Monthly Archives: August 2008

Slight error in Sunday column

10 Replies

My pastor, Msgr. Leigh Lehocky, gently corrected me this morning. My column said St. Peter’s "Parishioners live in something like 35 ZIP codes." He told me the number is now 46.

I probably remember the 35 figure from back when I was president of the parish council, back in the early 90s. I’ve heard different numbers since then, and consider it one of those wobbly numbers that can never be perfectly correct — even if you give the precise count for right now, based on parish registration, registration itself is a fuzzy thing — not everyone who attends our masses is registered, and some who are registered could have left us.

My point was that it was a bunch of ZIP codes, and I knew I would not be exaggerating if I said 35, so I covered myself by saying "something like." Bottom line, I’m right — it’s a bunch.

Msgr. Lehocky reminded me of something else I’d forgotten. Speaking of The Big Sort, the book that inspired the Robert Samuelson column that inspired my column, he said, "That’s the book I was telling you about a couple of weeks ago." Monsignor had been reading it, and recommended it to me. All I knew was that when I read the title in the Samuelson piece, I knew that I recognized it from a recent conversation; I had forgotten with whom.

Msgr. Lehocky said the book beats up on churches for the usual MLK thing (about 11 a.m. Sunday being the most segregated hour in America), but agreed that St. Peter’s was something of an exception to that "rule."

"And thank God for that," he added.

And perhaps our parish — and particularly the sub-community of those of us who habitually attend the only Mass that is bi-lingual — is an exception. But it’s the only church community I have, so my point that I don’t have the kinds of associations Mr. Bishop writes of — at least, not in any form that comes to mind — holds true.

Do you hang with people ‘like yourself’? (column version)

12 Replies

    Yes, you’ve read this before, if you keep up with the blog. There are some editing changes, but it’s about as close as I’ll usually come to a direct copy-and-paste from the blog to the paper. I just post it here in keeping with the theory that some folks will come here looking for the blog version of my Sunday column, and I hate to disappoint.

    While this is an example of Dan Gillmors’ suggestion to  "Make the printed pages the
best-of" what’s been on the Web, it’s slightly more complicated than that. I was thinking "column" as I wrote this on Wednesday, and consciously made sure it had an ending that I thought would work in a column. Unconsciously, I also wrote it to precisely the length of a column, which is remarkable — particularly since, when I’m deliberately writing a column, I always initially write it 10-20 inches too long, and have to spend as much time trimming as I did on the initial writing.

    Obviously, this is a method I should employ more often — at least, I should do so when I don’t feel the duty to write something fresh, and something with added local value. I can let myself get away with musing and riffing off someone else’s column during the Dog Days, but once we pass Labor Day and start interviewing candidates and chugging toward the general election, I’ll feel obliged to do more with the columns.

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
FIRST, READ this from a column by The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, which ran on our op-ed page last week:

    People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people favor friendships with those who share similar backgrounds, interests and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is nearly universal. It’s human nature.

