Foster Dickson's Blog, page 70

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #154

If corrective facts only make matters worse, what can we do to convince people of the error of their beliefs? From my experience, 1. keep emotions out of the exchange, 2. discuss, don’t attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum), 3. listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, 4. show respect, 5. acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and 6. try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews. These strategies may not always work to change people’s minds, but now that the nation has just been put through a political fact-check wringer, they may help reduce unnecessary divisiveness.

– from “How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail: Why worldview threats undermine evidence” by Michael Shermer, published in the Scientific American

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: civil discourse, divisiveness, editing, fact check, fake news, scientific american, teaching, writing

The Lillian E. Smith Symposium @ Piedmont College

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from the press release:

“Between dream and reality”
The Lillian E. Smith Symposium

on Arts and Social Change

Observations and activism from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s are perfectly relevant today. Throughout her career as a writer and humanitarian, Lillian Smith examined how the arts engage people around issues of social injustice, segregation, and isolation.

Through presentations and conversation with special guest speakers and artists moderated by acclaimed scholar and writer Barbara Brown Taylor, this symposium will explore art in the public arena as a form of cultural expression and an inspiration for social change.  Genres will include murals, graffiti, outdoor art installations, performances in public spaces, and more.

Please join us as we seek to engage current and future generations around the values and convictions that shaped the life and work of Lillian Smith.

“To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art . . . this is what man’s journey is about, I think.” – Lillian Smith, The Journey

Symposium Cost: $45

Registration will begin January 2017

Symposium Registration (Beginning January 2017)

Speaker Information

Hotel Information

Directions

Filed under: Civil Rights, Critical Thinking, Education, Georgia, Social Justice, The South Tagged: Civil Rights, georgia, Lillian E. Smith Foundation, Lillian Smith, Piedmont College, race relations, social justice

Chasing Ghosts: Capt. James Davis Dickson

*If you’ve never read any of the “Chasing Ghosts” series, you ought to read the first post in the series and “Chasing Ghosts: Southern Pride” first.

I hadn’t been much aware of Capt. JD Dickson until a relative wrote to me about him last summer. The message came out of the blue – I hadn’t known the man before – and in it, Jim Powers, Jr. explained that he had been doing extensive family history research and had found our mutual connection to David Madison Dickson, Sr. and Mary Ann Goss. Thus, he and I are distant cousins.

Capt. James Davis Dickson, who stands squarely in Jim’s patrilineal heritage, is only one step removed from mine. Capt. Dickson was one of the younger children of this couple who Jim and I have in common, and one of his older brothers, David Madison Dickson, Jr., was my great-great-grandfather. And he should not be confused with my great-grandfather, also named James Davis Dickson. I can only assume that the JD Dickson in my direct family line was named for his father’s younger brother, the man in Jim’s direct family line.

[image error]Attached to his email, Jim sent his very solid telling of Capt. JD Dickson’s life and accomplishments. Capt. Dickson was born in the midst of the Civil War, in 1862, as the eighth of eleven children. He went to the Baptist-affiliated Howard College in western Alabama – the school that later became Samford University – then moved back across the state to found both the newspaper and the “first graded public school” in then-fledgling Alexander City.

Though Jim’s information has JD Dickson co-founding the Alexander City Outlook, the newspaper’s About Us page explains it a little differently. According to its telling, the newspaper was founded in 1884 by a man named Adolphus Longshore, before Capt. JD Dickson bought it in 1892, after a succession of short-term owners. It was Dickson who renamed the paper The Outlook, and that name obviously stuck. It has been 125 years.

But JD Dickson’s accomplishments didn’t end there. The designation of Captain came from his service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s. His life and work later carried him to Texas, and his successes even led to a write-up in Time magazine in 1926. James Davis Dickson died in 1933 and is buried in San Jose Burial Park in San Antonio, Texas.

Though I can’t count Capt. JD Dickson among the men whose lives, father-to-son, led to mine, his presence in the family tree is compelling to me for other reasons. First, Jim’s message gave me a fuller understanding of how the Dicksons came to be in Texas. In the mass of information on our family, there appears a whole separate Texas branch that I’ve spent little time exploring, mainly since my branch stayed in Alabama. Second, since we spend a fair amount of time at Lake Martin in the summers, I sometimes read the Alexander City Outlook and would never have had any clue that my great-great-grandfather’s little brother had a hand in starting it over a century ago.

