On the complexity of the simple and the simplicity of the complex

[At http://mobile.iht.com/articles/dunleavy29.1.16531283.xhtml I read about some hack reporter who sold out to Murdoch and wrote the following to the International Herald Tribune]

Edward G. Nilges
Lamma Island
Hong Kong

29 Sep 2008

International Herald Tribune

To whom it may concern:

In "Blue-collar legend retiring after 55 years in newspapers" (IHT 29 Sep), your ace cub reporter Tim Arango quotes a grizzled Jimmy Breslin on the even more crusty Steve Dunleavy, who clocks in at a very respectable 34 words in "And he [Dunleavy] wrote simple declarative sentences that people could read, as opposed to 52-word gems that moan 'I went to college! I went to graduate school college! Where do I put the period?'".

That is: where's Breslin's simple declarative sentence? Get me rewrite! Shouldn't it be "Dunleavy wrote simple declarative sentences. People could read them. Dey weren't like dem 52-woid gems. Da gems moaned [insert moan]."?

Let's be serious. If you're working class, you don't get a retirement piece in a prestige rag such as the International Herald Tribune unless you were a henchman.

Working class people with a decent minimum of education, health care and leisure can both write and read simple, compound and complex sentences. Murdoch made his millions by pretending they cannot and should not, and one of the results today is that half the American electorate can't parse the current financial meltdown; to describe complex, nested, recursive financial wheeling and dealing, the description has to be, to quote Einstein, "as simple as possible, but no simpler".

Winston Churchill said that the English sentence is a wonderful thing. It is primarily because it shares with all or most other languages' sentences the ability to create an appropriate level of managed and bounded complexity. The English sentence can be simple where needed as in "I have a dream". But it can also name names and assign responsibility for bad things, and credit for good things, because as working-class writer Delmore Schwartz knew, but henchmen forget, in dreams begin responsibilities.

Regards

Edward G. Nilges