The Camp Of The Saints Is a Mean And Racist Diatribe But Given It's A Steve Bannon Favorite, Worth Knowing About

Some time ago I read that one of the books that influenced Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist,  was The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail which came out in French in 1973.  It took me a while to track down a copy - which I got through interlibrary loan.  

It's a disgustingly racist novel about 1000 old ships that leave India for Europe with 'the Ganges horde' of nearly 1 million people, led by the giant 'turd-eater' who carries the monster child on his shoulders.  I did try hard to read this book to see if it would help me understand something about Bannon and others who supported Trump.  I wasn't able to finish it - it's really hard to read this stuff - before it was due back at the library.  But I think I got enough to get the gist.

I'd like to share some of the book with you for a number of reasons.

• The author, twisted as he may be, is insightful in his analysis of how things operated back then in French society.  
• The language and unrelenting disdain for other people (not only the darker people of the world, but also their white stooges who believe in helping the poor and making the world a better place) has to be read to truly get the level of racism and general misanthropy.  Just my saying it is racist  doesn't convey the point here. 
• The insight it gives us to many Trump supporters' way of seeing the world and what his campaign targeted
• The roadmap the book offers as a way to capture the 'gullible masses' which the author despises when  the techniques are used by the left, but sound very similar to what the right has been doing in the US for the last twenty or thirty years.  
• The book that supposedly helps shape Bannon's view of the world clarifies a lot of why Trump is doing some of what he does

I thought I could do this in a series of quotes, but that isn't going to work.  The quotes need some context and some commentary.  I may do a second post, though midway through writing this up I did find the whole book on-line, so you can skim through it yourself.

The Basic Plot

The armada of poor leaves Calcutta for Europe.  The book is mainly about how the French will respond if they land on French shores (which they do.)  Raspail eviscerates various aspects of French society - from the media announcers, academics, government officials, teachers, the clergy, and the French public and their children - as stooges of the poor refuse of the earth.  The French, in Raspail's eyes are no longer men, but rather patsies due to their disgusting humanitarian beliefs in equality and their lack of will to defend their own hard won gains and to defend the white race.  You can read the plot in more detail at Wikipedia.  

It's Not Just The Plot That Matters

But the plot isn't what stands out to me.  It's the language, the hate, the disdain, the world view.  Raspail's world is zero sum - either we get the world's limited resources or they do - and that humans are just brutish members of tribes with no hope for a better society.  

The heroes of this book remind me of the heroes of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in that caring about anyone but yourself is considered foolish and weak.   This book then adds gallons of racism to Rand's cold libertarianism.  

Why We Need To Read Books Like This

As despicable as I find this book, the world views expressed in it do represent views held by many people in the world;  enough to pass Brexit and elect Trump.   Had these views not been so summarily dismissed as unacceptable and undiscussable, they might have been better debated.  The fears of the invading hordes that this book evokes might have been addressed rather than dismissed.  There are legitimate concerns and liberals left those with concerns to get answers from the likes of Raspail.  

Also reading about the process of social brainwashing that Raspail describes might have better helped us understand and address the Fox News and talk radio propaganda tools that set the stage for Trump.  

The World When The Book Was Published

The book came out in France in 1973, about five years after French students shut down universities with demands for sexual and other liberties and workers demanded higher pay and shorter work weeks.  During WW II, France was unable to rule its colonies adequately and their independence movements strengthened. By 1954 France was out of Indochina  By 1960 France was out of most of their other colonies, most notably those in Africa, and most painfully, Algeria, leaving many in France angry at this loss of economic and political dominance.   There was a tug between the old traditionalists and those clamoring for a modern world.  France’s cultural superiority in the world was  also being challenged by American culture as English became the new lingua franca.  The French did not look kindly on this American usurpation.  

“Georges Clemenceau, who had led France through the first world war, once said that 'America was the only country that had gone from barbarism to decadence without passing though civilization’” (from Americans in Paris) 

I'm guessing that some of Raspail's vituperation against the media stems from what this Wikipedia entry describes.

“De Gaulle's government was criticized within France, particularly for its heavy-handed style. While the written press and elections were free, the state had a monopoly on television and radio broadcasts (though there were private stations broadcasting from abroad; see ORTF) and the executive occasionally told public broadcasters the bias that they desired on news. In many respects, society was traditionalist and repressive.”

But 'traditionalist' didn’t mean in France what it might mean in the US.  From the same Wikipedia post:

“In the context of a population boom unseen in France since the 18th century, the government under prime minister Georges Pompidou oversaw a rapid transformation and expansion of the French economy. With dirigisme — a combination of capitalism and state-directed economy — the government intervened heavily in the economy, using indicative five-year plans as its main tool.”  

 In short, there was plenty for the French to be upset about.  And Raspail seems to have taken his insight, twisted with a virulent racism, and created a fantasy apocalyptic novel.  And the boat people and other refugees coming to Europe lends some prescience to Raspail.  Though his tales are fantastical misrepresentations and omit key factors such as:  labor short Northern Europe, particularly Germany, had begun importing workers and many of the immigrants were from former European colonies.

OK, Let's Look At Some Of The Book

The chapters jump back and forth from views of the west and views of the armada of Indians.  It starts in the present with the arrival of the ships at Côte d' Azur.  We bounce around a bit and then we're at the Belgian consulate in Calcutta which had been cherry-picking Indian babies for adoption back home.  Until the masses of mothers bringing their babies in for adoption got too much and a huge mob is outside the consulate.  This is where we are first introduced to the leaders of the armada as it prepares to leave India.

The Turd-Eater and the Monster

"Way back, behind the backmost women in the crowd, a giant of a man stood stripped to the waist, holding something over his head and waving it like a flag. Untouchable pariah, this dealer in droppings, dung roller by trade, molder of manure briquettes, turd eater in time of famine, and holding high in his stinking hands a mass of human flesh. At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all—no throat, no teeth—just a flap of skin over his gullet. The monster’s eyes were alive, and they stared straight ahead, high over the crowd, frozen forward in a relentless gaze—except, that is, when his pariah father would wave him bodily back and forth." (p. 9)

"Can a man spend his whole life grubbing for turds in all the slop pots along the Ganges, shaping them, rolling them between his fingers, day after day, and not know something about the true nature of man? He knew all there was to know. He just never knew that he knew, that’s all." (p. 10) 

These are the characters Raspail has created to lead the armada.  And Turd-Eater and Monster is what they are always called.  Reminds me a bit of Limbaugh's love for disdainful moniker's such as femi-Nazi as well as Trump's nicknames for his opponents.  Though Trump's 'crooked Hillary' and 'Lyin' Ted' were tame in comparison to Raspail.