    Then ask yourself this question: Is this true for you?
    What Mr. Samuelson is saying is accepted as gospel, as an “of course,” by so many people. And you can find all sorts of evidence to back it up, from whitebread suburbs to Jeremiah Wright’s church to the book that inspired the column, The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.
    Here’s my problem with that: I don’t know any people “like me,” in the sense under discussion here. I don’t have a group of people who look and act and think like me with whom to identify, with the possible exception of my own close family, and in some respects that’s a stretch — we may look alike and in some cases have similar temperaments, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to being alike in, say, political views.
    Oh, but you’re Catholic, you might say. Do you know what “catholic” means? It means “universal.” At the Mass I attend, we sometimes speak English, sometimes Spanish, and throw in bits of Greek and Latin here and there. The priest who often as not celebrates that Mass is from Africa. Parishioners live in something like 35 ZIP codes. There are black, white and brown people who either came from, or their parents came from, every continent and every major racial group on the planet. My impression, from casual conversations over time, is that you would find political views as varied as those in the general population. Sure, more of us are probably opposed to abortion than you generally find, but that’s not a predictor of what we think about, say, foreign policy.
    I may run into someone occasionally who shares my background as a military brat. But beyond a comparison of “were you ever stationed at …,” there’s not a lot to hang a sense of identity on.
I belong to the Rotary Club, which means I have lunch with 300 or so other people once a week. I can’t think of any attitude or opinion I have as a result of being a Rotarian; nor — to turn that around — did I join Rotary because of any attitude or opinion I held previously. Wait — there’s one thing that’s different: I started giving blood as a result of being in Rotary. But I don’t feel any particular identification with other people who give blood, or any particular alienation from others who don’t give blood, the selfish cowards (just kidding).
That’s not to say anything bad about Rotary, or anything good about it. It’s just not a predictor of my attitudes. I suppose people who have an objection to singing the National Anthem and “God Bless America” every week might stay away, but that still leaves a pretty broad spectrum. Rusty DePass, who worked hard for Rudy Giuliani last year, plays piano at Rotary. Jack Van Loan, longtime comrade and supporter of John McCain, is our immediate past president. Another prominent member is Jim Leventis, who is the godfather of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, the filmmaker Alexandra. Not one of them is any more or less a Rotarian because of his political attitudes.
    Reaching for a generalization, I can point to superficial sameness at Rotary — a lot of members are among the 6 percent of American men who still wear a tie to work every day, although many are not. And the membership is notably whiter than South Carolina, but that seems to correlate demographically with the tie thing. In any case, this is a place where I spend one hour a week; it does not define me.
    Bottom line: I cannot think of five people not related to me, with whom I regularly congregate, who share my “backgrounds, interests and values” to any degree that would matter to me.
    This is a barrier for my understanding of people who do identify with large groups of people who look alike and/or think alike and/or have particular interests in common that bind them as a group and set them apart from others. I don’t see how they do it. If I tried to be a Democrat or a Republican, I’d quit the first day over at least a dozen policy positions that I couldn’t swallow. How do others manage this?
    Maybe I’m a misfit. But the ways in which I’m a misfit helped bring me to support John McCain (fellow Navy brat) and Barack Obama (who, like me, graduated from high school in the hyperdiverse ethnic climate of Hawaii) for their respective nominations. Sen. McCain is the Republican whom the doctrinaire Republicans love to hate. Sen. Obama is the Democrat who was uninterested in continuing the partisan warfare that was so viscerally important to the Clintonistas.
    Coming full circle, I guess I like these guys because they’re, well, like me. But not so most people would notice.
    It’s going to be interesting, and for me often distressing, to watch what happens as the media and party structures and political elites who do think in terms of groups that look, think and act alike sweep up these two misfit individuals in the tidal rush toward November. Will either of them have the strength of mind and will to remain the remarkably unique character that he is, or will both succumb to the irresistible force of Identity Politics? I’m rooting fervently for the former, but recent history and all the infrastructure of political expression are on the side of the latter.

Does Mr. Samuelson’s observation apply to you? Tell us all about it at
thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Raskolnikov, blogger

20 Replies

The upstairs bathroom, the one most convenient to the home "office" where I set up my laptop on weekends, has three books balanced atop the tank behind the throne, books which I have grabbed off a shelf on the landing on my way in there at different times, in different moods:

  1. A paperback copy of Spy Hook, part of Len Deighton’s wonderful Bernard Sampson trilogy of trilogies.
  2. A simplified-for-children paperback of The Adventures of Robin Hood.
  3. An elegant little hardbound edition of Crime and Punishment, published by Barnes & Noble, with gilt-edged pages and a built-in ribbon bookmark (original price: $4.95, with 10% off for members).

Just now I was in there and scooped up the Dostoevsky masterpiece (which I would have listed as my favorite novel when I was in college, but which I haven’t read all the way through since), and opened to this passage:

  When the soup had been brought, and he had begun upon it, Nastasya sat down beside him on the sofa and began chatting. She was a country peasant-woman, and a very talkative one.
  “Praskovya Pavlovna means to complain to the police about you,” she said.
  He scowled.
  “To the police? What does she want?”
  “You don’t pay her money and you won’t turn out of the room. That’s what she wants, to be sure.”
  “The devil, that’s the last straw,” he muttered, grinding his teeth, “no, that would not suit me … just now. She is a fool,” he added aloud. “I’ll go and talk to her to-day.”
  “Fool she is and no mistake, just as I am. But why, if you are so clever, do you lie here like a sack and have nothing to show for it? One time you used to go out, you say, to teach children. But why is it you do nothing now?”
  “I am doing …” Raskolnikov began sullenly and reluctantly.
  “What are you doing?”
  “Work …”
  “What sort of work?”
  “I am thinking,” he answered seriously after a pause.
  Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill.
  “And have you made much money by your thinking?” she managed to articulate at last.

The perpetual curse of the intellectual! It can be so hard to get any respect, especially from these pleasant peasant types…

But in that moment, taking a break from blogging as I was, it occurred to me: If Raskolnikov had had the outlet of a blog, maybe he wouldn’t have murdered the old woman and Lizaveta. Maybe he would have gotten it out of his system, clacking away at his keyboard there in his garret. Maybe he could even, with the help of his enterprising friend Razumikhin, have sold some ads on his blog; who knows?

But then something else occurred to me: In his own, tortured, 19th-century way, Raskolnikov was a blogger, or had been before he had shut himself off from the world. Wasn’t that his undoing? Hadn’t Porfiry read his rantings about Napoleon and other rare, "superior" creatures stepping over their inferiors to achieve great things? Wasn’t that just the kind of indiscreet stuff that people put on blogs today, with little concern for the consequences of revealing their madder thoughts?

There’s a blogging thread that runs all the way through Dostoevsky, isn’t there — from Notes from Underground to the collection of atrocities that Ivan Karamazov kept?

