worry it might lead some innocent soul to experience that movie—and, please, don’t. It’s a horrible movie, more horrible because it successfully appeals to the lack of aesthetic sense of the young via flashy action, simple gags and silly characters. A bad movie made all the worse by being part of a trend of contemporary movies that make the meaningless artful as a way of thoughtlessly entertaining us, especially children. Do yourself a favor. Pick any Pixar movie for your kids instead.

In defense of John Green, I will agree that a point of his in this essay—that we, humans, make consequential decisions for other species—is important, and one of the many compelling factoids in this entertaining set of essays that comes from this review is that lemmings never commit suicide by casting themselves into the sea.

We choose to believe many things that just aren’t so.

As a journalism professor, I also think John is too hard on CNN—although I agree with his premise that a huge problem with news media is the lack of context in most news. I also concur that long-term, important trends are under-reported because they don’t cause unusual day-to-day events. My issue with his point is that I don’t think CNN is central to these trends—those tendencies existed before that cable TV network and are exacerbated today by social media. Lack of grounding in context has been a problem with American journalism since colonial times, although the problem is getting worse. CNN is not innocent in this, I just don’t it’s as guilty as Green implies.

In my kitchen, a monarch butterfly has emerged. My wife and I adopted a caterpillar in a program run by a local nature center, and we successfully raised this one to butterfly stage (not much to it, it was large when we got it and formed its chrysalis the next day). We are leaving on a trip and will have to have our daughter release it after its wings dry, so I have not seen the other side of its wings to confirm its biological sex. But I see no evidence of scent spots that males have. We named our caterpillar Anderson Pooper. After the CNN anchor. Turns out it may be Andrea.

Still, agreeing with his opinions or disagreeing with them is not really central to enjoying this book. In many ways, I like reading an essay that I don’t completely agree with—it causes lots of thoughts in me, which is pleasant to experience.

And good writing should encourage the reader to think—full credit for that, John Green.

A daughter got me this book for Fathers Day. It's cool that John Green signed thousands of sheets of paper so that each copy of the book has his actual signature in it. I don't think he doodled a cat, however--I think that image may be courtesy of a 5-year-old grandson who has a cat. Or his mother. Cool, either way--I am happy to have a book signed by John and decorated by family.

Beyond the nits I can pick, the book, overall, is excellent. Green has a pleasing, repetitive structure to many essays. He’ll open either with a personal anecdote or a seemingly unrelated tidbit, ruminate on it for a page, and then the main idea or thing that this essay reviews enters the stage, with Green sharing what he likes or does not like using the opening tidbit as narrative glue or for comparison. Each essay ends on the titular topic of the essay being rated on a 5-point scale.

He also writes about how artificial, how human, the 5-point rating scale is, which is part of the fun. He’s rating the works of humankind on a contrived, human scale. We live in a universe that our complex mammal brains give us the ability to reshape and tell stories about and make sense and nonsense of.

I’m listening to “The Mountain Goats” as I write this, a band I have never tuned into before. I don’t know that they’ll be a favorite of mine as they are of John’s—so much in musical taste depends on your age when you encounter that music—but I can hear his point. It’s good music.

It’s also media consumption that feels more useful than both CNN and “Penguins of Madagascar.”

To me, the book is all about the duality of humanity. We are a global species and we are doing a lot of damage to this Earth—and yet, we have the capacity for shared endeavor and understanding that maybe leaves some room for hope that we can learn to shape that impact in a less disastrous way.

One of my favorite essays is early in the book: “Humanity’s Temporal Range.” Temporal range refers to how long a species has been that species (or will be that species). We are, as humans, much younger than many types of life whose existence we have ended. The dodo was far more ancient than us. Elephants, whose long existence we now threaten, have been modern elephants for approximately 10 times longer than we have been modern humans—homo sapiens have had their hands on this planet for something on the order of 250,000 years, compared with the African elephant, lumbering along for more than 2 million years.

And one reason for us to think about the future of the elephant is that we are part of a complex web of life that we ignore at our peril.

As John puts it: “We probably didn’t know what we were doing thousands of years ago when we hunted some large mammals to extinction. But we know what we’re doing now. We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we chose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”

A profound point, even if the editor in me want to remind John that the name of our planet—Earth—is a proper noun. Maybe he means we are treading upon dirt—earth—but I think the sense of the noun in his sentence refers not to soil, but to our planetary home.