The Western Media And Its Consumers

"To appreciate the West’s opinion of the refugee fleet—or, for that matter, of anything new and unfamiliar—one essential fact must be borne in mind: it really couldn’t give less of a damn. Incredible but true. The more it discovers about such things, the more fathomless its ignorance, feeble its interest, and vulgar its own self-concern. The more crass and tasteless, too, its sporadic outbursts, fewer and farther between. Oh yes, to be sure, it indulges in flights of sentiment now and again, but cinema style, like watching a film, or sitting in front of the TV screen, poised for the serial’s weekly installment. Always those spur-of-the-moment emotions or secondhand feelings, pandered by middlemen. Real-world drama, served in the comfort of home by that whore called Mass Media, only stirs up the void where Western opinion has long been submerged. Someone drools at a current event, and mistakes his drivel for meaningful thought. Still, let’s not be too quick to spit our scorn its way. Empty drivel indeed, but it shows nonetheless how reading the papers or watching the news can provoke at least the appearance of thinking. Like Pavlov’s dog, whose slobber revealed the mechanics of instinct. Opinion shakes up its sloth, nothing more. Does anyone really believe that the average Western man, coming home from his ofiice or factory job, and faced with the world’s great upheavals, can eke out much more than a moment’s pause in the monumental boredom of his daily routine?" (p. 20  - emphasis added)

There are many on both sides of the political divide who might characterize parts of the media this way - though probably in less scornful tones.  But this is clearly the message about the media that Trump fed his voters, though calling the media the 'enemy of the people' seems tame by comparison.   Liberals certainly believe the basic message when it's applied to Fox News and its audience.

Let's look at the media's consumers as Raspail sees them, beginning here with the intermediaries - the priests and the teachers.  First the clergy:

"Three thousand two hundred sixty-seven priests started frantically scribbling with an eye toward the following Sunday—ready-made sermon, delivered to the door, nothing to do with the gospel for the day, but who worries anymore about such minor details? (Among the cast of thousands we should note the presence of a certain married priest, Catholic and cuckold, wearing a pair of Christian horns, and aware of the fact—a situation so utterly new to the poor man, and muddling his mind into such disarray, that for over a month his Sunday sermons seemed to leave him at a loss. Durfort’s strong dose saved him from total silence. The therapy worked so well, in fact, that the antlered, oil- fingered gent forgot all about his sanctified horns and recovered that gift of thunderous fire and brimstone that made him the shepherd of the largest flock of masochists in the diocese. Perhaps we’ll see him again bye and bye ...)" (p. 27) 

And the teachers:

"At the very same moment thirty-two thousand seven hundred forty-two schoolteachers hit on the subject for the next day’s theme: “Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in.” Irresistible, really!"  (p. 27)

And the kids:

"And the dear little angel—all simple, childish soul and tender heart—will spread four pages’ worth of infantile pathos, enough to melt a concierge to tears, and his paper will be the best, the teacher will read it in class, and all his little friends will kick themselves for having been much too stingy with their whines and whimpers. That’s how we mold our men nowadays. Because even the tough, hardhearted little brat, the one with all he needs to succeed in this life, is forced to take part, since children abhor standing out from the crowd. So he’ll have to play along too, and work himself into a hypocritical sweat over the same philanthropic rubbish. And he’ll probably write just as brilliant a theme, clever child that he is, and he may even wind up believing what he writes, because youngsters like this are never really bad, just different, that’s all, just untapped potential. Then he’ll go home, like his classmate, both of them proud of their fine compositions."

And the parents, whom he identifies as Marcel and Josiane, which I take as a generic French worker husband and wife, sort of like Mr. and Mrs Joe Six Pack.  Remember, this all came out in 1973.

"And father, who knows what life is all about, will read the A-plus masterpiece, terrified (if he has the slightest imagination) at the notion of that foreign family of eight coming to live in his three rooms and kitchen, but he’ll sit back and keep his big mouth shut. Mustn’t frustrate the little angels, mustn’t shock them, mustn’t sully their innocent thoughts and risk turning them later into hopeless prigs. No, he’ll wallow, ensnared, in his gutless affection, and chuck his little angel on a cheek flushed with pleasure, telling himself that he’s really a dear, and besides, “out of the mouths of babes,” isn’t that what they say? ..."

Raspail describes Marcel further, a man who actually questions why the announcer is talking about helping the far away poor.  Marcel himself is living in a pretty basic apartment.  Shouldn't some of the help go to his family?

"Let’s give ear, in passing, to this discordant note. Good, canny common sense, a little uncouth and harsh—in other words, healthy— draws itself up to its dignified height and kicks up a fuss. Just a bit more effort and it could save the day. Marcel is no fugitive from the Ganges. He works, he wears shoes. He’s a hundred percent man, and make no mistake! With some prodding you could get him to admit that he’s part of a civilized country, that he’s proud of it too, and why not? Peekaboo, it’s our little white friend again, our foot-slogging soldier of the Western World, hero and victim of all its battles, whose sweat and flesh seep through all the joys of Western life. But he’s hardly the man he used to be. He only goes through the motions now. This volley won’t hit the mark. And there won’t be another. When the time comes, he’ll sit back and watch, as if none of it makes any difference to him. When he suddenly finds that it does, it will be too late. They’ll have made him believe it’s no skin off his nose, and that only the others—all the ones with money—will cough up and pay, in the name of equality, and brotherhood, and justice, or some such nonsense that no one dares question. And of course, in the name of the beast. But that’s something they won’t tell Marcel. Would he know what they meant?" (p. 27)

Sounds exactly like the voter that Trump targeted.  




Raspail's descriptions of people - politicians, newscasters - are so detailed  that I can't help but think he had real people in mind.  For example:

"Albert Durfort was full of the milk of human kindness. (Machefer would have used a rather more vulgar expression. He always said the professional do-gooders turned his stomach. A little too harsh, perhaps, for Durfort, not a bad sort, really.) Constant crusader, he would gallop through radioland to the rescue, looking for supposedly desperate causes, barely taking the time to change horses between two campaigns, always panting for breath as he came on the scene just in time to deliver the downtrodden victim, expose a scandal, and lash out at injustice. A Zorro of the airwaves. And the public adored it. So much so, in fact, that some—the most obtuse—saw each nightly editorial as a serial installment: Durfort on skid row, Durfort and the Arabs, Durfort vs. the racists, Durfort and the police, Durfort against brutality, Durfort for prison reform, Durfort and capital punishment, etc., etc. But no one, not even Durfort himself, could see that our Zorro was flogging dead horses, flying off to the rescue ‘of issues long since won. Something else, strange but true: he was looked on as the model of the free, objective thinker. He would have been shocked and surprised to learn that he was, in fact, a captive of fashion, bound by all the new taboos, conditioned by thirty years of intellectual terrorism; and that, if the owner and general manager of the station that employed him entrusted ten million good Frenchmen to his care each night, it certainly wasn’t to use his talents to tell them the opposite of what they supposed they believed in." (p. 26) (emphasis added) 

That's for a white French guy.  Note how the news model seems to fit Fox News and one could probably make a good argument that it fits well for some of the more centrist and liberal news outlets.  He also points out the contradiction between the professed concerns for the poor and the rich salaries the newsmen get.

