Unit Nine Text I A Red Light for Scofflaws Frank Trippettw-and-order is the longest-running and probably the best-loved political issue in U.S. history. Y et it is painfully apparent that millions of Americans who would never think of themselves as lawbreakers, let alone criminals, are taking increasing liberties with the legal codes that are designed to protect and nourish their society. Indeed, there are moments today—amid outlaw litter, tax cheating, illicit noise and motorized anarchy—when it seems as though the scofflaw represents the wave of the future. Harvard Sociologist David Riesman suspects that a majority of Americans have blithely taken to committing supposedly minor derelictions as a matter of course. Already, Riesman says, the ethic of U.S. society is in danger of becoming this: "Y ou're a fool if you obey the rules."2.Nothing could be more obvious than the evidence supporting Riesman. Scofflaws abound in amazing variety. The graffiti-prone turn public surfaces into visual rubbish. Bicyclists often ride as though two-wheeled vehicles are exempt from all traffic laws. Litterbugs convert their communities into trash dumps. Widespread flurries of ordinances have failed to clear public places of high-decibel portable radios, just as earlier laws failed to wipe out the beer-soaked hooliganism that plagues many parks. Tobacco addicts remain hopelessly blind to signs that say NO SMOKING. Respectably dressed pot smokers no longer bother to duck out of public sight to pass around a joint. The flagrant use of cocaine is a festering scandal in middle-and upper-class life. And then there are (hello, Everybody!) the jaywalkers.3.The dangers of scofflawry vary wildly. The person who illegally spits on the sidewalk remains disgusting, but clearly poses less risk to others than the company that illegally buries hazardous chemical waste in an unauthorized location. The fare beater on the subway presents less threat to life than the landlord who ignores fire safety statutes. The most immediately and measurably dangerous scofflawry, however, also happens to be the most visible. The culprit is the American driver, whose lawless activities today add up to a colossal public nuisance. The hazards range from routine double parking that jams city streets to the drunk driving that kills some 25,000 people and injures at least 650,000 others yearly. Illegal speeding on open highways? New surveys show that on some interstate highways 83% of all drivers are currently ignoring the federal 55 m.p.h. speed limit.4.The most flagrant scofflaw of them all is the red-light runner. The flouting of stop signals has got so bad in Boston that residents tell an anecdote about a cabby who insists that red lights are "just for decoration." The power of the stoplight to control traffic seems to be waning everywhere. In Los Angeles, red-light running has become perhaps the city's most common traffic violation. In New Y ork City, going through an intersection is like Russian roulette. Admits Police Commissioner Robert J. McGuire: "Today it's a 50-50 toss-up as to whether people will stop for a red light." Meanwhile, his own police largely ignore the lawbreaking.5.Red-light running has always been ranked as a minor wrong, and so it may be in individual instances. When the violation becomes habitual, widespread and incessant, however, a great deal more than a traffic management problem is involved. The flouting of basic rules of the road leaves deep dents in the social mood. Innocent drivers and pedestrians pay a repetitious price in frustration, inconvenience and outrage, not to mention a justified sense of mortal peril. The significance of red-light running is magnified by its high visibility. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then furtiveness is the true outlaw's salute to the force of law-and-order. Thered-light runner, however, shows no respect whatever for the social rules, and society cannot help being harmed by any repetitious and brazen display of contempt for the fundamentals of order. 6.The scofflaw spirit is pervasive. It is not really surprising when schools find, as some do, that children frequently enter not knowing some of the basic rules of living together. For all their differences, today's scofflaws are of a piece as a symptom of elementary social demoralization—the loss by individuals of the capacity to govern their own behavior in the interest of others.7.The prospect of the collapse of public manners is not merely a matter of etiquette. Society's first concern will remain major crime (see Cover Story), but a foretaste of the seriousness of incivility is suggested by what has been happening in Houston. Drivers on Houston freeways have been showing an increasing tendency to replace the rules of the road with violent outbreaks. Items from the Houston police department's new statistical category—freeway traffic violence: 1) Driver flashes high-beam lights at car that cut in front of him, whose occupants then hurl a beer can at his windshield, kick out his tail lights, slug him eight stitches' worth. 