This is why family history is so important to explore— for all people. When I went to Dallas last fall, to the Arts Schools Network conference, thought leaders and school leaders kept saying over and over: you have to know where you’re going, and you can’t know that until you know who you are and where you’ve been. They may have been talking about arts schools, but that guidance has a larger importance. Our connections to places, to events, and to cultures come through the people who experienced them before us, and then brought those experiences to us by building what we would later experience for ourselves. That foundational element of our lives, of history being personal, is the truest – and most under-appreciated – element of modern American culture, which tends value newness over everything else. While a forward-looking attitude is integral — Capt. JD Dickson had one, after all — looking backward sometimes is equally so.

Filed under: Alabama, Family History, The Deep South Tagged: 1862, 1933, Alabama, Alexander City, Capt. James Davis Dickson, chasing ghosts, Family History, genealogy, newspaper, Spanish-American War, Texas

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #153

Little poem, the two of us know too much.

You and I can never be quite the same again.

— from the poem, “Envoy,” by George Garrett, in Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry, edited by David Rigsbee and Steven Ford Brown

Filed under: Poetry, Teaching, The South, Writing and Editing Tagged: editing, george garrett, poetry, teaching, writing

Walking and wondering

I’ve gotten fat. It sucks, but it’s true. I first realized it last summer, when I caught sight of my reflection in the plate-glass window of a storefront in Greensboro, Alabama and thought, “Is that what I look like?” I had already noticed that my 33″ waist pants were getting harder to button, but I chalked that up to shrinking in the laundry.

The final straw for my insistent denial came in November, when I had to go to my health insurance plan’s required annual wellness check. Though it is masked as an effort to help us take care of ourselves, it is really just their Gestapo way of obtaining information that our doctors wouldn’t otherwise share with them. In a particularly seedy move, this year they scheduled the nurses to come on-site and do our checks on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving— after we had all gorged ourselves on sweet potato soufflé and dressing and red velvet cake. My weight was logged at 187 pounds.

A man who is 5’9″ tall shouldn’t weigh 187 pounds. (I don’t necessarily to care to maintain the 160 that their chart suggests, but a solid 170 or 175 would be nice.) The reason that this weight-gain worries me is: my father, who I resemble a great deal, very slowly ballooned into the little round man that he was when he died in 2011. I’ve looked at pictures of him in his 40s – the age that I am now – and he had the same pudgy little belly I have. By the time he was 60 and wearing pants with a 40″ waist, there was nothing he could do about bulk that he carried around his middle. He was 5’7″ and weighed well over 200 pounds, and no amount of work at the gym helped. My dad suffered a massive heart attack nearly six year ago, while he was jogging on a treadmill— trying to lose weight.

So I’m making an effort to get less fat, before that happens to me. We got a new dog for Christmas – his name is Chip, he looks like a border collie with shorter hair – and this walk doubles as a daily treat for him. Instead of sitting down each afternoon with a Shiner Bock or a Blue Moon (or, if I’m feeling sassy, a Dickel-and-Coke), I’m going for this walk. Just a one-miler, with the kids and the dog. Nothing big. Nothing radical. We’ll see how that goes.

Herein lies the rub: I hate exercising. I hate it. Not because I dislike physical activity, but because I despise the monotonous boredom of repetitive acts. And I also love food and beer. I would much rather be passing afternoons on my porch with a wheat beer or a Belgian white than loping around my neighborhood. I’m not happy about this, and I’m not going to pretend that I am. But I’ve got to find ways to make it tolerable.

Already, I’ve found my mind wandering away from the task itself. On one nearby street, the Japanese magnolias have been a particularly beautiful bright-red this year. The kids and I have had the idea to deliver some Christmas goodies to the Fire House No. 7, which we pass on each go-round. We also have taken the time be a little judgy about who doesn’t clean up their yard adequately, who allows their leaves to clog up street drains, and which houses need repair work.

The quandary, for me, remains: how to make exercise tolerable. I’ll be damned if I’ll ever join a gym and have some latter-day Richard Simmons shout at me about how I need to do more! What some people consider motivation baffles me utterly. I also won’t be joining a men’s league team – soccer or basketball – because I don’t want to be beholden to that commitment, having to show up at this time and at this place . . . I just want not to be fat. That’s all.