Consider another nit picked.

“The Anthropocene Reviewed” is a book of our time. It is written during the pandemic, which is one of the points. Such a pandemic has long been foreseen, and inevitably, like the next flood, will occur again because of human action and inaction.

So, it would be easy to despair at the state of humans. Indeed, in many personal essays, John Green deals with his own mental health struggles, living with the black force of meaninglessness.

However, he does not despair, and neither do I. His brother provides scant comfort for him in an essay about the pandemic by noting “the species will survive this.” Well, yes, but I would like to survive it, along with all who I love and even some who I don’t love, too. As Green notes, diseases that wipe out many humans are not unprecedented, they are very precedented, and what matters is our response.

Some of the essays concern nature, and how we are not separate from it, but part of it. “Sycamore Trees” are reviewed, and like Green, I am occasionally comforted by gardening and by nature. It’s good to gaze in awe at the trees.

As he puts it: “I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that’s the point.”

It is.

Morning glory bud Monday in my backyard. It will be a pretty blue flower on Tuesday, gone on Wednesday. Life is temporary but beautiful. It's good to be in awe of it.

I don’t think it’s giving too much away, that it’s too much of a spoiler, to quote the end of this flawed but marvelous book, because it encapsulates John Green's message well, and also the words will resonate more when you experience the journey that brings to you to them. We are connected to each other as humans and to the planet that spawned us. We are not entities on Earth, but part of Earth that has become conscious of being part of Earth. We are Earth experiencing Earth.

“I won’t survive, of course. I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else. But until then: What an astonishment to breath on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.”

With a capital E.

I give “The Anthropocene Reviewed” five stars.

Ghosts of Photography Past

It does not work anymore, but it still looks good. My first SLR camera, unearthed today.

As a journalist, my pre-professor career was mostly as a writer. True, my first gig was as a sports editor at a small daily paper, and I later was overall editor of that same paper—but while I did copy editing, page design and photography, my primarily activity was interviewing people and writing stories based on those interviews.

So if you asked me what I “was” before I began teaching at Mount Mercy University, I would say “a writer” and I meant it, although I was really a reporter/writer.

Still, photography was important to me. In 1979, for a photography class at Muscatine Community College, I purchased a Minolta SLR camera, a model XG-1. It was a lower-end camera, sort of between the amateur and professional worlds, but it served me well and was my primary visual tool for a decade or so.

I learned to roll my own black-and-white film, develop it in a darkroom, create contact prints and print images for media use.

Old film, a photography guide, the camera, lenses and a flash. The cloth for cleaning lenses may still be useful.

A lot has changed in the world of photography, and journalism, in 40 years. All that knowledge of film and paper is way less important in the digital era.

This week, my wife has taken on the project of clearing a mountain of clutter from our garage. I’ve helped out, some, but to be honest, she has done the bulk of the work. She is trying to be as clear as possible—if it’s been accumulating in the garage for 10 years or more, the idea was to toss it out.

But the old Minolta was there. It was slated for the junk yard—it’s been nonfunctioning for decades—but I decided it just looked too cool. I’m going to consider it office decorations.

These days, I teach others to write and make images mostly as a hobby for my own pleasure. I like it, but just as a background in typewriters and early computers helps me today (students often don’t known what a “tab” key is nor how it should be used, a concept us old Remington users have more of a handle on), time spent years ago with the Minolta and its manual controls ingrained ideas such as depth of field that are not obvious to new image makers.

I have many fond memories of using that first SLR camera. Honestly, I don’t miss the darkroom all that much—Photoshop is way much handier—but I learned a lot using that Minolta. Along with the camera was a book I bought back then. I don’t recall if it was the text for that MCC class, but it was a book that opened my eyes to see the world in a new way.

The way a photographer sees it. And even if I never was fully a photographer, making images was something that I could do and enjoyed doing.

Thus, I was happy to see that camera again. And I’ll be happy to us it as a fancy paperweight on my desk. It’s a physical reminder of where I was and where I started.

Camera bag. A bit grimy, but I may clean it and use it again. It's the one piece of ancient equipment that may still work.

Is Joe Biden Your President?

Official White House images of President Joe Biden (above) and Vice President Kamala Harris (below). In 2020, they won the election. Let's acknowledge that as a fact.

What a week! Who knew the contemporary Republican party could be so weird and vindictive that Democrats would feel a little sympathy for someone named Cheney?