2) Dump-truck driver annoyed by delay batters trunk of stalled car ahead and its driver with steel bolt. 3) Hurrying driver of 18-wheel truck deliberately rear-ends car whose driver was trying to stay within 55 m.p.h. limit. The Houston Freeway Syndrome has fortunately not spread everywhere. But the question is: Will it?8.Americans are used to thinking that law-and-order is threatened mainly by stereotypical violent crime. When the foundations of U.S. law have actually been shaken, however, it has always been because ordinary law-abiding citizens took to skirting the law. Major instance: Prohibition. Recalls Donald Barr Chidsey in On and Off the Wagon: "Lawbreaking proved to be not painful, not even uncomfortable, but, in a mild and perfectly safe way, exhilarating." People wiped out Prohibition at last not only because of the alcohol issue but because scofflawry was seriously undermining the authority and legitimacy of government. Ironically, today's scofflaw spirit, whatever its undetermined origins, is being encouraged unwittingly by government at many levels. The failure of police to enforce certain laws is only the surface of the problem; they take their mandate from the officials and constituents they serve. Worse, most state legislatures have helped subvert popular compliance with the federal 55 m.p.h. law, some of them by enacting puny fines that trivialize transgressions. On a higher level, the Administration in Washington has dramatized its wish to nullify civil rights laws simply by opposing instead of supporting certain court-ordered desegregation rulings. With considerable justification, environmental groups, in the words of Wilderness magazine, accuse the Administration of "destroying environmental laws by failing to enforce them, or by enforcing them in ways that deliberately encourage noncompliance." Translation: scofflawry at the top.9.The most disquieting thing about the scofflaw spirit is its extreme infectiousness. Only a terminally foolish society would sit still and allow it to spread indefinitely.From: M. A. Miller, pp. 266-269Unit Ten Text I Straight-A Illiteracy James P. Degnan1.Despite all the current fuss and bother about the extraordinary number of ordinary illiterates who overpopulate our schools, small attention has been given to another kind of illiterate, an illiterate whose plight is, in many ways, more important, because he is more influential. This illiterate may, as often as not, be a university president, but he is typically a Ph.D., a successful professor and textbook author. The person to whom I refer is the straight-A illiterate, and the following is written in an attempt to give him equal time with his widely publicized counterpart. Comment on the the effect of the present tense, the parallelism, and name of the student, and other linguistic devices used to highlight the problem of this straight-A illiterate.2.The scene is my office, and I am at work, doing what must be done if one is to assist in the cure of a disease that, over the years, I have come to call straight-A illiteracy. I am interrogating, I am cross-examining, I am prying and probing for the meaning of a student’s paper. The student is a college senior with a straight-A average, an extremely bright, highly articulate student who has just been awarded a coveted fellowship to one of the nation’s outstanding graduate schools. He and I have been at this, have been going over his paper sentence by sentence, word by word, for an hour. “The choice of exogenous variables in relation to multi-colinearity,” I hear myself reading from his pape r, “is contingent upon the derivations of certain multiple correlation coefficients.” I pause to catch my breath. “Now that statement, I address the student --- whom I shall call, allegorically, Mr. Bright —“that statement, Mr. Bright, what on earth does it mean?” Mr. Bright, his brow furrowed, tries mightily. Finally, with both of us combining our linguistic and imaginative re-sources, finally, after what seems another hour, we decode it. We decide exactly what it is that Mr. Bright is trying to say, what he really wants to say, which is: “Supply determines demand.”3.Over the past decade or so, I have known many students like him, many college seniors suffering from Bright’s disease. It attacks the best minds, and gradually destroys the critical faculties, making it impossible for the sufferer to detect gibberish in his own writing or in that of others. During the years of higher education it grows worse, reaching its terminal stage, typically, when its victim receives his Ph.D. Obviously, the victim of Br ight’s disease is no ordinary illiterate. He would never turn in a paper with misspellings or errors in punctuation; he would never use a double negative or the word “irregardless.” Nevertheless, he is illiterate, in the worst way: he is incapable of saying, in writing, simply and clearly, what he means. The ordinary