My top book picks of 2019

Couldn’t resist. This year, I kept as much of an eye on new releases as I could; here are my top picks, culled from an admittedly short list. Hyperlinks, when present, take you to my reviews on Goodreads.

On global warming, we have The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, On Fire, by Naomi Klein and the Warmer collection, on Amazon Kindle (six short books—my favorite was Jesse Waters’ The Way the World Ends). ) Because global warming is looming, and we need the facts and the art to deal with it

 Then there was The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead. What a great followup to his last novel. Gripping. Horrifying.

Then there was Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay by James Baldwin—he tells writing instruction like it is. I also loved The Problem With Everything, by the wonderful Meghan Daum—she's a unique feminist voice we need more of.

It was a bit of a grind, but Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto should be required reading for both those who espouse a greater social safety net for today’s vulnerable people and aging, bitter white collar types grousing about young people and their “entitlements.” I didn’t fully agree with Matt Taibbi’s takedown of the mainstream media in Hate Inc, but he’s ideologically and intellectually consistent, and well worth listening to.

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was so good, I read it through twice. Yes. It’s that good.

 But because we live in the world we live in, I also have to put before you Trumponomics, by Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffler. It’s total crap, but if you want to see the direction his financial advisers took us, look no further. (Also, my review is at the top of the Goodreads page, so if you like it, you're fighting the power--hint hint).  

None of these books are on this list. But they're still good.

Runners up: Whose Boat Is This Boat? by Stephen Colbert (because yes, it’s accurate, he really said all that) and Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (which I haven’t read yet, but going off her speeches and media coverage, I think it belongs on any list worth considering).

 Happy 2020. Read on.

A week in the life of a Chicago Tribune reader

It was tough, but for a week, I limited myself to a media diet of the Chicago Tribune alone. 

No New York Times or Washington Post. 

No CNN, MSNBC or Fox. Not that I watch them anyway, but still. 

No Daily Worker or union publications printed in the blood of the Illinois taxpayer. Because, as the Tribune has been warning us all week, we're bleeding them dry, so the presses haven't been able to run for a while now anyway. 

Every morning, after brewing myself a pot of coffee and the finest caviar, beluga and pate de fois gras my union provides for me in exchange for my unrelenting support for Mike Madigan, I settled down in my Throne of a Million Public Sector Swords and leafed through all twenty pages or so of the main section of each day's Chicago Tribune.

Pictured: An endangered species. The newspaper reader.

Why? Because I’m masochistic? Because I wanted to see what happened when you took as much of the Internet commentary out of the question as possible? Because I wanted to know whether I would hunger for more context, or whether I would just accept the line I was given? 

Who knows. As a child, I was sort of raised to deify Chicago press, though they've been known to crap all over my own profession in return. And given the fact that this week was the most messed up, tumultuous week in a long series of Weeks in Hell, concluding with the deaths of five reporters in Maryland at the hands of a gunman with a grudge going back years, this may have been the worst possible week to attempt this experiment. Or the best, depending on how you look at it. 

Let me stress that this was in no way a scientific strategy. I did not objectively measure and compare stories, number of stories, word count in stories. Naturally, I gravitated to what was repeated the most, and naturally, my own biases, cognitive and political, played a role in my observations and reactions. (I have not included weblinks to any of the Tribune stories I've talked about here, since I worked exclusively off their print edition.) There were stories I absorbed more readily than others. There was some top notch journalism. There were stories that adhered closely to the narrative the media has been selling for decades. I can say nothing new on that subject; if you're not looking for it by now, you won't get any insight from me. But here's a hint: it has nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative. 

It does, however, have a lot to do with what's acceptable power and what's not. Like public opinion. 

Janus vs unions

For starters, one thing I was explicitly taught early in the week was that the Janus case, which the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday, had absolutely nothing to do with taking power away from unions. This is the case of Mark Janus, who felt it was unfair to pay union dues to a union he didn’t belong to but nevertheless negotiated his contract and working conditions on his behalf. The case our governor of Illinois originally started, and then watched eagerly as Janus went ahead on his behalf. 

No, this wasn’t an “anti-union” thing. I learned this from Kristen McQueary’s column earlier that unions wouldn't be "dead" after the ruling, only obligated to work harder to retain members. And I learned that, while page Two sage John Kass "understands" fair share fees being used to negotiate contracts, nevertheless we all have to understand ourselves that every union member is a Democratic minion giving their money straight to Mike Madigan (a man I've never voted for and couldn't even if I tried), which is how they earn their "luxurious" pensions (averaging $45,000 a year), 37-hour workweeks and retirement at the age of 50. 