 Now let's look at an immigrant news man:

"The speaker was one Ben Suad, alias Clément Dio, one of the monster’s most faithful minions, concoctor in chief of the poisonous slops poured piping hot each Monday into the feeble, comatose brains of the six hundred thousand readers of his weekly rag, served up in its fancy sauces. Citizen of France, North African by blood, with an elegant crop of kinky hair and swarthy skin—doubtless passed down from a certain black harem slavegirl, sold to a brothel for French officers in Rabat (as he learned from the bill of sale in his family papers)—married to a Eurasian woman officially declared Chinese and author of several best-selling novels, Dio possessed a belligerent intellect that thrived on springs of racial hatred barely below the surface, and far more intense than anyone imagined. Like a spider deep in the midst of French public opinion, he had webbed it over so thick with fine gossamer strands that it scarcely clung to life. A cordial type all the same, given to great informative bursts if he chose, though always one-way, sincere enough to put his convictions on the line and draw the occasional fire of intelligent colleagues—of whom there were fewer and fewer, alas!, and whom people had all long since stopped reading. In those topsy-turvy days the Left sprawled out in abundance, while the rightist press, in a hopeless muddle, languished alone in its trenches, deserted. The home front, meanwhile, true to form, fraternized high and low, unabashed and unrestrained. Politically, Dio’s columns were something of a hash, whipped up with a proper dose of utopian pap. But most dangerous of all was his very special talent—unrivaled, in fact—for planting his mines through the waters of current French life, far and wide, just surface-deep, always finding those areas still intact, and larding them through with the deadly devices, spewed mass-produced from his prolific brain."

One last quote from early in the book - the mayor of New York talks to a consultant for the city after they hear the news of the armada.

"As consulting sociologist to the city of New York, he had seen it coming, predicted it to the letter. The proof was there, in his lucid reports, ignored one and all. There was really no solution. Black would be black, and white would be white. There was no changing either, except by a total mix, a blend into tan. They were enemies on sight, and their hatred and scorn only grew as they came to know each other better. Now they both felt the same utter loathing. ... And so the consulting sociologist would give his opinion and pocket his money. The city had paid him a handsome price for his monumental study of social upheaval, with its forecast of ultimate doom. “No hope, Doctor Hailer?” “No hope, Mr. Mayor. Unless you kill them all, that is, because you’ll never change them. How about that?” “Good God, man, hardly! Let’s just wait and see what happens, and try to do the best we can ..."  (p. 7)

The 'scientific' proof that is supposedly buried in the report is, of course, fake news created by the novelist.   The 'realistic' sociologist is Raspail's good guy in this scene, and the mayor who won't hear of killing off the blacks in New York is the fool.  But there is lots one could write about overpriced consultants whose expertise often supports what a government wants to do, or is ignored.




This is supposedly and influential book for Steve Bannon, still running loose in the Oval Office and helping Trump figure out what to do on things like the Paris Climate Agreement.

"Yes, the lips pay, but notice how trumpet players usually have an exaggerated vein going up their forehead." The Costs Of Perfection

I recommend listening to the video while you read this.  (I realize that Coltrane isn't a mass consumption product, but some of my readers must know this music.)




The following comes from an LA Times commentary by The Doors original drummer,  John Densmore, on the price musicians pay to master their craft.  He's also in a documentary coming out on Coltrane.

"Coltrane was one of the first tenor players to switch from the old plastic, black mouthpieces that made Coleman Hawkins famous to the silver metal ones. The old plastic ones were bigger and usually produced a heavy vibrato sound, whereas the new metal ones were smaller and elicited a more narrow tone.
The space for air to come into the horn is smaller (like the trumpet), and the trap of metal mouthpieces is to produce a “cold,” or modern, sound. JC chose to use a No. 5 reed (the wooden piece under the mouthpiece that vibrates), to counteract that problem; No. 5s are very hard pieces of wood.
That forced John to dig deeper into his abdomen for more air, but it produced a warmer sound. Hard work, but he was reaching for something new.
It turned into a simply gorgeous sound, full of empathy, passion and every emotion in the human condition — from the rage over four girls killed in the bombing of a church in a song called “Alabama” to the gentle feeling of photosynthesis in “After the Rain.”
Coltrane is so in my blood. Every time I go outside after a storm, I “hear” that melody."

He acknowledges other occupations also take their toll.  He mentions Sandy Koufax's elbow and offered this tribute to construction workers.  But in the end, he thinks it's worth it.

You know what, though? It’s all worth it. If you have to contort muscles to produce whatever you’re working on, so be it. That’s why high-rise buildings should have a plaque outside on the wall listing all the workers who built those skyscrapers … all of them.
And hopefully readers of this will have a new understanding and respect for the toll musicians pay for the love of their craft.

I've often wondered if the toll many Olympic athletes have to pay, or the children in China who are identified early and plucked out of their families to train to become perfect gymnasts or dancers, is worth it.   Yes, virtuosity is thrilling both for the performer and the audience, but is it worth giving up so much that encompasses being human?  I suspect the answer is different for different people.  We give up some things and gain others.   Many people have developed no skill at all and still live lives of pain, so why not go for it?  Or would we be better off in balance with nature and follow the Greeks' advice on the golden mean?  I think true artists push themselves in their pursuits of perfection.  It's what they have to do.

In any case, think about the people who built that skyscraper, who sewed your pants, worked on your microwave and your cell phone.  And enjoy the music, since it cost the musicians a great deal.

The title quote also comes from the article.

Quick SF Observations - Preschool Education, Aggressive Cars, Butterfly Wing

I've been watching a couple of kids (almost three and someone older) negotiate some pretty fancy playgrounds the last couple of days and I'm impressed at all the learning they're doing.  It's all about testing balance and strength and grip.  They're learning what their muscles can do, how far they can stretch or lean.  I watched my grandson today (the one under three) as he worked his way across a net.  He had to step on a shaky surface, keep from slipping through the holes, find handholds, and pull himself up onto a platform.  When he finally made it to the top he did a little dance shouting, "I did it!"

This is serious work.  Can you jump from rock to rock?  How do you get up different kinds of 'ladders'?  And while both the kids worked hard to master their challenges, it was also amazing the difference in ability the four months difference makes.

Sometimes they need a little help - a hand to hold, a suggested hand hold - but mostly they were better off just working it out themselves.

This is why I haven't had time to write here.

But here are a couple more pictures from the last two days.

This butterfly wing was caught while feeding on orange slices at the California Academy of Sciences rain forest exhibit.




And these two cars were in the underground garage.  These were two human-less parked cars, that struck me as appearing unusually aggressive.  Maybe there should be a special word for anthropomorphic for objects that were created by humans (as opposed to natural objects.)  And, I guess words that distinguish between living and non-living things.

Racism Is Racism Is Alive

[Note:  This is an unpleasant topic, but please indulge me.  The history here helps put today's narratives and actions into sharp focus.]

I've done more reading and listening about racism than the average American.  (No, that's not like Trump saying "I'm the least racist person ever." First, having read more about racism than the average American doesn't take much reading.  But I've been involved with Healing Racism in Anchorage for many years and I've attended many workshops on racism as well.  So my claim is no boast, nor an exaggeration.)

Yet reading White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide makes me feel like I was totally not getting it before.  Even though I know a lot of what Dr. Carol Anderson writes about.  But she puts together the pieces like I've never seen before.  I've already posted about the first chapter which traces how the South basically reestablished slavery after the civil war, but a nastier, meaner form.

  They did this with laws that denied the rights of blacks guaranteed in the then new fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, with the help of US Supreme Court decisions that said the federal government couldn't interfere with states, even if the states were denying those newly won rights such as citizenship and voting.  They also did it with laws that required blacks to have work contracts with white farmers or mine owners.  If they didn't, they could be convicted for vagrancy and then as convicts, leased out to those same employers with no pay and no rights.  Those are just a few of the structural means of denying Southern blacks their rights.

