Mimetic Armageddon and the Modern Plague of “Bad Readers”

by Dimitrius DeMarco

Image by Blaz Photo on Unsplash

People who can’t read are ruining the world, and we’re letting them. If I had a dime for every instance of a title, theme, character, or concept getting bastardized by some barely-literate half-wit, I’d be part of the way across the northern sea on a luxury cruise trying to get a good look at aurora borealis. The sad truth of the matter is that we’re in trouble, and it’s permeating into every aspect of our lives: in classrooms, in media, and in government. ​

One of my major gripes with being a “student of literature” is that I get whipped back and forth between enriching conversations with my fellow learners-in-arms, to a glorified book club with my peers who either whine, complain, or project themselves on what had otherwise been an excellent read. I’ll sit in a survey class, or a lecture on theory, or even a course dedicated to methodological practices in reading for multiple dimensions—and still, the conversations devolve into  echo-chambers chock-full of projections and unethical readings. ​

I give Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises my personal award for “book best butchered” by my peers, as the nuance and vertical dimensions of narrative (the irony, satire, and authorial critique of Hemingway on a world after war) fall by the wayside. The classroom turns into a straw-manned battleground of moral superiority between green college freshmen vs. a seasoned author of a bygone era. The story gets labeled dated, the language and characters as bigoted, and by extension, so does Hemingway as the author. He couldn’t possibly be delivering an accurate depiction of the “Lost Generation” after World War I, could he? Apparently not. ​​

While vertical reading is a rather tacit tool supposedly employed by those of us in literary circles, it truly is not all that common. For this I name (and blame) two things: Hollywood and primary school. Those bad readers become teachers and they teach their students who also become bad readers. They then get jobs in TV and run the media cycles, or fill in the classrooms yet again in a vicious cycle. In school, we learn to look for main ideas and skip the details beyond the first few, or the “most important” (whatever the hell that means). We preach mimetic reading as the easiest and most holistic method for reading comprehension at the early stages, and while there is some merit to the process (it certainly is integral), we don’t teach beyond the mimetic experience until the collegiate level. Even then, the courses are few and far between if they exist at all. Then there’s my personal cherry on top, which is the literacy rate of the United States taking a less-than-graceful swan dive, which makes me wonder if things would be better if we were all still hooked on phonics…

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This is subsequently compounded by the fact that when we’re not in school or working, we park our asses in front of the nearest screen and veg out to easy-to-follow stories with characters tailor made for easy consumption. Hollywood has a habit of pre-chewing IP’s and feeding them like mother birds to newborn chicks in a regurgitated fashion, sucking out all the nuance and nutrients from what would otherwise be (or had been previously) a great story. We’re content to eat our mush: we accept and praise versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that give the creation superpowers or change the thematic complexity of the text to a simple “daddy didn’t love me enough” story. We watch comic book adaptations of superheroes become shells of themselves, and we love it! We gobble up Superman hyperbolic portrayals as either a villain or the embodiment of the “American Way!” Or we take versions of Marvel’s “The Punisher” (an anarchist anti-hero that clearly despises all criminal acts) as a white supremacy icon—you know those skull stickers on the backs of every truck on I-95? Our readings inform our beliefs and vice versa; we are content to see what we want to see in the media, just as we are in politics, which leads me to our most dire situation. ​

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Bad readers make horrendous leaders, and the real world consequence of dimensionless reading is most malignant in our political landscape. Reading and comprehension doesn’t apply exclusively to the page, and having genuine close-reading capability allows us to decode speech and resist manipulation. So when we can’t read, we can’t decode, and when we can’t decode, we are easily fooled by the many bad actors present in the scene. Such is the case with our supposed “best and brightest” of our fine establishments reliving the hollow dream of the Roaring ‘20s with a Gatsby-esque party on the eve of American SNAP benefits being cut off. Who cares if our population can’t eat or can’t read? Have some more caviar and champagne!

I am quite literally watching both books and the world burn in real time, and it all points to one culprit—reading! Bad readers are just churning out even worse readers. They are perpetuating a cycle that perpetuates power. But what’s the solution? How do we make sense of a world that has removed itself so far from nuance? Is everything only either good or bad? Right or wrong? 

The real answer—quite paradoxically—is no. There are meanings beyond meanings, and things materialized in language that will have a corporeal effect on the world around us. Frankly, it comes down to us, to the ones brave enough to advocate for such a “daring” concept. We need to read more, read often, and read better. Bad readers are ruining the world, and yet, reading is, ironically, the only thing that can save it.​