The Abusable Past

Speech Class

Last fall, in the middle of the presidential campaign, David Kirkpatrick, a business reporter for the New York Times, wrote a relatively unnoticed piece on the declining level--reading level, that is--of presidential debates. To assess this drop in literacy, he interviewed Robert Beard, a retired Bucknell linguistics professor and "chief linguistics officer" of the language information Internet company, your-Dictionary.com. Beard had evaluated the Gore-Bush debates with software that incorporated the Flesch-Kincaid reading level formula regularly used by publishers to evaluate the difficulty of their textbooks--a formula based on the length of words and the complexity of sentences.

Beard's findings were not exactly comforting. Using the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a benchmark (Douglas: nearly twelfth-grade level; Lincoln: just above eleventh grade), Beard concluded that in the 1960 presidential debates, Nixon had spoken just above a tenth-grade level and Kennedy just below; in the 1996 debates, Clinton had spoken at an eighth-grade level, while Dole had pitched his message at the sixth-grade level. Gore's contribution to last fall's debates were at an eighth-grade level, though the sighs and rolled eyes threatened to lower the mark further; Bush, Beard judged, was nearly a grade below Gore. Now we know what Bush meant when he promised to leave no child behind.

Brother, Can You Spare a Grand?

First it was Ralph Lauren's Depression-style celebration of the fashion statements of the "Wild Boys of the Road" (see "The Abusable Past," RHR 78). Then it was the mail-order promotion for a "Hooray for the Depression" collection of 1930s pop music. Now, fresh from last fall's catalog of the American Girl doll collection, we have Kit Kittredge, an eighteen-inch doll with accessories keyed to the year 1934. "Meet Kit," the catalog exclaims. Kit "is enjoying the carefree life she has always known--until suddenly her world turns upside down. First, Mother's friend and her sickly pampered friend Stirling come to live with her family. Then Kit's dad loses his business, and things go from bad to worse. Will life ever be the same again?"

To find the answer to that question, parents will have to ante up. Kit herself has a price tag of $84, but the four hardcover books that tell Kit's story come to almost $52. In them, we learn that Kit is shocked by what she sees on a visit to a soup kitchen, that she takes care of "cranky Uncle Hendrick and his nasty dog Inky" to earn money for the mortgage, and that, having been displaced from her bedroom by boarders, Kit uses her imagination to decorate her new attic bedroom. Consumers need not use their imagination, since the American Girl catalog offers a wide range of homely accessories, ranging from Kit's school lunch box (cheese sandwich, apple, carrot, oatmeal cookie, and embroidered napkin) at $16 and her rolltop desk and swivel chair at $70, to her waffle iron set ($18) and tufted bedding and bed set ($76).

But by far the most impressive accessory is Kit's dresser trunk at $155. What, one wonders, will Kit do with it? Will she use it to keep the "sickly, pampered" Stirling from trying on her clothes? Or will she use this pièce de résistance to hide her Wild Boy of the Road? With luck the three additional books "coming next year" about Kit, not to mention the many "new outfits and accessories," will let us know whether this downwardly mobile doll joins the Young Communist League or a Klan auxiliary.

A New York Times article in January took the addition of Kit to the popular American Doll collection as yet another "economic indicator" of the recent downturn, all the more intriguing for the fact that the doll's conception and design preceded last year's dive in the stock market. Even more surprising are the reports that Kit's initial sales have far outstripped those...