The American culture is hooked on speed, and there are consequences
Jul 29, 2024
∙ Paid
Announcement: This week is WRITERS’ week here at my Substack.
Starting tomorrow morning, I’m posting pieces about writing… because I just endured listening to Biden’s “farewell address” from the Oval Office.
The language…the clichés…the 1950 7th grade patriotic generalities strung wall to wall…the forced non-human elocution of Biden, as if he were a barely functioning machine…the “heroism” couched in lollipop lingo…
Horrific.
And yet I know that for many viewers, his speech was a success! It resonated! They are lit up. My God.
Kamala and Trump also have their “language problems.” Incessant drumbeats repeating the same sentiments over and over. Swarming generalities. Fishing for reflex responses from their audiences. The Mechanical posing as Life. Grotesque.
THIS is where authentic literacy sinks to its knees and begins to weep.
The unknown authors of the King James would go out into a dark alley and scream.
Poets like Fitzgerald and Whitman and Dylan Thomas would go deeper into their whiskey and try to blot out what they just heard.
A vast formidable intellectual—Teddy Roosevelt—would march into the Oval and toss Biden out into the Rose Garden.
I’ve never heard such an execrable performance from a sitting President.
And so…I dedicate this week to WRITERS and WRITING. I have to.
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And now, today’s article:
The American culture is hooked on speed, and there are consequences
I’m not talking about meth and other drugs, although they’re certainly involved.
Have you stopped and listened, really listened to the tone and velocity of people talking on television and social media? Some of them have express-train mouths.
And movies and TV shows and videos—the cutting from one scene to another keeps getting faster. Cut cut cut.
In life, people are generally talking faster. They’re texting back and forth, quick.
So let’s look at just one consequence. The teaching of the English language. Reading, spelling, grammar. Yeah, all THAT.
Having been through it myself, as a boy, in the 1940s and early 50s, when the teaching was done expertly, I can tell you it took time. A whole lot of time. Across years. I had a 7th grade year-long course in grammar alone. Parts of speech. Subject-predicate agreement. The works.
In this culture, today? The students don’t have time. That’s their reaction. They don’t have the patience. They feel things in class are moving too slowly. Where is the SPEED they’re used to? Where are the quick cuts?
They just watched a movie that skipped forward and back in time eight times, on three worlds. There were 30 explosions which took a total of three minutes’ screen time. There was a four minute car chase that featured 357 cuts and 37 crashes. And you’re going to ask them to sit down in a classroom and figure out the difference between an adjective and an adverb. Under the methodical guidance of a teacher. Utilizing many examples. With a text book, not a screen.
They go to a concert with 15,000 screaming people, and the drummer is doing a fast one one one, pound, pound pound, for two hours. And now they’re in a classroom and the teacher is explaining what a participle is, and how it can hang, and there are 25 sample sentences to go through, meticulously, to sort this out.
There is a spelling test. The student had to memorize 50 words the night before.
There are two pages of a short story to read. A story about a boy painting a fence.
The students don’t have time.
Time has gone away.
Speed culture.
Flash forward:
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