Pictures vs. Print

 I’m a print person. Although I worked many years at a television news station, I love putting words on a page, trying to get the right one. I’m in the minority since most people are picture people. They believe indeed that a picture is worth a thousand words, so why waste your time reading. Shamefully, it was a newspaper editor, Arthur Brisbane, who in 1911 coined the saying about pictures trumping words. However, it was popularized by a leading practitioner of  advertising, Fred Barnard, who lied that it was a Chinese proverb, so people would take it seriously.

 I started my career on a newspaper, the Providence Journal, in its Newport bureau. I wrote thousands of words about all sorts of things. I also carried a camera at times, an old speed graphic I had to lug around, the kind you see in old movies. Did my stories make the front page? Occasionally. My pictures? More often. Sigh.

I will admit I really liked pictorial journalism as a child. I grew up during the popularity of Henry Luce’s Life Magazine. It was the foremost practitioner of photojournalism, from 1936 through the 1960s. While Life, the magazine, contained words, and at times it even presented lengthy books in serial form such as Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the focus was news photography. It was the visual medium before television. Our family subscribed to Life, along with 8.5 million others, and I recall hurrying home from high school on Thursdays (I think it was) to see what it featured that week. It claimed then  to reach quarter of the US population. Meanwhile, Luce’s print-oriented Time magazine, while older (it began in 1923) had at most a subscription list of 4 million, less than half  Life’s.  

 Today, on the Internet, I’m constantly frustrated by people who put up videos which take five or twenty minutes to watch, instead of summarizing the information contained in them in words which would perhaps take 30 seconds to read. People, though, like watching pictures – if only of a talking head – rather than taking the effort to read. You don’t have to be literate to look at a picture. And a picture, a photograph, or more vividly, a video, seems to takes you there. It’s real.

 It isn’t. Photographs, film, and video aren’t reality. They may come from a camera pointed at what we call reality – unlike paintings or (goodness help us!) AI images. Even if unaltered, only consisting of what the camera took, photographs can and often do mislead. Photographs are of an instant. Reality last longer. An example: no matter what has happened during a contest – be it a sports event, or an election, for instance the winner is always shown smiling, the loser frowning or sad. That’s because the photographer believes that a winner should smile, and a loser must frown – even if that may not be the case. The winner might dread what she is about to face; the loser may be relieved that she lost. But everyone changes his expression many times over time.    So the photographer can and does catch what he thinks is the appropriate one. Winners smile; losers don’t.

 Video and film are from seconds or minutes, or very occasionally hours long. Still, it’s a snippet of time which may or may not be representative of what has happened. And there’s another factor that video and film have: they are almost different sequences put together into one. Our interpretation of what we see is very much influenced by the sequence of images put together. Among the first people to recognize how important was the sequence in which images are put was were Soviet film makers in the 1920. They used it for propaganda purposes.

The Soviets developed what became called montage theory. The sequence of images is what develops a film’s power. Editing the images together is as important, if not more so, in conveying a message as the content of the shots alone. An important theorist of montage theory was Sergei Eisenstein. His silent film, Battleship Potemkin, is considered by many film critics as one of the greatest films ever. The film is dramatic. A powerful scene is of the massacre carried out by the Tsar’s troops on the Odessa steps. First comes the boots of Tsarist soldiers marching down the steps; then a baby in a carriage falling down the steps; then a wide shot of the massacre. The fact that there was never a massacre on the Odessa steps fails to diminish to scene’s power, and many were convinced it happened, due in large part to the emotional response the sequence of images create.

 When I worked for television, a news director introduced me to Eisenstein’s ideas about montage. Use montage, ethically (of course) to tell a vivid story – the real truth -- at least as you, the camera person, and the editor understand it. The technique doesn’t make all television news misleading. It does mean that video, like photography, is always shaped by the understanding of the human beings creating it. It is not reality, whatever reality is. Video presented by media in magazines, in newsreels, on television on the Internet, may appear to take you there, to what actually happened. The fire hose of images overwhelms the senses and can be exciting and powerful, but sometimes wrong.