Supt. Scott Andersen and Dist. 5 school board in better days

5 Replies


Our Sunday lead editorial will be about the Lexington/Richland District 5 school board’s conspiracy of silence over the resignation of Superintendent Scott Andersen. As I was editing it earlier today, it occurred to me that I had video of the superintendent together with his board at a time of perfect unity — just under a year ago, when they came to visit us to promote the bond referendum that failed last fall.

I had posted video from this meeting before, but the clips concentrated entirely on the board members. They, after all the ones who are elected and therefore directly accountable to the people (or should be, their recent secrecy to the contrary). And the thing that impressed us was their unanimity on the bond referendum. None of us could remember when the District 5 board had been so unified about anything, so that was where the news lay.

But I remember having the impression that the unanimity might have resulted in part from a good selling job by the superintendent. Superintendents work for boards, but all of them strive to lead their boards when they can. And when they lose that ability, they are often on the way out.

In the above clip, watch for two things:

  • Mr. Andersen’s breezy confidence as he makes his pitch, even to the point of joking about his having "skipped over the price tag." This was obviously a guy who was comfortable in front of his board members.
  • His board was comfortable with him, chuckling and joshing about the fact that "Scott’s not from around here," after the superintendent had explained his ignorance about a piece of property the district had been interested in (ignorance that critics of the board had misinterpreted as a deliberate attempt to deceive, according to Mr. Andersen).

To help you remember, I’m imbedding below the old clip from that meeting as well, with the board members speaking.

John Edwards speaks

40 Replies

Irony of ironies! No sooner do I speak dismissively of all the gossip about political also-ran John Edwards (you know, that guy I dismissed as a phony a year ago), but the guy steps out of the shadows and makes all that trashy, painful personal stuff a news story by talking publicly about it.

The spin cycle enthusiasts will have a field day with this, no doubt. Go ahead, y’all — yak away!

Taking Gillmor’s advice

10 Replies

"Who are your influences?" Jimmy Rabbitte asked the prospective Commitments.

Well, mine are legion. But one of the major influences that caused me to start a blog was Dan Gillmor. He made a pitch at the last-ever meeting of Knight Ridder editorial page editors about the virtues of blogging, back in January 2005. Four months later, this blog was up and running, in spite of the fact that there was no way to accomplish one of his prerequisites to maintaining a blog: "First, you’ll need more FTE’s." We all refrained from laughing at that, because it wasn’t funny. As you know, we have had to do with fewer and fewer people here at the newspaper since then. But I blog anyway, because I made the mistake of starting it, and I’m obsessive.

A digression, if you don’t mind (and if you do mind, tough; the one great reward of blogging for me is that it provides an unlimited outlet for my penchant for digression): Why was that the last KR EPE meeting? Well, there never was much point in editorial page editors gathering. KR publishers (and now, McClatchy publishers) had and have all sort of reasons to gather or engage in conference calls, because they’re all part of one big business enterprise. But the corporation’s policy with regard to editorial pages is that they were independent and not to be influenced by corporate. KR would occasionally get us together anyway, in some vague hope that we would voluntarily trade good ideas or something. They didn’t do it often (the 2005 meeting was the first in five years), but they did it. Actually, that last meeting was the only one in which Tony Ridder sort of broke the rule: He spoke to the group, and had a researcher make a presentation, in an effort to persuade us not to endorse in presidential elections. His points were that it was a distraction from our main mandate, which was local issues, and all it did was make readers mad at us. The assembled editors rather pointedly ignored his advice.

Anyway, back to Dan Gillmor. He popped up last week in the form of a quotation sent to me by a reader, saying various smart things about the future of newspapers and related platforms. Here’s part of what he said:

    (E)xpand the conversation with the community in the one place where it’s already
taking place: the editorial pages. Invert them. Make the printed pages the
best-of and guide to a conversation the community can and should be having with
itself. The paper can’t set the agenda, at least not by itself (nor should it),
but it can highlight what people care about and help the community have a
conversation that is civil and useful.

Increasingly, I find that I engage in the very inversion that he recommends. I write a lot of stuff on my blog, we have all sorts of discussions about it, and I end up plucking something from the blog and turning it into my column for the paper. This week, my Sunday column will be, almost word-for-word, this blog post inspired by a Robert Samuelson column.

When we newspaper types first ventured into the online world, we basically took what we had already put into the paper and then posted it on the Web. To a great extent we still do that, although you’ll see more and more breaking news that hasn’t been in the paper, plus video and other multimedia extras.

But increasingly for me, the paper is a place where highlights from my blog appear. That doesn’t make the blog more important than the editorial page, far from it. I still have far more readers in print (although my online readership is broader geographically, and increasingly when I hear from national media, it’s as a blogger, not a newspaper editor), and the blog is still sort of like New Haven is to Broadway — a place to try out ideas before putting them on the bigger stage.

But the evolution continues.

