Politics is theological

A friend asked me on Facebook how the Republican Party came to be associated with Christianity. My brief answer, subject to FB's character limit, was not about history but about the gravitational forces that will always tend to pull people who hold a biblical worldview toward what is called conservatism. Here's my Politics 101 answer, slightly expanded.

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General rule: Liberals (more often Dem) tend to see people as naturally good, so they are big on personal rights, favor centralized power (calling it unity), and are therefore skeptical of property rights.

Conservatives (more often Repub) distrust human nature so they favor decentralized power, promote property rights, and see wisdom in putting some limits on personal rights.

The lines often get blurred. As if in support of the conservative view, sad and even tragic caricatures of both perspectives are not uncommon. But whether you trend right or left comes down to your response to: "What is Man?"

Politics is theological.

Story is King...in an unruly democracy

I link today to this typically insightful Joel Achenbach piece from the Washington Post on the state of publishing and the power of narrative. His primary focus is the news business, but his comments apply to the book world, too.

So, I can urge publishers to reinvent themseves from the ground up, as in this post, but the constant is that great writing and editing are still at the heart of everything. In fact, as the market gets ever more flooded, quality will only become more important.

Writing is still King, but the monarchy is gone. The King does not rule as before. He's a richly bedecked figure, wise and genuinely worthy of honor, but his context is a democracy. And not even a republic, but a one-person/one-vote, massive ongoing self-aggregating opinion poll of what's hot and what's not.   

Here are some excerpts from the full article.

There's a furious adapt-or-die mentality among media organizations. Researchers say we're becoming a "society of scanners." They say the Internet is a "link medium." We find ourselves abandoning stories in mid-sentence. Newspaper executives have embraced a new format known as "charticles," which are, in the words of the American Journalism Review, "combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article." The Orlando Sentinel, for example, now has a front page crammed with graphics, columnist head-shots, bulletins, story keys, headlines, bumpers, tags, indexes, an advertisement -- a cartoon! -- and lots of pleas to check the Web site.

There is much confusion about what, precisely, should vanish in this broad media makeover. Is it print? Or just long stories? Or just bad, boring, dishwater-dull stories? Complicating the situation is that the online world is both increasingly dominant and, for many media organizations, stubbornly unprofitable. If you're a media exec, wrap your head around the paradox that print is dead and online news a bust.

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Good stories take time to craft. Good writers, editors, copy editors, photographers, etc., all expect a living wage. The real question in the months and years ahead is whether there's a business model that can support good stories. Norman Sims, journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: "The great stories will survive. But the question is who's going to pay for them. . . . This is not fast food. This is slow food. And it's expensive."

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Storytellers will have to be more disciplined or get a new line of work. This is not a crisis, this is progress. Fewer "jello ledes," quote-dumps, the whole notebook disgorged upon the page. Less overwriting by frustrated novelists. Sorry, we don't need to read Proust's version of the zoning hearing.

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The best feature of print is that it doesn't interrupt you. It doesn't try to link you somewhere else. It doesn't talk back. That's a killer app in and of itself these days. Interactivity is a great virtue sometimes, but there are other times when you want to read a story that doesn't try to heckle you as it squirms in your lap.

Death of the Book Review

Helpful perspective from Fast Company. Excerpts:

Good reviews help, at best, incrementally, and bad reviews hurt, at worst, incrementally. They're published then they disappear, living on as pithy testimonials on authors' Web sites, or on the back covers or in the fronts of paperback editions.

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....Like news, book reviews have become crowd-sourced, with bloggers and Amazon readers leading the way. But these reviews, unlike those that appear in publications, do have an impact on sales, because they appear right next to the product being sold and persist in online perpetuity. Would you buy an electric razor at Macy's if the department store listed a bevy of complaints from dissatisfied customers next to it? Indeed, an academic paper by Yale Economics professor Judith Chevalier found that while positive reviews increase a book's sales and negative reviews dampen them, "the impact of 1-star reviews is greater than the impact of 5-star reviews."

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...But the dirty secret of book reviews is that they have always been rife with abuse, even when left to the ostensible pros. Every author knows what I'm talking about, the reviewers (most of whom have never written books) that use their pulpit to settle scores.

Strategic Decision Tree for Book Publishers

I don't mean to make light of the huge challenges faced by book publishers. But I think the options before them may essentially come down to this.

Being in That Number

Our two youngest kids, ages 9 and 12, sing in a local community choir where they learn a lot of wonderful old songs that otherwise they might not be exposed to. One day we were all going somewhere in the car when they when they launched into When the Saints Go Marching In. At one point it started to die down so I tried to reinvigorate it by singing "Oh when the Day of Judgment comes...I want to be there in that number..."

They had no idea what I was singing and tried to tell me this was not part of the song. Do you realize what happens when you remove that verse? Suddenly an explicit limitation becomes an implied universality. The song becomes a celebration of everyone being "in that number." The excluded verse is politically incorrect because it implies, accurately, that before God not everyone is equal.

I remember even as a kid how that verse seemed to tie the package together. It was clearly central to the entire point of the song. There will be a number. Some will be in it. Others won't. That is the point of the song, and the truth and the tragedy of the fall.