As a friend warned, the next chapters get worse.  This is material most of us want to avoid confronting and our schools, media, and general disposition have made that easy.  I'm asking you to just take another five minutes to do what all American really need to do.  It's the first step of overcoming denial.  And if you're not in denial, the first steps to understanding the enormity of the mistreatment of blacks, not by individuals, but by a corrupt and evil system that established elaborate legal structures to keep blacks in shackles.

Chapter 2 is called Derailing The Great Migration - how blacks fled the South during WWI, enticed by promises of better jobs in the North and how the Southern states did all they could to prevent that exodus. Laws banning newspapers that recruited blacks to the north.  Stopping trains. And how housing discrimination in the North condemned blacks to live in overcrowded poor ghettos.  Part of the problem with our education on these topics is that we've only gotten the most generalized descriptions, like the beginning of this paragraph.  We haven't seen all the mutilated bodies hanging from trees or burnt alive.  If you see this book in a book store, read the end of chapter 2.  In my hard cover edition it starts at the bottom page 56,

"Tired of the cramped living conditions and exasperated with paying exorbitant rents for ramshackle housing that landlords refused to repair, black professionals sought to move away from Black Bottom."

It goes on to relate the stories of two black doctors in Detroit who moved into white neighborhoods.  The first moved out the first day when neighbors mobbed his house.  The second brought friends and guns to protect his property.  The black doctor and his family were jailed for inciting a riot and murdering a white neighbor.  Everyone lied about what happened - the police, the neighbors, etc.  Only because they had Clarence Darrow as their attorney did they win the case, after the first trial ended in a hung jury, but meanwhile his wife and daughter and friend all contracted tuberculosis in prison and died after their release.  And this was in the North.


Chapter 3 is about how, following Brown v Board of Education, Southern (and to an extent Northern) states essentially nullified that decision to integrate the schools by a variety of tactics from using public money to fund private white academies, to simply not funding education for blacks, to enacting a variety of laws that they knew were unconstitutional, but that they also knew would take years to grind through the courts, giving them time to figure out more strategies.  Meanwhile black students were deprived of a their rightful education.

I've rushed through chapters 2 and 3 because chapter 4 offers some insights that cut to the chase about why Americans are ignorant about the magnitude of the Southern mistreatment of blacks and horrific impacts it's had on African Americans.  And why African American mistreatment and abuse continues to this day.

Chapter 4 is called Rolling Back Civil Rights.  It's about 1965 now.

"The impact of this civil rights struggle had been slow but significant.  Inequality had begun to lessen.  Incomes had started to rise.  Job and educational opportunities had expanded.  And just as with Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the Brown decision, this latest round of African American advances set the gears of white opposition in motion."(p, 99)

How?  First,  those who thought blacks were trying to get their rights too fast,  including Nixon, Reagan, and the Supreme Court, redefined what the civil rights movement was about.  

". . . centuries of oppression and brutality suddenly reduced to a harmless symbolism of a bus seat and a water fountain.  Thus when the COLORED ONLY signs went down, inequality had supposedly disappeared.  By 1965 Richard Nixon asserted, 'almost every legislative roadblock to equality of opportunity for education, jobs, and voting had been removed.'  Also magically removed, by this interpretation, were up to twenty-four trillion dollars in multigenerational devastation that African Americans had suffered in lost wages, stolen land, educational impoverishment, and housing inequalities.  All of that vanished as if it never happened."(p. 99)

To emphasize this point she quotes Patrick Buchanan.

"America has been the best country on earth for black folks.  It was here that 600,000 black people brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known." (p. 100)

So by taking down the "COLORED ONLY" signs, race was no longer an issue.  Sort of like, by electing a black president, race was no longer an issue.  But rather these events merely triggered more backlash against blacks.

"President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and affirmative action, which were developed to ameliorate hundreds of years of violent and corrosive repression, were easily characterized as reverse discrimination against hardworking whites and a 'government handout that lazy black people 'choose' to take rather than work.'" (p. 100)

 Second, was to redefine racism itself.

"Confronted with civil rights headlines depicting unflattering portrayals of KKK rallies and jackbooted sheriffs, white authority transformed those damning images of white supremacy into the sole definition of racism.  This simple but wickedly brilliant conceptual and linguistic shift served multiple purposes.  First and foremost, it was conscience soothing. . ." (p. 100)

Just as after World War II, there were no Germans who knew what had happened to the Jews, or who even were Nazis themselves [this is my insertion into Anderson's discussion],

"The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although 'resentful of black progress' and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the 'kind of upstanding white citizen[s]' who were 'positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.'  The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.  Moreover, isolating racism to only its most virulent and visible form allowed respectable politicians and judges to push for policies that ostensibly met the standard of America's new civil rights norms while at the same time crafting the implantation of policies to undermine and destabilize the norms, all too often leaving the black community ravaged."(pp. 100-101)

Between the time I read this today and I started this post I read a couple of Tweets that remind me that this legacy is alive and well and still doing its evil in the United States today. From the Dallas News:

"In a 2-1 ruling, a three-judge panel in San Antonio found that the maps gave Republicans an advantage in elections and weakened the voting strength of minority voters. House Districts in Dallas and Tarrant counties were among those in which the judges ruled minority voters had seen their clout weakened.
The ruling is yet another blow to the state in its six-year legal battle over the redrawing of the maps. Last month, the same court found that the state's congressional maps were drawn with intent to discriminate against minority voters and invalidated three congressional districts. And last week, a federal judge ruled that the state's voter ID law was written with intent to discriminate."

But like the delaying tactics to fight Brown v Board of Education, the redistricting was used for all the elections since 2011 and those candidates won't be unelected and their laws won't be invalidated.  So while this is a setback, there's new redistricting when the 2020 census comes out and so this will only, possibly affect, the 2018 and 2020 elections.  Cheating works.

This disenfranchisement of blacks continues.  And in 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled to end a key part of the Voting Rights Act that required pre clearance from the Justice Department before their redistricting plan could go into effect for a number of states including Texas and Alaska.  The court said the criteria set 40 years ago were out of date.  Just as Anderson tells us, they were arguing that the civil rights abuses had long ago ended.  But this decision - as well as the one for North Carolina  - show they haven't.  Had the Supreme Court NOT invalidating that section of the Voting Rights Act, Texas would have had to get the approval of the Justice Department before implementing their plan.  And that would not have happened under Obama's Justice Department.

But with Trump's Justice Department, would it matter?

The other Tweet was about Attorney General Jeff Sessions who said today,

"I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power."

This language about amazement and 'an island in the Pacific' (the State of Hawaii) is just about right from a man born in 1946 in Selma, Alabama, who was in elementary school when Brown v Board of Education was decided and he grew up in as racist a state as there was.  Where his family was surely part of the outraged Southerners who did all they could to block school integration.  So, the legacy that Anderson writes about is now reincarnated as the highest law enforcer of our nation.  This isn't even about a legacy, Sessions was right in the middle of the most virulent racist state in his formative years.  And he's now our Attorney General in charge of enforcing laws to protect our rights.  Disgraceful!

There's also this story in today's LA Times on neo-Nazi attack on Jewish woman in Montana.  The same kind of harassment, though mostly today digital that Southern blacks and their allies were subject too, though it hadn't gotten to the point of physical violence.  Nevertheless, the result was what all terrorist action wants - to put fear into the hearts of its victims.


A few choice quotes from the book about some of our past presidents (and one of Sessions' teen heroes I'm sure) from these three chapters.

"At the behest of his 'great friend' South Carolina governor James Byrnes, Eisenhower hosted a small dinner party at the White House to explain to Chief Justice Earl Warren that Southerners 'are not bad people.  Al they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside big overgrown Negroes.'"

"During his 1968 presidential bid, Alabama governor George Wallace understood this resentment.[white resentment of black gains]  He had experience a startling epiphany just a few years earlier after trying to blok the enrollment of an African American student in the state's flagship university at Tuscaloosa.  For that act of defiance, the governor received more than one hundred thousand congratulatory telegrams, half of which came from north of the Mason Dixon Line.  Right then he had a revelation:  'They all hate black people, all of them.  They're all afraid, all of them.  Great God! That's it!  They're  all Southern!  The whole United States is Southern!"

"Using strategic dog-whistle appeals - crime, welfare, neighborhood schools - to trigger Pavlovian anti-black responses, Nixon succeeded in defining  and maligning the Democrats as the party of African Americans, without once having to actually say the words.  That would be the 'elephant in the room.'  In fact, as H. R. Haldeman, one of the Republican candidate's most trusted aides, later recalled, "He [Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks.  The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.'"

"The objective [of redefining racism] was to contain and neutralize the victories of the Civil Rights Movement by painting a picture of a 'colorblind,' equal opportunity society whose doors were now wide open, if only African Americans would take initiative and walk on through.  Ronald Reagan breezily shared anecdotes about how Lyndon Johnson's great Society handed over hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a 'slum sweller' to live in posh government-sbsidied housing and provided food stamps for one 'strapping young buck' to buy steak, while another used the change he received from purchasing an orange to pay for a bottle of vodka.  He ridiculed Medicaid recipients as 'a faceless mass, waiting for handouts.'  The imagery was, by design, galling, and although the stories were far from the truth, they succeeded in tapping into a river of widespread resentment." 

Not much different from what we see today, not only about black, but even more so about Muslims.

Data Viz

Data visualization is the art of taking data and presenting it visually so the significance of the data is easy for people to read.   I took a class called "Data Exploration and Storytelling: Finding stories in data with storytelling and visualization" at the beginning of this year online. Alberto Cairo and Heather Krause co-taught it.

While 'data viz' isn't tumbling off most people's tongue's, it seems to be a big deal in journalism.  Or maybe just among a certain subset of journalism.  Cairo and Krause were terrific teachers - they knew their stuff and presented it clearly.  But 6000 people from around the world were signed up for this MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.  The assignments were basically to address questions in the discussion forums, not to do projects using data and the suggested software from Tableau.

Having taken the course, I'm seeing data viz all over the place.  Sort of like when you're pregnant you notice all the other pregnant women, or if you buy a new car, you start seeing that car everywhere.  It also helps that I started following Alberto Cairo on Twitter.

I'm thinking about this particularly now because I filled out a questionnaire about the MOOC yesterday, and I saw this chart on Twitter just now.

Literally the best advice ever I've had on #dataviz. Had to pin it to my desk#VizBookClub 📈 @tableau pic.twitter.com/aTRQvYZ7mh

— Ashish Chauhan (@ashishyoungy) March 28, 2017

So I'd also like to share this list [partial here] of best Data Viz websites from Medium Corporation:

1.  Story Telling With Data - the link takes you to a step-by-step post on decluttering of a data visualization.

2.  Junk Charts - "Junk Charts is made by Kaiser Fung, the Web’s first data visualization critic. I discuss what makes graphics work, and how to make them better. Think chartjunk + junk art."


3.  The Functional Art - "Alberto Cairo's weblog on visualization, infographics, and data journalism"  And if you've been paying attention, you'll know he was one of the professors for the class I took.  This one includes a lot of news about what's happening in the data viz field.

4.  Rock the Vizcomm - The link takes you to a post on a 2016 survey of data visualization professionals.  He lists these key findings:

"Key Findings

1. Practitioners are using an incredibly large array of tools to do their work, while some market leaders are beginning to emerge.
2. “Increasing understanding” is the primary goal of data visualization but after that, the opinions vary.
3. Good data and trained staff are the keys to success, while “figuring out the story” in the data remains a critical challenge for many.
4. Those who are measuring their outcomes expect spending on visualization to increase, with nearly one in five expecting significant growth."

5.  Our World in Data - I realize this is a post on visualization blogs and so far it's mainly words.  So here's a visualization.  It had four countries listed.  Ethnocentric as I am, I added the US (the upper red line beginning 1900).  The cursor will give you specific data.

Surely there are a bunch of doctoral dissertations waiting to be written by people discussing the correlations between the peaks and valleys and the political, economic, and social events in each country.  Note the US dip in the 1950s.  Is it because all the youngish men were tired from the war (or off to Korea)?  Because they were in college on the GI bill?  Because the US had the highest income taxes ever?  Because economic equity was and hope was high?   Lots to chew on.


6.  The Perceptual Edge - "Visual Business Intelligence: A blog by Stephen Few" And yes, this one focuses on business.

I've just taken the top six of  Medium Corporations list of best Data Viz websites of 2016.  Go to the link to see the other six on the list.

Afternoon At Elliott Bay Book Company - Scary Old Sex, The Life You Can Save, And More

While in Seattle this last time, I got the pleasure of browsing the shelves at the Elliot Bay Book Company on Capitol Hill.  Here are some books to munch on.  I hope this reminds folks that there is more to do than follow Tweets about politics,

Alec Ross - Industries of the Future


You can watch Ross talk about this book at this Ted Talk presentation.  He talks about growing up in West Virginia and teaching in West Baltimore.  He thinks the kids he saw in those place are no less intelligent than kids anywhere.  Those kids didn't fail, the system did.

Premise of the book:  If the last 20 years were shaped by the rise of digitization and the internet, if that's what produced the jobs and wealth, what's next?
The book, he says, mentions a number, but in this talk he flags three.

1. Big data analytics - land was the raw material of the agricultural age, iron of the industrial age, and data is the raw material of the information age.  Background in data analytics will get you employment for the next 20 years or so.  
2. Cyber security - just an associate degree will get you a job starting at $60,000, with college degree, $90,000.
3. Genomics - The world's next trillion dollar industry will be created by our genetic code.  

Question is:  How inclusive will these industries be?  San Jose, for instance, has 4000 homeless people.
How to compete and succeed in tomorrow's world.

Three things we can do now for your kids:

1. Do not rely on the systems to save you.  Because the system fails kids.  Create your own system to save the kids.  
2. Make sure your kids learn languages - foreign languages and computer languages.  
3. Be a life long learner yourself.  

Loss of hope and loss of opportunity is fatal.

The video fills in a lot more background.  I've just given you the barest outline.

[If I do all of these in this much detail, I'll be up way past my bedtime.  I've already decided to do this in two parts.  Each one of these is worthy of a post of its own.  But the point is to just give you a quick look at these titles, like you were browsing in the book store.]

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o - In The House Of The Interpreter

Margaret Busby, reviewing this book in the Independent writes:

"From the first pages of In the House of the Interpreter, strong and memorable themes emerge: the power of education, the rootedness of kin, the need to transform the colonialist narrative. "How could a whole village, its people, history, everything, vanish, just like that?"

This memoir takes place in 1950s Kenya as the Mau Mau are fighting for independence from the British and Ngugi is going to a school.