In some ways, the odd Republican reaction to the election of 2020 parallels the reaction of liberals in 2016.

Remember the #notmypresident trend? That was a hot hashtag in 2017 when it became obvious Trump’s odd craziness during the 2016 campaign wasn’t a publicity stunt—Donald J. Trump was every bit as awful and delusional as president as he seemed to be when he was a candidate.

The campaign bombast was not a ploy—Trump immediately began governing in chaos, occupying his time on strange obsessions like the battle over the inaugural crowd size, and his insistence that his basically average Electoral College win (coupled with a popular vote loss) somehow was a historic landslide.

There was a sense of unreality on election day in 2016, that something unexpected had happened—and indeed it had. I recall hearing an acquaintance say shortly after that at a meeting that Trump “is not my president.” At the time, I was taken aback. Our republic rests on political opponents accepting election results and agreeing to fight another day.

President Donald Trump, the man who thinks he's still President. He's not. Accept it and move on.

Trump won. Not a clean nor decisive win, but under the rules, a win. Last year, Biden won, by the same Electoral College margin as Trump, and also, unlike Trump, in the popular vote—and yet there is again a new “not my president” idea in the air.

But the 2017 #notmypresident movement was fundamentally different from what we face today.

In 2016 and 2017, neither President Barack Obama nor candidate Hillary Clinton sought to have the election of 2016 overturned. Clinton didn’t call her supporters to the streets to disrupt the normally routine task of Congress counting electoral votes. The losers in 2016 were not digging in their heels, denying reality.

And when some said in 2017 that Trump was not their president, they were mostly rejecting him symbolically—implying that he was not fit to be president and they would not consider him their leader. There was no huge movement, run by the leader of the Democratic party, to recount votes months after it was all over. There were no oddball Q Anon ninjas seeking bamboo in Arizona. There weren’t dozens of lawsuits—all based on BS and all tossed quickly by the courts—to try to overturn the election.

Today, Donald Trump still has a grip on the increasingly extreme GOP, and he’s fuming in Florida, plotting his return, sometimes even seemingly convinced he’s still “Il Duce.” Trump’s stranglehold on his party is cutting off the fact oxygen supply to the GOP brain, and the Trumpy House vote to oust conservative Liz Cheney from her leadership post because she speaks the truth this week shows how tight that grip is.

There’s a sharp contrast between today and four years ago. When Rep. Elise Stefanik was named third-in-command among House Republicans this week, her first public statement called for “unity” as she works with her party’s undisputed leader—President Trump.

She got around to mentioning President Biden after first praising the orange one—Stefanik referred to the current president in a statement about how terrible, socialist and dangerous he and his party are—so she’s not denying the election results.

Rep. Elisie Stefanik, R-NY. When was the last time we had to care who was number three in the House minority party?

At least not yet. As quickly as some in the GOP are re-writing the events of Jan. 6 into harmless tourists touring the Capitol, I wonder what the gaslighting future holds.

But still. The shout out to Trump as the current party leader by Rep. Stefanik was startling. Think what it came after. Trump attempted to overturn a lawful election in any way he could. After all else failed, he called for protests on Jan. 6 that led to the violent storming on the U.S. Capitol by a murderous crowd.

What if that crowd had found Nancy Pelosi? Or Mitt Romney? Or Mike Pence? What if they caused so much chaos—as they seemed intent on doing—that Congress was prevented from fulfilling it’s role in the election?

Some people died that day—and President Trump was impeached a second time, correctly so, because he incited that violence.

In a rational world, Trump would be retired in ignominy, a shallow, shamed figure shunned by all as the Republicans move on and seek new party leadership. Instead, Rep. Stefanik called for the GOP to retake the House, and seems to be looking forward to the second Trump administration.

It’s all about the base. And there’s the trouble.

Tweet this week by Iowa's Republican Governor, Kim Reynolds. Odd how she doesn't ask about any credible news sources in her "where do you get your news" tweet. That's part of the problem.

Trump, term 2? God helps us. Not my president again, please.

Anyway, today you can buy a “not my president” shirt today with Joe Biden’s picture on it. As some on the left rejected Trump, so many on the right reject Biden.

The current “not my president” movement, however, is tied to the Big Lie, to the sense that President Trump was somehow cheated of a victory he won.

