Creating a National Crisis - What's the Story?

Tea Party Republicans met in caucus agreeing to illustrate the unlimited importance of stories on a global scale.

Wall Street 1927

I never really read that as a headline during the exhausting arguing that has the nation's lawmakers in its current apoplectic fit, but that is the meaning that I gained from the news. It is extremely easy to look at their efforts as either heroic or totally misguided as demonstrated by any sampling of the words that have been devoted to the efforts of congress to find a way to create a national budget that can gather enough votes to pass both houses of congress. Consider a some of the real headlines from this week's news:

John Boehner's Last Greedy Move

The Problems Are Just Starting for Obamacare

Playing the Racism Card in the Shutdown

The Presidency Is No Place for Amateurs

Follow the links if you must, but the text with these headlines will not do much more than reinforce whatever view you began with. Small wonder that both side of the budget battles have grown frustrated with reporters and tried to remind them that this is not a game. Our problem, living outside of the beltway, remains that we do not have a story that makes sense other than the story of the reality soap opera. To truly understand the events and what they might mean for the future of the country, we need a story that provides us with understanding of both sides.

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Different Generations, Different Stories

Filed under irony

Just an innocent conversation with a twenty something. His enthusiasm met
by my glazed over incredulity. His subject, a new smart phone app that uses GPS signals from other phones to allow people to know when they were in the same neighborhood and how “totally” cool it would be to hook up with friends using GPS. When he finished, I asked if he thought people would actually pay for this service. I could not summarize the difference in two generations any better than his notion of a “totally cool app” because I cannot fathom why any one would pay some one else to track their comings and goings so that the data set could be used for marketing intelligence or just turn it over to a secret NSA subpoena.

Science fiction from 1984 to The Matrix shows a culture that has been beaten down by oppressive control of information, but always independence has been taken by meglomaniacal overlords. The iPhone (click the image to get the true meaning of irony) generation wants to build their own apps to voluntarily pay to turn that control over to anyone, no evil overlord needed. How could it happen that the sixties generation with their distrust of corporations, the military and bureaucrats could raise a generation seemingly without the ability to be suspicious? Somehow, we forgot to tell the stories of how bad guys use information to hurt the good guys, or as they said in WWII, loose lips sink ships.

The rest of the post.

Three Generations in Tuscaloosa Changes

Identifying the characteristics of a generation, like generation X or Baby Boomers, takes up a lot of time for people in the business of creating messages that appeal to the stereotype of millions of people. Frankly, it works; far better than we might hope, but it works because a generation shares a collection of stories that form how they define their culture. The simplest example compares the reception veterans received arriving back from Vietnam with those returning from Iraq. The way we treat those people cannot be separated from the stories that surround those two very different conflicts.
A more complex demonstration of how the our stories define our responses and understandings of events is playing out in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It is not fair to say that it is on the campus of the University because it also extends to alumni of the school. The simple story is that a sorority was prepared to invite non-whites to pledge the organization for the first time. They were pressured by people outside of the active membership to forego what would have been a ground breaking step for the current generation of students in Tuscaloosa. The decision was followed by an article in the student newspaper and national attention.

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We All Tell Our Stories, Some are Musicals

Austin, Texas attracts a lot of attention for being the hub of the reddest of

red states, ask Attorney General Eric Holder. While it seems somewhat ironic to a survivor of the “Cold War” that Texas is proud of being “red” today, irony

barely shows in the herds of viable stories about Austin. If you focus on a single member of the herd, stereotyping takes its toll and robs you of knowing the culture of a place or a group of people. Austin prides itself on being the home of a vibrant musical community where people you probably never heard of share their stories using a variety of instruments and genres. While you ponder the multiple threads that make up Austin, Texas, here is a little bit of July in Austin.

We All Tell Our Stories, Sometimes in Sculpture

Note from Story Chip: It has been pretty quiet here for a while, but the reason is quite exciting as Story Chip prepares to launch a new addition to the web. This post will tease our expansion, but keep the details for later.

Sallie Chisum Roberts

Stories arrive in many forms. Graphics, music as well as the words that are most frequently the subject of this blog. The city of Artesia in southeastern New Mexico spent a decade and millions of dollars to remind us that sculpture and three dimensional representations can tell some powerful stories with very little help. Main Street features a series of bronze sculptures that tell the story of Artesia's founding and development from Sallie Chisum to men who work the oil rigs of the Permian Basin.

Independence Day - Bearing Witness

Kelly McEvers has been bearing witness as a reporter in Syria and other ravaged parts of the Middle East for some time. She took over the spot in my mind formerly held by the heroic Anne Garrels who reported mesmerizing accounts of the Iraq war. I marveled over the bravery and perhaps insane devotion to the telling of truth of first Anne Garrels and now Kelly. 

It is a Good Day to Learn Something New

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When I wrote about bamboozling, I was not thinking about any specific instance as there are so many examples. Rather, I was trying to point out the amount of trouble we get ourselves into when we trust a single source of information or, far worse, we allow someone else to decide what information is trustworthy. So, while it is easy to mine Fox News or MSNBC for the number of bamboozling attempts per minute, we are warned before hand. We know there is an agenda that we do not have to take to heart and we can look behind their message for the rest of the story. Fate has handed me a golden opportunity to discuss how sources of information both create and solve problems in the form of Associated Press's Twitter account being hacked.