Filed under: Critical Thinking Tagged: Walking, wandering, wondering

Southern Movie #19: “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”

Though the subject is more passé since the legalization of same-sex marriage, mainstream acknowledgment of homosexuals, bisexuals, and drag queens was not common in the late 1990s. And that was what made this month’s Southern Movie shocking in its day. Directed by Clint Eastwood, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is based on the book of the same name by John Berendt and set in then-present day Savannah, Georgia. The film follows the story of Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey), an exceptionally wealthy closeted gay man who kills his unseemly lover, Billy Hanson (Jude Law) during a passionate argument. The story is thus explored by New York writer John Kelso (John Cusack), who has come to Savannah to cover Williams’ infamous Christmas party for a lifestyle magazine.

From the film’s opening scene, we get the Hollywood version of scene-setting for Southern oddity and darkness. As a jetliner traverses the blue sky overhead and comes in to land, we briefly follow a large black woman with heavy braids and dark glasses as she first talks to a squirrel then begins to cackle wickedly at the sight of the incoming plane. This knowing laughter foreshadows her voodoo-priestess role in the story that will unfold. After she has gone from the shot, John Kelso arrives and tries to manage a ride from the airport, bumbling himself onto a tour bus driven by a black driver whose drawl is thick enough to be almost unintelligible. We know from the first few scenes that John Kelso is entering a place that he doesn’t understand.

But that won’t stop him. Kelso has come to write up Jim Williams’ Christmas party for Town & Country magazine, nothing major, just five hundred words or so, a society piece. As the nosy Yankee writer approaches the beautiful home where the party will take place, he encounters Billy, a Camaro-driving greaser with little more to say than a quintessential “Whaddaryoo lookin’ at?” But, no harm-no foul, and Kelso gets his bearings to write his piece. He first meets Sonny, Jim’s old-school Southern attorney, then Jim Williams himself, who invites Kelso to the private party the night before – to this one he must come as a gentleman, not as a reporter – but Kelso declines, so he can go to bed early.

However, the Savannah we get in this film is not so simple; as Kelso tries to get some rest, an unknown woman, a pretty blonde with a flirty demeanor, knocks on his door in the middle of the night first to ask for ice, then to invite him to a party nearby. Of course, he must say yes.

There, we meet yet-another cast of characters who will become a part of our story: Mandy, the pretty lounge singer, and Joe Odum, a disbarred lawyer-turned piano player with a little too much joi-de-vivre. John Kelso is invited sight-unseen to a cocktail party where he is a little overly embraced. By this point in the movie, the Southern charm is getting syrupy, what with the falling-over “where are my manners?” introductions and overly quippy dialogue. On his way out the door, he asks Mandy how she knew to about him, she simply replies, “Welcome to Savannah.” (I’ve been to Savannah a few times, and that never happened to me . . . )

So, it’s the night of the big party – Kelso’s assignment – and everyone is dressed up, in tuxedos and gowns, and all are glad to see each other. Jim Williams is as charming as he should be, moving easily through the room, greeting each guest. Then he takes Kelso upstairs to a little parlor to show him even more impressive items in the grand collection, including the dagger used to kill Rasputin. All is well . . . until Billy Hanson shows up, drunk and belligerent, bitching about having to come in the back entrance and asking for $20 to go and get drunker. When Jim refuses, Billy smashes a vodka bottle and threatens him— now, we get it. (Wealthy, debonair Jim and crass, greasy Billy are more than casual acquaintances.) The standoff relents, though, and the scene ends with Jim playing a massive pipe organ to piss off his neighbors braying dogs.

So, the party ends, and everyone leaves except John Kelso, who politely declines an offer to stick around, since he has an early flight back to New York. This brief assignment might have been little more than a landmark in an otherwise not-too-stellar career, but Kelso is awakened in the middle of the night by the flashing of police lights. He gets up and crosses the street to find a crowd gathered outside, among them Joe Odum, tray of hors d’oeuvres in hand, who informs him that Jim Williams has killed Billy Hanson.

Now, we have conflict. We had setting . . . and characters . . . and plot— now, we’ve got a problem: a rich socialite in an old Southern city has shot and killed his seedy gay lover. And because the central character is a writer (from out of town) we have a means for moving this roman a clef forward: John Kelso scraps the lifestyle-mag article, because he is going to write a book, one whose research he will navigate by aiding Sonny the attorney in establishing Jim’s defense.

