Intents & Impacts – Steve Zolno on Democracy

 Published 22 September, 2022 in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat, short version of "Bitter Truths, Distorted Hopes." © Wyndy J. Knox Carr.

Guide to Living in a Democracy by Steve Zolno
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think this is a Guide to start class discussions with in junior high school, paired with a real history text, The U. S. Constitution and Amendments. It’s really good. Unfortunately, the American public school system; especially in history, civics and social studies; has been so damaged and degraded since the 1950s and 60s, that Zolno’s Guide may be suitable for high schools and even community colleges and adult ed.

Parts and tones of Steve Zolno’s Guide to Living in a Democracy left me confused and hesitant at first. I had to put my “writing tutor” cap on to realize that he started with abstractions named from an authoritative stance that seemed to “leave me out.” He was instructing me about things I already knew, without sharing the tools I need to make those ideals and principles into realities.

Three things I learned as a copy editor and in graduate school in Creative Writing:
Ask first “Who is ‘my audience’?” “Who do I want my reader to be?” then
“SHOW, share stories and sense images; don’t TELL” and
"How can my structure and language support those two goals best?"

Journalism and Poetry are two ends of a spectrum of writing styles where Facts and Rules are on one end and “throwing out the rule book” in order to Take An Inspired Leap with the intuition-spirit-heart-mind-senses is on the other. The “nonfiction” middle path Zolno’s striving for needs a good dose of both to actually get his readers engaged.

If I’d picked up his book in a bookstore and started reading the first few pages or chapter, I would have put Guide back down, thinking, “This isn’t for me.” Our readers’ time is valuable, too – in persuasive nonfiction especially, how do we bring others along with us in our most courageous, passionate dreams for creating a present and future world?

When Zolno describes events, concepts and people in general, flat binaries only; highlighting quotes, persons and events in either/ors; his views slant condemnatory or rosy. After an elementary introduction “about what the democratic vision looks like,” Zolno’s Guide glides past specific Union goals stated in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution like “establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity”…et cetera to very contemporary memes like “Shared Prosperity,” “Freedom of Choice,” “Fair Elections” and “Protecting our Environment,” assuming his readers not only know all about their details, but are with him in mind and spirit. 

Excellent ideal goals, of course, but how can we enforce, coerce or educate thOurselves to participate nationally in thOur democratic republic abiding by principles of “Constructive Dialogue,” “Universal Respect,” “Commitment to Truth” and “Equal Justice” when we have so much heated discussion as to what those are, in structure as well as policy, let alone whether we can commit to, employ and practice them wholeheartedly? What kinds of practices, people and organizations will “get us there?” 

Grappling with how to employ particular policies and actions globally when thOur cultures, languages and governmental structures are so diverse feels even more daunting, even if it’s more necessary than ever. “We all live downstream,” and a war or epidemic on the other side of the world also devastates thOur own. 

Can “We the People” lead the way, or at least shine a light into the seeming darkness? How can we “walk the talk,” “put our money where our mouths are” “be the change we want to see in the world” and live out other encouraging metaphors describing activity leading to real political functionality? 

Even Zolno admits to conundrums in his Guide to Living in a Democracy, confirming authors like Dante D. King in The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide - and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory: “The concept of universal respect and the actions of democracies toward others often are not consistent. They (not We, mind you – he’s taking the omniscient narrator stance here, absolving himself from blame or responsibility?) have a history of subjugating people under the guise of liberating them.” Indeed. 

These issues are about “morality and fighting for justice,” “radical change from the 1960s to today” using words, funding, technology, science and communication methods that we have now that we didn’t have then. It is STILL hard to tell the warmongers, racists and rapists that we want peace, community and bodily autonomy -- respect, freedom and creativity – preferably through art, humor and diplomacy – but will we persist “by any means necessary” if prejudice and privilege refuse to hear their/our/thOur pleas and incorporate new values and systems? 

We need to own up to the habits, values and systems we hold in thOur own pasts and psyches. Confronting thOur collusion in “the structure of a system.” 

