Lament For the Little Things
What we're losing.
I am reading a book called While Rome Burns by Alexander Woolcott. It was originally published in 1934 and the front page has an inscription that reads, Anna Metcalfe Roe, March 1935. I’m not sure if the book was given to Miss Metcalfe or if she was claiming ownership.
Alexander Woolcott was an “American drama critic for The New York Times and the New York Herald, critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.”
It is not a book you read quickly. In the modern world, the language seems antiquated, not because it is, but because he is a master of the form and, being unused to reading English as it should be written, you have to concentrate, and pay attention to the words you are seeing.
The book contains passages that are written in French and not translated, perhaps because people who read the stories understood or spoke French.
The difference between this book and modern articles is like the difference between a Tom Clancy book and a John le Carré spy novel.
Admittedly, lamenting the loss of our ability to absorb and digest complex writing is way down the list of things to worry about, but it speaks to loss on a deeper level. The loss of our intellectual capacity, the loss of critical thinking skills, the loss of an education system that made this writing possible, the loss of a culture, and the loss of an ability to examine and process information.
At a class reunion seven years ago, when things like class reunions were possible without worrying about contracting a deadly virus, I found myself in the bathroom standing next to a classmate at the urinal, I told him that it reminded me, for some reason, of a story by Hunter S. Thompson about standing next to Richard Nixon in a bathroom, he looked at me and said, “Who’s Hunter S. Thompson?” the twenty-year-old at the next stall down said, “Hunter S. Thompson dude. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. You should really know who he is.”
That twenty-year-old restored my faith in young people, and caused me to pity my classmate for his complete lack of knowledge about cultural icons.
At that same reunion, I got a chance to sit down with my third grade teacher, we chatted about books and reading and literature and just before I got up to leave she leaned over and whispered, “I’m so glad we got a chance to talk. If we hadn’t, I would have gotten the idea that I had failed every other one of your classmates.”
She was 93 years old at the time, and she knew who Hunter S. Thompson was and had actually met him. She restored my faith in old people.
As these types of things disappear, “little things” that get lost in the noise of big things, I fear we will lose parts of ourselves that are going to be vital in the time we have left, and that loss will be sorely felt.
Did you see this in my latest piece?
Another sign of AMERICAN Decline —
The US ranking in literacy varies depending on the definition of literacy and the specific assessment used, but recent data indicates a ranking of 36th in the world in terms of literacy skills, with a literacy rate of approximately 79% for adults in 2024. This contrasts with the high percentage of U.S. adults (21%) who struggle with basic reading tasks and a significant portion (54%) reading below a sixth-grade level.
People who can barely read at a 6th grade level are NEVER going to know who Hunter S Thompson was.
I too, have been struck by the falling literacy rate across the U.S. in recent years. This only goes along with everything else some of us are seeing. When a large portion of the population becomes functionally illiterate, it becomes easier to manipulate them, which is how you win elections, which is how you change from a democracy to theocracy. which we're seeing front and center in the republican controlled states here in 2025.