Oh! The Stupid Things I Hear! No. 3

Goddammit.

So I’m listening to the Diane Rehm “Friday News Roundup” (the BBC’s Katty Kay filling in for Diane) this morning and the initial topic is the new jobs report, which shows that 80,000 jobs were added last month:  104,000 new private sector jobs, offset by a loss of about 24,000 public sector jobs.

First I hear Ron Elving, senior Washington editor for NPR News, make the incredibly stupid claim “that’s not bad, but it’s not great either.”  No, that’s friggin terrible.  Look . . .  the United States needs to add about 150,000 new jobs every month just to stay even with population growth.  So a jobs report showing that we created about ½ that amount last month means that October was utterly horrible.  Telling the American public that “we added 80,000 jobs” without putting that figure into context is just journalistic malpractice.

But far, far worse was what Elving said next. 

Oh, the Stupid Things I Hear! No. 2

So I caught the last ten minutes of the Diane Rehm show this morning while driving into the office.  It was the standard end-of-the-week news roundup with a few pundits, one of whom was David Ignatius from The Washington Post.

On its ten-year anniversary, Diane was asking her guests whether there was any connection between the 9/11 attacks and the country’s current financial crisis.  (I love the Diane Rehm show,  but here is a simple answer to a stupid question:  No.)  David Ignatius took it upon himself to answer, and he said something like this (I am paraphrasing from memory):

I think what September 11^th showed us is that our systems are not self-correcting.  We had this sense that our political and economic systems could take care of themselves.  That is what they are supposed to do; a disturbance comes along and they self-correct back into a stable state, back to equilibrium.  It took us a long time to get past September 11^th and now our financial system doesn’t seem to be doing what it is supposed to be doing, we’re not seeing that self-correction taking place.

Oh, fer gawd’s sake!  Where to begin?

Our Evolving Language of War

I caught part of the Diane Rehm Show this morning on my way to pick up some breakfast biscuits.  I think it was a repeat; George McGovern was her guest, and she was asking him about the Open Letter to President Obama that he published in Harper’s last month. 

One small topic that got tossed out for discussion was McGovern’s assertion that we never should have renamed the “War Department” the “Department of Defense.”  I perked up a little when he said that, because I’ve argued the same thing in the past.  According to McGovern, by 1947 the United States had had a “War Department” that had served it well for more than a century, but then some clever public relations person suggested that the name be changed to generate greater public support.  After all, nobody likes the idea of “War” but everybody is in favor of “Defense.”  It made me reflect a little on how language influences our actual thinking.