The meat of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil centers on the complexities of being gay in the Deep South in the late twentieth century. Now that the nature of their relationship is out in the open, the question must be answered: did Jim Williams kill Billy Hanson in self defense, as he claimed to police, or out of anger and bitterness toward a lover who was difficult to live with? Living in vastly different worlds, Jim and Billy were unlikely partners, brought together – we find out – by Billy working for Jim’s antique furniture restoration enterprise. Yet, the immersion into that heavily veiled Southern gay culture doesn’t end there. In the research for his book, John Kelso meets The Lady Chablis, an audacious black drag queen whose former roommate was one of Billy’s lovers. He/She becomes Kelso’s own unlikely partner in his search for the facts.

Though Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil‘s plot centers on John Kelso’s research into Jim Williams’ murder trial, the larger issues at hand are the gay community in the South and its connections to upper-crust society. In a conversation at a cafe shortly after Jim’s arrest, Mandy says this to Kelso:

Jim’s friends knew he was gay. Secretly, they congratulated themselves on being so cosmopolitan. If they knew he was completely open with his sexuality, they’d have shunned him.

That sums it up. The South of the 1980s and 1990s very much embodied Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy. As Kelso explores the private corners of Savannah’s local culture – attending a drag show on the one hand, and seeking out the hush-hush insights from the who’s-who on the other – he overturns the rocks that no one wants to look under. The film’s main plot seeks to show-not-tell us the dichotomies: society ladies playing cards in pastel suits and big hats versus a skinny black man talking sass in a sequined gown and too much make-up, African-American cotillions with their formal dances versus violent messy-haired bisexuals, locals who understand the need for discretion versus a Yankee outsider who is there to out their uncomfortable secrets.

The “research” portions of Midnight of the Garden of Good and Evil constitute a messy mix of aw-shucks detective work, banter about how “out” a gay person can be, and the development of a love story between Mandy and Kelso. There are few surprises and lots of cardboard.

Ultimately, Jim Williams is found not-guilty of murder. Kelso’s writerly detective work uncovers more than a little “shoddy police work,” since both he and Williams’ cat had ambled un-accosted into the crime scene, and he unintentionally finds out at the hospital that Billy’s corpse had not been properly preserved for investigation. Yet, Kelso’s assistance to the defense attorney will hardly get him closer to the truth. After a glint of honesty during one jailhouse conversation, in which Jim forthrightly proclaims to Kelso that Billy’s gun had never fired, Jim’s self-preservation instincts kick right back in. John Kelso must write what he can write, because Jim will never confess openly to the crime he was cleared of. Not being in jail feels pretty good.

As Hollywood is wont to do, John Kelso’s adventures in this strange land culminate in a love story. As the film ends, Kelso has moved to Savannah and is involved with Mandy. Even in a story of gay murder, the boy-meets-girl plot line must rise to the top.

As Hollywood is also wont to do, the film adaptation of Midnight of the Garden of Good and Evil takes liberties on the true story that forms its basis. Berendt’s book, which is listed on Amazon.com in the categories “Social Sciences” and “True Crime,” relays the actual story of socialite Jim Williams and the man he killed, Danny Hansford. Though the real killing took place in 1981, the movie has more of a 1990s feel, and in the real events, Williams underwent four murder trials. (In the movie, there is only one, right after which Williams dies.) The Georgia Encyclopedia’s entry on the book relays this:

The impact of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on Savannah has been greater than that of any other book in the city’s history. Written by John Berendt and published by RandomHouse in January 1994, the nonfiction narrative quickly became known locally as simply “The Book.” Since that time it has sold more than three million copies in 101 printings, has been translated into twenty-three languages and appeared in twenty-four foreign editions, and has brought hundreds of thousands of tourists to Savannah to visit this loveliest of crime scenes. The one point on which both critics and admirers agree is that, after Midnight in the Garden, Savannah’s clock will never be turned back.

However, the film adaptation . . . not so much. Even though it runs about two-and-a-half hours, the film’s handling of the disparate elements doesn’t go well. Southern storytelling is highly regarded for its ability to connect all of the far-flung pieces that must be in their right places, and this film doesn’t accomplish that. Though we get to encounter a black voodoo priestess who was the widow of the infamous Dr. Buzzard, a mild-mannered man who has horse-flies tied to himself by threads and who carries a vial of supposedly powerful poison, a lawyer who proudly owns the University of Georgia’s mascot bulldog, a bowler-wearing dog-walker who is paid to exercise an an empty collar and leash, and a drunken former lawyer who plays lounge piano . . . their presence in not connected effectively with the story being told in the film. Sure, the characters from the book may all be there, but the storytelling isn’t.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil seems to me like a mild effort at turning a good book into a good film. The problem is: it didn’t work. The elements are there – a successful book as a foundation, a good cast, a controversial and modern subject – but they don’t add up. Sometimes the most interesting stories have only one media through which they can be told, and for the story of Jim Williams and Danny Hansford, I think it was long-form nonfiction. Put plainly, you shouldn’t have to read the book to understand its film version; the film should stand on its own. About the actors, Kevin Spacey was in the midst of a great run of films at this time (Se7en and The Usual Suspects in 1995, American Beauty in 1999) and John Cusack was just shy of his big films (Being John Malkovich in 1999 and High Fidelity in 2000), but Midnight won’t be held up among those classics. Even good actors can’t carry bad scripts.