In reality, Trump was the loser. Neither he nor his fans can face that, but public servants who have sworn a duty to the Constitution, should feel some obligation to speak truth on this point.

Biden won. You can wear the “not my president” shirt with his image all you want—that doesn’t change the fact that old Joe is president.

Sure, Trump doesn’t accept it. Yet Trump edited weather maps and would not believe crowd counts nor images. Trump not accepting something isn’t very strong evidence for the lack of veracity of the thing.

I understood the “not my president’ idea in 2017, even if I didn’t buy it. Today, if Biden is not your president—if you, like Elise, look forward to Trumps triumphant return—you make me shudder.

In 2020, The voters spoke. Get over it, get on with it, and try to live in the fact-based universe.

The Trumpverse is perverse and increasingly out of touch. As Jan. 6 showed, that perversion can even bring anti-democracy violence.

May the Don never be my president again. Rep. Cheney was right, even if she speaks from the right. Donald Trump should never again get anywhere near the White House.

Ousted in the House, but not silenced--Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming will probably face many primary challengers. Because she would not speak the Big Lie. Good for her.

Welcome to Iowa: I’ll Write Your Name

OK, the idea of a blank space that needs to be filled in on our state welcome signs put me in mind of Taylor Swift.

An aside about your media correspondent: He is a bit of a Swiftie. Things that put him in mind of Taylor Swift are not bad news, even if haters gonna hate.

Anyway, the Iowa legislature, trying to grapple with anything but the most important public policy questions of the day (pandemic, what pandemic?) has decided that Iowa’s welcome signs need a new motto. Right now, they say “Welcome to Iowa: Fields of Opportunities.”

From wikimedia commons, image uploaded to flickr by Jason Riedy, 2008 images of Iowa welcome sign.

And on March 7, an opinion writer for my local paper, The Gazette, published a column suggesting many new slogan ideas for the state. Todd Dorman is a good writer, and this particular column struck a chord.

The idea is too good for me to pass up. And although I mostly grew up in Iowa (my family moved here when I was 8) and have spent all but 8 years of my adult life in the state, I have to admit that most of the slogans that leap to my mind are a bit sarcastic.

Iowa, a land once known for excellence in public education and high literacy, has had a rough 40 years or so. Starting with the farm crisis of the 1980s the state has been culturally stagnating, and in recent years this open-minded land is becoming increasingly small minded.

So, while I love Iowa, my ideas for a new motto tend a bit more to warnings than welcomes:

• Welcome to Iowa. No Deep Fake Needed, Shallow Ones Will Do.
• Welcome to Iowa. Smell the Money.
• Welcome to Iowa. White Wonder Bread Land Of America.
• Welcome to Iowa. If You Have Ethanol in Your Tank.
• Welcome to Iowa. Land of The Free. Home of The Delusional.
• Welcome to Iowa. You’re Not from Chicago, Are You?
• Welcome to Iowa. We Don’t Need No Education.

The topic sent me from Taylor Swift to Pink Floyd.

Somehow, I don’t think I rival Dorman’s slogans. My favorite of his was “Iowa — Our Liberties we Prize and Your Reproductive Rights We Will Mansplain.” I also really like “Iowa — Home to Real Americans, and Iowa City.”

Dorman wasn’t all down on Iowa. One of his slogans messes with Texas: “Iowa — Our Windmills Don’t Freeze.”

Dorman's Twitter mug.

In a follow-up column this week, Dorman reports that the March 7 one drew a lot of reaction. In that recent column, after reporting ungentle suggestions that he leave his native state, Dorman got a bit serious, writing about the political changes he has observed in Iowa in recent years:

“What we have now is the least responsive, transparent and reasonable state government I’ve ever seen,” Dorman wrote. “We have a state government uninterested in listening to Iowans who are not their allies or donors. They shove bills to passage before the public can weigh in or anyone can fully fathom their consequences. They embrace ideas from out-of-state think tanks and bill mills while shoving concerned Iowans out of the way.

“Iowa veered so sharply right so quickly many of us got whiplash. The Republican Party in Iowa is far more ideologically rigid, extreme and radical than it was just a decade ago. It has embraced Trumpian cruelty, political vendettas and dishonesty over restraint and moderation.”

Unfortunately, Dorman is dead on. The great tragedy of Iowa is not just that it has turned from a politically balanced state into one that is calcified conservative, but that the brand of conservatism it has bought into features “Trumpian cruelty.”

I hope the pendulum can swing back, and Iowa can recover its historic middle-of-the-road politics.

In the meantime, all sarcastic mottos aside, I am grateful for writers with sharp wits who can keep and eye on the state of politics in this troubled state. “Iowa – If Dorman Left, we Would be Poorer.” We would be a bit more of a blank space.

Experiments in Democracy and Zoom

My screen during Pints and Politics event. I had some issues dealing with the Gazette link--and the monkey is here to say "something went wrong." Iowa is seeking a new motto for it's welcome sign, maybe the computer has supplied a timely slogan: Something Went Wrong.

On Feb. 25, a week I ago, I tuned in to view a “Pints and Politics” panel discussion put on by the Gazette.

They do these now and then, and I’ve been to one before. However, Thursdays tend to be busy days and nights in the academic universe, so sadly I often have to miss these. But I viewed this one and enjoyed it.

Erin Jordan of the Gazette moderated, and Todd Dorman, Adam Sullivan and James Lynch, Gazette writers, were joined by Kassidy Arena of Iowa Public Radio.

The panel talked about the freak winter storm in Texas, Iowa education bills and election reforms pending in the Iowa legislature.

It’s been a week—I’ve been busy—but here are some of my notes from the program:

Best quote: The panel spent much of its time describing some rather strange and anti-democratic ideas in the Iowa legislature—ending tenure, a protection of free speech, in the name of free speech; tightening election rules to stamp out nonresistant vote fraud; rushing through important bills with minimal feedback partly due to a failure to create safety rules during a pandemic—it was a discussion of a legislative session in which one party has run amok. Adam Sullivan, I thought, had the quote that summed up the spirit of the discussion: “States are supposed to be the laboratory of democracy, but they are running some messed up experiments.”

James Lynch had interesting points to make, but also provided the séance moments of the event, as he sometimes froze. I noted that he used a background that had the Gazette name—but it appeared backwards, to me.

A bill that would tighten election rules drew much of the discussion. The bill moved through the legislature at breakneck speech, and Kassidy Arena noted that it did so at a time when many Iowans are reluctant to go to the Capitol—where the GOP leaders have not mandated masks.

That points out what to me is one of the oddest things that has happened in recent politics. Iowa’s governor has relaxed rules as infections, while dropping, remain higher than they were for much of 2020. In Texas, in the week since this Pints and Politics discussion, the governor there cited mysterious “matrices” in announcing an end to state mask mandates.

Is he drinking the same Matrix vodka that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has been drunk on for the past year? Somehow Reynolds sees matrices none of the rest of us see. Not it has spread to Texas like a bad virus. Matrix delusion--the new GOP affliction.

Back to this event. I enjoyed my own beer as I listened, yet I appreciate that Jordan said the Gazette may try some social-distance in-person events this summer. I would have to pay more, but I'm OK with someone bringing me my drinks. Assuming I have a shot by then—and not of whiskey, of a vaccine—I would like to go.

I also thought Arena was a good guest panelist and hope she attends again.

Kassidy Arena of Iowa Public Radio during event. All  images on this post are screen shots of the Gazette event.

I also kind of miss Zoom. Yes, I know, they used Zoom for this event, but I was viewing it indirectly, not via a Zoom link. At an earlier Gazette discussion featuring photographers, the chat in Zoom was an interesting adjunct to the discussion. This event lacked that chat feature, and I missed it

Of course, given the political nature of this event, it’s possible that chat comments easily get out of hand, and maybe The Gazette knows that from experience. As I say, I have not been able to attend these all that often.

I enjoyed this one. Still, the men in the panel, at least visually, all had some trouble—James had the backward background and froze; with his t-shirt and unruly hair, Dorman looked a bit like he was being held hostage in suburban Marion (with COVID-19, I suppose he sort of is); Sullivan had a mantle sprouting from the sides of his head.

From a nicely decorate cell somewhere in Marion, a hostage speaks.

The double X’s in the crowd, in contrast, opted for contacts if they needed corrective eye lenses, had their hair comparatively under control and seemed to have more of a sense about their backgrounds.

As far as the optics go, men, the woman are making us look like slackers. What else is new?

Anyway, apt final word to Dorman, who made a point about the pandemic: “As long as we can get beer and streaming services, we’ve proven over the past year that we can make it.”

Or maybe to Jordan, whose final sentence cut out and finished on these segue words: "until then."