 At college I had a teacher who would rant about Life Magazine, which was still a dominant in the 1960s. Back then I wondered why a person who taught writing and literature hated the magazine I had grown up with. Now I see that writing – print on a page – can express complexity and ambiguity. Is Hamlet a hero or a whinny procrastinator? Macbeth a villain or hen pecked husband? Was Julius Caesar a tyrant or a statesman? Is Trump a blowhard or a scheming autocrat? Well, both. You explore complexity in prose. That is much harder to do, and often impossible, in visual media, with pictures. That, I think, is why I prefer to write.

 

Trying to be Perfect

  Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. –Matthew 5:48

Recently I came across small blue paperback with a line drawing of Benjamin Franklin on the cover that I must have purchased 70 or more years ago. The glue in the binding had almost deteriorated, and as I turned its pages they detached. It reminded me of a youthful obsession I suffered from: improving myself by reading self-help books that told me how I could be a better person.

 Franklin’s Autobiography  isn’t exactly a self-help book, but my teenage self, I recall, used it as one, after I read, and re-read chapter 9, his “Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection.” Franklin wrote:

I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.

Franklin had made a list of 13 virtues he would work on: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility.  He worked each week on one virtue, which meant he could focus on each of the 13 four times a year. The Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson suggests there are “hints of irony and self-deprecation” in his recollection, written at age 79. However Isaacson thinks that Franklin had been very sincere when he began his moral perfection project at age 27.

 As a sincere young person I tried to work on my virtues, using Franklin’s list. Each virtue had a short explanation. Temperance was “Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.”; Silence was “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.” The virtue I didn’t quite understand was “Rarely use venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another's Peace or Reputation.” I wasn’t quite sure what venery was; sometime later I realized Franklin was talking about sex. I tried Frankin’s scheme a few months, perhaps as long as Franklin had.

 There had been earlier ventures into perfection by way of self-help. Perhaps the first was as Boy Scout. I memorized and took very seriously the Scout law: a Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent. The Scout Oath spoke of keeping oneself  “Physically Strong, Mentally Awake, and Morally Straight.” I poured over the  Handbook for Boys, the American Scout manual, which, among many topics like camp craft and merit badge requirements, explained the law and oath. For instance, being Clean wasn’t just about taking baths. It read:

 Fellows who hang around street corners or waste their time in other ways are the ones generally who have time for dirty stories and thoughts. The fellow who keeps busy with worthwhile things, who is thrifty with his time and his energies, is also clean in his thoughts and actions. “Rules of Scouting,” page 38 of Hanbook for Boys

My attempts at perfection also came from religion, responding directly to that verse in the Gospel of Matthew. My mother, an artist, had an illustrated book of the Ten Commandments. The pictures were fairly abstract but recognizable. Many were fairly abstract, but I tried not to take the Lord’s name in vain; “Hell!”, was a curse word. I honored my parents, and I knew I shouldn’t steal or lie. I wasn’t quite sure about coveting maidservants and adultery was a puzzle.

 But the bible wasn’t as much use in my quest as was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. It had religious stuff, for sure, but also what I felt was practical advice. He wrote:

 “The way to happiness: Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Scatter sunshine, forget self, think of others. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.”

“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”

And so on. I had a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking bound in faux red leather, which my mother must have purchased for me. I later got Peale’s workbook. Good stuff – no wonder my 12-year-old self was a Norman Vincent Peale fan, as was (and I think still is) Donald Trump. I could add other books my young self poured over, like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.  But you get the drift. Over time, my addiction to self-help dwindled, thank goodness, and now I recognize the selfishness in self-help.

 Eventually I came to realize that moral perfection was a pretty hard task. They may have helped get me though loneliness in childhood and adolescence. Being a good friend to others in real life no doubt helped more – even with fellows who hang around street corners. The drive for perfection is not as strong as it was in youth, though my wife still thinks I’m a bit of a perfectionist. The appeal of self-help books, too, has greatly lessoned, and when I read a magazine article or book that offers “simple steps” to improve some aspect of oneself, I resist. Life isn’t simple enough, and perfection isn’t possible.  

 Nationalisms

I do find it awkward holding dual Canadian and American citizenship in this time of tension between these two great countries. I feel like a mugwump.

 What is a mugwump you ask? originally an Algonquian word, the exact definion of which is unknown, it meant something like “war leader,” “important person,” or “one who thinks himself important.”

