Lorrie Moore on language for sale

There's a whole body of First Amendment law on "commercial speech." This is a weird grey area: the First Amendment isn't irrelevant, but it doesn't confer the full protections you think of when you hear the phrase "freedom of speech." That's why the law can prohibit false advertising and require companies to say certain things, e.g. to put nutrition labels on food.

But isn't "commercial speech" vs. "noncommercial speech" a false dichotomy? Isn't most speech commercial?

My mom, Ann Althouse, embeds a short video clip of Lorrie Moore (who, as another full disclosure, is a family friend) saying:

It's important to get language that isn't commercially mediated, and increasingly, we don't have that. . . .

I sometimes think: is reading a book itself a value? . . . It doesn't matter what book, as long as you're reading a book? And I go either way on that. . . . It's not valuable because it's a book. It would be better to spend time watching a good movie. . . .

Most language that we encounter is trying to sell us something. And that's really unfortunate, and it degrades the language, and it degrades encounters with language.

I agree with all that.

At one point, she starts to say that fiction writers are "presumably" an exception — but she immediately catches herself and points out that they're also working for money.




Once the 2-minute segment is over, the embedded video switches to a black background with the word "PREMIUM" in a gold rectangle. The screen urges us:

Get full access to this premium program: http://FORA.tv/premium

If you click on that link, you'll see a list of "PREMIUM EVENTS." To the right, there's an explanation in fine print:

FORA.tv Premium Events offer pay-per-view programming from the world's top conferences, universities, and public forums. Now, you can enjoy many of the benefits of these exclusive gatherings without the costs and hassles of travel, and at a fraction of the ticket price. We offer flexible access plans to suit your interests including annual and monthly subscriptions, and full event and single program passes. . . . We invite you to watch Previews of our premium programming to take in a big idea and sample the panel, presentation, or debate.

So, when Lorrie Moore said, "Most language we encounter is trying to sell us something," those words were part of a teaser for a website that's trying to sell us more words (including more of her own words). On that same webpage is a list of titles in gold type (with the color gold signaling, "This is worth spending money on").

One of the more attention-getting titles is "Hollywood, War Crimes and the Search for Love," which is accompanied by a photo of a blond-haired woman wearing sunglasses, a revealing shirt, a jeans skirt, hot-pink stockings, and high heels that are mostly blue but have pink heels to match the stockings. She's writing on a pad of paper while lying on her stomach, legs crossed, in classic lying-on-the-bed-writing-in-a-diary pose. It isn't immediately apparent what any of that has to do with war crimes, but that doesn't matter because the image got us to stop and look.

Each of these visual elements was meticulously selected in order to persuade people (male and female) to spend money in exchange for language.

Speech is always going to be commodified — we're never going to solve that problem. As consumers/readers, the best we can do is to keep this in mind: when you're reading a text that seems strikingly authoritative or persuasive, remember that the words are so powerful because the person who wrote them was trying to make a living. If we're skeptical of the statements we see on food packages in the supermarket, we should be just as skeptical of statements we read in a book. It's all "commercial."

Should we have a White House Council on Men and Boys? Should we have a White House Council on Women and Girls?

Last week, President Obama created a "White House Council on Women and Girls."

Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review has the obvious response:

Where's the White House Council on Men and Boys?

Marybeth Hicks elaborates:

A council on men and boys would promote stable marriage as the best avenue to improve the lives and living conditions of America's women and families. A council on men and boys would address the crisis in American manhood that results in the scourge of infidelity, divorce, lack of commitment and fatherhood with multiple partners.

Dr. Helen doesn't like the idea, or at least not Marybeth Hicks's version of it:

If Ms. Hicks wonders why men have no interest in a "stable marriage," or commitment, she need only look as far as her own dripping disdain for men and her lack of insight into a culture that holds men responsible, portrays women as victims, and then sets up a "council" to correct a problem that women spend over 30 years in the making. A council on women is about expanding their opportunities. A council on men is about controlling them.

I don't buy that explanation for why men screw up society. Men have been screwing up society forever. It's not the result of a few decades of anti-male feminists.

But I want to get back to the thing that actually happened -- the "White House Council on Women and Girls." What I want to know is: why is this really necessary?

Unequal pay? Obama loves to say that women are paid only 78 cents on the dollars relative to men. It's not at all clear to me that women are paid unequally. But that's a complicated enough topic that I want to leave it for a whole other blog post. (If you have actual evidence on this question that controls for all the relevant variables, please let me know in the comments. I cannot emphasize that italicized part enough.)

I'm particularly wondering about the "girls" part. They pointedly chose to put "girls" in the title, not just "women." Why do we need a White House Council on girls rather than, say, boys? This is not a rhetorical question -- I'd be interested to see any answers in the comments.