New category: ‘Spin Cycle’ (today’s nontopic: John Edwards)

24 Replies

Frequently, readers get frustrated because they come here all ready to rant about the latest pointless Topic of the Day on the partisan, 24/7 TV "news" spin cycle, and I’m just not into that stuff. People accuse me of being too much into trivia, but to me, there’s nothing more trivial than the latest attack by one side or the other in the endless wars among the Republicrats.

But I do like to make folks feel at home. So I’m going to try a new category, "Spin Cycle," and at least provide a landing place for those of you who want to discuss these things. I’m torn about doing this, because it sort of makes me an enabler — seen in the worst possible light, it makes me like those idiot parents who have beer parties for their teens so they’ll do their drinking at home (never mind all the drunken teenage guests they unleash on the highways). But perhaps I can have a good effect, tossing in the occasional comment as to why the latest spin topic is so mind-numbingly insignificant. Or maybe someone else can do that.

Anyway, let’s kick it off with all the ranting going on out there about John Edwards these days. I’ll start it with an excerpt from a blogger out there who’s trying to bait the MSM into treating this as a serious topic:

    I can think now of five separate angles the mainstream news outlets are missing with the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal story. In other words, by not writing about the charges originally—airing them out and letting their audience assess their validity—the media is now in the position of stamping down not one story, but five. What tangled webs we are weaving!
    Once the story hits the front pages, as it inevitably will, we’re going to hear all the excuses as to why reputable news outlets couldn’t find their way to telling their readers patently interesting news about a major political figure that was widely available on the web. This arrogance will help reinforce the perceptions in the audience that the media is not always looking out for their best interests and continue the move to alternative outlets. I’m as devoted a follower of the traditional media as can be, but this willful non-disclosure makes me want to scream…

Well, I almost screamed myself when I read the bizarre assertion that John Edwards is "a major political figure." Oh, yeah? Maybe you should leave the blogosphere and pick up a few newspapers. The last time I bothered to write about the guy, it was to dismiss him (and boy did the spinmeisters have fun with that), and Democratic primary voters quickly agreed with me, once they actually got to vote.

As relevant news goes, talking about this also-ran’s personal life is like gossiping about, oh, I don’t know, Gary Hart or somebody.

Make a case to the contrary if you think you can, but don’t expect me to stay awake for it…

Alert: Actual relevant discussion happening on the blog as we speak!

3 Replies

Just thought I’d clue y’all into the discussion going on as I type this between DHEC’s Thom Berry and the S.C. blogosphere’s "not very bright" over the sewage spill into the Saluda River.

Those of you who prefer serious issues to Top Five Lists should probably tune in, and weigh in…

But what are Obama’s Top Five?

13 Replies

The Republican National Committee seems to think it has some sort of "gotcha" with this frivolous little item from Entertainment Weekly , apparently based upon a stunningly shallow interview with Barack Obama.

This is apparently part of a series of RNC releases that they call "Audacity Watch," which provides further proof of the lack of wit among partisans, as if any were needed.

Anyway, here’s the "article" from EW that the RNC refers to. The implication on the part of the GOPpers seems to be that Obama has been caught discussing something silly and beneath the dignity of one who would be president.

But I don’t see it that way. Unlike our pal Lee (such things are beneath him), I think a person’s cultural proclivities are indicative of character, and I do want to know about them. My complaint with EW, and the reason I call the interview "shallow," is that it doesn’t go deep enough even into this shallow end of the character pool.

They don’t even provide a Top Five list! That’s just inexcusable. So he likes "The Godfather" — big deal. That tells us nothing. Everybody (except bud) likes "The Godfather." The real clues to his character — the test as to whether he has the judgment and, dare I use the word, discrimination to be president — is in the OTHER four movies on his "Top Five" list.

And what about TV shows — assuming Obama has ever watched TV, which many Americans doubt? (And no, I don’t watch it, either, but I did when I was younger.) We are informed that he likes "The Dick Van Dyke Show" — an excellent, primo choice — but that is listed AFTER the saccharine, anachronistic, smug "M*A*S*H," one of the lamest hits in the history of the idiotic box. Where are his other picks? Does he redeem himself? We are not told.

The item does tells us that there are lists on Obama’s Facebook page, so finally we get somewhere. His Top Five movies:

  1. Casablanca
  2. Godfather I
  3. Godfather II
  4. Lawrence of Arabia
  5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Good. Very nice touch with "Cuckoo’s Nest" — very cool, not too obvious. But "Lawrence of Arabia?" Respect it as a David Lean masterpiece, fine. But who lists it as a favorite? Seems pretentious to me, the sort of thing that one reads that he should like it, and puts it on the list to impress people. And, given the subject matter, what does this tell us about his likely Mideast policy? Must give us pause.

And mind you, I’m not even going to get into his choosing Stevie Wonder on a list with Miles Davis (pretentious again), Coltrane and Dylan. I’ll let Jack Black’s Barry, purveyor extraordinaire of Top Five lists, pass judgment on that.

