I was going to use as my headline, “Do you know what your sin is?,” the quote from “Serenity.” But then I realized I’d done that before. Too bad, as it would have worked better here.
Anyway, I had to smile when I read this in Cindi Scoppe’s column today:
My friend and editor at the time, Brad Warthen, wasn’t convinced that joining an Anglo-Catholic parish made me Catholic, but as a Roman Catholic, he understood the power of confession, and he figured anything that might make me less of a pain to work with was worth a shot, so he happily helped me compile my list of sins. “Imperious is the word you’re looking for,” he said, before more began rolling off his tongue: arrogant, dismissive, condescending, scornful, impatient. (Most of them were already on my list.) “Don’t forget pride,” he said. “That’s one of the seven deadly sins.”
Thus prepared with my list, I went to my first confession.
Frankly, I had forgotten that incident. But it all came back when I read, “Imperious is the word you’re looking for.” Yep, that was me. I say things like that.
Now, here’s the question: What condemnatory words might someone who is inclined to judgment apply to someone who so glibly details another person’s sins? But hey, I was just trying to oblige. I’ve always done that. Ask me a question, I’ll give you an answer, with a minimum of hemming and hawing.
Back in the early days of our acquaintance, it took my poor wife about a year to realize that I would answer ANY question, whether I knew the right answer or not. She’d ask, “Why is the car making that noise?” or “Why did the weather get so cool so suddenly?” and I would launch into an explanation that sounded reasonable to me. Sometimes I would add, “That’s my theory, anyway;” other times I would forget to. Eventually, she learned to recognize my “theorizing” tone. I wasn’t trying to mislead her. I just always figured that if a person asks a question, they want an answer, not “I don’t know.” And as I said, I like to oblige.
Then, as editorial page editor, I developed the capacity to come up with something to say, under any circumstances. Since the point of an editorial board is to come up with something to say, this was a handy skill to have. It settled many an impasse on the board. We’d be deadlocked, and the inspiration would come upon me; I’d say “Here’s what we’ll say,” and essentially dictate an editorial that took into account all that had been said. Just something I did. I’m hoping to come up with another job that requires that skill, because I’m very good at it. Better at that than writing or editing. (Too bad no one’s hiring absolute monarchs these days, because that’s something they need to know how to do…)
So if you asked, “Whom should we endorse for governor and why?,” I’d come up with the answer. And if you asked, “What are my sins?,” I’d tell you that, too. Even if it made me sound disturbingly like that insufferable busybody, the Operative.
And it’s just like Cindi to remember something like that…
Related Posts
It is no sin to quote from “Serenity.”
I quickly learned when I moved to Chicago that while all Midwesterners are wonderfully helpful and accommodating, the men would give me directions regardless of whether they had a clue.
So I thought you were going to ask us what we thought was wrong with YOU…..
I’m going out on a very shaky limb here, but I think it’s a man-thing! I’m going to hypothesize that men tend to view any question (rhetorical or otherwise) as exactly that: a question, which therefore requires an answer, which they are compelled (by an answer-gene??) to provide.
My female buddies and associates, on the other hand, might either answer the question or use it as a conversation topic. As in, “Why in the heck do I ALWAYS seem to hit a red light when crossing Gervais St?” Male answer: “You know, those lights are set to change at specific intervals…” (you fill in the rest). Female answer: “I dunno. But did I tell you about the JERK that ran right through the intersection there at Taylor and nearly took out my right fender? Let me tell you, I was so pis…”
Biological? Cultural? You decide…
I asked my husband once why the dirt roads around here get so rough over time (hey, I live in the Pee Dee, dirt roads are our infrastructure). He gave me a very long and detailed explanation (I think it had something to do with rain, but I stopped listening after a while). When he finished, I said do you KNOW that, or are you just guessing, whereupon he admitted that it sounded right to him.
The answer-gene is closely related to the advice gene, which compels men to tell you what you should do in any situation, even if they know nothing about it and you aren’t really asking for advice. (My daughter is driving me nuts. Female response: Oh, honey, don’t I know it. Male response: Well, I’ve already told you what you need to do. You need to ….)
Funny, KP! One of these days I’m going to count the number of sentences my hub utters in a given period that begin with “You need to…”, then measure it against his utterances (to me, within the same period) that don’t! Then I’m going to use it in one of my sociology classes…
Don’t get me wrong – DH (dear hubby) is a very smart guy. And, blessedly, neither a know-it-all or arrogant. But I gotta tell you, that “you need to” verb phrase can get WAY overused! ;-D
Interestingly, I hear it even more when he’s together in a group with his father and brother… from all three of them, directed at one another. So, here’s my idea:
it’s not a male-to-female thing, just a male thing;
and,
it’s multiplicative amongst males in a group of males.