"Alliance High School is a sanctuary. It is an elitist establishment – the first secondary school for Africans in the country – founded by a coalition of Protestant churches and initially shaped by American charitable funding that aimed at turning out 'civic-minded blacks who would work within the parameters of the existing racial state'".

Arlene Heyman - Scary Old Sex

From a New Yorker review:

"Consider a character like the retired doctor in the story “Nothing Human,” a grandmother three times over, who takes the opportunity of a cruise-ship vacation to berate her husband for his squeamishness: “We can’t try anal intercourse because you think I’m filled with shit to the brim. You have no sense of anatomy. I can take an enema! You can use a condom!” She knows she’s being less than fair. It’s the middle of the night, and he’s half asleep; she picked a fight over his not washing his hands as he groped his way back from the cabin bathroom, and now she’s turned to nagging to cover her deeper anxieties about the relationship. Was he in there to masturbate, when they haven’t had sex since the start of the cruise? When they got together a decade ago, after her first husband’s death, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She misses that, and she misses her first husband, too. But she’s too wise to indulge in nostalgia. When she dreams occasionally of her first husband, it’s in a detached, friendly way—'like a little visit.'”

This is a description of one of the short stories in this book, stories about older women and sex.  The author, Anne Heyman, is a psychoanalyst in her 70s.  To prove that so called sophisticated magazines like the New Yorker aren't any different from other media, the reviewer spends most of the review on literary gossip about Heyman's early affair with a much older famous author and how that affair is treated in different works of fiction.

Peter Singer - The Life You Can Save 

Singer is a prolific and well known philosopher.  You can actually read this book online here.   In the Preface, he writes about this book:

"I have been thinking and writing for more than thirty years about how we should respond to hunger and poverty.  I have presented this book's arguments to thousands of students in my university classes and in lectures around the world, and to countless others in newspapers, magazines, and television programs.  As a result, I've been forced to respond to a wide range of thoughtful challenges.  This book represents my effort to distill what I've learned about why we give, or don't give, and what we should do a out it."

Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie


I pulled this book off the shelf because Liu is the translator for the Chinese science fiction book, Three Body Problem.

Amal El-Mothar writes about the book for NPR:

"Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a book from which I staggered away, dazed, unable to speak. I have wrestled with how to review it, circled my metaphors like a wary cat, and finally abandoned the enterprise of trying to live up to its accomplishment. I will be honest, and blunt, because this is a book that has scoured me of language and insight and left itself rattling around inside the shell of me."

No wonder he was asked to translate The Three Body Problem.






Neil Gaiman - The View From The Cheap Seats




I know Gaiman from the graphic novel Sandman, a gift from my son.  This is a collection of non-fiction essays.  Kirkus Review writes:

"Gaiman (Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances, 2015, etc.) is a fan. Of course, as a writer, he’s created unforgettable worlds and characters, but in this collection of essays, introductions, speeches, and other nonfiction works, it’s his fan side that comes through most strongly. The author writes about the thrill of discovering a piece of art that feels like it was made just for you; the way certain books or songs seem to slot into a place in your heart you didn’t know was there; the way a text can mean different things at different times in your life. If the idea of going on a long, rambling walk with Gaiman and asking him about his influences sounds appealing, this is the book for you."

Jason Heller offers a longer review at NPR.

Charles Johnson - The Way Of The Writer

From a short review in the NY Times:

"Johnson’s book, the record of a single year’s email correspondence with his friend E. Ethelbert Miller, is a piecemeal meditation on the daily routines and mental habits of a writer. Johnson describes his study’s curated clutter, his nocturnal working rhythms and the intense labor of his revisions, alongside a careful outline of a theory, reminiscent of both Aristotle and Henry James, of how plots emerge from a “ground situation.” There is a winning sanity here: Johnson wants his students to be “raconteurs always ready to tell an engaging tale,” not self-preoccupied."

As I read some of this book in the bookstore, it was one I knew I needed to get back to.


I've got another bunch of images of books from that afternoon which I'll try to get up before too long.

They Doubted Alexander Humboldt's Intellectual Ability

I started reading Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature:  Alexander Humboldt's New World while Z was getting her swimming lessons.  (That's another wonderful story.)

You know - Humboldt like in the Humboldt Current, or Humboldt County, or any number of mountains, bays, glaciers, towns named after him all over the world.

The introduction talks about the 100th anniversary of his birth,

"On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, alexander von Humboldt's centennial was celebrated across the world.  There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas.  In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honor of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.  There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the 'Shakespeare of sciences', and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks.  The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from an Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street pa were in the United Strades, sumptuous dinners and concerts.  In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long.   President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburg together with 10,000 resellers who brought the city to a standstill."

Somehow I missed that in American history.  The next paragraph talks about the celebrations in New York City.

So what did Humboldt do that made him such a hero around the world?

"Most important . . . Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world.  He found connections everywhere.  Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, was looked at on its own.  'In this great chain of causes and effects,' Humboldt said, 'no single fact can be considered in isolation.'  With this insight, he invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today."

He got his insights from a strong scientific education, a strong interest in nature, a wealthy family that allowed him to make amazing journeys around the world collecting observations of nature.

"After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800 [just as the United States was becoming a country], Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change.  Deforestation there had made the land barren, water levels of the lake were falling and with the disappearance of brushwood torrential rains had washed away the soils on the surrounding mountain slopes.  Humboldt was the first to explain the forest's ability to enrich the atmosphere with moisture and its cooling effect, as well as its importance for water retention and protection against soil erosion.  He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on 'future generations.'"

Wolf talks about how his ideas influenced others.

"Thomas Jefferson called him 'one of the greatest ornaments of the age'. [Is that a compliment?] Charles Darwin wrote that 'nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt's Personal Narrative,' saying that he would not have boarded the Beagle, nor conceived of the Origin of Species without Humboldt.  William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both incorporated Humboldt's concept of nature into their poems.  And American's most revered nature writer, Henry David Thoreau, found in Humboldt's books an answer to his dilemma on how to be a poet and a naturalist - Waldon would have been a much different book without Humboldt.  Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary who liberated South America from Spanish colonial rule, called Humboldt the 'discoverer of the New World' and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest poet, declared that spending a few days with Humboldt was like 'having lived several years'."

So it seems spending a few weeks with Humboldt via Wulf's book, seems like a good use of my time.

This is all background to better understand the title of this post.

Alexander and his older brother learned  Latin and Greek and Enlightenment science and humanities from tutors,  one of whom was particularly stingy with praise.  He was important in their lives because their father had died when Alexander was ten and the tutor was with them a number of years.

". . . Kunth was never quite satisfied with their progress.  Whenever they made a mistake, Kunth reacted as if they had done so to hurt or offend him.  For the boys, this behavior was more painful than if he had spanked them with a cane.  Always desperate to please Kunth, as Wilhelm [the older brother] later recounted, they had felt a 'perpetual anxiety' to make him happy.
  It was particularly difficult for Alexander, who was taught the same lessons as his precocious brother, despite being two years younger.  The result was that he believed himself to be less talented.  When Wilhelm excelled in Latin and Greek, Alexander felt incompetent and slow.  He struggled so much, Alexander later told a friend, that his tutors 'were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be developed in him'." (emphasis added)

Judgments of teachers can do great good and great harm.  Different kids react differently to different ways of teaching.  One of my very best teachers was stingy with praise and quick to dismiss, but I learned more from him than any other teacher.

