Years ago, Fortune magazine ran a powerful advertising campaign using the slogan, “There’s nothing harder to stop than a trend.”  Trends are indeed mighty. But what if things are trending the wrong way? Can a trend be slowed or turned?

This country has been on a stupid vector for a long time. It’s hard to tell when being inarticulate started being as acceptable as being smart, but the notion gained great traction and one could even say reached it fullest expression during the recent decade. The trend didn’t just show itself in malapropisms about how hard it was to put food on your family, it was the explanations of concepts that, when simplified, become dangerous. “I’m the decider,” had reasonable people all over the world start thinking about grabbing a shovel and digging that nuclear shelter.

Some people, apparently, are fond of the dumbing down trend. Witness Charles M. Blow’s recent piece in the New York Times objecting to the President’s language in the State of the Union. Blow says the President was “stuck on studious.”

And the answer? (Warning! I did not fabricate the following:)

Blow says, “Obama has to accept that today’s information environment is broad and shallow, and we now communicate in headline phrases, acerbic humor and ad hominem attacks. Sad but true.”

Blow is saying that the President should try to communicate at the lowest possible level to the people of the United States. Instead of raising the quality of public discourse, which he constantly does, he should lead a race to the bottom and drag those who still think and speak in entire sentences down with him.

What if Blow is right, and President Obama  were to follow his advice? Then America would get even dumber. Continuing along this trend to its logical conclusion we would eventually be communicating in grins, grunts and thrown objects. Devolution will be complete. And this is called thinking by the editorial staff of the New York Times?

I would have imagined that the New York Times, with its billions of net worth riding on the ability of the next generation to think might have some wee bit of vested interest in the world of smart. Now you could reasonably argue that a number of recent columns from Dowd, Collins and Douthat might not be providing the right flypaper for smart folks. You might even wonder if the Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal even reads what goes on his pages. Maybe his job description doesn’t include calling up Mr. Blow and asking him if he really believes the President should talk down to all Americans. Or maybe, and I’m just thinking out loud here, maybe Rosenthal is using Blow to speak for the New York Times itself — We need to try and be as dumb as we imagine our dumbest readers to be.

Now that Safire’s gone we can start with a Vocabulary Cop and go from there.

Blow says, “The President must communicate within the environment he inhabits, not the one he envisions. Someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’” That’d be us, the American people. Nipping at Obama’s ankles.

Mr. Blow also seems to suggest we need more ad hominem attacks. I could take the dangled bait and say something not nice about Blow’s thought processes. I could take an easy swipe with some true but snarky remark about how obtuse his graphics have become over the years, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just make an entreaty that he take a moment before the next column to speculate what the world would be like if everyone took his advice.

Coming soon: How u can hv deep thots & save teh world n 140 lttrs.

Why can’t little Tiffany learn to program? What happened to American genius for math? I’ve been wondering about this for a long time, but suddenly I saw the cause during the World Series last night.

Imagine a computer that runs on chewing tobacco. Shouldn’t be that hard — just picture your basic Major League Baseball manager, leaning on the dugout rail. He looks worried. Then he spits. That one.

Now, if you could look inside the heads of the two guys running the contenders in the World Series this week, you’d see a 3D array of numbers flying by. With every pitch, with every attempted steal, with every out, an entire universe of numbers inside the manager’s head is re-computed.

I had taken a hiatus from baseball for quite a while, but with two California teams in the playoffs my wife and I decided to get into the spirit. Although the Dodgers and the Angels have gone by the wayside, we’re completely hooked.

And having not watched television coverage of baseball for quite awhile, I suddenly realized why American’s math scores have gone in the toilet for the last ten years. Baseball is a game of numbers, of billions of statistics of the most arcane kinds which record everything that’s ever happened in professional baseball going back more than 100 years. The statistical history of baseball may be the single greatest resource of meaningful numbers on the planet, including the human genome. And probably a lot more important.

When I was a kid, and when Nate Silver (statistics genius) and Michael Lewis (Moneyball—basically about how understanding the numbers in baseball is more important than wads of cash for name players) were kids, everyone knew the batting averages of every player on the home team. We knew slugging percentages, on base percentages. We understood the implications of having a switch hitter deep in the lineup.

We knew that the catcher ran the defense — that only he knew what pitch he was signaling the pitcher to throw next, and that the catcher knew what the odds were a particular batter was going to pull or flare that pitch. We understood that the catcher’s job included subtle shifts of the outfield and infield almost all the time.

Raising my kids under the kind tutelage of Vin Scully, the dean of all baseball announcers, they learned that baseball was a deep game of complex strategies. The battle between pitcher and batter was just the simplest surface of what was actually going on. When Scully was calling a game, the video director would follow Scully’s cues. So if the real duel was about the shortstop sneaking up behind the runner at second for a pickoff play, the camera would constantly check back at second, because that’s where, according to Scully, that particular runner, point two six five percent of the time against lefties, could be picked off. Now, none of my guys has yet won a Nobel for science, but with that kind of rich, hands-on training, they could have easily won it if they had really wanted it.

Now to the current absolutely barren “coverage” of the playoffs and World Series. The video direction, and the announcers, cover the pitcher, pitch placement, and almost nothing else. We almost never see where the infield is set, and never where the outfielders are playing. What we do get is lots of shots of players spitting — the result of a long lens raking through the dugout, magnifying the effect, so half the time us TV viewers can’t tell if it’s raining or just a vast downpour of spit.

And what about that rich field of high definition screen real estate? So much space, so little information. We get a little box that shows the runners on base and the count on the batter, but nowhere do we get the batter’s NAME (unbelievable, actually) their average during the season, their average during the playoffs, or any of the dozens of bits and pieces that are running through the manager’s mind as he decides what to do next, pitch by pitch, out by out.

Baseball strategy really is something of a computer that runs on a chaw of tobacco. But with the current coverage that has dumbed the game down to only its most surface components, all little Tiffany gets to see, is the spit. Meanwhile, her innate genius for numbers is being cruelly starved.