 Canadians and Americans have taken the term for their own uses. In Canada, it’s the name of a monster that lives in Lake Temiscamingue, which is a swelling of the Ottawa River between Ontario and Quebec. For Americans “mugwumps” was the name a New York newspaper gave to reformist Republicans who refused to support the nominated Republican candidate in the 1884 U.S. presidential election. The mugwumps considered James G. Blaine corrupt and supported Glover Cleveland. Today we call Republicans who fail to support President Donald Trump “moderate Republicans,” though I suppose we could call them mugwumps.

 My American father, Charlie Adams, though whom I inherited American citizenship, had his own definition. A mugwump is a person, or a bird, who perches precariously on a thin rail fence, his mug on one side, his wump on the other. I don’t know where my dad got that definition, but he thought it very funny.

 My father had deep American roots, according to a genealogy book his family held, His line of Adamses went back to a Puritan Adams, Henry, in 1634 in Massachusetts. Ancestors fought in the Civil War on the Union side, and, though his mother, on the Confederate. Dad wasn’t especially nationalistic, but he was definitely American, and served in the U.S. Navy as an officer during the Second World War.

 Peggy Neale, my mother, other on the other hand was proudly Canadian, born in Montreal six years after her father, my grandfather, immigrated to Canada. His career was working for that very Canadian corporation, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, in their hotels division. Since we lived in the States, each January mother had to renew her “Alien Registration Card.” To my knowledge, she never became an American.  Because father was on an assignment in the Navy, my mother went home to Canada to give birth to her first child, me. I am Canadian by birthright. I grew up in the States – Florida, New Hampshire, and Texas, went to college and university in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but after finishing studies returned to Canada in my twenties, and have lived in Vancouver for 57 years.

A very early memory is hearing a bugle play at a patriotic ceremony which must have been in 1945 at the end of World War II, after victory in Europe but before the Japanese surrendered, and my father could come home the South Pacific. As a school child with my hand over my heart, I recited the pledge of allegiance “to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation with liberty and justice for all.” In 1954, the U.S. Congress and President Eisenhower added to one nation the words “under God,” so my 12-year-old self complied.

 And there are a lot of things that the U.S. has done that I’m proud of. Playing a major role in the defeat the fascism in Europe, the Marshall Plan that followed, helping create and hosting the United Nations, containing Stalin’s and other Soviet leaders’ expansionism during the Cold War, generally supporting decolonization in Africa and elsewhere, ending legal segregation and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, raising living standards for many Americans – certainly not all – up to the 1980s. I love so many American authors, poets, and other artists. Many national parks are gems.

 On the other hand, the United States has made many mistakes, foreign and domestic: Vietnam and far too many wars afterwards, and allowing inequalities to grow and fester, leading to its current government which seems to want to destroy almost everything I hold great about America. And Americans elected the current president – twice. Fool me once, and it’s a mistake; fool me twice, and I’m just being stupid.

And I have come to love Canada. How could I not? Canada’s embrace of diversity, especially during the last couple of generations, is key for me. As a Quebecker, at least by birth, I appreciate the tolerance of the Two Solitudes for each other, and the acceptance by most of bilingualism.  International peacekeeping, Medicare, public broadcasting, the arts, especially its musicians, Canadian football, hockey (of course), that its police both R.C.M.P and local don’t tend to shoot people as often, that the country is trying to reconcile with Indigenous peoples  – all these are important. This is not to say Canada hasn’t made mistakes, too.

Like 8 or 9 out of 10 Canadians I support Canada’s current Prime Minister’s efforts to counter U.S. tariffs imposed by the current American administration. I know which side I’m on in the trade war, and I know a lot of Americans also oppose what their country is doing in trade. I haven’t crossed the U.S. border for years, and my wife won’t let me buy American produce in the grocery store.

 I must say my bi-national situation has made me somewhat skeptical of all nationalisms. One has to be from somewhere, and it is good to appreciate the place where one is from. But it seems that nationalism is far to often, and far too easily, exploited by elites. The result can be unnecessary wars, jingoism, and chauvinism. It can be a cudgel wielded against vulnerable minorities. Albert Einstein once put it this way: "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind"

 Yet I simply cannot renounce love for country – in my case for two countries. I am my father’s definition of the mugwump, sitting on the rail, precariously, this way and that, mug on one side, wump on the other.