And somehow Alexander got past these challenges to become the kind of scientist who was able to synthesize vast amounts of information and see how all the pieces fit together.  Looking forward to this book.

[I've posted more about this book here.]

Inaugural Graphic - Length, Words, Great Interactive Visuals

My last post talked about the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) I'm taking now on Data Exploration and Storytelling.  Below is an example of a pretty spectacular example of taking data and presenting it in a relatively easy to use graphic.  It's a Google undertaking.   I'm not sure how critical the content is, but I foresee media doing this sort of thing on state or municipal budgets, crime statistics, proposed legislation, etc. that makes it much easier for citizens to get better way to understand important public policy issues.


Alberto Cairo, one of the instructors in the my class, was an advisor to this graphic that compares the eleven most searched presidents' inaugural addresses.

It's highly interactive and you can see each use of a particular key word, including the sentence it is in.

The five categories of words (and five diagrams) include:

• Politics (Words:  Justice, Constitution, Democracy, President of the US, Communism, Republic, US Congress)
• Finance (Tax, Money, Commerce, Economy)
• Emotions & Human Traits (Love, Happiness, Dignity, Courage, Sacrifice, Compassion, Loyalty, Patriotism, Morality)
• Spirit and Mind (Bible, God, Spirit, Soul, Destiny, Prayer, Faith, Truth, Wisdom, Conscience)
• Society (Liberty, Hero, Freedom, Crime, Revolution, Peace, Promise, Wealth, Poverty, Hatred, Common Good)  

Guess who used the word 'wealth' more than anyone else.

Below is a screenshot, which doesn't have the interactivity of the original.  But click on the image to go to the original.

You can see the total length of the speech by how far down it goes. Each bar or rectangle represents a sentence and your cursor can pop up each sentence.

The dots represent each time the president used one of the word listed above. Yellow shows the word that is highlighted - in this screenshot, it's the word democracy. You'll notice that Trump didn't use any of these words - but neither did Lincoln, Kennedy, or Nixon. For the screenshot, I highlighted one of the first Bush's use of the word Democracy.

As I said in yesterday's post, readers have to be vigilant, perhaps even more vigilant, of graphics like this.  There's always the danger that the cool factor will depress people's attention to design or factual issues.  People need to understand the assumptions of the graphic makers.  In this case the creators explain their decisions:

• "we picked the presidents based on the most searched presidents on Google since 2004"
• Our analysis of a selection of historical inauguration speeches allowed us to extract the most common subjects mentioned in speeches. 
• Subjects that were at least mentioned 4 times overall were selected. 
• These subjects are organized by theme, and 
• by comparing them with average search interest from Google search data in 2016, you can explore if these subjects are still searched for today."

There are lots of decisions that have to be made and that could effect the comparisons.  Perhaps picking presidents who came into offie under similar economic or war conditions as Trump would have made more sense.  But determining that would also involve lots of decisions.

And there's an assumption that all this is accurate.  But the website (before the Society chart) says:

"Contrary to other recent Presidents, President Trump does not mention the word Freedom."

Well, that's not exactly true.  Trump said,

". . . we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American Flag."

I'm not sure how long this took to prepare and how many people were involved.  There's a brief overview at Alberto Cairo's blog, where I learned about it.  

Data Journalism In The Alternative Fact Era

This is the second week of a MOOC class I'm taking called "Data Exploration And Story Telling" taught by Alberto Cairo and Heather Krause.

I'm taking this class because several work sessions at Alaska Press Club conferences (for example this session with Chrys Wu)   have convinced me of the power of being able to extract information from online or otherwise acquired (with permission of course) data bases and then manipulating that data, offers opportunities for really powerful stories.

[For those of you still scratching your head about MOOC, it's Massive Open Online Course.  This class has some 6000 students.   And when I write 'manipulate' I mean it in the sense of reorganizing the data so that the meaning of the numbers is easier to understand.  But I acknowledge that it is easy to misinterpret the data both accidentally and intentionally.]

Data Journalism seems to be a hot topic these days as large data bases are increasingly becoming available.  For me the issue is figuring out how to download them, clean them up, and then play with them to find interesting patterns.   That's what I'm hoping to get out of the class.

Here's a link to a Guardian article on data journalism.  Here's a section of that article that is becoming increasingly clear to me

"5. Data journalism is 80% perspiration, 10% great idea, 10% output
It just is. We spend hours making datasets work, reformatting pdfs, mashing datasets together. You can see from this prezi how much we go through before we get the data to you. Mostly, we act as the bridge between the data (and those who are pretty much hopeless at explaining it) and the people out there in the real world who want to understand what that story is really about."

This is both encouraging (I'm not a dummy because I think this looks like a lot of work) and discouraging (because I'm one blogger without a team of folks to help figure this out and do the work.)

Numbers, graphically displayed, can powerful tell stories that are otherwise invisible.  I've known this for many years.  It can often be relatively simple to prove or disprove someone's idea by getting the numbers.  I remember back in the 1980s at the Municipality of Anchorage, a couple of fairly easy projects where data ended or changed the conversation.

One was about the use of pool cars.  The Muni had some cars that employees could use to go out on Muni business.  We were getting complaints that there weren't enough cars and people were getting turned down.  We just asked the person who assigned the cars to log the requests for a month.  It turned out that anyone who asked for a car 24 hours in advance, got one.  But people who wanted a car in ten minutes sometimes got turned down.  That report ended the discussion.

Another study of the people making over $10,000 a year in overtime was sent to all the department heads, just to let them know.  This highlighted some departments with high rates and led to more careful monitoring and in some cases to adding positions.

Hospitals have used data on treatment and length of stay and recidivism rates for each doctor's patients in certain units.  The data led to doctors making changes in their treatment of patients.

So I know this can be very powerful.  We'll see whether I can learn to do this with the tools I have - I've been an Excel holdout, trying to by with Apple's version, Numbers.  And there seem to be a number of folks in class who are doing this already as part of their work.  And this class seems a little harder to negotiate online than the Coursera class I took in the fall.  There are so many forums and comments - which there should be with 6000 students - that it feels a bit like being in jammed train station at rush hour.

And then there's the issue of storytelling.  I believe in the power of stories and their importance.  But I'm starting to get concerned about how loosely it is being used, and how it can lend to people dismissing the stories as, just that, stories.  Something made up.

We're in the era when photos can be easily manipulated by anyone and now video can be manipulated to change the narrative.  The use of story lines by media is nothing new.  The broader skepticism on the part of the public is also a good thing.  But skepticism without the critical skills to assess a story's accuracy is problematic.  We're in an era where people shop around until they find the spin that fits their world view, wether it's accurate or not.

And some take full advantage of this.  Trump tells whatever story makes him look good and challenges those that don't.  From the LA Times:

Challenged on NBC's "Meet the Press" about Spicer making incorrect claims, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway made a startling characterization , that Spicer gave "alternative facts."
“You're saying it's a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” Conway told host Chuck Todd, who immediately interjected his disbelief over her description.
Conway eventually backed off Spicer's adamant claims and inflated crowd estimates. “I don’t think you can prove those numbers one way or the another,” she said. “There's no way to really quantify crowds."

