Nature has an unri­valled abil­i­ty to still the depress­ing cho­rus of affronts to our intel­li­gence by pol­i­tics, and to the Eng­lish lan­guage by those who bring the trans­gres­sions to our atten­tion. It also gifts us metaphors for humanity’s foibles.

Ear­ly one morn­ing this week I came upon a line (known as a “pad­dle”) of juve­nile mer­ganser ducks. They’re nor­mal­ly found preen­ing on flat rocks or div­ing for food in shel­tered inlets scoured out by ice age glaciers,
Instead, they were swim­ming furi­ous­ly against wind-whipped chop the mid­dle of the lake, a ver­sion of “fol­low the leader” to a place where it’s a fair bet none of them knew or could guess what awaited.
Their human equiv­a­lent is peo­ple who cheer, vote for and will­ing­ly fol­low any­one who leads their par­ty of choice, irre­spec­tive of qual­i­fi­ca­tions or  suit­abil­i­ty to do so. (In the mer­ganser’s defence, they were at least fol­low­ing what appeared to be  an adult.)
In a com­men­tary on Don­ald Trump, the Wall Street Jour­nal’s edi­tor-at-large point­ed out: “About one third of his remarks at last week’s press con­fer­ence were false, obtuse or lunatic.”
And yet, the polls still con­sis­tent­ly have him in a horse race with the indis­putably more artic­u­late, qual­i­fied and  demon­stra­bly ratio­nal Kam­laa Har­ris. (For one thing, she hasn’t shown a  creepy fas­ci­na­tion with a fic­tion­al can­ni­bal ser­i­al killer.)

                           NOT ALL THEIR FAULT

In defence of less-than-dis­cern­ing vot­ers, includ­ing those shield­ed by MAGA base­ball caps, polit­i­cal report­ing — and not just on FOX News —  isn’t con­sis­tent­ly crisp and artic­u­late, nev­er mind intel­lec­tu­al­ly enriching.
It might help if air time was denied to inter­vie­wees, on-air pun­dits and talk show guests known to repeat them­selves and bab­ble inchoate sen­tences that as often as not begin with and/or include “So, you know, like, I mean, obviously.”
In their place, I sug­gest “experts” be pre-inter­viewed for their famil­iar­i­ty with the advice of the Eng­lish writer and colo­nial founder of Penn­syl­va­nia, William Penn: “Speak prop­er­ly and in as few words as you can ‚but always plain­ly, for the end of speech is not osten­ta­tion, but to be under­stood.”    That guid­ance goes dou­ble for TV and radio cor­re­spon­dents who seem to have no idea that sen­tences require a verb (for which a gerund is not a sub­sti­tute) and nouns need a prepo­si­tion, to make sense.
Con­sis­tent­ly ignor­ing the rules of basic gram­mar and expect­ing to be seen as cred­i­ble is the jour­nal­is­tic embod­i­ment of the “infi­nite mon­key the­o­rem” pro­posed by French math­e­mati­cian Emile Borel in 1913; ”If you let a mon­key hit the keys of a type­writer at ran­dom an infi­nite amount of times, even­tu­al­ly the mon­key will type out the entire works of Shakespeare.”
Since we don’t  have that much time, and type­writ­ers are as hard to find as  jour­nal­ists who call out lies at press con­fer­ences, sure­ly it behooves rep­utable news orga­ni­za­tions to at least pro­vide copy editing.
The con­cept, nev­er mind the posi­tion of a copy edi­tor, shows signs of becom­ing an endan­gered species however.
As evi­dence, this gem from a New York Times  report  on the assas­si­na­tion of the polit­i­cal leader of Hamas in Tehran: “…an explo­sive device was covert­ly smug­gled into the Tehran guest­house.” . (My bold­ing)
Is that as opposed to open­ly smuggled?
From the same NY Times issue, many hours after the event in ques­tion: “Video|Watch Live: Biden and Har­ris Greet…”
I thought tout­ing every­thing from break­ing news to the mun­dane as “LIVE” was the purview of TV news, which despite the puz­zling belief that live super­sedes well-report­ed and thought­ful as a sell­ing point, gen­er­al­ly man­ages to refrain from putting a false Kyron on video images.
Unless you have clear, full and trust­wor­thy report­ing, or are too shal­low to give a damn who’s in charge, antic­i­pa­tion and anx­i­ety are the nat­ur­al emo­tion­al com­po­nents of the human elc­c­toral process.
For many ani­mals, group sur­vival demands they fol­low the best leader.The selec­tion sys­tem varies from brute force to, in the case of ele­phants, the eldest female, because she’s deemed to be the wis­est when it comes to know­ing and remem­ber­ing where to find food and water, espe­cial­ly in lean times.
That is in no way an endorse­ment of Kamala Har­ris on the basis of gen­der, by the way. It’s mere­ly stat­ing the obvi­ous: the leader should be the most capa­ble of  serv­ing the needs of the group.
The human selec­tion process seems to me to resem­ble a quaint char­ac­ter­is­tic of  a pad­dle of mer­gansers, con­stant­ly dip­ping their heads under the water in search of food. When the leader dives, the fol­low­ers have a ten­den­cy to do the same, whether they’ve spot­ted prey or not.
And if that’s not Nature pro­vid­ing a metaphor of cur­rent human behav­iour, I’m pad­dling on the wrong lake.

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