My God! I haven't learned I had it so good since Trump proclaimed the nation's schools "flush with cash" in his Inaugural Address. These two guys must attend PTA meetings together or something. 

And that's not even counting the three editorials from the Editorial Board, gushing over the SCOTUS decision in favor of Janus, who says he doesn't "begrudge" unions, but only thinks it's unfair he should have to pay for them negotiating on his behalf. The Edit Board agrees. They totally agree. 

They agreed Thursday: "We’re not great fans of that symbiosis between one party and the public’s workforce. Unions have a vested interest in the taxing-and-spending status quo in Illinois, which in fiscal terms is a disaster. Democrats have been too happy to go along for the ride, saddling taxpayers with enormous public debts." 

I can't wait to read about the concerns these guys have with corporate cash infecting the minds and lining the pockets of the GOP!

They agreed again on Thursday, comparing Rauner to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Rauner's victory, they argue, has given "a louder voice to rank-and-file taxpayers long battered by the high personnel, pension and benefit costs imposed on them by Illinois politicians. Those often exorbitant overhead costs have created huge public debts — and threaten to keep taxes rising." 

Since I limited myself to the Tribune, I couldn't consult the news or periodicals reporting on exactly what Walker's crackdown on unions has done to Wisconsin, but rest assured, it's easy to find. It's been bad for schools, bad for unions, bad for Wisconsin's economy,  bad for their municipalities...if I were reading a more evidence-based account of this issue, I'd be mad.  

And lest alone forget how awesome this decision was, the Editorial Board agreed with it again on Friday. They think Governor Rauner should take a "victory lap" for dealing a blow against one of the last democratizing forces in this country and beefing up private power, and use his clout to...raise the smoking age to 21? Well, whatever. 

Trump's Muslim I mean brown-skinned people whoops, that's travel ban

Oh but it wasn't only a week to bash public unions. It was also the week SCOTUS upheld President Trump's ban against foreign nationals from seven different countries, most of which, coincidentally, are Muslim-majority and none of which, also coincidentally, have sent terrorists here to kill us. 

But the Roberts court, according to Tribune reporting and according to the Editorial Board, assured us that the intention behind the ban doesn't matter, just like Trump's tweets don't matter. It's what the president does that matters. 

“Roberts pointed to one broadly worded provision in an immigration law that says the president may ‘suspend the entry…of any class of aliens’ if he believes they ‘would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,’" the Tribune page one story read. "After a ‘multi-agency review…the president lawfully exercised that discretion,’ (Roberts) said in Trump vs. Hawaii.”

Again, true to form, the Editorial Board echoed the point in their corresponding piece. They quoted Roberts again: “Plaintiffs argue that this president’s words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tolerance ...But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core executive responsibility. In doing so, we must consider not only the statements of a particular president, but also the authority of the presidency itself.” 

And they then delivered this little bon mot: "Say it with us, Trump critics: deeds over Twitter feed.”

In all of this coverage, there was a pitiful amount of space dedicated to counterarguments from the liberal dissenters on the bench. One writer Tweeted a line from Sotomayor's argument I wish they'd considered, though: "It (the ruling) leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a 'total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States' because the policy now masquerades behind a facade of national-security concerns." Very true. If the president believes seven nations are a threat to us, he has discretion to ban entry from those nations, but if the president believes Muslims are evil, we're supposed to discount that? 

Say it with me, Tribune: In Twitter veritas. 

And before they could even finish their surface-level discussion of a racist policy enshrined by the nation's highest court, the Board had to go ahead and talk up the court’s thinking on the Korematsu ruling from 1944. This was the case that, remember, legalized the forced internment of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during World War II. The Editorial Board agreed with Roberts and said critics comparing this disgrace of a precedent to Trump’s Muslim travel ban were wrong: "Because different rules apply to noncitizens and citizens...those legal comparisons are baseless." 

Meaning, I take it, we can cage as many noncitizens as we want. Yay Supreme Court! 

And how about that new Supreme Court seat?

Somewhere during the week, the Janus ruling popped up in my news feed even as I was reading the Tribune's coverage of the travel ban ruling, and somewhere after that, Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. It was too much. My circuits blew. I threw the papers away and went drinking. 