Funny topic, Brad! Wonder what the guys think… (??)
The smart guys think that this is just one of those topics that “you [don’t] need to” add any comments to.
Does it fall under “does this make me look fat?” catagory, SGMret? ;-D
I learned (or better put, my bride trained me) long ago that when she is sharing details of her day with me, all she wants me to do is listen, not help her fix things. As a schoolteacher, I have many opportunities to get my daily you need to… fix.
On the other hand, if you don’t want me to answer a question, don’t ask it. I’m pretty sure I’ll come up with an answer, and insist I’m right until shown evidence to the contrary, at which point I’ll make a comment something like, Hmm… That must have changed since I was in school.
If a man says something and a woman is not there to hear it,
is he still wrong?
Claudia, “no darling, you look terrific in that dress” to which the wife responds silently, “what the hell do you know, my thighs look like tree trunks in this thing.”
Anyone have Sarah Palin in the pool for “Next Governor To Resign”?
Her resignation speech made Sanford’s confession look halfway sane.
Andrew Sullivan, as usual, nails it:
“In the end, I think, the one thing to say is that the Republican party is in such a total state of collapse and incoherence that it actually believed she could be a future president; and that John McCain was so reckless, so cynical and so cavalier that he was prepared to rest the national security of this country on her shoulders if he, in his seventies, were to become unable to fulfill his duties or die. In some ways, this is a moment to reflect on McCain, and his irresponsibility, not Palin and her drama.”
I say BAL and she says RPG.
Actually, I don’t know RPG and grateful that I don’t and she doesn’t know IBM 370 Assembler Language, which I remember.
But my wife and I are both techies (and no, we won’t disclose our phone number or fix your computer problems).
But my wife continues to surprise me.
Ralph, I didn’t know any of us were still around, well IBM 360 guys that is. When I was introduced to the wonders of the computer age on an IBM 360-30, I thought it was the ultimate in technology. Cards, tape, stack disks, and high speed printers were the greatest things since sliced bread. RPG was just gaining a foothold but still looked down upon as a “low end” report generating program, i.e. the acronym, RPG. The IBM System/3 used RPG almost exclusively and it had been developed into a much more powerful language at that point.
Remember the punched tape controller for the high speed printers and some of the other “marvels” of the times? The transition from unit record equipment (401, 403 with a cam), the old IBM 1400 Series, the 360 series, 370 series, etc.
My daughter has her masters in business and finance and works for a national company as a corporate manager in their IT department and uses the current version of RPG.
If my life depended on it, I couldn’t do much with BAL, Fortran, RPG, or Cobol today. PL1 was a language IBM was developing during my time studying at the IBM Educational Center in DC but they could never get the bugs out of it.
Well, enough reminiscing. Have a great July 4th weekend.
“Since the point of an editorial board is to come up with something to say, ”
No. No. No. That misconception is the reason your career was a failure. The point of an editorial board is to serve the public, and the public is served not by your promulgating whatever random opinion pops into your head, but by analyzing issues of interest, studying facts relating to those issues, and providing thoughtful views on those issues. Your failure to perform this service is the reason your career collapsed as soon as you no longer had a monopoly.
When enormous barriers to entry shielded you from competition, you could do anything you wanted. You could have provided value to the public, and if you had, you might have weathered the storm better than you did. But you didn’t choose to provide value to the public, you chose to serve your own self-importance, promoting your own idiosyncratic views that no one else shares, and fancying yourself the leader of some sort of movement. In the meantime, people such as Josh Marshall, Marcy Wheeler, Glenn Greenwald, and many others, studied important issues and became expert on them, both breaking important stories and providing thoughtful analysis. You dismissed this sort of work as beneath you.
Of course, you aren’t the journalist to be undone by his own inflated self-regard. The malady is rampant. Josh Marshall’s work in examining the US Attorney firings and the corruption of the Department of Justice was ignored and scorned. Dana Milbank derided President Obama’s recognition of Nico Pitney based on Pitney’s work. rather than ignoring him due to his lack of credentials.
You failed in your career because you failed to acknowledge the fact that in a world without barriers to entry, credentials don’t matter, what matters is the quality of the work. Your credentials gave you entry, and when you were able to keep others out, the poor quality of your work was irrelevant.
But once the barriers removed, the quality of the work was all that mattered. And so you failed.
Did anyone besides me just hear a familiar voice, that of one whose name must not be mentioned?
Brad, that’s sure turning the dial on the way-back-machine. (‘Course, I’ve haven’t been what’cha might call a regular participant here for quite some time either.)
