Who Reads?

Apparently the US federal government is having difficulties recruiting agents to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). There are a number of reasons, but one important one is that applicants often cannot pass an “open book test,” that is, cannot answer written questions even if the answers are readily available in other written documents provided. It’s a very loose, broad measure of reading and writing skills, more particularly of reading in relation to writing, a general grasp of the relationship between “taking in” and “giving out” in language.

These same applicants can presumably answer questions orally, or they would not have been able to arrange the job interview. They can hear speakers, as in the photo above. So the issue is writing. Yes, it does make you wonder who is applying to be an ICE agent now, when the agency’s work increasingly appears to be paid, licensed physical bullying. In any case, it suggests that the proportion of citizens who constitute potential readers, that is, those we, as writers, can even hope to reach, is shrinking; the proportion that cannot or do not to read and write would, accordingly, be growing. Perhaps I’m not the only one who, like the polar bear on the floating ice floe, senses her habitat threatened, her sense of being in the presence of fellow humans with reading eyes and receptive minds unravelling.

Who reads? These days, it’s a choice: it’s possible to negotiate the world without reading, or reading a minimum, such as advertisements (and most posts fit here), commands that neither need nor want a response. Perhaps it seems easier not to read. Is it too slow? Does it take a lot of patience? Does it take a lot of practice to be reasonably quick and confident? Maybe. On the other hand, consider the price of not reading, and suppose is paid in the loss of those those features of contemporary life that require the participation of readers and writers in order to function at all: literature, science, history and, above all, law.