Twenty-four hours later when I sobered up, I looked over their coverage. A long front page article walked through the powerlessness of Democrats wanting to hold up a conservative nomination in revenge for Mitch McConnell's theft of Antonin Scalia's seat in 2016, and highlighted Kennedy’s career, calling his a "pivotal role at the center of a court equally balanced between more predictable conservatives and more consistent liberals." His "legacy" would likely come down to his decisions "championing gay rights: striking down discrimination, restrictions on sodomy and the federal government's position of not recognizing legal same-sex marriages." (Later in the week, such praise would be tempered by commentary.) 

The Editorial Board wasted no time setting about framing the issue as another instance of Washington Power Politics. "Rerun here the debate," the Board intoned, "about whether Senate Republicans unfairly kept Obama from replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, or whether Republicans merely were following the dictates of Democratic Sens. Joe Biden (in 1992) and Chuck Schumer (in 2007) that the Senate shouldn’t confirm a nominee in the final year of a presidency."

See? It's nothing that hasn't been done before. I mean, Biden didn't actually try to hold up a Supreme Court seat getting filled. And Chuck Schumer didn't do it either--he was urging "no" votes against candidates Democrats didn't like. You can't vote "no" if there's no hearing at all, right? 

But the Editorial Board equivocates them, so yeah, this is all the same and the Trump presidency is so far nothing different than any other Muslim-banning, Supreme Court-stealing, invective-spewing administration this country has seen. Oh my head. Where are my pills? 

The rest of the mess

I learned plenty of other things reading the Trib exclusively this week, though. I learned there's a problem with affordable housing in Chicago, and that the Emanuel administration, having been taken to task, is setting up a department to look into it. 

I learned that the ongoing Chicago Public Schools sex abuse crisis has gotten a lot of attention, thanks to Tribune reporters hitting the pavement, delving into records and doing all the things journalists are supposed to do (and for which they're reviled by our president, but never mind, that's nothing new, blah blah blah). 

I heard from dissenting opinions questioning some (but only some) of the narratives fed by the lead articles and their omissions, the Editorial Board and their agenda, and the right-wing shrieking of the occasional National Review contributor or paean to Charles Krauthammer (may his nationalist, Iraq War-supporting soul rest in peace). 

I heard from Eric Zorn, one of the paper's most prominent liberals, dissenting from cries for "civility" in the wake of Sarah Huckabee Sanders being refused service at a restaurant last weekend. "Sorry, no, I won’t suffer lectures about civility from members of a party led by a swaggering, unrepentant bully who relentlessly attacks his detractors with schoolyard insults," he wrote. "Civility has a poor track record in politics, particularly lately — the nastiest, crudest, most dishonest primary candidate won the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 over a host of more qualified, more restrained contenders. He then marched through the rhetorical sewers all the way to the White House."

Presumably, the rest of the staff reminded him that, in light of the upheld travel ban, words are meaningless. 

Zorn also cautioned Rauner not to take too much credit for the Janus decision, walking it back to the earlier California case and McConnell's blocking Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016. "Credit" is an interesting word here--I would have said "blame," but that's just a liberal word, I guess. Towards the end of the piece, Zorn brings out what I would have called a central point: "Though they like to cloak their advocacy with gauzy platitudes about freedom of speech, those backing the Janus effort, including Rauner, are plainly motivated by a desire to destroy public-sector unions. These unions, for all their flaws, have provided a bulwark against the decline of the middle class and the widening income gap."

Likewise, columnist Rex Huppke, the paper's other most prominent liberal, took the country to task for hating Muslims, distrusting Muslims and betraying the values we constantly tout as "American." 

“We are a country that doesn’t want Muslims to come here," he wrote (correctly). "We are a country that doesn’t want people from Mexico or South America or Central America or Africa to come here. We are a country that wants people who weren’t born in America but have lived here and put down roots to leave, even if it means they’ll return to countries plagued with violence and poverty. We are a country that will intentionally separate mothers from their children as a means to deter non-white people from coming here, even if they’re facing certain death and seeking asylum. That’s who we are."

Strident words, though they seem drowned out by the overbearing coverage and commentary to the contrary. True to form, page two featured another diatribe from Kass’s, drooling over the thought of sad liberals and equating everyone on the left upset at the thought of weakened unions and another Trump Supreme Court justice pick as “Democratic bosses” or hippie dippies living on Big Rock Candy Mountain, wanting to abolish ICE and get “free government jobs for all.” 