illiterate --- perhaps providentially protected from college and graduate school --- might say: “Them people down at the shop better stock up on what our customers need, or we ain’t gonna be in business long.” Not our man. Taking his cue from years of higher education, years of reading the textbooks and professional journals that are the major sources of his affliction, he writes: “The focus of concentration must rest upon objectives centered around the knowledge of customer areas so that a sophisticated awareness of those areas can serve as an entrepreneurial filter to screen what is relevant from what is irrelevant to future commitments.” For writing such gibberish he is awarded straight As on his papers (both samples quoted above were taken from papers that received As), and the opportunity to move, inexorably, toward his fellowship and eventual Ph.D.4.As I have suggested the major cause of such illiteracy is the stuff --- the textbooks and professional journals --- the straight-A illiterate is forced to read during his years of higher education. He learns to write gibberish by reading it, and by being taught to admire it asprofundity. If he is majoring in sociology, he must grapple with such journals as the American Sociological Review, journals bulging with barbarous jargon, such as “ego-integrative action orientation”and “orientation toward improvement of the gratificational-deprivation balance of the actor” (the latter of which monstrous phr ases represents, to quote Malcolm Cowley, the sociologist’s way of saying “the pleasure principle”). In such journals, Mr. Cowley reminds us, two things are never described as being “alike.” They are “homologous” or “isomorphic. Nor are things simply “different.” They are “allotropic.” In such journals writers never “divide anything.” They “dichotomize” or “bifurcate” things.From: M. A. Miller, pp. 355-358Unit Eleven Text I On Consigning Manuscripts to Floppy Discs and Archives to OblivionWillis E. McNelly1.Manuscripts, those vital records of an author’s creative process, are an endangered species. The advent of word processors, and their relatively low cost together with increasing simplic ity, means that even impoverished, unpublished, would-be write rs’ (as well as the Names who top the best-seller list) have turned to their Wangs, IBMs and Apples, inserted Wordstar, Scriptsit or Apple Writer programs and busily begun writing, editing and revising their creative efforts. The result? A floppy disc!2.We should deplore the disappearance of manuscripts. How can anyone, student or scholar, learn anything about the creative process from a floppy disc? Can this wobbly plastic reveal the hours, the endless hours, where beauty was born out of its own despair (as William Butler Y eats put it) and blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil? Manuscripts are these records of creative agony, often sweat-stained, coffee-splattered or cigarette-charred. Manuscripts tell us what went on in a writer’s soul, how he or she fel t during the agony of creation. Edna St.V incent Millay may have burned the candle at both ends and wondered at its lovely light, but her first I drafts are treasures for future generations.3.Imagine if Yeats had written those magnificent lyrics celebrating his futile love for Maud Gonne on a word processor! No floppy disc can possibly reveal the depth of his sorrow. Almost a century later his manuscripts in the National Library in Dublin still glow with the power of his passion. They tell young, wan poets of either sex that faded tearstains are not new, that their feelings, hopes, despairs, loves and losses are actually eternal. Suppose Ray Bradbury had written “Fahrenheit 451” on a Wang. How appropriate, even ironic, it might have been had his various drafts gone the way of the burning books that he deplores and disappeared into a memory bank.4.Fortunately, any student of writing can inspect those same drafts in the Special Collections Library of California State University, Fullerton. Novices and professionals alike can examine how a brief story, “The Fireman,” grew into an unpublished novelette, “Fire Burn, Fire Burn!” and then developed into another longer version, “The Hearth and the Salamander,” also unpublished. The final copy (complete with an occasional typo, since it was typed by the author himself) is available for inspection. On these pages Bradbury’s own bold handwriting has substituted a vivid verb for a flabby one, switched a sentence or two around, sharpened or sometimes eliminated an adjective, substituted a better noun. The manuscript provides a perfect example of the artist at work. We would never see that kind of development or final polishing on any number of floppy discs.5.Moreover, put a lot of manuscripts together and you have an archive. Memoranda, diaries, journals, jottings, first, second and third drafts --- these archives are important to all of us. The archives of a city are often musty collections of scribbled scraps of paper, meaningful