I saw Dan Rather on T.V. the other day, offering some kind of new online program to help advance the cause of integrity in journalism. Apparently this last election shook him up. Let’s put those side by side and see how they look:
Dan Rather / Integrity in Journalism.
Huh. A few thoughts struck me by his reemergence in my living room. May I share one?
Another pairing, Fondness and Absence have long been associated; the one purportedly growing in some way proportional to the other. I’m not willing to concede the relation “out of hand” but it seems worthy of consideration and I’d like to use the case of Dan Rather to work out a simple thought experiment.
One of the objectives of science is to look for patterns in the natural world and deduce meaningful general laws from those patterns. I intend this thought experiment to test the premise that “Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder” and to discover if this relation should be left to poets only or if the methods of science might have something to offer.
Using mathematics (the language of science) I offer a tentative formula for consideration:
Suppose Ft = A x Fi where Ft is the final fondness, A is absence and Fi are the initial feelings. To apply the equation all we need are some reasonable units of measure.
We’ll do the easy work first. Units of time should probably be measured in months or years. Let’s face it, if two people run in slow motion the one toward the other and embrace passionately after taking a phone call; we’re talking about something other than fondness. At bare minimum I’ll allow a Fortnight.
Units of fondness are more difficult. How to measure fondness. The physicist and the poet both attempt to describe attraction. Their common vocabulary and disparate reference frames are confused at the peril of all.
When a poet tells his sweetheart that she grows more attractive with every day, she smiles and blushes.
When a physicist tells his matron that she grows more attractive with time she would do well to consider the consequential effects of distance and mass on gravitational force.
Mindful of this, we won’t use pounds to measure fondness.
This is complicated. The pinheads with PhDs in passion can offer no better than verbal scales and emoticons to compare predilections. We’ll make do with the best they can do. Here is my favorite version of this.
Pictures don’t conveniently plug into equations. You can see how the arbitrary numbering of the images above will corrupt the mathematician’s attempt to quantify. Still, done with care, the results though imprecise need not be meaningless. The top seven are, I’m sure we’ll agree, generally positive. The bottom seven negative. Let’s make a simple adjustment to the numbering system and propose that the bottom images be numbered -8 thru -14. Room for improvement? Certainly. Functional? Let’s see.
These give us a magnitude, but we still need a unit of measure.
I forthwith propose the use of the Notion. Notions, in this context, are feelings or sentiments. Notions can be positive or negative. It is admittedly a relative scale.
To get started I’ll try this on, oh, let’s say, Dan Rather. Let me see. He retired in June of 2006. That is something like 549 weeks since I’ve given him much thought. Converting to the Fortnight for reasons explained above, that rounds off to 275 Fn. That is a reasonable stand-in for Absence. Now the tough one. I’m going with -9 N. I hope that is not too severe. Some news anchors leave me feeling informed. Others, annoyed. Like catching someone trying to "pull the wool over your eyes". Yep, -9N.
So. Ft = 275 Fn x -9 N. My fondness for Dan Rather comes out to -2,475 Fortnight Notions.
Just to be fair, I think I should apply my formula to Mr. Rather one more time. In an attempt to be generous we’ll calculate the fondness that Rather might experience for a figure he apparently pines for between sparse visits. Have you had a chance to see the fond good-bye that Dan gave to Fidel Castro after a heartrending rendezvous many fortnight ago. The video link is Here. Note the Glow at 10:06, the Pose at 10:08, and the Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow at 10:16.
And with that, I think my experiment is exposed for containing a fatal flaw.
I'd like to make a point and a confession all-in-one. I pretty much knew how this was going to come out when I started. That alone seems to me to invalidate my so called thought experiment. That meeting between Rather and Castro struck me at the time as anything but journalism. I was certain that I was watching an important news event lost in the distraction of deference. Years later as I watched "memogate" unfold, I noted the contrasting treatment that contrasting presidents received from this legendary journalist. His "had I known then what I know now" seems an excuse. Surely, he knew enough to know better than to pick sides and then call his work journalism.
Journalism and Science share, at the very least, a commitment to objective observations.
No veneer of science lingo can produce objectivity where there is none. Any attempt to corrupt science to confirm feelings is a fool’s errand, as is the corruption of journalism to validate passionately held notions.
Let it be noted that my Rather negative sentiments do not translate to ill will. I wish only the very best for D.R. and am willing to improve my opinion of him in proportion to his improvement. But then, I already knew that.