Rebellion or revolt are open resistance or the attempt to overthrow a system, but Revolution is a rebellion that SUCCEEDS in overthrowing a government or system and ESTABLISHES a new one. (Farlex Trivia Dictionary online. © 2012 Farlex, Inc.) (note that there is no reference to being armed, the military or violence in these definitions. wc)

We civil rights activists, draft and war resisters, feminists, "back to the landers" and others who decided to “question authority” in the 1960s and 70s caused a broader change than many political and social historians admit to. We knew what the American Revolution against British monarchy was, because we learned about it in schools that were proud of it, as well as the Constitution and Bill of Rights that came out of that revolution, because our parents had just defeated authoritarian fascism in Europe, the Pacific and East Asia. We were not educated about Imperialism and the brutalities as well as the bounties of capitalism, however. We had to learn and relearn that time and time again over the past 50 years, from “Banana Republics” to “Climate Injustice.”

The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, “New Federalism” and other policy-benders of education, commerce and law gathering power and support since Nixon, Reagan and the Bush presidencies have strategically “dumbed down” history and social studies in schools since then, however, leaning us to the far right. (The Brookings Institution, considered Centrist-Left by the Right and Centrist-Right by the Left in journalism and Congressional references, is referenced  almost evenly by conservatives and liberals in congress and the press, although "In total, since 1990, 96% of its (employees) political donations have gone to Democrats." Retrieved opensecrets.org , Dec 10, 2018, Wikipedia.) 

We’re facing fascism again, authoritarianism and totalitarianism here and globally. YOU are, because we’re too old to go through this again, and YOU have the tools, hope, energy and imagination to bend and defeat it, this time around. Again, I think this is a Guide to start class discussions with in junior high school, paired with a real history text, The Constitution and Amendments. 

Not a history text like the one my son had in Minneapolis Public schools in 5th or 6th grade, provided free of charge by the Heritage Foundation, with such notables on the editorial Board as Newt Gingrich and Lynne Cheney, Dick’s wife, who almost destroyed the National Endowment for the Humanities when she’d been appointed under President Reagan. 

If you are not familiar with the names of these people, policies, think tanks or corporations I mention here and in Zolno’s copious supporting footnotes, look them up. You will be AMAZED at what you HAVEN’T BEEN TAUGHT. And what varieties of viewpoints exist beyond your algorithmically-slanted FB, Twitter and Instagram “feeds.” (Algorithms “feed” you what they know you want and prefer already – that’s why they call them “feeds.” See more at * below.)

Unfortunately, the American public school system; especially in history, civics and social studies; has been so damaged and degraded since the 1950s and 60s, that Zolno’s Guide may be suitable for high schools and even community colleges and adult ed.

We have response-abilities. Find tools and mentors for Critical Thinking. “Democracy cannot survive on its own.”

* “al′go·rith′mi·cal·ly adv.
Word History: Because of its popularity over the last century, one might figure algorithm for a new coinage. The source of algorithm, however, is not Silicon Valley but Khwarizm, a region near the Aral Sea in south-central Asia and the birthplace of the ninth-century mathematician Muhammad ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi (780?-850?). Al-Khwarizmi, "the Khwarizmian," who later lived in Baghdad, wrote a treatise on what is called algorism, or the use of Arabic numerals for mathematical computation. Despite the name by which the Arabic numerals are known in Europe, these symbols, as well as the methods for using them, were actually developed in ancient India. Europeans learned to use the numerals, however, through treatises written in Arabic by mathematicians working in the Muslim world. Algorism, the English word for computation with Arabic numerals, is derived from Al-Khwarizmi's name. The word algorithm originated as a variant spelling of algorism, probably under the influence of the word arithmetic or its Greek source arithmos, "number." With the development of sophisticated mechanical computing devices in the 20th century, algorithm was adopted as a convenient word for a recursive mathematical procedure, the computer's stock-in-trade. In its new life as a computer term, algorithm, no longer a variant of algorism, nevertheless reminds us of the debt that modern technology owes to the scientists and scholars of ancient and medieval times.”
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. (1 December 2022) https://www.thefreedictionary.com/alg... (2003-2022) Farlex, Inc.

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