doodles about boundary lines or endless handwritten records of marriages, divorces, deeds, births and deaths. Our country’s archives of all kinds are a priceless heritage. The National Archives is jammed with ragged papers, preserved for the scrutiny of historians.6.Manuscripts tell us how Thomas Jef ferson’s mind worked as he drafted the Declaration of Independence. A famous letter to the president of Y ale informs us of Benjamin Franklin’s true feelings about religion. We’ve learned volumes from the diaries, papers, letters and exhortations of those who put our Constitution together. Would we know as much if they had done it all on a newfloppy disc? Unthinkable!7.Similarly, would letters from famous men and women spewed out on a dot-matrix printer have the same fascination as an original holograph? Would a machine-signed, mass-produced letter generated in some White House basement have the same emotional impact --- or the same value, for that matter --- as a handwritten letter mailed by Citizen Ronald Reagan in 1965, complete with hand-addressed envelope and canceled 5-cent stamp? Hardly.8.James Joyce once wrote that the errors of an artist are the portals of discovery. Unfortunately, we’ll never know of those errors if clean, neat, immaculate but errorless floppy discs replace tattered, pen-scratched, scissored, taped, yellowed, rewritten, retyped manuscripts. Libraries preserve them, students learn from them, auctioneers cry them at fabulous prices, owners cherish them. And word processors totally eliminate them. Our loss would be incalculable.9.Manuscripts are our gift to our heritage, and we have no right to deprive future generations of learning how we think and feel, simply because we find word processing more convenient. Patiently corrected manuscripts, not floppy discs, can tell any novice writer or future historian that writing is hard work, that it takes vision and revision alike --- and that it should be done on paper, not with electrons on a screen.From: J. R. McCuen and A. C. Winkler, pp. 512-515Unit Twelve Text I Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts Bruce Catton1.When Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met in the parlor of a modest house at Appomattox Court House’, V irginia, on April 9, 1865, to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern V irginia, a great chapter in American life came to a close, and a great new chapter began.2.These men were bringing the Civil War to its virtual finish. To be sure, other armies had yet to surrender, and for a few days the fugitive Confederate government would struggle desperately and vainly, trying to find some way to go on living now that its chief support was gone. But in effect it was all Over when Grant and Lee signed the papers. And the little room where they wrote out the terms was the scene of one of the poignant, dramatic contrasts in American history.3.They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths, of two conflicting currents that, through them, had come into final collision.4.Back ofRobert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life.5.Lee was tidewater V irginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition… the age of chivalry transplanted to a New World which was making its own legends and its own myths. He embodied a way of life that had come down through the age of knighthood and the English country squire. America was a land that was beginning all over again, dedicated to nothing much more complicated than the rather hazy belief that all men had equal rights and should have an equal chance in the world. In such a land Lee stood for the feeling that it was somehow of advantage to human society to have a pronounced inequality in the social structure. There should be a leisure class, backed by ownership of land; in turn, society itself should be keyed to the land as the chief source of wealth and influence. It would bring forth (according to this ideal) a class of men with a strong sense of obligation to the community; men who lived not to gain advantage for themselves, but to meet the solemn obligations which had been laid on them by the very fact that they were privileged. From them the country would get its leadership; to them it could look for the higher values --- of thought, of conduct, of personal deportment --- to give it strength and virtue.6.Lee embodied the noblest elements of this aristocratic ideal. Through him, the landed nobility justified itself. For four years, the Southern states had fought a desperate war to uphold the ideals for which Lee stood. In the end, it almost seemed as if the Confederacy fought for Lee; as if he himself was the Confederacy... the best thing that the way of life for which the Confederacy stood could ever have to offer. He had passed into legend before Appomattox. Thousands of tired, underfed, poorly clothed Confederate soldiers, long since past the simple enthusiasm of the early days of the struggle, somehow considered Lee the symbol of everything for which they had been willing to die. But they could not quite put this feeling into words. If the Lost Cause, sanctified by so much heroism and so many deaths, had a living justification, its justification was General Lee.7.Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past hut who had a sharp eye for the future.8.These frontier men were the precise opposites of the tidewater aristocrats. Back of them, in the great surge that had taken people over the Alleghenies and into the opening Western country, there was a deep, implic it dissatisfaction with a past that had settled into grooves. They stood fordemocracy, not from any reasoned conclusion about the proper ordering of human society, but simply because they had grown up in the middle of democracy and knew how it worked. Their society might have privileges, but they would be privileges each man had won for himself. Forms and patterns meant nothing. No man was born to anything, except perhaps to a chance to show how far he could rise. Life was competition.9.Y et along with this feeling had come a deep sense of belonging to a national community. The Westerner who developed a farm, opened a shop, or set up in business as a trader, could hope to prosper only as his own community prospered --- and his community ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada down to Mexico. If the land was settled, with towns and highways and accessible markets, he could better himself. He saw his fate in terms of the nation’s own destiny. As its horizons expanded, so did his. He had, in other words, an acute dollars-and cents-stake in the continued growth and development of his country.10.And that, perhaps, is where the contrast between Grant and Lee becomes most striking. The Virginia aristocrat, inevitably, saw himself in relation to his own region. He lived in a static society which could endure almost anything except change. Instinctively, his first loyalty would go to the locality in which that society existed. He would fight to the limit of endurance to defend it, because in defending it he was defending everything that gave his own life its deepest meaning.11.The Westerner, on the other hand, would fight with an equal tenacity for the broader concept of society. He fought so because everything he lived by was tied to growth, expansion, and a constantly widening horizon. What he lived by would survive or fall with the nation itself. He could not possibly stand by unmoved in the face of an attempt to destroy the Union. He would combat it with everything he had, because he could only see it as an effort to cut the ground out from under his feet.12.So Grant and Lee were in complete contrast, representing two diametrically opposed elements in American life. Grant was the modern man emerging; beyond him, ready to come on the stage, was the great age of steel and machinery, of crowded cities and a restless burgeoning vitality. Lee might have ridden down from the old age of chivalry, lance in hand, silken banner fluttering over his head. Each man was the perfect champion of his cause, drawing both his strengths and his weaknesses from the people he led.13.Y et it was not all contrast, after all. Different as they were — in background, in personality, in underlying aspiration --- these two great soldiers had much in common. Under everything else, they were marvelous fighters. Furthermore, their fighting qualities were really very much alike. 14.Each man had, to begin with, the great virtue of utter tenacity and fidelity. Grant fought his way down the Mississippi V alley in spite of acute personal discouragement and profound military handicaps. Lee hung on in the trenches at Petersburg after hope itself had died. In each man there was an indomitable quality… the born fighter’s refusal to give up as long as he can still remain on his feet and lift his two fists.15.Daring and resourcefulness they had, too; the ability to think faster and move faster than the enemy. These were the qualities which gave Lee the dazzling campaigns of Second Manassas and Chancellorsville and won Vicksburg for Grant.stly, and perhaps greatest of all, there was the ability, at the end, to turn quickly from war to peace once the fighting was over. Out of the way these two men behaved at Appomattox came the possibility of a peace of reconciliation. It was a possibility not wholly realized, in the years to come, but which did, in the end, help the two sections to become one nation again…after a warwhose bitterness might have seemed to make such a reunion wholly impossible. No part of either man’s life became him more than t he part he played in this brief meeting in the McLean house at Appomattox. Their behavior there put all succeeding generations of Americans in their debt. Two great Americans, Grant and Lee --- very different, yet under everything very much alike. Their encounter at Appomattox was one of the great moments of American history.From: K. Flachmann and M. Flachmann, pp. 305-311。