Now, does anybody know where we can find a similar list for John McCain? This could be important, people, so get on it.

Yeah, but what’s ‘normal?’

23 Replies

Just now had to run downstairs to make a change in a Friday editorial because I got this release from DHEC to the effect that test results "from the Saluda River in Columbia indicate water quality has returned
to normal following the discharge of partially treated wastewater last
week."

DHEC further says it’s taken down the warning signs that everybody was ignoring, so I guess it has a lot of confidence in the tests.

Personally, I’m not going to run down the river and jump in quite yet, partly because of my heavy dignity as eminence grise of the editorial board, and partly because, after I dragged my old behind back up the stairs after updating the editorial I got to conjurin’ (which is "Firefly" talk for "figuring"): Do they mean "South Carolina" normal, or "states with the kinds of safeguards in place to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the first place" normal?

Mind you, I’m not putting the blame on DHEC here — or rather, I’m only assigning to them their fair share of it. The whole way we provide such basic local services as sewer in this state — a fragmented, often overlapping mishmash of local gummints, special purpose districts and private providers — is such a mess it’s hard for anybody to keep track of it.

Maybe Mayor Bob ought to go ahead with pulling his summit together. With all these little local fiefdoms along the river counting on its waters to attract untold wealth to the region, I expect they’ve all got some more conjurin’ to do.

(Oh, and for those of you who conjure that Mayor Bob, or someone in local gummint, should have been able to deal with this without meeting with a bunch of other folks — well, you just don’t understand how weak and fragmented local gummint is in our state. You can thank the Legislature for that, by the way. They never miss an opportunity to keep things this way.)

Are you a locavore?

1 Reply

Emile DeFelice, sometime contributor to this blog, said it this way: "Put Your State On Your Plate."

Hugh Weathers, the man who beat Emile to remain state agriculture commissioner, has a more succinct way of putting it: The word, he says, is "locavore."

Read about the concept, and what South Carolina is doing to promote it, in Mr. Weathers’ op-ed piece today, if you haven’t read it already. Then take the challenge — eat local for a day.

Then, do it again.

Why isn’t it the Peking Olympics?

18 Replies

Being pretty sure that I’ve had this explained to me before, and I just forgot the explanation, I’ll ask again: How come we say "Beijing" instead of "Peking" now?

Here’s the thing that puzzles me about this: It was supposed to be a phonic representation of the way the Chinese name sounds. So how could the West have been so wildly wrong about the way the name of that place was said for so long? "Peking" doesn’t really sound anything like "Beijing," or at least not enough so that if someone said "Beijing," we would make the mistake of writing it phonetically with a "P" and a "K."

And if his name was Mao Zedong, why did we hear Mao Tse-tung for all those years?

My theory is that one version of Chinese somehow won out politically over another. Like Mandarin over Cantonese or some thousand other variations, because I know there’s a bewildering array of them. Another theory is that the Chinese are just messing with the heads of us foreign devils, and maybe at the height of the Olympics, while they have the attention they’ve been craving, they’ll suddenly announce that the city’s name is pronounced "Vei-ling" or something, just to see if we’ll start calling it that. Then they’ll laugh their heads off.

But I suppose that’s just the paranoia of the Westerner who never truly understands the East, try as he might.

60 years of an integrated military

17 Replies

Today is the 60th anniversary of the integration of the U.S. Armed Forces, a commemoration I would have missed without this release from the Pentagon:

    Secretary of Defense Robert Gates today celebrated the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of the armed forces and the federal civil service in a ceremony at the Pentagon.
    Executive Order 9980, which President Truman signed on July 26, 1948, created a Fair Employment Board to eliminate racial discrimination in federal employment. Executive Order 9981, signed the same day, began the process of eliminating segregated units and occupational specialties from the post-World War II military.   

Having grown up in the military (making it sort of like my real hometown), I’ve always taken pride in the fact that it was the first major institution in our country to integrate, far ahead of the schools and the rest of our society.

Perhaps that experience of being surrounded by a meritocracy that made a point of erasing unimportant divisions — everyone was alike, once they put on the uniform — had a lot to do with my having the attitude as an adult that the differences civilians still make so much of really don’t matter. Consequently, the way Democrats and Republicans — and all too many black people and white people — look at each other as alien seems unAmerican to me.

But what do we CALL the building?

13 Replies

Today’s paper reported that the tallest building in South Carolina — you know, the one across GervaisAtt
Street from the State House — is to have yet another new owner.

Fine. But what I want to know is what to call it, preferably something less cumbersome than "the tallest building in South Carolina — you know, the one across Gervais Street from the State House."

I have in the past called it "the AT&T building," because that’s what it was known as first, near as I can recall. But it hasn’t really been that for a lot of years. Officially, it’s been the "Capitol Center" — but how many people who have occasion to refer to it actually call it that. And it’s so generic-sounding, not many are likely to remember it. The new owner is the Boston-based Intercontinental Real Estate Corp., which doesn’t suggest anything catchy.