At least Dahleen Glanton's column on page three that same day delivered a solid rebuttal. Where Kass sees some crazy broad yelling on camera, Glanton sees an independent woman standing up for what she believes in. One can only hope those two writers go out for coffee sometime and Kass can get an earful. 

Then there was Steve Chapman wearily trotting out the inconvenient facts about our 17-year-old war in Afghanistan: lives lost, money spent, nothing to show for it. I love that he thinks this. In 2001, he called protestors of the Afghanistan war "morons" and argued that they would have tried to make peace with the Japanese empire after Pearl Harbor in 1941. And look at him now, all grown up and thinking rationally...

Or not. Now, Chapman tells us not to feel guilty over not having heard of a cease fire breakdown with the Taliban this week. Not because his paper didn’t cover it (they didn’t), but because "Seventeen years after the U.S. invaded, there is not much reason to pay attention to Afghanistan because nothing ever changes much. Yet we remain there in the obstinate hope that something will.” 

So wait, if "Afghan civilians have been dying at a near-record pace," if "Production of poppies, used to make heroin, set a record last year," and if "the U.S. has been dropping a huge number of bombs – three times more in 2017 than in 2016, under Barack Obama," only to see the insurgents flourish and civilians die by the thousands, there's no need to pay attention?

Chapman also warned liberals of the responsibility they would have protesting the decisions likely to be handed down by a conservative-majority court in the future. No, he didn't like the travel ban ruling, he assures us, but the law is how the courts make up their own minds, independent of what a president says about his own laws, at which point the people can exercise power of their own via protests, elections. 

See? If they overturn Roe, you can carry a sign in the streets. That’ll show them.

I support newspapers, but you guys, you...

By the end of the week, even though I was punch drunk from everything and drowning in my own liberal tears, the Tribune headlines were still looking like news dispatches from Gilead. Analysis of the threat Roe vs. Wade is now under. The Democrats’ toothlessness in stopping Trump’s judicial pick. Trump blistering his hands with a shovel, breaking ground on the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin, all while threatening Harley Davison to keep its jobs in the U.S. or else. Secretary of Defense James Mattis assuring the nation that, even though we’ve heard how Trump is going to totally rock out peace with the North Koreans, we’re still keeping troops in South Korea. John Kass in his garden, grumbling about all the politics today and protestors “demonstrating for what they want” and his tomatoes. 

And then there was the shooting in Annapolis. 

Five died and at least two were wounded when a man with a beef against the Capital Gazette going back to 2011 stormed the building with smoke grenades and a shotgun. The coverage quoted extensively from reporter Phil Davis, who described hiding under his desk and listening intently to the gunfire, fearing for his life. He said it was like “a war zone.” 

The Gazette, it turns out, is also owned by Tronc, parent company of the Tribune, and the Editorial Board referred to the victims, understandably, as “family.” 

“Shootings are frighteningly common in the American workplace,” they wrote. “People in virtually every store, factory, warehouse or office dread what happened Thursday: Blasts of gunfire. Workers dead or wounded. The caterwaul of sirens.”

Horrifying, no question. And to their credit, the board has been calling for reasonable gun control measures for a long time now. A brutal end to a dispiriting and alarming week. 

A perfect time to call for support of journalists, who are doing careful, diligent work in the face of an apathetic, aliterate public and a White House that seems to have declared de facto war on them. I’m all for that. I just wish their opinion makers would talk more to those scrappy journalists, firsthand, maybe read their work a little more carefully. 

Over the past week, the Tribune has given careful, often limited coverage of key issues emanating from Supreme Court decisions that nevertheless gave a much broader context than you find in their myopic editorials and columns. Their coverage of the travel ban, for example, had one single direct quote in it, from Devin O’Malley, Justice Department spokesman, who claimed that “Without this action by Congress, lawlessness at the border will continue,” leading to “more heroic and fentanyl pushed by Mexican cartels...a surge in MS-13 gang members and an increase in the numbers of human trafficking prosecutions.”

Is this correct? No way to tell; nobody fact checked it. And such nuance doesn’t seem to matter to They Who Opine for a Living. 

And when the paper covers crises in DCFS or the creation of a committee to investigate sexual abuse in the Chicago Public Schools, does anyone attempt to square that with their gripes about spending-spending-spending? Infrastructure costs money. Counseling children costs money. That is no small part of what the 2012 strike was about, not these gold-plated pensions I keep hearing of. 

