Highlights
Writing in a Democracy
From left: Gaston Caperton, Susan Tifft, Adam Gopnik, and Bob Herbert
A panel discussion with authors Adam Gopnik, Bob Herbert, and Susan Tifft, moderated by College Board President Gaston Caperton
On the morning of Saturday, October 30th, Barbara Eason-Watkins, chief education officer of the Chicago Public Schools and co-chair of the Forum 2004 Program Planning Committee, welcomed all attendees to the first general session of the Forum. On behalf of her fellow co-chairs, Ted Spencer, director of admissions at the University of Michigan, and Tally Hart, director of student financial aid at the Ohio State University. Eason-Watkins thanked all the volunteers and staff who had made the Forum possible. She then welcomed Gaston Caperton and the panelists there to talk about the role of writing in a democracy.
Governor Caperton began by asking each panelist where writing had played a role in the formation of the United States. Bob Herbert, a columnist for the New York Times, evoked the Federalist Papers and those statesman-writers who "made the case for the federal system that still exists today."
Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, described a moment when editing had played a pivotal role: "I always think all writers hate editors but our country was born with the single greatest editorial fix in the history of letters. That's when Jefferson wrote 'we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.' And Ben Franklin, who was looking over his shoulder, said make it 'self evident. We hold these truths to be self evident.'"
That change stripped the phrase of a sacred or belligerent tone, said Gopnik, and turned the idea into something accessible to everyone. "Anybody who thinks about it will see that it's so," said Gopnik, "and that's so much at a heart of everything that's positive about American pragmatism, American openness. All you need to do is think about it and its clear."
Susan Tifft, a professor of Journalism at Duke University and the author of two books on the history of journalism, evoked the recent publication of the 9-11 Commission Report as a moment when good writing played a role in American democracy. "I was so struck by it because from the very beginning, the Commission set out to write a report that was going to be read, that wasn't just going to be gathering dust on some bookshelf. It was great, strong, spare, compelling writing."
Herbert agreed and noted that the report was an important example of why all students must learn to read and write for themselves. "We want the 9-11 Report to have some positive effect but for it to have the full effect that it should have, you need an audience of Americans who are capable of grasping, understanding, and appreciating the richness of that report, and then moving from the document itself to the imposition of real recommendations. You can't do that if too many members of the public are not educated and cannot grasp the implications of that report."
Caperton then asked Gopnik why the New Yorker had chosen to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time this year. Gopnik explained that while the magazine is not a journal of opinion, the editors felt strongly that something was at stake in this election that went beyond mere partisan disagreement. "I want to say this in a way that is as bipartisan as an entirely partisan claim can possibly be," said Gopnik. "We felt, as an institution, that something crucial was at stake in the election on Tuesday, and what was crucially at stake had something to do with the future of liberalism writ large. I don't just mean liberalism in of narrow sense of voting democratic or believing in Pell grants or a whole agenda of that kind. Language itself was at stake, a kind of honesty, a tradition of tolerance, an understanding that a range of positions could be considered equally patriotic."
Gopnik went on to explain that he did not mean liberal in the political sense, but rather in "the root sense of loving freedom, loving free debate. And that seemed to [the editors] to be essentially threatened by the actions and the rhetoric of the current administration."
Caperton asked the other panelists what they thought the word liberal had come to mean. "When I think of liberal, I think in terms of tolerance and the idea that government can take steps to alleviate the suffering of its citizens and maybe accelerate steps toward a better life," said Herbert. "This is a liberal country. American-style democracy was a grand experiment in liberalism and as far as I'm concerned, it has been working fairly well for a long time, although I think that its in deep trouble now."
Tiff agreed. "The root of that word is progress, something that embraces change that says change is inevitable and we're going to do whatever we can to have change in the best way possible."
Caperton asked the authors what they believed were the consequences of the rash of political books that had been published during this election season. "It's an indication that the spigots of information have not been turned off in this country," said Herbert. "One of the greatest things I think about the United States of America is that if you work hard enough you can get access to almost all the information you want. We've had an administration for the last four years that would like to close off the pathways to really important information and that has just not worked. We are used to the idea of a free and open press. The media are growing not shrinking. There still is a hunger among Americans for that information."
Gopnik described how the bloggers and the massive quantity of political discussion that took place on the Internet also gave him a renewed faith in the power of writing. "I remember ten or15 years ago, there was this notion that language itself, written language, was just vanishing from the world and we were going into a world of sound bites and visuals," said Gopnik. "But if you think about it, the Internet has proven to be above all a medium of writing. What has worked a greater revolution in the way that we relate to each other in then past decade than email? Basically I live on email. I'm hardly a human being any more. I'm just a vehicle for email."
Caperton asked each panelists if there was anyone in particular who had inspired them to write. Herbert answered that it had been his father, an upholsterer, who loved books and encouraged his son to read. "I remember going around to customers houses with my dad, and I remember him complaining all the time, 'there's no books in that house, there are no newspapers strewn around the floor. How can people go without reading?'"
Gopnik described writing an impassioned letter to his parents at age nine after a disagreement over his allowance. His father had been persuaded by his argument and Gopnik knew at that moment that he wanted to be a writer. "I genuinely realized that there was this amazing alchemy that was possible in the world, that you put marks on paper and you changed people's feelings. You could actually alter your parents' minds and pocketbooks by the skillful orchestration of words. I remain in awe of that power now. These black and white marks on paper actually enter other people's heads as bits of experience, as entreaties, as emotions."
After their discussion, Caperton called for questions from the audience. A school counselor asked whether the writers had any advice she could pass on to her students struggling with their college application essays.
"I always say try and write it to the smartest person that you know who sees right through you," said Gopnik.
"Young writers especially try to hide. They hide in the tall weeds of excess verbiage and they think more words are better and they hide in bureaucratic words that they've heard," said Tifft. "With my students, I talk about putting a magnet over their piece, and all those excess words that you didn't need--the adjectives that don't really say anything and the bureaucratic words, like 'to dialogue with'--if we pulled all that stuff up, then all that is left is the bare bones. Then you'd probably have a wonderfully powerful, spare piece."
