There's a world of difference between calligraphy and typography, and though the latter is critical to determining the authenticity of the "Bush/Guard Documents," in a much deeper sense the difference between the two is symbolic of the struggle between the new and the old media. This has all been fascinating to me, in part because as a young'un I studied calligraphy in art school. Even after I learned the discipline I never got within striking distance of my instructor's elegant flow and artistry, but I was fascinated with the process of making letters with ink and brush. It's a kind of soothing magic. In Margaret Dehn's class at the Pacific Northwest College of Art I acquired an appreciation for what must have distinguished the scribe's profession from all others for most of human history. And I came to understand how profoundly the typographical revolution that ended their dominance changed the world. They must have resisted tooth and nail.
Calligraphers are artists, as any perusal of monastic text from the Middle Ages, or even a Roman inscription, will show. And as long as it remained art, books remained luxuries, and the knowledge therein the property of traditional elites or their designated lackeys. But typography crystallized and standardized the artistic and variable nature of calligraphy into a craft, and a new "occupational community" was born. That community not only made the treasures of knowledge more broadly available, but also expanded and institutionalized the culture of the scribes, leading to the birth of the trade union.
Perhaps one of the best books ever written on either trade unionism or democracy is Seymour Martin Lipset's: Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union which was coauthored by the great James Coleman, and Martin Trow. It's a study that exposes the strengths as well as the weaknesses of trade unionism, and the unique role of the occupational community of the printing craft in the atypical development of a democratic union. (Most unions are autocracies or oligarchies, so the ITU was an "outlier," or an exception to Michel's "Iron Law of Oligarchy.") Lipset's book tells us a great deal about the social conditions required for democracy to flourish, and those lessons are not irrelevant to our attempt to expand the franchise into the Islamic World. The primary reason why democracy succeeded in the typographical union, where it had failed in nearly all other unions, was the status security enjoyed by the losers of the political contest for internal power. In a sense this is a blueprint for what must happen in Iraq. [Emphasis added.]
Whereas ex-officials in the ranks of most unions are potential sources of division and a threat to the normal workings of one-party government, in the ITU the ambitions of leaders in the ranks and their quarrels with successors in office are harnessed to an institutionalized two-party system and are hedged around with norms and rules which make competitiveness and striving elements in a democratic political process.The return of union officers (defeated in elections) to the shop has, as we have noted, many functions for internal democracy, not least of which is the creation and maintenance of an informed body of men in the shops who are able and qualified to comment critically on the behavior of the union administration. The existence of such a body of men in the shops is of great importance to the maintenance of the union's political system; in addition, the fact that they can continue to play this leadership role, both in and outside the shops, reduces their stake in union office and greatly increases their freedom to oppose the incumbent administration. (Lipset, et al: 236)
So, the leaders have not so far to rise, nor so far to fall, that their sense of risk makes irresistible the corruption and power hoarding that inevitably lead to oligarchy or autocracy. Even in failure they remain a valuable social and political resource. But that quavering one hears in Dan Rather's voice as he presents his distorted and one-sided case to the viewers concerning his 60 Minutes stumble tells you just how much he despises and fears even the thought of failure, and how far he thinks he could fall. It is unlovely.
It's sad that the ITU was destroyed by the very medium we're discussing at the moment. They never recovered from the invention of Desktop Publishing, but in some sense the spirit of the ITU became embedded in the internet, and now in the blogosphere. In this medium there's simply no way for the "elites" to get so far ahead of the "masses" that we aren't always within reach of, or a resource for, one another. This contrasts significantly with the behavior of CBS, which bears a stronger resemblance to behavior of oligarchs than democrats (small "d").
I just watched CBS News with Dan Rather, and incredibly they've decided to hold tough on their claim that the documents are genuine. As you might imagine they provided none of the testimony or expertise supporting the opposition claim that the documents could not have been authentic, and instead focused the entire report on arguments so transparently inadequate that it's hard to imagine even they found them convincing. In MS Word it is possible for me to type a lowercase letter "el" for a numeral "one," and it's not impossible to type a "th" after a number without automatically transforming into a half-height superscript. Only someone stupefied by fear could possibly make such an argument with a straight face. By omitting literally dozens of the opposition's rather substantial arguments CBS managed to amplify the impression of profound bias and incompetence, rather than diminish it. In fact, it's hard to believe they could actually be as incompetent as they seem.
Update: Gerard sees a pattern at CBS.
Posted by Demosophist at September 13, 2004 07:10 PM | TrackBack