And when Kass grouses about protestors protesting “just so they’ll get what they want,” I assume he’s talking about people like Lidia Souza, a Brazilian who was covered that day on the following page. She crossed the border illegally last spring, applied for asylum and was released, but it took a federal judge to reunite her with her son Diogo while the home she’s moving to is being investigated. The judge ruled it was harmful to keep them separated while the home she was moving to was being investigated. 

“I cried almost every day when I wasn’t with my mother,” Diogo told the Tribune. “The other children are suffering a lot.” 

The protestors in Washington, D.C. this past week are protesting exactly this sort of thing, and it’s embarrassing when our commentators can’t factor humanity and empathy into their opinions and commentary. 

Sixty-one percent of Americans approve of labor unions, and 39 percent want them to have more influence, according to a recent Gallup poll. But if you read the Tribune, all you learn is that union members retire at 50 and feast on the flesh of the taxpayer. Also frustrating. 

This is a week where Americans saw key liberties thwarted, and others threatened, by the Supreme Court. Take your cue from the bulk of coverage provided by this newspaper, not to mention the overwhelming slant of its commentary, and all of this is business as usual. Banned Muslims, partisan bickering. 

But take your cue from your own honest thought and reflection, and there’s plenty to be alarmed about. To protest about. 

Just make sure you stay out of the old guy’s garden while you do. 

What a lovely garden. If you look outside its walls, you'll see brown-skinned people getting thrown in cages, but you go ahead and rock those cucumbers, you... 

"Dumb" America, and a book that doesn't say what to do about it

I just happened to be watching Best of Enemies on Netflix the same day that I finished this book, and by sheer coincidence (I suppose), both works end on a similar grievance. At the end of the documentary, which features the Gore Vidal/William F. Buckley debates of 1968, Eric Alterman and a couple of other figures lament the rise of partisan news channels, featuring talking heads yelling at each other and thereby contributing to the partitioning and atomization of American citizens.

Because Vidal and Buckley's sparring got such high ratings for ABC (the climax of which consisted of Vidal calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," to which Buckley called Vidal a "queer" and threatened to "smash (him) in the goddamn face"), the media, according to the film, immediately constructed the debate template for the late 20th and now 21st century. They figured, just get two people in front of the camera who disagree with each other and watch them slug it out. Only now, instead of just talking heads, we have talking networks (Fox and MSNBC most likely the predominant example) that have transformed television news into one big shoutfest. And look where we are today.

This narrative, while seductive, seems more simplistic to me now than it would have five or ten years ago. For one thing, the "opposing sides" we're talking about pretty much all serve the same corporate masters. Because one wants to speak about the discord and cacophony of the media today, one has to sound unbiased and evenhanded, and as a result, one has to pretend like both sides of the spectrum are equally insane. Which is nonsense. It's not my business to defend liberal media--having seen precious little of it, I'm in no position to do so--but let's at least not inflate their liberality while supposedly advocating a free press.

Sure, there's shrill hysteria and propaganda along the political and ideological spectrum, but where does most of this lie? The media's op ed content is overwhelmingly right-tilted, while the American electorate, not so much. If you replace our children's school milk with Mountain Dew, you can yell at the kids for choosing to drink it. Or you could, conceivably, go after whoever made the switch. Right?

The State of the American Mind makes similar errors in its reasoning. A collection of sixteen essays that self-consciously iterates Alan Bloom's famous jeremiad of the 1980s, it supposedly seeks to investigate, and provide a solution for, the decline of intellectualism and cultural literacy in America. But in places, it does just what Best of Enemies did at the end: ignore its own premises and simplify the conflict. David T.Z. Mindich's essay, "A Wired Nation Tunes Out the News" makes some excellent points about the dumbing-down of mainstream news and argues that this kind of "fluff" is a huge problem to address when discussing the uninformed voter of the 21st century. But after laying out his case there, he puts it all aside to make a rather perplexing suggestion:

In a recent book about the news consumption habits of Millennials, Paula Poindexter noted the importance of caring about every generation's news consumption. Imagine, Poindexter asks rhetorically, if the Coca-Cola Company didn't work hard to get the latest generation interested in soda. It would risk losing lifetime customers. So why aren't we doing more to interest young people in the news?

