Towering Babble

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 18, 2006)

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. – Captain, Road Prison 36 (Strother Martin), in the 1967 movie ‘Cool Hand Luke’

Most of you reading this will not understand it. The US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics said in November that “prose literacy” among national university graduates fell to 31 percent in 2003, from 40 percent in 1992. Among those with post-graduate degrees, prose proficiency fell to 41 percent from 51 percent over the same time span. And that’s in the country with supposedly the best university system in the world. (Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 29, 2005)

Accepting those percentages as a universal marker – problematic I realize – would mean maybe a third of the Bali Advertiser readership comprehends what the columnists write. If an argument can be made that some English-speaking countries teach the basics of education better than the US, then whatever comprehension percentage gained among native English readers is likely offset by the many people reading the paper in a second language.

It is distressing to contemplate that written words have such a low efficiency rate. Even assuming that a writer has put down what he means to say – and the low “prose literacy” rate in reading puts that in doubt – there is no guarantee he has communicated his thoughts to a reader. “Letters to the Editor” sections often carry examples where someone clearly mistook a commentator’s or reporter’s meaning. Perhaps a satirical tone was missed. Perhaps a quick read gave the reader only an impression of what the author was saying. Maybe the reader doesn’t “do” nuance, preferring or needing instead the prose equivalent of a two-by-four smack between the eyes.

Many people right now are congratulating themselves on being in the third with reading proficiency. But how do they know? Consider this: most incompetent people don’t know they are incompetent, according to studies conducted in the 1990s by Dr. David A. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University in New York. The problem, Dr. Dunning believed, is that “the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence,” (according to a Jan. 18, 2000 article in the New York Times).

In tests designed to compare ability versus self-evaluation, people scoring in the lowest percentiles consistently over-rated their performance. Specifically, test subjects scoring in the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves in the 67th percentile in their ability to “identify grammatically correct standard English.” On the test of logical reasoning, subjects scoring in the 12th percentile ranked their reasoning skill in the 68th percentile.

The possibility we must contemplate, then, is that only a small percentage of people in the world are intelligent, and nobody is certain who the intelligent ones are – not even the intelligent themselves (only the unintelligent would fail to think of the possibility that they aren’t really intelligent, just incompetent). Moreover, none of us can ever be sure that we are reading, writing, talking, or communicating in a language or representational system with any accuracy, understanding, or comprehension.

So, going by the US Dept. of Education statistics and Dr. Dunning’s study, a few readers are nodding along; the rest are bewildered, maybe cursing me for calling them stupid, maybe happily oblivious they have missed my meaning … or maybe I have just been writing gibberish ever since I left the safe ground of quoting articles in the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times … which I may not have understood anyway.

Language brings only the illusion of understanding. Basic reading and writing is so widespread in most societies we forget it is a skill humanity learned slowly. Even when two people speak the same language, communication is hard and has to be worked at. I once told a British friend my favorite activity as a youth was “shagging flies.” I was referring to my baseball playing days, when practice included hours of “shagging” -- or catching -- pop flies, that is, baseballs hit high into the air to be caught by the fielders. “Shagging flies,” of course, has a different meaning in British parlance, and my friend did not hold the image I meant to convey.

All of which goes to demonstrate the level of insanity displayed by English-speaking persons when they abuse an unlucky service person that doesn’t immediately grasp the meaning of their pidgin Indo-English … or post signs along rice field paths warning in English against dumping household garbage in the streams … or plea – again in English in big red letters -- that farmers in the area stop poisoning the dogs and stealing the water pumps. It demonstrates, too, the folly of anyone who thinks conversational ability in a language gives them instant access to the philosophy, symbolism, and collective spirit that is its underlying basis.

Not even talk, it would seem, is easy.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

The End of the World As We Know It

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 4, 2006)

Plastics. He is completely irate about plastics, the plastics industry and prepackaged goods. The whole consumer culture has got him crazy. He thinks it's the end of the world. – Norman Mailer’s agent telling a New York Times reporter what Mailer talks about when he isn’t talking about writing, NYT, Nov. 18, 2005

Singapore in 1997 was my first memorable experience of the Southeast Asian “haze.” The El Niño weather pattern brought a drought that year; smoke from forest fires in Sumatra hung over Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia for months. Poor visibility delayed flights and forced seaports to close, and health concerns shut schools and kept people home from work.

The sun shone weakly through a smoky, grayish sky. Acrid fumes crept into MRT stations three levels below street level, where they still burned throats and eyes. Residents and citizens could do little short of leaving or strapping on personal oxygen tanks. But we in Singapore were better off than people in Malaysia and Indonesia, where visibility dropped in some places to less than 100 meters and people collapsed from respiratory failure.

The haze hits Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia to some degree every dry season. That’s when slash-and-burn farmers in Sumatra cut out plots of land from the rainforests for subsistence farming. It’s when tracts and tracts of forest are cleared for new palm oil plantations. The smoke from the burning wood and drying peat spreads wherever the trade winds take it – usually that’s wafting over peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, and the South China Sea.

I was unprepared, however, for a Singapore taxi driver to tell me that the haze had more sinister connotations. He snorted at my suggestion that it was just smoke from forest fires in Sumatra.

“Well, what do you think it is?” I asked him.

“It’s the end of the world.”

He wasn’t joking. He thought the smoke was a sign of the end-times and that the government and newspapers were lying when they said the air would clear with rain and a shift in the winds. To him, I was a deluded fool unprepared for the coming end. He seemed almost happy to be the discerning prophet of destruction, even if he was on schedule to burn up with the rest of us.

I, too, am partial to apocalyptic, hell-in-a-hand-basket viewpoints, always ready to believe God has abandoned us to rap music, low-rider jeans, tattooed pop divas, two-week vacations, seamless digital connectivity, mega malls, and mega churches. And there is a strange grim exhilaration at the thought of divining a doomsday no one else can see.

Maybe it comes from the thought that something will finally break the world out of the same-old-same-old. Maybe it is the thought of a final religious revelation. Maybe it is a sense of impending relief from the old, familiar burdens of debt, family duty, taxes, and homage to God.

The main problem with the view is that it can enervate as well as exhilarate: If the apocalypse IS coming, there is nothing one can do about it. If the world is eventually going to choke itself on plastics and toxins, why bother recycling or developing cleaner technologies? Or if the religious nuts and political fanatics are soon to push the red self-destruct button, why have any hope about anything at all? Why not disappear into a cave with Jim Jones and David Koresh to contemplate the purple of grape-cyanide Kool-Aid and the taste of a bullet? Why not move to Bali to watch the show on satellite hook-up with rice fields as a backdrop and Bintang for company?

Some people get so caught up with the coming end that they can think and talk of nothing but universal death by plastics, global warming, plagues, or the final battle of a religious and political war. The hoped for or dreaded coming end gives an odd comfort that “freedom” will follow the cataclysm, that responsibilities and duties will disappear without any shameful abdication, that we can finally rest even it is only in blank darkness.

So, my resolution for 2006 is to adopt a more hopeful perspective, to allow that humanity may muddle through -- as it has done so far, despite all the dire predictions, all the possible end-of-the-world scenarios, all the madmen with an insatiable hunger for power – to dare to hope that in a psychobabbical, cosmological sense, what is always a button push away, is no more than what happens in the destruction and rebirth contained in each ticking second. If that doesn’t sound suitably skeptical, my only answer is that in a week that contains Christmas, the turn of the year, and my birthday, it is proper to take a break and wish and pray for a better, more peaceful world … and try to forget that the 2004-2005 Asian haze was the worst since 1997.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi