In his very laudatory Foreword to Why Johnny Can’t Think Joe Sobran said you couldn’t even really call it a book. He was right in the usual sense of that term. It is not a book because there are no talking heads in it.
I am about to write to book about American history from the Southern point of view. Those who love Southern history know that there are few places outside of Elizabethan England from which greater oratory came. That thundering speech is what most of us love to quote.
Those who look to my book for it will be deeply, sorely, heartbrokenly disappointed.
And furious.
I write logic, not oratory. I am pretty good at real oratory myself. I had the paychecks to prove it.
What Sobran wanted was more quotes and especially more quotes from Great Men about how bad things are in America. My book was based on the proposition that everybody could see what I was talking about by a proper reading of the magazines in a doctor’s waiting room.
After one hundred-hour-a-week job after another, steam-cooker pressure job in Washington, I had had enough. So I took a nice, forty-hour-week career job as a writer for the Voice of America.
Needless to say, that “easy” job was the one that did me in. It wasn’t any scary assignments abroad. I could handle an assault weapon.
What did me in was the tape recorder.
All the editors at VOA came from the cookie cutter that produces all media writers today. You have to have a “talking head” in every discussion. So every time you have a TV reporter say, “Many government officials feel that lemons are sour” they have to cut to a clip that shows a man with the words, “James L. Kliphammer, D-New York” below his picture saying, “In my opinion, lemons are sour.”
This is what is called “a talking head” that says what everybody knows. Every cookie-cutter reporter has to do that.
So I was paid the highest salary of any writer in my area because I was an expert on American government. My fatal assignment was to explain the workings of the American government for foreign broadcasts.
Every broadcast had to have two “talking heads.”
To get a “talking head” that week, you had to arrange an interview with an official at the part of the government you were talking about, do a taped interview with him, and then write so that some piece of the tape you had made could be cut and quoted.
I had to cut the tape myself. Anyone who has ever done this will tell you it is, to say the least, tedious. So is setting up an interview in that week. Two of them are twice the fun.
The cookie-cutters were all trained in news departments. What I was doing was not news. I was trying to explain the workings of the many segments of the United States Government to foreigners. It is not easy to explain the workings of the United States Government to Americans. But trying to treat the Federal Communications Commission as if it were a news item and sticking in talking heads made the task impossible. The FCC was not invented this week and the place of a regulatory agency inside the administrative machinery of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches is not helped by the current opinion of some appointee.
My books were NOT cookie-cutter books. They are explanations of what you already know or should know from a different point of view. I had to rewrite “Why Johnny Can’t Think” fifteen times, and I don’t think there’s a quote in the whole thing.
I don’t WRITE talking heads. I AM the talking head here.
I WROTE the quotes they used from congressmen and senators and cabinet members and the president. At age forty I couldn’t adjust to trying to fit some inane remarks into the complicated explanation they hired me for.
And after I left they couldn’t find a product of the cookie-cutter who COULD.
So my last book was not a REAL book.
My next one won’t be either.
#1 by Alan B on 10/24/2006 - 2:07 pm
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Objectivity and common sense are rarely a byproduct of anything sponsored by the goverment. Voice of America could have been called. The mouth piece of the Establishment would be a beter tile for the Voice of America. The talking weirdo’s or hairdos read from a script Bob prepared, these elitist as usual, stroked their egos and as usual, wanted to come across as the great statesmen of America. Common sense and reason are a byproduct of the human experience, what we get from goverment is the nanny state idea that even things that are common sense require the endorsement of the elite, even if this individual is a dunce, its the illusion that those in power must be wise. The true voice of America comes from the regualr folks who are what make America great, no edorsements, spectacular quotes by famous men or goverment hacks are required. This approach is reality plain and simple.
#2 by Dave on 10/24/2006 - 2:51 pm
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RE: BW’s “Logic”.
How does one successfully compete? By having better insights than your competitors.
I am such an intensely competitive person that I have spent my life furiously looking for advantages. That is why I so much appreciate BW because he has been the best intellectual coach I have ever run across.
And believe me, I have run across I lot of them.
BW taught me to appreciate wordist orthodoxies and the profound role they play in law and politics. He also convinced me that the asymmetries of race trump everything in economics.