In order to "get" the latest generation hooked on Coke, the company spends a gargantuan amount of money selling a transparently fake image of its product and attempting to attach a sufficiently hip and cuddly lifestyle to it. That's more or less the "fluff" CNN et al has been generating these past decades, and suddenly Mindich wants more of it?

That's just one example. Building ostensibly upon ideas generated and championed by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. decades ago, the book's essays argue that there is a cultural and intellectual currency that all Americans should know in order to fulfill their civic duties and correct the decline the authors see in our pop culture, educational institutions, political involvement and other barometers of democracy.

And that's all to the good, as far as I'm concerned. Championing the need for knowledge is something I find hard to dispute. "The American mind possesses specific knowledge, too, not just an attitude," Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow write in the foreword. "You must remember the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Bible…along with stories of the first colonists, the Founding, and the pioneer experience."

Fine. Dandy. I'm all for the currency of knowledge. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I used to teach Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation in a synthesis unit in my AP Language class. Not, I hasten to add, because I bought into his thesis, but because I figured it was a surefire way to get my students steamed, and thereby involved in the critical reading process.

So this is all not a line of thought I find repellent. But where the authors lose me, and lose, I suspect, a great percentage of potential converts, is when they stumble over their own endorsement of hegemony and disdain for perspective and diversity. It's a fine line, but it's there, and it doesn't take much of a careful reading of certain passages to ferret out this disregard for anything they see as extraneous or nonessential.

Take Daniel L. Dreisbach's essay on the importance of Biblical literacy. He writes, "Because of the Bible's role in shaping people's thoughts and speech during the forming of our nation, it matters deeply that Americans today know so little about the Bible and its influence on their culture. It matters because the Bible has informed diverse aspects of the culture in innumerable ways. To understand themselves and where they come from, Americans must know something about the Bible."

If he'd stopped there, he might have been okay. But to argue that familiarity with the Bible is currency for anyone seeking to understand the Founders is one thing; to argue that, without a spiritual component to one's civic literacy, one is spiritually doomed, is something else:

Moreover, biblical literacy is essential to understanding not only the Christian tradition and Christianity's continuing influence in the world today but also core cultural components of Western civilization and the intellectual roots of the American political experiment. Biblical literacy, in short, mattered to America's founders, and it still matters to those engaged now in cultural and civic life. 

First of all, it begs the question a teensy bit to argue you need to understand the Bible to understand Christianity. Second, the Founders, while leaning towards Christianity in private matters, made it clear that religion and government were two distinctly separate things; I don't know why this point still has to be continually made in the 21st century. And finally, does anyone seriously think that Christianity isn't still seeping into our pores throughout our common culture already? I saw no shortage of nativity scenes over the holiday season; if there's a War on Christmas, the Christians are winning it. Americans have more trouble than I'm comfortable with distinguishing between what the Bible says and what the Koran says; maybe we should be calling for a better understanding of the Muslim faith instead?

The book is on firmer ground when it points to a deficit of college-ready skills, as measured by Gallup polls and various education research institutions ("College Graduates: Satisfied but Adrift," by Richard Arum), or the problems with democratic activism in an era of staggering apathy towards the political process ("Political Ignorance in America," by Ilya Somin). Ditto our obesssion with pharmaceutical drugs as a cure-all ("Anatomy of an Epidemic" by Robert Whitaker). With a little practice, you can learn the most horrifying stats by heart and reel them off at parties: more Americans can name more of the Simpsons family on television than can name the freedoms afforded to us by the First Amendment, for example, or the astounding percentage of Americans on antidepressants.

I'm just as frustrated with this as any of these writers. But it's one thing to bemoan a lack of engagement and knowledge; it's quite another to marginalize the very values and concerns of the people you're trying to engage.

Take Greg Lukianoff's "How Colleges Create the 'Expectation of Confirmation.'" He spends quite a bit of time drawing a portrait of a system of higher education concerned with insulating its students against contrary opinion. His opening narration describes an effort by Brown University students to prevent a campus speech by former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2013 because of their disapproval of his stop-and-frisk program. Advocates saw his methods as crime-reductive; critics saw them as racist and tyrannical, and to Lukianoff, this is all in an effort that students expend in order to "not be offended." The idea that they are protesting what they see as a gross endorsement of backwards policing is apparently not even worth discussion.

