Danny Moore is one of twelve members of Colorado’s Independent Congressional Redistricting Committee. The other eleven members – Four Democrats, four Independents, and the three other Republicans – recently voted to remove Moore from his role as Committee Chair after some of his Facebook posts had been revealed by the Colorado Springs Gazette and other news media.
Among other things, he wrote that “mass mail-in ballots can be controlled by the people you give them too (sic)” and that “the media, blue-state officials, social media, Judge Judy, the establishment, the Intelligence Community, and the Global elite” had somehow defeated Trump, who, he said, had received more votes than Biden. (He neglected to mention the part played in what he referred to as “the Democrat steal” by Judge Crater, the international Communist professor conspiracy, John Travolta, designated hitters, or the Oxford English Dictionary people.)
Asked about these posts, Moore asserted that he is not a conspiracy theorist. He said he had “read articles” that made similar claims. “I don’t know if these things are true or not, but in my circle we share these things between us and we debate these things,” he said, adding that “My opinion is no more or less than anyone else’s opinion, but in this country we have to be able to express our First Amendment rights, without fear of being canceled by one side or the other.”
When I was teaching Freshman Comp, back when the last dinosaurs were expiring, I required my students to write six or seven essays each semester. I’d explain to them that their essays would be graded, once I’d subtracted points for mechanical and grammatical errors, on the basis of 30 points for clarity, 40 points for organization, and 30 points for support. I’d tell them what I meant by each: “clarity” meant that I didn’t have to read a sentence more than once to understand what it was trying to say. “Organization” referred to such matters as the existence of a thesis sentence, topic sentences for paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph whose conclusion referred back to the thesis. “Support” had to do with marshaling factual evidence from reliable sources and/or with avoiding common logical fallacies in supporting arguments.
When I got to that third criterion, I nearly always encountered some version of Moore’s assertion of the inalienable value of his opinions. “Everyone has a right to an opinion” was the standard formulation. I’d come to expect it. I was prepared.
I’d choose some student who looked unlikely to be armed or psychotic, walk up and peer at him or her, and say, “You are very sick. You are clearly suffering from Mogo on the Gogogo. You need to leave class and get to a doctor immediately.”
The student, or other students, would of course question my competence to make such a diagnosis, and I’d respond that it was my opinion, and I had every right to it. They’d ask me if I was a doctor, or if I had had medical training. I’d grin idiotically and say, “Nope!” This would lead to a discussion which usually concluded with general recognition that not all opinions are of equal value. Sometimes I’d attempt to cement that point by reading the passage from The Sun Also Rises in which Jake Barnes is drunkenly ruminating about Life, and thinks to himself, “You paid some way for everything that was any good. . . . Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. . . .” And I’d suggest that the 1st Amendment did, indeed, grant all citizens the right to spout any foolish opinions they wished to spout, but that didn’t mean that every opinion was of equal value, or of any value at all, if the right to it hadn’t been earned. Some people got it.
If I were teaching Freshman Comp in these days of the Digital Hegemony, I’d revise my grading system to 30-30-40, so that mindless blithering filled with mindless ad hominem labeling, post hoc arguments, and reference to unexamined “sources” and “studies” would guarantee a failing grade to even the most elegantly written and faultlessly organized essay.
Danny Moore’s bio page on the Commission’s website says, “Danny is a graduate of numerous Navy leadership and technical schools. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Management from Colorado Christian University and an MBA in International Business from the University of Phoenix.”
I must conclude that neither the Navy nor Colorado Christian nor the University of Phoenix requires English composition in their programs. Or else I must conclude that English composition has come to hold students to very different standards than it did in my day, which was not all that long ago. Moore would never have gotten beyond my freshman comp class.
I suppose it’s perfectly possible that Freshman Comp is no longer a requisite in many degree programs. Before I left the profession, fewer and fewer classes had any writing requirements. Shortly after I retired, the State Board essentially did away with the requirement that students meet minimum standards of literacy before being admitted to regular college classes.
This is a most melancholy trend. Until our rewiring is complete, and our thoughts can be provided us by the Masters of the Universe (“Elon Musk’s Neuralink implanted a chip into a monkey’s brain and now he ‘can play video games using his mind,'” a recent headline happily observed), we are stuck with the marvelously imperfect, extremely hazardous tool of language with which to find and make our way through life. The imperfections – the likelihood of misunderstandings, ambiguities, emotional manipulations, etc. – are nearly endless. The hazards – lies, misrepresented or misinterpreted truths, unscientifically produced “scientific evidence,” emotional manipulations, etc. – are equally numerous. Anything close to the truth is damned hard to find, and if you don’t know that, you’ve never tried to investigate a crime or lived with a spouse for more than a year.
The ability to use language responsibly and honestly is not inborn. We grow up learning the language from those around us, whoever they are, and without the aid of teachers most of us wind up not as masters of language but at its mercy, which it is not likely to offer. One of the most effective tools for examining language, our own or others’, is seeing it written down on a page, where it’ll hold still long enough that we have time to question it. That’s why for hundreds of years we considered learning to write with some degree of precision and clarity a necessary part of anyone’s education. Until playing video games with our minds becomes a satisfactory and sustainable lifetime’s work, learning to write will remain necessary.
Danny Moore, by all accounts, is a genial, companionable man. He has honorably served his country in the Navy for much of his life, and now runs his own successful business. But it’s clear from his remarks in defense of his Facebook posts that he doesn’t think any better than Archie and Fred on their tenth beer down at the corner bar. This seems not to have bothered the panel of six retired judges who appointed him to the Commission, and perhaps they were neither required nor chose to consider the intellectual competence of the pool members from whom they made their selections. It should, I think, bother the rest of us citizens of Colorado, whose representation will be significantly affected by the decisions of Moore and his fellow commissioners.
It should bother us as well, I think, that the systems of public and higher education we fund are failing to equip students with the basic tools of literacy which living in the global village does not render less but rather much more necessary.