However, as a cultural document, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil‘s subject matter has relevance. Its release in 1997 constituted one of several films from that decade with cross-dressing or gender-bending central components: 1992’s The Crying Game, 1995’s To Wong Foo, and 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry. These films were opening the eyes of mainstream America to LGBT life. For gay men in the South, like Williams and Hansford, there was an unforgiving tightrope to walk every minute of every day. Being openly gay, or even being outed as gay, meant real danger, as in the case of Billy Jack Gaither, who was killed in February 1999 in Alabama. So, though Midnight is only a mediocre film, its merit can be measured in other ways.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Generation X, Georgia, The Deep South, The South Tagged: Deep South, drag queen, film, gay, homosexual, John Berendt, LGBTQ, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, movie, movies

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #152

Auden was wrong. Poets take some things far more seriously than other people, though he was right to the extent that they are not the same things others would take seriously or often even notice.

— from chapter two, “The Triggering Town,” in The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo

Filed under: Poetry, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: editing, poetry, poets, Richard Hugo, teaching, Triggering Town, writing

“Remembering Mikey” @ Saturn Birmingham

On Friday, January 6 and Saturday, January 7, the Sam Holt Band is playing two tribute shows to the late Mikey Houser, long-time guitarist for Widespread Panic, on what have been his birthday. The Friday night concert will be held at Smith’s Olde Bar in Atlanta, and the Saturday night show will be at Saturn Birmingham. The Saturn show will be an 18 and up event, and tickets are $13 – $15.

Mikey Houser was one of the founding members of Widespread Panic, along with John Bell. He died of cancer in 2002.

 

 

Filed under: Alabama, Georgia, Music Tagged: Mikey Houser, Saturn Birmingham, widespread panic

Truth-telling in an age of— what do we call it?

We’re at an “oh no!” moment in our culture. No one can deny that. We are actually having arguments about whether facts exist and whether they matter. We are actually nonchalant about the idea that the Russians interfered with our presidential election. We are actually sitting on the time-bomb that is a game-show-host-turned-president, who will be inaugurated in just over a month.  And all  of those problems – the “fake news,” the hacking, the president-elect – are being traced back to our adamant insistence on technology being all-pervasive in our culture.

Back in the 1990s, we first loved our desktop PCs and our dial-up internet, then we fell in love anew with laptops that allowed us to go anywhere and “stay connected.” Cable modems sped up the process immensely, then came WiFi. And now we’re full-on addicted to our smart phones and our mega-giga-hotspots for the masses. Police cars now look like rolling computers labs. The books in the library have dust on them, while the computer workstations stay full.

And look where it has gotten us. Some of us even crash our cars or walk into phone poles because we won’t look up from the damn things. We’ve so thoroughly insulated ourselves against everything we don’t want to see or hear that we’ve lost our way. Three hundred years after the Enlightenment, we have leaders in our country proclaiming that empirical facts don’t exist. We have massive numbers of people who base their ideals on a twisted array of half-truths from widely discredited cable TV channel. We have university-based studies that show how whole swaths of the population aren’t interested in scientific proof, and the majority of young people can’t recognize “fake news” when they see it.

How can this be? Has the use of social media so warped our brain functions that we no longer care to prefer reality over personal conceptions? Are we so addicted to setting our preferences and blocking the unwanteds that we expect real life to be that way? Have search engines made us so lazy that we believe it is too much trouble to find out the truth?

Yes, apparently, for many people that is the case.

To my understanding, only a few things separate human beings from animals: opposable thumbs, language . . . and the ability to reason. I know that we still know how to use our thumbs because every day I see teenagers employ them deftly as they churn out a text message in milliseconds. I know that we haven’t forgotten how to use language because way too many people never seem to shut up. But our reasoning ability— what about that?