Maybe Lukianoff is correct when he argues that colleges are full of students unwilling to hear contrary points of view, but I doubt it--his evidence, garnered from what he has "noticed" in his work at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, seems anecdotal to me. A broader look at, for example, commencement speakers across the country in various colleges sees a host of figures that students are not wild about (Lukianoff is quoted in the linked piece), and their protests are in the same spirit of discontent that kept the Sixties (the period these authors alternate between praising and condemning) such a firestorm for student activism. It makes little sense to me that students protested, say, John Roberts and Ann Coulter's presence out of offense. What makes more sense to me is the notion that these students were protesting the speaker's ideas, and the university's tacit endorsement of them by extending an invitation. We could debate where to draw the line between free speech and academic endorsement of that same speech, but that's a decidedly different debate than the one Lukianoff offers here.

There's also Dennis Prager's "We Live in the Age of Feelings," where he scoffs at college students consulting their emotions first when confronted with decisions and conflicts. "Call it emotional relativism," he writes,

...the idea that the best foundation for judgment is emotive response and the best one for choice is emotive preference…To apply any broader criterion that is based upon nonemotive, impersonal reality or truth is not only mistaken, it's oppressive--which is why the young lean so far in the direction of liberalism: not because of its political content (they know little about progressive tax policy, regulations, and specific government programs), but because conservatism sounds too much like someone telling them what to think and do. 

I've always marveled at Prager's ability to dichotomize incredibly complex issues (like when he dismisses societal transformation, and thereby civil rights), but this is particularly impressive. The youth of America couldn't possibly have their emotions filtered through intellect or reason. They aren't suspicious of a political wing that advocates bombing the Third World into the Stone Age because they know anything about history. They're just squeamish over it, and by his yardstick, that makes their take on the situation worthless.

It goes on like this throughout the book, over and over again. America needs a cultural and intellectual currency, and if you want to know what it is, just ask us smart guys (Bauerlein and Bellow's Foreword). Americans are dumb and we know this because two-thirds of them think there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, and yeah, the news is dumb too, but we'll just ignore the folks who peddled that lie in the first place because it's easier to attack the lied-to than it is the liars (Mindich). A man decides he identifies as a female and undergoes surgery and harrowing life adjustments--well, that's just him jumping to fulfill an immediate desire, just like you get a Big Mac attack and run to your car to hit the nearest drive-through; it has nothing at all to do with figuring out who you are and taking painful and courageous steps to become that person ("The New Antinomian Attitude," by R.R. Reno). We have more people on government assistance because of an addiction to entitlements, and this has nothing to do with the $2 trillion that left our economy in a matter of days in 2008's banking crisis or the subsequent housing collapse ("Dependency in America" by Nicholas Eberstadt). The reason we're so dumb is because government is so big, so if people vote with their feet and move somewhere else, that'll lead us to make smarter shopping decisions at the ballot box (Somin). 

And on and on. The prescription for these writers seems to be, Find the problem, acknowledge one-third of the causes of the problem, ignore the other two-thirds, offer a vague solution, move on.

Even where I agree with these writers, I find myself maddened by their lack of specific suggestions. It's nice when, at the end of "The Troubling Trend of Cultural IQ," Bauerlein points out that "The parents and mentors inclined to heed our exhortations probably already recognize the problem (of the knowledge deficit) and strive to restrain it--they don't need our advice." That's true--I do, and I don't. It's also reassuring to hear Jean M. Twenge point out in "The Rise of the Self and the Decline of Intellectual and Civic Interest" that, in an effort to combat a praise-heavy academic environment, "those few who resist the trend and stick with lower grades look like curmudgeons and suffer lower enrollments and lower student evaluations." Story of my life.

But over and over again, even when acknowledging problems I would be hard-pressed to deny, their prescriptions are vague and simplistic. Schools should stress critical thinking. Schools should advocate civic engagement. Schools should get kids interested in the news (show me the lesson plan, folks; I'll even pay for it. What do you think I do all day?) Oh, and people should stop living places where they are underrepresented. It's your home? Who cares--it's up to you to make the change, not the country.

The writers put no real onus on the true leaders and powers of this country that I can see. Little or no  accountability for the people selling us crap; only on us, for either wallowing in that crap or ignoring it altogether.

When Bauerlein and his pals stick to empirical observations about knowledge, engagement and the like, they make perfect sense. When they tie it to a lack of Christian values, Big Government or young people watching too much Jon Stewart, they sound exactly like their critics paint them: old, grumpy white men yelling at everyone to get off their lawns. Buckley would doubtless find something to agree with there, but that's not the sort of position that leads to any kind of meaningful change.