Here’s an idea: You remember my column about the political etymology of "good ol’ boy." If you recall, I traced its use in S.C. to the 1986 gubernatorial campaign. Here’s something I wrote then in an addendum to that column about a conversation I had with Bob McAlister, who was in the middle of all that:

In fact, he believes (immodestly) that a TV commercial he produced,
entitled "Good Old Boys," was what won the election for Campbell. The
thrust of it was to drive home the cozy relationship between the
developers of what then was called the AT&T building on the site of
the old Wade Hampton Hotel (neither Bob nor I could remember what it’s
called now; it’s had several aliases). The clincher was a picture he
had taken of a banner in front of the building itself supporting
Democratic nominee Mike Daniel.

So how about, "Good Old Boy Tower?" OK, I just said it was an idea, not that it was a good one.

Can you do better? It’s the tallest building in the state, folks; that makes it a landmark. We ought to have something memorable to call it.

How do you say ‘So Gay’ in German?

18 Replies

Cindi wrote a short editorial for tomorrow about the latest way that our state has found to waste "Competitive Grant" money. In case you haven’t read about it, Rep. Liston Barfield got 100 Gs to entertain German visitors to the Grand Strand, even though some local tourism officials said the money would have been better spent on advertising to promote tourism.

Wanting to jazz up the headline a bit, I sent her an instant message asking, "How do you say ‘So Gay’ in German?"

So far, she hasn’t replied. Maybe Herb can help us with that.

Do YOU hang with people “like yourself?”

22 Replies

First, read this lead paragraph from Robert Samuelson’s column today:

    People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the
celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people
favor friendships with those who share similar backgrounds, interests
and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations
and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is
nearly universal. It’s human nature.

Then share with us your answer to this question: Is this true for you?

I ask that because what Samuelson is saying is accepted as Gospel, as an "of course," by so many people. And you can find all sorts of evidence to back it up, from whitebread suburbs to Jeremiah Wright’s church to the book that inspired the column, The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.

The thing about this for me is this: I don’t know any people like me. I don’t have a group of people who look and act and think like me with whom to identify, with the possible exception of my own close family, and in some respects that’s a stretch — we may look alike and in some cases have similar temperaments, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to being alike, say, in our political views.

Oh, but you’re Catholic, you might say. Yeah, do you know what "catholic" means? It means "universal." At the Mass I attend, we sometimes speak English, sometimes Spanish, and throw in bits of Greek and Latin here and there. The priest who often as not celebrates that Mass is from Africa. We live in, I seem to recall my pastor telling me, 35 zip codes. There are black, white and brown people who either came from, or their parents came from, every continent and every major racial group on the planet. My impression, from casual conversations over time, is that you would find political views as varied as those in the general population. Sure, more of us are probably opposed to abortion than you generally find, but that’s not a predictor of what we think, say, about foreign policy.

Yeah, I might run into someone occasionally who shares my background of having been a military brat. But beyond a comparison of whether you ever were stationed in the same places, there’s not a lot to hang a sense of identity on.

I belong to the Rotary Club, which means I go have lunch with 300 or so other people who also belong to that club once a week. I can’t think of any attitude or opinion I have as a result of being a Rotarian, nor — to turn that around — did I join Rotary because of any attitude or opinion I held previously. I joined Rotary because Jack Van Loan invited me to, and my boss — two publishers ago, now — said he wanted me to join. Wait — there’s one thing that’s different: I started giving blood as a result of being in Rotary. But I don’t feel any particular identification with other people who give blood, or any particular alienation from others who DON’T give blood, the selfish cowards (just kidding).

That’s not to say anything bad about Rotary, or anything good about it. It’s just not a predictor of my attitudes. I suppose people who have an objection to singing the National Anthem and "God Bless America" every week might stay away, but that still leaves a pretty broad spectrum of life here in the Columbia area. Rusty DePass, who worked hard for Rudy Giuliani last years, plays piano at Rotary. Jack, longtime comrade and supporter of John McCain, is our immediate past president. Another prominent member is Jim Leventis, who is the godfather of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, the filmmaker Alexandra. No one of them is any more or less a Rotarian because of his political attitudes.

(I can think of one superficial way in which an outside observer might see sameness at Rotary — a lot of the men in the club are of the 6% of American men who still wear a suit to work every day, although plenty don’t. And it’s whiter than South Carolina, but that seems to go with the suit thing.)

I’m a South Carolinian, but I’m very much at home in Memphis, and have grown quite comfortable during frequent visits to central Pennsylvania, where the Civil War re-enactors wear blue uniforms.

I cannot think of five people not related to me, with whom I regularly congregate, who share my "backgrounds, interests
and values" to any degree worth noting.

