More photos?! One lawmaker’s twisted answer for – Latest News
During the regime of Cambodian dictator and genocidaire Pol Pot, troopers and secret policemen used eyeglasses as a fast manner of figuring out who deserved a place of their socialist utopia.
The bespectacled had been typically shot for that purpose alone, as treacherous bourgeois parasites.
Last week Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) resurrected one thing of that sentiment in her plan to encourage illustrations in all new payments in Congress — as a result of textual content alone is simply too tough to understand.
“For too long, our laws have been written for ‘staffer bros’ with bow ties who will issue guidance on how to follow them from cubicles on Pennsylvania Avenue,” she declared in a letter to congressional management.
“We should be able to draft legislation that speaks to all Americans, regardless of how they learn or the profession they work in — from visual learners and foremen to lawyers and policy experts.”
“Ultimately, this is about representation.”
An uncommon place for an elected official to take: Literacy belongs to the socially undesirable, to retro “staffer bros.”
(Note, too, the snobbery: Blue-collar staff, for whom “foremen” serves as a clear stand-in, ipso facto can’t learn this manner.)
Perez is true that the byzantine tangle of each our legal code and our regulatory regime baffles and confuses even essentially the most clever and expert Americans.
But printed federal laws already comprise a lot of pictures — and this hasn’t executed a lot for their legibility.
A more elegant answer is perhaps for law- and policy-makers merely to supply fewer, clearer legal guidelines and laws, as legal students like civil-rights legend Harvey Silverglate have argued.
Yet the vivid and impassioned language Perez reserves for mocking the bespectacled, bow-tied “bros” who can parse and explicate textual difficulties in our law stands out amid her letter’s in any other case tepid prose — all of the more in order her remarks come amid what can solely be described as a national literacy disaster.
Consider our youngsters’ persistent underperformance on the NAEP studying check, due to lecturers’ unions and their ever more aggressive erosion of requirements.
In Perez’s own Washington state, in response to 2024 NAEP information, nearly 40% of fourth graders fall beneath the “basic” customary in studying.
Consider, too, the elite personal and public universities whose incoming college students, at Berkeley, Princeton and elsewhere, can’t handle to learn more than a few pages a day per class — not to mention digest, comprehend and develop insights into tough novels or philosophical texts.
This supplies a profoundly ugly context for Perez’s demonization.
What does a broadside towards high literacy inform kids — or adults, for that matter — struggling to grasp the fundamentals?
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Foremost that their effort will probably be wasted, that success will depart them bespectacled and bro-ish, and that advanced texts might be mocked and ignored — or worse, degraded and bowdlerized.
In earlier eras, deep interpretive skill drew admiration: Think of the awe through which Jews held Talmudic sages.
And regardless of the best efforts of Perez’ celebration comrades to delegitimize the Supreme Court, the analytical brilliance of its justices nonetheless instructions high esteem.
Mocking people who possess these capacities appears the very embodiment of the senseless malice the Khmer Rouge displayed once they put myopics up towards the wall.
Indeed, Perez holds an undergraduate degree in economics — that means she herself has mastered the artwork of extracting that means from abstruse technical supplies, similar to these tedious bespectacled bros.
Why denigrate such mastery in others?
Yet there’s an uglier irony right here.
Perez’s letter introduces this anti-literacy tirade with the foundational buzzword of wokism, “representation.”
Its prominence appears meant to counsel that discarding America’s hard-won mass up to date literacy — deeply compromised although it could be — would one way or the other serve to make us more equal, more free, more human.
Yet citizenship in America can’t be disentangled from literacy, nor can true liberty — because the great Frederick Douglass demonstrated in his autobiography.
In a well-known passage, Douglass described his proprietor Mr. Auld’s livid response upon discovering that his spouse was instructing the younger Frederick to learn.
“It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Auld raged — saying that after Douglass turned literate, “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
Perez serves nominally within the trigger of defending that citizenship, and that liberty.
One wonders what Douglass would possibly make of her letter.
Sam Munson’s most up-to-date novel is “The Sofa” (2025).