The Bamboozler who Came to Dinner

Photo from Farm Services Adminstration

I have a neighbor who reads a lot of history books. I have always suspected that he only reads them so that he can impress dinner guests with the newest “truth” he has discovered in the pages. Usually, it is enough to just let him go on about whatever he is reading, but every once in a while his evening lecture deserves some discussion that goes beyond his selected text. We all know, and try to avoid, someone who reads a book, a magazine article or visits a website and immediately awards themselves an advanced degree on the subject, but their stories are still important when they are balanced by multiple perspectives. Admittedly, my bias for avoiding that single version of the historical record motivates my thinking, so when he hijacked the dinner conversation to lecture on his current reading about the ancient Egyptian library in Alexandria, his text moved right into those ideas that make Story Chip so important.

Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness

A very interesting week for the laws of marriage and the legal status of alternative lifestyles produced a very interesting moment for the importance of story telling and remembering our cultural history. The discussion of Proposition 8 in front of the Supreme Court produced one of those moments when words and what they mean became the focus. The word for the week was marriage as both Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act sought to define the word, not in use but in the eyes of the law. The legal definition of words and the common usage of words are frequently at odds but the process of changing the meaning in the courtroom differs from changing word meanings on the street only in who listens to the appeals. In law, we have judges, while in common use, all of us sit on the court. The stories that we tell become the anecdotal evidence, the very core of how we change our usage of words and what they mean on the street and in the courts. In the middle of the arguments on California's Proposition 8, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, ‘This is my friend.’ But it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend.” The Chief Justice made it very clear that words and their meanings change in unintended ways under the influence of both legal cultural actions.

Terabytes of Dolphin Oral History

If you are not a regular listener of NPR's “All Things Considered”, you have never experienced the “gotcha” moment when you suddenly realize that it is once again April Fool's Day and the staff at NPR has put together another wonderful piece of audio that shows that we are all a little gullible when we trust the source, or we accept that truth is always stranger than fiction or just that the fun of laughing at yourself is the tastiest. My own favorite, was a number of years ago when the subject was the economic and physical danger of producing maple syrup. I was doing fine until they started talking about maple trees spontaneously exploding injuring or killing sap harvesters.

This year's treat is close to our hearts at Story Chip. If you run a web site that collects oral history, you listen intently when you hear about a group that is recording dolphins stories about serving in the United States Navy. Some might not even notice that the sorrow over not being able to collect the memories of the “rescue bunnies” causes more laughter than genuine remorse. Our thanks to everyone who refrained from sending us an email suggesting that we add these great stories to our archive. Also our thanks to those of you who fell into the annual NPR extravaganza and are enjoying the reminder of your humanity. Finally, thanks to NPR for another job well done. Sorry we cannot embed the new story, but here's the link.

Memories are made to be broken

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I found a perfect illustration for the existence of Story Chip, right in my own writing backyard. Several years ago I wrote about my experiences on the day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated – my own where were you when Kennedy was killed - one of those events one never forgets. We see them in our memories as video, crystal clear, no doubt as to the accuracy of those memories, etched in the stone of our gray matter.

Madison Elementary School

In my recounting of this memory I knew to be wholly accurate, I wrote of being in school in Arlington, Virginia. The father of one of my classmates was a friend and colleague of then Vice President Johnson. I wrote of how this man’s son Lyndon, and others, were the first to be released from school that day in order to protect their families or to assist those in deeper grief than those not close friends or associates of the President. I knew this to be true, factual and beyond dispute.

Spring Break Stories

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Beer, heavily spiked fruity concoctions, limited clothing, lots of Sun and parties that change venues rather than begin or end form the back bone of spring break mythology. Maybe you even remember Elvis Presley's spring break movie, Girl Happy or some other classic film like Where the Boys Are to give some substance to the lore. Not the same as MTV doing live coverage of bikini contests in Daytona but stories have to start someplace if they want to grow into legends. For those with a more serious approach, visit springbreak.com for the history of spring break or an alternative version from coolestspringbreak.com. With all of the spring break information on the web, the surprise is that there is not an archive of oral histories. Sounds like a job for Story Chip!

Some years ago, one of my students submitted a piece for the school paper that attempted to put some perspective on his legendary adventure with spring break that included parties, Sun, lots of drinking and aspirations of finding bikinis with removable tops.

Stories for a Valentine

Here's a suggestion for warming the heart of your Valentine this February. Add your memories to Story Chip! Valentine stories celebrate relationships, so they cannot be jammed into groups of “the day we met” or “our golden anniversary” or any of the moments that make stories worth retelling. Valentine stories can become the metaphor for a relationship, that example that defines those days or decades together.

Thanks for 2012. Next up, 2013.

2012 was a good year for a wedding

Story Chip enjoyed rapid growth in 2012, not viral wardrobe malfunction growth, but steady sustainable expansion of both our content and readership. A website that has lofty goals and a zealot's faith in its mission can never afford a moment of idle satisfaction, so this discussion allows us to view what has happened over the last several months and our vision of what is coming in the immediate future.

Great stories that are hard to find

Photo by National Park Service

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Oral history archives exist in many forms and many places. There are miles of audio taped interviews and reams of laboriously typed transcripts from those interviews. Most of these marvelous collections are useless to the average person because they are not accessible. Story Chip started with the simple idea that the technology now exists to make oral history as accessible as an episode of a network sitcom. The more stories and archives become available, the more history is available to the curious.

Since we have just experienced another presidential inauguration, lets focus on one of the presidential libraries. You hear about these as each president leaves office and decides on a location for the archive of presidential records as part of the public record for future research and administered by the National Archives. Dwight Eisenhower's library is located in Abilene, Kansas, where he was raised and, like most presidential libraries, it contains an amazing amount of material about the man and his time in office. It also contains an impressive collection of oral history interviews, a small sample of which can be viewed on line.