Alternative facts?  No way to really quantify crowds?   Really?

If you live in Trump's competitive world where everything is about winning, then facts only matter if they help you win.  You challenge the umpire every time he calls you out and every time he calls your opponent safe.  Whether you got to the base before the ball did is irrelevant.  Instant replay is only your friend if it confirms your claim.

Can data journalism become a form of instant replay?  I suspect not.  It plays a different role.  Instant replay shows us, in slow motion and from a better angle, what we all just saw from different angles at high speed.  Data journalism goes through lists of numbers and converts them into visuals that make sense of the numbers.  It makes the incomprehensible, comprehensible.

And people will have to become more sophisticated about data collection, about categories used in collecting data, about survey questions, and a whole lot of other things if they're going to be able to evaluate the accuracy of data journalism.

Journalist have to learn those things.  In the first week of the class, Heather Krasue offered students a checklist for data:

• Who collected the data?
• How they collected the data?
• Who was included? 
• When it was collected?  
• Why did they collected the data?  

So, between watching the class videos, reading the articles, participating in the forums, and doing the assignments, not to mention playing with my granddaughter and other duties as assigned, keeping up here is getting sketchy.

Here's another look at this topic that my friend Jeremy posted on FB the other day.

Diagram of Connections in Newstown Development Scandal

[Regular Blog readers, see note to you below]

[Coursera readers - below is the chart that graphically shows the key shell corporations that my article explains.  I couldn't put it into the story, so I've posted it here for you.  You can either look at it here or you can download the pdf image to look at while you read the article.]

Regular Blog Readers:  This chart is part of my assignment for the online course I'm taking from the University of Melbourne (Australia) called Journalism Skills for Involved Citizens,  We have been getting more information each week on a land development deal in a fictional town called Newstown.  This week we got to see a set of documents about political donations and corporations.  I decided that the best way to illustrate the links between these corporations was to make a diagram.  But it turns out I can't put an illustration into the template for my assignment.  So I'm linking the graders here.

The Foundation for Good Government (FGG) contributed to the campaign of the mayor of Newstown to the tune of $80,000.  The various documents show us the connections between the Foundation for Good Government and the CEO of Futupia, Robert Blatchford.  As you can see in the chart, Shield PTY company has a share of FGG as does Newstown 38.

Newstown 38, in turn is owned by Robrey PTY, which is owned by Roblatch, which is wholly owned by Robert Blatchford, the CEO.  And Shield PTY is also owned by Roblatch.  So, in fact FGG is wholly owned by the developer.  And all the companies have the same address at Rocket Suite 1101.

There's a lot more, but I decided in this case a picture was worth more than 1000 words.

I'm not sure that the other students who end having to grade this will agree, since I'm not exactly sticking with the assignment.

"Conflicts of Interest and the Medical Value of Tree Frog Raise New Questions About Newstown Marshes"

That was the headline on the news article I submitted last night for my online class on Journalism Skills for Engaged Citizens from the University of Melbourne through Coursera. The lead paragraph went on:

"New revelations arose this week about the mayor’s personal financial interests in Futopia’s Newstown Marshes project and about the potential medical value of the endangered auburn tree frog.  More questions linger about the effectiveness of the flood control projects given the impacts of climate change on future flooding."

Over the several weeks of the course, new information emerges on the "Newstown" website which includes background on key players, press releases, interviews, and other bits of information on the events of the fictional community of Newstown, somewhere northwest of Melbourne, Australia.  Each week a little more is revealed.

Last week our assignment was to write a lead sentence for the story of the Newstown Marshes development.

This week we had to do a whole story.  I submitted mine just before the deadline - which is somewhat confusing for a class with people in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

The key story revolves around a land development deal in environmentally delicate marshlands.

This week the instructors conducted video interviews;  one example of a poor interview and one of a good interview with each of the key players.  I do interviews now and then for the blog, and I know about preparing for them as an academic, but I haven't previously read stuff about how journalists do it.  One issue that resonated with me is that most journalists don't like confronting people about things they don't want to talk about.  That made it feel a little less daunting.   There was also an interesting lecture on interviewing people undergoing trauma - something that some journalists routinely, but isn't normally part of my blogger beat.

My blogging experience has helped me to review information quickly and see the whole story and then fill it in with facts and quotes.

After submitting our stories, we then have to grade four of our classmates' papers as well.  There's a template for grading that makes it fairly easy to mark levels on different aspects - like covering all the key facts in the story.

When I taught, I had  developed my own template for grading my students' papers which helped considerably to articulate to students what I was actually looking for and what I thought they did well or poorly.  It also forced me to give examples of why I gave a lower or higher grade.  Sometimes, in looking for those examples, I found my score on that factor was wrong, and I'd change it.

The templates for the course are similarly useful, but we're also limited in comments to:

The aspect of this article I most enjoyed was…

The most useful suggestion for improvement to this article I can make is…

The spelling and grammar errors I identified (if any) in this submission were…

I think limiting the areas for improvement is a good idea because taking criticism is difficult.
People can deal with one point, but lots might be overwhelming. And since everyone in this class is getting feedback from at least four classmates, that should suffice.  It also helps to make one's  point by identifying specific concrete examples and how to improve them.  This allows you to get straight to the issue without having to use judgmental terms.  

I've found that the papers I've had to grade were really quite good.  Generally they got the key ideas and were written in clear English.  Better than some graduate papers I've read here at UAA.  But I also suspect that a lot of people aren't actually turning in assignments because the number of  assignments listed is far short of the number of students who were originally signed up for the class.

A couple more things of interest in this assignment for me included the inverted pyramid idea and the Hemingway editor.

The inverted pyramid was offered as a template for writing news stories - with the most important

Image from Cyber College

points at the top, and then filling in the less important ones further down.  While that's generally a good way to write, specifically identifying it as an inverted pyramid was helpful.  And I think I've heard that before, but I haven't thought about it that way when I've been blogging stories.  And while I'll think about it now, I'm not sure that's the format I want to always use.  I like to give a lot more context and to speak directly from me to the reader about what I'm doing and why.  (Which is what the ethical principles I wrote about recently say to do.)



The Hemingway Editor is a tool to check the readability of your article.  You just paste it in and it gives you a score and marks your article up in different colors.

0 of 9 sentences are hard to read.

9 of 9 sentences are very hard to read.

2 phrases have simpler alternatives.

3 adverbs. Aim for 2 or fewer.

1 use of passive voice.Aim for 2 or fewer.

My sense is that this is a simple formula related to things like  number of words in a sentence and doesn't assess how well the words were put together.  One paper I had to grade got a horrendous Hemingway score, but was really quite readable.  With all the attribution we had to use in our stories, the sentences got a little longer and more comma'd up than the Hemingway editor likes.  But if it's done well it's fine.

But I think dropping work into the Hemingway editor is not a bad idea to remind me to look for easier ways to say something.  

I think there are a couple more weeks left of the class.  Overall, it's not too taxing.  The online interface is good.  We see the instructors in video, but we have no interaction with them at all.  We do have discussion boards, but there's relatively little extended discussion.  Teaching assistants monitor the discussions.  It's an alternative to getting information from a book, or maybe it's using the internet to augment what you can do with just print and it's not as linear as a book.  And I am able to take this class for free.  Maybe the paying students get more attention, but it doesn't appear so.  What they get is a certificate at the end.