Anyway, my point is that all of this is a barrier for me to understanding people who DO identify with large groups of people who look alike and/or think alike and/or have particular interests in common that bind them as a group and set them apart from others. If I tried to be a Democrat or a Republican, I’d quit the first day over at least a dozen policy positions that I couldn’t swallow. And I don’t see why others do.

Maybe I’m a misfit. But the ways in which I’m a misfit helped bring me to supporting John McCain (fellow Navy brat) and Barack Obama (who, like me, graduated from high school in the hyperdiverse ethnic climate of Hawaii). McCain is the "Republican" whom the doctrinaire Republicans love to hate. Obama is the Democrat who was uninterested in continuing the partisan warfare that was so viscerally important to the Clintonistas.

Coming full circle, I guess I like these guys because they’re, well, like me. But not so most people would notice.

It’s going to be interesting, and for me often distressing, to watch what happens as the media and party structures and political elites who DO identify themselves with groups that look, think and act alike sweep up these two misfit individuals in the tidal rush toward November. Will either of them have the strength of mind and will to remain the remarkably unique characters that they are, or will they succumb to the irresistible force of Identity Politics? I’m rooting fervently for the former, but recent history, and all the infrastructure of political expression, are on the side of the latter.

Civilian golf

8 Replies

Shield1

When I was very young, I spent large chunks of my summer days playing golf at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. That’s one of the nice things about being a military brat during the Cold War, back when this country went to any and all lengths to provide for servicemen and their families — you could play a LOT of golf for practically no money at all. As I recall, at some base courses all I had to do was sign my name, provided my Dad had paid a nominal monthly fee, which he always did. Some people grew up on farms, or in suburbs. I grew up playing golf on military courses from Florida to Hawaii, or playing basketball with sailors at the base gym, or bowling in a high school league at the base lanes, etc.

Now, with bases closing, and bases that aren’t closing cutting back on amenities or opening them to the public to help pay for them, things are different.

In some ways, this is good, from my perspective. I figured out several years back that I can play at the course at the former Naval Air Station in Millington, Tenn. — where I spent even more hours back when I was still a dependent — even though I no longer have a military ID. That course is almost exactly as it was in the early 70s. It’s still run by the Navy, but it now bears the civvy sobriquet "Glen Eagle."

But last week, I had occasion to play the MB course (civilian name: "Whispering Pines") for the first timeCup since the base closed, and the experience was for me sadly different. Part of that was that I played it back in the days when there were only nine holes — the "back 9" consisted of playing the same holes from different tee boxes. There were days in my youth when I played — walking, and carrying my clubs on my back — 27 or 36 holes, and was none the worse for wear. Can’t do that any more.

There are 18 holes now (and I think there were before the base closed). So this time, I went to play the front nine and found only two holes to be as I remembered. I still had a nice time, but … I hate to see anything that was once military turn civilian (correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think this course is now run by local government). You may think that’s weird, but it’s what I grew up with. ForPad
instance, there were the concrete pads in little hidden cul de sacs in the woods on the drive into the course, which were once there to hide warplanes from the Russkies in case we ever went toe-to-toe with them in nuclear combat. Those are now overgrown (right). To folks who grew up in the civilian world, particularly those of a pacifist stripe, this change might be seen as a positive development. To me, it’s a piece of ground that is somehow less purposeful, even less noble, than it was.

I did find the old Tactical Air Command shield etched into the glass of the door to the pro shop. But it’s companion shield, emblazoned with "Valor in Combat" had a paper sign taped over it urging visitors to "ASK US ABOUT 10% OFF MDSE…" This seemed just a bit tawdry to me.

But that’s just me.
Shield2

Erin Brockovich? I didn’t get into that movie, either

16 Replies

A release informs me that the S.C. Trial Lawyers are really excited about their speaker for an upcoming event:

SOUTH CAROLINA TRIAL LAWYERS ASSOCIATION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                          
Monday, August 4, 2008

ERIN BROCKOVICH NAMED 2008 SCTLA CONVENTION KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Award-Winning Environmental Advocate to Address 1000 Attendees on August 9

