During the regime of Cambodian dictator and genocidaire Pol Pot, soldiers and secret policemen used eyeglasses as a quick way of determining who deserved a place in their socialist utopia.
The bespectacled were often shot for that reason alone, as treacherous bourgeois parasites.
Last week Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) resurrected something of that sentiment in her plan to encourage illustrations in all new bills in Congress — because text alone is just too difficult to comprehend.
“For too long, our laws have been written for ‘staffer bros’ with bow ties who will issue guidance on how to follow them from cubicles on Pennsylvania Avenue,” she declared in a letter to congressional leadership.
“We should be able to draft legislation that speaks to all Americans, regardless of how they learn or the profession they work in — from visual learners and foremen to lawyers and policy experts.”
“Ultimately, this is about representation.”
An unusual position for an elected official to take: Literacy belongs to the socially undesirable, to unfashionable “staffer bros.”
(Note, too, the snobbery: Blue-collar workers, for whom “foremen” serves as a clear stand-in, ipso facto can’t read this way.)
Perez is right that the byzantine tangle of both our legal code and our regulatory regime baffles and confuses even the most intelligent and skilled Americans.
But published federal regulations already contain plenty of images — and this hasn’t done much for their legibility.
A more elegant solution might be for law- and policy-makers simply to produce fewer, clearer laws and regulations, as legal scholars like civil-rights legend Harvey Silverglate have argued.
Yet the vivid and impassioned language Perez reserves for mocking the bespectacled, bow-tied “bros” who can parse and explicate textual difficulties in our law stands out amid her letter’s otherwise tepid prose — all the more so as her remarks come amid what can only be described as a national literacy crisis.
Consider our kids’ persistent underperformance on the NAEP reading test, thanks to teachers’ unions and their ever more aggressive erosion of standards.
In Perez’s own Washington state, according to 2024 NAEP data, almost 40% of fourth graders fall below the “basic” standard in reading.
Consider, too, the elite private and public universities whose incoming students, at Berkeley, Princeton and elsewhere, can’t manage to read more than a few pages a day per class — let alone digest, comprehend and develop insights into difficult novels or philosophical texts.
This provides a profoundly ugly context for Perez’s demonization.
What does a broadside against high literacy tell children — or adults, for that matter — struggling to master the basics?
Foremost that their effort will be wasted, that success will leave them bespectacled and bro-ish, and that complex texts can be mocked and ignored — or worse, degraded and bowdlerized.
In previous eras, deep interpretive ability drew admiration: Think of the awe in which Jews held Talmudic sages.
And despite the best efforts of Perez’ party comrades to delegitimize the Supreme Court, the analytical brilliance of its justices still commands high esteem.
Mocking people who possess those capacities seems the very embodiment of the mindless malice the Khmer Rouge displayed when they put myopics up against the wall.
Indeed, Perez holds an undergraduate degree in economics — meaning she herself has mastered the art of extracting meaning from abstruse technical materials, just like those tedious bespectacled bros.
Why denigrate such mastery in others?
Yet there’s an uglier irony here.
Perez’s letter introduces this anti-literacy tirade with the foundational buzzword of wokism, “representation.”
Its prominence seems meant to suggest that discarding America’s hard-won mass contemporary literacy — deeply compromised though it may be — would somehow serve to make us more equal, more free, more human.
Yet citizenship in America cannot be disentangled from literacy, nor can true liberty — as the great Frederick Douglass demonstrated in his autobiography.
In a famous passage, Douglass described his owner Mr. Auld’s furious reaction upon discovering that his wife was teaching the young Frederick to read.
“It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Auld raged — saying that once Douglass became literate, “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
Perez serves nominally in the cause of protecting that citizenship, and that liberty.
One wonders what Douglass might make of her letter.
Sam Munson’s most recent novel is “The Sofa” (2025).
This story originally appeared on NYPost