The internet is the most powerful and far-reaching information tool ever created. Yet, the term information – as in “information superhighway” and “information systems” – does not necessarily mean that what we read, watch, or hear constitutes knowledge or fact. We have to discern which is which by using our reasoning. Recently, when my family and I were watching “It’s a Wonderful Life,” my son asked, “Is this is a true story?” If an eight-year-old second-grader can make that inquiry about a feature film, then the rest of us should be able to make that inquiry about anything shared as “news.” It’s very simple to ask, Is this a true story? And we have to use our common sense; to borrow an old saying, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . . it’s probably a duck.

Concern about this issue is widespread. Earlier this month, NPR’s Steve Inskeep ran a piece called “A Finder’s Guide to Facts,” which is a pretty good primer for those who are new to critical thinking. Slate.com jumped on the bandwagon with “Only You Can Stop the Spread of Fake News,” which introduces a “Chrome browser extension called This Is Fake.” The Education Week blog just ran the post, “Three Great Resources to Help Students Fight Off Fake News,” which regarded the education community’s role in combating this phenomenon. And America magazine, which is dedicated to Catholic news, spoke to the problem as it relates to religion in “Academics and Journalists Unite Against Fake News”:

The sense of urgency surrounding religion journalism has emerged from the rise of fake news and the ascendance of Donald J. Trump, who has pioneered a “post-truth politics” that places a premium on narrative over fact. Perhaps more than ever, people are beginning to care less about the factual truth of the news they consume, and more about whether it speaks to their experience of the world. All journalists in attendance appeared to agree: journalism has to change not only in order to better challenge false conceptions about religion, climate change and immigrants—to name a few topics—but also to simply survive.

The range and breadth of articles and opinions being cast about is staggering.

Finding the truth, however, takes effort. The main problem with liars and deceivers is that they usually pose as being honest and forthright. Yet, everybody out there isn’t so bad, and there are ways to sift through the muck. Even a cursory effort can yield some benefits. For any current event, reading or watching multiple versions of coverage from a variety of reputable news sources is a good way to start. To borrow another old saying, Where there’s smoke, there’s fire— if all of the stories line up, you’ve probably got a reasonably good sense of what really happened. If they don’t, you’ve at least got a good sense that the issue is complicated.

Fact-checking, though it sounds like a professional-level skill, is actually not too hard, now that we have internet access and long-distance service on most cell phones. For example, if you read a news story where a man named Fred Wannamaker from the CDC says that Obamacare caused a national health crisis, you can look up whether Fred Wannamaker actually works at the CDC, and you can probably find his email, job title, or his phone extension. If there is no Fred Wannamaker at the CDC, the story may well be fake. If Fred works in the mail room, the story is probably fake. If Fred is the press secretary for the CDC, the story may have credibility. Fake news producers count on us taking them at their word and not checking.

Some of the best places to fact-check news stories are government publications, like the Census. (Note: Actual government websites will have a .gov web address, though some local entities do use .org domains.) Government publications are meant to be unbiased, unlike many non-profits, which have agendas to promote. The Census, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) are all excellent sources of factual information. As another example: if a news story claims that graduation rates have declined by 10% in ten years, NCES will have the data to prove or disprove that. Seeking the truth is worth the time, if you actually care about the issue.

Living in the Deep South, I’m long accustomed to a culture where facts don’t matter, where myths are held in high esteem, and where substantive change is stymied or outright prevented. Great thinkers, writers, and editors – Gunnar Myrdal, WJ Cash, Ralph McGill – have tried to move the Deep South fact-ward to little avail, and it still frightens me to think that the rest of nation might be steered down our mean path. Southerners have suffered mightily for our refusal to face facts, or even to know them. (When certain journalists have recently used the term “the Alabamification of America,” it wasn’t a compliment.)

So, rather than goofing off, let’s put those devices – and our brains – to good use! Let’s max out our data plans doing some fact-checking. When we get on the inter-webs, let’s think more deeply than simply trusting our friend’s share of a BuzzFeed story or some candidate’s persistent name-calling. And let’s also have some intelligent conversations with actual human beings face-to-face. Heck, be really radical about it and challenge Uncle Fred’s Sunday-dinner diatribe by asking him for the facts and sources that back up his assertions. If we do a few simple things like that, maybe we can make better decisions in the future.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, Social Justice Tagged: community, Education, facebook, facts, internet, numb skull, social media, truth

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #151

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne,

32 and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

33 He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me,

36 naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

37 Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

38 When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?

39 When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’

40 And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

41 Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,

43 a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’

44 Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’

45 He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’

46 And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

– from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25

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