COLUMBIA, SC – The South Carolina Trial Lawyers Association today named award-winning Environmental Advocate Erin Brockovich the keynote speaker for its 2008 Convention at the Westin Resort in Hilton Head, SC from August 7-9.  Mrs. Brockovich will address nearly 1000 of the organization’s members and their guests on Saturday morning at 10 a.m.
    "Mrs. Brockovich is an internationally sought after speaker and we are honored that she has made time in her busy schedule for us," said SCTLA Executive Director Mike Hemlepp.  "Given the great dedication that trial lawyers have had in bringing environmental issues to public attention, this comes at an important time in our association’s history.  It will be a privilege to have her at the convention."
    In 1993, Mrs. Brockovich discovered that the California utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, had been poisoning the residents of Hinkley, Calif. with the toxic chemical Chromium 6.  Her tireless research resulted in the largest legal settlement in U.S. history against the company.
    She has won numerous awards and has spoken with many groups dedicated to protecting the rights of consumers and citizens against environmental torts.  In 2000, Universal Studios released the movie "Erin Brockovich" to tell the story of the residents of Hinkley and Julia Roberts won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the title role.
    "We do our best to ensure that our members get the most from the annual convention," SCTLA President John Nichols said.  "Mrs. Brockovich continues a long line of special guest speakers who raise the bar for knowledge and insight in the ever-changing field of law and justice."
    Mrs. Brockovich owns Brockovich Consulting and still works closely with to Masry and Vititoe, the law firm that brought the PG&E litigation after she discovered medical records as part of a pro bono real estate matter.
    The South Carolina Trial Lawyers Association was founded over 50 years ago and is the state’s leading advocate for the protection of citizens’ right to civil justice as guaranteed by the Constitution.
    This event is open to members of the media possessing proper credentials.  Press are asked to check in at the media registration desk and should note that neither Mrs. Brockovich nor her personnel may be recorded, broadcast, televised, filmed, photographed or webcast during the convention.
    For more information, visit www.sctla.org…
                ###

Which reminds me, as long as I’m on a tear about such things — I didn’t really get into that movie, either.

I’m not really into spunky underdog movies unless they’re made by Frank Capra, nor do I really get into dogged muckraker movies, unless they’re All The President’s Men. I sort of liked "A Civil Action," but that took a somewhat more ironic, and less worshipful, look at trial lawyering than what the SCTLA is probably looking for in a speaker.

SLED’s antique helo

7 Replies

Sometimes on the edit page, we get into a bit of a rut. There are so many ways in which our inadequate state government is underfunded that for simplicity’s sake we tend to fall back on certain standbys when we gripe about our Legislature’s failure to set priorities in budgeting. When we cite a litany of neglect, we usually fall on:

  • Mental Health — A favorite example is how the lack of state resources for the mentally ill unnecessarily overcrowd our jails and hospital emergency rooms.
  • Prisons — We keep locking up more and more people, and providing less and less resources even to guard, much less rehabilitate, them.
  • Highways — We let them crumble, and we don’t enforce speed limits or other laws.
  • Schools — Too many districts, no follow-through on the promise to do more in early childhood, the neglect of the most troubled and impoverished rural districts, etc.

And that’s a nice overview, as far as it goes. It’s fine for just a representation in passing of the overall problem. We refer to such examples when we’re complaining about everything from poorly considered tax cuts to spending on things the state doesn’t need to spend on.

But we could write about other examples as well, and probably should more often. I was reminded of this by new SLED Chief Reggie Lloyd when he spoke to the Columbia Rotary yesterday. He talked about how everywhere he’s been in either state or federal government, he always seemed to arrive just as the budget screws were being applied.

The wiretaps he spoke of, and which were cited in the brief in today’s paper, were related to this. SLED has the equipment and the authority to do wiretaps in drug and gang investigations. But the people haven’t been trained in how to do it, so the equipment has sat there (to the delight of libertarians, no doubt, but not to those of us who love Big Brother).

But my favorite anecdote was when he was talking about the department’s Huey. When I heard that, I thought maybe I heard wrong: They’re still flying a Huey? But that wasn’t the half of it. This particular Huey was salvaged from the rice paddy it once crashed into in Vietnam. Now, it’s being flown by pilots who weren’t yet born then. Not long ago, SLED did some sort of joint thing with some folks from the Coast Guard, and they all wanted to see the Huey. They had heard about it, but found it hard to believe.

Hamburgerhill

There Will Be Tedium

16 Replies

Lewis

Do you ever feel you’ve been had, or at least put-upon, by what some will urge upon you as ART?

Tonight I finished, after three highly tedious sessions over as many nights and lots of fast-forwarding, trying to watch "There Will Be Blood." I kept thinking it would get better. Some of the ways in which it was off-putting at the start reminded me of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" — the same sort of heavy-handed atmosphere that seems designed to rub into your head the notion that "the West in olden times was really weird, and not at all like a Gene Autrey movie" — and that one got better. I even enjoyed it by the end.

But this did not. Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis acted up a storm, but that’s all there was to it — an actor showing off, really getting into a character that I was sick of by the second reel, a character not worth getting into. So he’s done various American archetypes now — the raw nativist of "Gangs of New York," the effeminate dandy of "The Age of Innocence," and now the rapaciously driven oil man — but frankly, I think he’s repeating himself. In fact, I felt like, having seen his "Bill the Butcher," I’ve already seen the character he did in "There Will Be Blood." And the first version was much, much more interesting, even though "Gangs" is probably tied with "Innocence" in my mind for least-appealing Scorcese movie.

Anyway, it’s presented me with a tough decision. On Netflix, should I give it two stars for "didn’t like it," or the rare one star for "hated it?"

Maybe two stars. Now that I’ve griped to y’all about it, I’m not as ticked as I was about the time I wasted. I need to save the one-star rating for awfulness that is truly inspired, truly worth hating, like Lynch’s "Dune."