Lorrie Moore (a family friend) wrote a New York Times op-ed last year that seems mostly outdated because it was about the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it had one insight that's not about the presidential race and is still very relevant:

The children who are suffering in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.

In the progressive Midwestern city where I live, the high school dropout rate for these alienated and written-off boys is alarmingly high. Some are even middle-class, but many are just hanging on, their families torn apart by harsh economics and a merciless criminal justice system. Why does it seem to be the Republicans who are more vocal about reforming our drug laws? Why has no one in the Democratic Party campaigned to have felons who have served their time made full citizens again? Their continued disenfranchisement is a foolhardy strike against these men and their families.

UPDATE: One of the commenters on my mom's post that links to this post makes a good point:

[T]he message here seems to be that no matter how bad things get for boys/men, well, they're men, so they can look after themselves.

Women, on the other hand, need a Presidential Council to make sure they're doing all right, even if by many metrics they are outperforming men.

I think I'd be vaguely insulted if I were a woman.

Another commenter has this ground-breaking idea:

The White House Council on Women and Girls should be merged with the White House Council on Men and Boys to create the White House Council on People, the goal of which is to promote policies that help people. President Obama should head the Council, and its name can be shortened to the White House.

25 random things about me

It's the craze that's sweeping Facebook:

In the past few weeks, a chain letter called "25 Random Things About Me" has wormed its way through Facebook at an alarming speed. The exhibitionistic format has remained surprisingly intact: In addition to rattling off 25 facts about themselves, "Random Things" authors are supposed to tag 25 of their Facebook friends, prompting them to write their own note and tag 25 more people, and so forth and so on.

[UPDATE: The evolutionary basis of "25 things."]

Here's mine, cross-posted from Facebook:

1. My first word was "happy." My first phrase was "Beach Boys." My first sentence was "I want it."

2. I haven't eaten meat since I was in elementary school.

3. I was baptized on Wall Street.

4. My favorite band is the Beatles. I used to say my favorites Beatles song was "You Never Give Me Your Money," but I can't decide anymore.

5. In the summer between 7th and 8th grades, I got an electric guitar and practiced about 8 hours a day.

6. The most famous people I've met are Al Franken, Christopher Hitchens, and Lorrie Moore, the last of whom is an old friend of the family.

7. I have a weird set of movies I watch over and over, while I haven't seen a lot of the most famous ones. I've never seen Forrest Gump, Titanic, etc. Movies I've seen a ridiculous number of times: My Dinner with Andre, Back to the Future trilogy, Annie Hall, Duck Soup.

8. I'm a pessimist and a skeptic, but I try not to be a cynic. I think the world is probably doomed, but I have confidence that a lot of individuals will make a good-faith effort to try to make things better along the way to our demise.

9. I spent a month in Rome but have never seen the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.

10. Since the beginning of 2007, I always wanted Obama as president and Biden as VP. I couldn't believe I hit the nail on the head.

11. I have a vivid memory of touching Courtney Love's bare shoulder when she was crowd surfing at a Hole concert, one of the emblematic moments of my teenage years.

12. When I was a law review editor I spent about half an hour on the phone with an author debating every single contraction in the piece, about 60 in all. He loved contractions, and I didn't want any of them, so we compromised and changed about half of them to full words.

13. People tell me I'm very "tech-savvy," but I'm actually technophobic. I waited as long as possible to switch to a cell phone and digital camera, and I still don't have any kind of iPhone/Blackberry/etc. because I prefer writing things down in notebooks.

14. I wish I'd been European instead of American; I think I'd fit in better in Europe.

15. When I was in middle school, I didn't cut my hair for a long time and I looked like this.

16. When I was 2, I played a game we called "do counter," which was getting up on the kitchen counter and recognizing spices. I knew each one by smell, or as I called it back then, "hmell."

17. This article accurately describes me.

18. The first time I acted in a play, there was a part at the end where the other actor ran up to me (per the script), but I accidentally struck her forehead with my teeth, causing her to bleed onstage. We were both fine, but I felt really bad. People in the audience didn't realize anything had gone wrong; they thought it was fake blood.

19. I cook myself dinner almost every night.

20. I used to sketch people's faces all the time, and I wish I still had the time or inclination to do so. One of my favorites is a drawing I did in 7th grade of Justice Scalia.

21. I can't whistle. But I'm really good at snapping.

22. I can't give you an answer about whether I'm a liberal or not. I often agree with them, but I also think they get too much stuff wrong.

23. I have a crush on Regina Spektor and Tracyanne Campbell, the singer from Camera Obscura.

24. I'm tired of being in my 20s; I can't wait till I'm in my 30s.

25. I started a blog last April. You should bookmark this link and read it on a regular basis.

Obviously, that last one was done for Facebook and is a moot point for you who are reading it here.