These are not trivial insights.
But Mark’s “Brilliant Line” restating BW is the most profound: “Those who own the present own the Future. Those who own the present NEVER have any serious relationship to what is really going to happen.”
I so much appreciate this insight because I have spent years studying system dynamics.
Reflecting BW and his basic thinking, Mark conveys a system dynamics perspective that is fundamentally scientific in character. In science we are concerned with what actually happens and why, not with what “is supposed” to happen.
Our current computers are not powerful enough to do dynamic simulations in the form of animations (three dimensional objects) in a way that is reasonable regarding the labor and expense involved in creating them. But this will change and when it does, BW insights will be useful for computer simulations that convey racial asymmetries and wordist politics in avatar animations providing a great indoctrination tool for our struggle.
BW says our current society is running on “inertia”. That’s a system dynamics perspective also.
Accordingly, a history book is more important if it conveys knowledge useful to obtaining an objective. In our case that objective is the preservation of our race, the defeat of our oppressors, and the management of the non-white hordes descending upon us.
In order to do that, we must have superior insights to out compete our racial competitors and political oppressors. BW is a very important player in that effort.
Also, BW is very important to reminding us “all is not lost” and to place our struggle in context of the struggles our previous generations. It is the in the very nature of war that everyone involves comes to believe that “it will never end”. But wars do end, always.
Since we are in a race war (that is what it really is) we need to be reminded that our job is not to despair but to procure victory, no matter how long it takes.
#3 by Mark on 10/24/2006 - 7:32 pm
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“Joe Sobran said you couldn’t even really call it a book…because there are no talking heads in it.”
I’ve said it before: Joe Sobran has a necro-romance with the very, very late hack author, Bill Shakespeare — a topic only Harvard or Yale “intellectuals” give a damn about, not because it relates to their life in any usable, common-sense way, but because it’s “in vogue” to do so in the so-called intellectual crowds. I’m sure smoking marijuana is in vogue with those Reds too.
Meanwhile, Bob is writing books to save the White race. I’ll buy Bob’s book. I would be inclined to start a fire in my fireplace with Sobran’s books just so I could have enough light to read Bob’s books by it. Perhaps Sobran should come down off his Buckley-like throne and join us in the trenches. He could recite Shakespeare to keep his knees from knocking once the revolution gets messy.
#4 by James Edwards on 10/25/2006 - 10:52 am
Bob has always been a great guest on our radio show and will be appearing once again with us on Friday, October 27. You can tune in via the internet at our website, or on AM 1380 WLRM in the Memphis area.
Anyways, Bob was kind enough to leave me a few autographed copies of his book to give away to our listeners and we recently did a call-in contest with “Why Johnny Can’t Think” offered as the prize. The winner was a college student from Rota, Spain, and he e-mailed me yesterday to let me know what he thought of the book. Below are his comments…
“I finished reading “Why Johnny can’t think.” This is one of the top three books I read this year. Mr. Whitaker put all the social sciences on their ass! This book is a must read for all college students! I can’t wait for my next class for the teacher to open his or her mouth and I can tell them that all their hard work has done nothing for society. When Mr. Whitaker appears on Friday tell all listeners in college or who knows someone in college to pick up the book. The more college students that read this book the more students will challenge their incompetent ass!”
Just thought Bob and his loyal blog readers would like to see that comment! Bob is a great writer and a helluva fun guy to be around. Perhaps he will indulge you about our time together in Charleston, SC, one of these days!
All the best,
James Edwards
Host, The Political Cesspool Radio Program
http://www.thepoliticalcesspool.org
#5 by Pain on 10/25/2006 - 9:36 pm
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“a necro-romance with the very, very late hack author, Bill Shakespeare”
This is so damn hilarious. I have been trying to avoid commenting. What’s wrong with Shakespeare? chuckle, chuckle
#6 by neville on 10/25/2006 - 11:33 pm
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Pain: “What’s wrong with Shakespeare?”
I’m not sure, it makes for fine kindling.
#7 by Shari on 10/26/2006 - 2:03 pm
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Here’s a Shakespeare quote I came across. ” Some say that ravens foster forlorn children, The whilst their own birds famish in their nests.” Wonder what Sobran thinks of that?