Excellent Writing from the New Executive Which Itself Demands Meritorious Service
Merit is as merit does. The Executive Orders and What They Mean for the America and the West
Every American writer ought to read the Executive Orders issued by the White House yesterday. They are well-written: succinct, clear, efficient and emphatic. From this writer’s point of view. they are exemplary models of expository writing because they eschew the obfuscation typical of bureaucratese.
REFORMING THE FEDERAL HIRING PROCESS AND RESTORING MERIT TO GOVERNMENT SERVICE
Section 1. Policy. American citizens deserve an excellent and efficient Federal workforce that attracts the highest caliber of civil servants committed to achieving the freedom, prosperity, and democratic rule that our Constitution promotes. But current Federal hiring practices are broken, insular, and outdated. They no longer focus on merit, practical skill, and dedication to our Constitution. Federal hiring should not be based on impermissible factors, such as one’s commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of “equity,” or one’s commitment to the invented concept of “gender identity” over sex. Inserting such factors into the hiring process subverts the will of the People, puts critical government functions at risk, and risks losing the best-qualified candidates.
Can one improve upon this? Not a whit. As it reads, this paragraph beautifully accomplishes its objectives as an executive order, evincing the highest quality of written English. To edit, reword or rephrase this paragraph would be to diminish its superb craftsmanship and weaken its linguistic power. Read it aloud and you will hear that phrase follows phrase with a musicality indicating that a profoundly literate writer has set a natural talent to skillful legal writing that is as aesthetically pleasing as it is meaningful.
Writing this competent demonstrates the competency the new executive itself demands of those who serve. With these orders, the writers, editors and lawyers who composed it — a committee must have generated it and I want to know who they are — have proven that they can write to the standard of competency they demand of others who must act pursuant to it. A model to be followed by the like-minded who are similarly capable.
How refreshing! HOW AMERICAN!
Having read and re-read this admirable bit of writing, and many of the other orders which one may review at leisure on the White House site, I am more hopeful now than I was even last year.
As many as ten years ago, those who know me personally heard me speak of saplings: I saw a handful of artistically-minded younger people, that is, much younger than I, here and there poking their heads out from the coffin of ashes into which the Left of the past century had fired and burned into black the arts of Western Civilization. Nothing of value — nothing that sticks to your ribs — replaced what the Left had destroyed — all their gleeful gremlins had discovered in its place was mere sensation-seeking; and all of that pales quickly for any thoughtful person.
Many more of these younger people (how many I do not know, but I keep coming across them) are searching for a nutritious aesthetic to enliven their work as its meaningful inspiration. To be sure, the aesthetic principles they seek reside in the traditional arts of the West. They can be accessed today, right now, primarily through the recorded work of those no longer alive, but there are still many guides, Masters. But even without a living guide, the plans, the designs are there to be studied, emulated and brought into the world, refreshed and renewed.
Over the past decade, especially in the American South and in Texas, where I live, I witnessed an expansive growth in my anecdotal notice of these saplings. Now, having read the language of these Executive Orders, one of which is Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture (!), I am utterly convinced these saplings can, if they so choose to persist in this fledgling new world against the rough and tumble, survive. The foundations of a growth medium are being laid out for them. This is the new trend in the West: It is healthy. If these younger artists have that nub of stubborn persistence — and we must be willing to nurture them actively should we be asked — they will begin to thrive in a new greenhouse we Americans are constructing for ourselves. Read these orders for their language and you will see it plainly.
Why? Because “The Word” is at the very beginning, the root of all things, sprung from the ideas in consciousness.
I.A. Richards, you were dead wrong, ideas don’t come from language, but from elsewhere – yet that is a topic for another essay.