“Mary” was, if nothing, entertaining, but always a bit too long-winded for my tastes. Finally got so I just skipped her/his posts since the points were buried too deep. That is when he/she wasn’t just gratuitously beating you up like a schoolyard bully out for your lunch money. Those posts weren’t worth reading since they eventually all fell into the realm of “hey, we got it already.”
Brad, are you familiar with one John Lott? Maybe you should do a little research and check this guy out. He is some sort of nut case pretending to be a conservative, gun rights supporter, etc. Apparently, he created an alter ego to write letters and start a blog to defend his work. Guess what the name of the alter ego is or was? You guessed it, Mary Rosh. When I went to the link to your older threads, the name Mary Rosh struck a chord of familiarity.
I think you may have an internet stalker going under different names and his or her obsession with you is creepy. The long, rambling, and inconsistent commentaries should be an indication the unreliability of anything this person submits.
But, then again, anyone can be fooled, even a brilliant math teacher.
I omitted the link I meant to make. Mike Toreno = Mary Rosh. Who knows how many other names this creep has used.
Bart, John Lott is a real conservative, all right. I agree that he is a nut case, but certainly being a nut case is compatible with being a conservative. He has always been ready to present phony arguments to further the conservative cause. In 2000, various conservative apologists kept claiming that Bush lost votes in the Florida panhandle because the TV networks called the state prematurely, causing voters who were standing in line to abandon voting and go home. The “analysis” this claim was based on came from Lott.
For a while there, he/she was using names of characters from comic books. Now, it’s a character from a video game (Grand Theft Auto).
Nut cases abound on both sides. Nothing new about that. You are a good case in point.
I respect Randy even though I disagree with many of his positions and at times, we hurl a couple of invectives at each other. Randy has earned his stripes, you haven’t. Randy has laid it out for all to see and hides behind nothing. He articulates his position with coherent language and gets to the point he is trying to make. Sometimes I get long winded but try to stay on point and only really get personal when confronted with obvious dishonesty – like yours.
After reading about some of his work on the Drexel site, Randy apparently has an exceptional academic mind. So far, about the only thing you have succeeded at is finding irrelevant comic strip and video game characters to emulate and hide behind to spew your particular brand of hatred.
This is my last response to you because it is a waste of time and energy. You are truly irrelevant.
Well, Mike, since the recount by the news organizations found that Bush won Florida by a wide margin, it was actually Gore and his media pals who were spewing phony data at us.
As one of Gore’s lawyers revealed in his lawsuit, Gore had the lawsuits, with all the detailed charges of voter irregularities, drawn up weeks before the election, in 19 states. Their plan from the get go was to dispute any close election, create confusion, and steal the office by bullying.
The bully got his nose rubbed in the dirt.
Bart, I have never understood this obsession with the name someone uses online. It is irrelevant, what’s relevant is what the person says. And knowing who the person is doesn’t tell you anything. My wife and I were driving the other day and Ana Marie Cox’s radio show came on. I said, she rose from being a blogger, to working for Time Magazine, to having her own radio show. My wife said, oh? I said yeah, she’s Wonkette. My wife said oh! The name originally didn’t mean as much as the online persona, although now that she’s gaining fame under her name, the name begins to continue to increase in relevance.
I think Brad’s obsession with what name somebody uses has to do with his forlorn desire to maintain a monopoly, and his valuation of credentials over content. If you have a monopoly, you can exclude the wrong sort of people by making a list of people who (like Brad) can be counted on to follow a particular line and exclude people who aren’t on the list. If you believe that someone’s right to speak depends on credentials handed out by a corporation, knowing someone’s name allows you to know whether that person has credentials.
But there is no monopoly, and credentials don’t matter. What matters is content, and you can evaluate commentary by looking at the commentary, rather than worrying where it comes from. I took the incontrovertible fact that Brad failed in his career, and, based on my observations of his commentary, examined what I believe are some of the reasons for his failure and the changes he needs to make to succeed.
Your complaint that I use a name you don’t like is specious. My commentary stands or falls on its own.
Lee, the fact that everything you believe, you believe very strongly, doesn’t alter the fact that nearly everything you believe is wrong. Try reading a newspaper other than the Crazytown Herald.
Mike the Pseud, you don’t know the difference between knowledge and belief, so don’t try to “diagnose” those of us with whom you are afraid to engage in discussion. Your silly insults don’t do anything to extract your image from the gutter.
I have been a longtime critic of newspapers for ignoring their customers, and of Brad Warthen for his many political crusades and vendettas to bring us backward South Carolinians into his bright world, but for Mike the Pseud to call someone a “career failure” after 30 years in a career is false and rude.
The news and commentary business is changing, and the Old Guard journalists can’t figure out how to deal with competition. The businesses are closing, people are being laid off, whether they know what the problem is and how to fix it or are clueless. That doesn’t mean everything they did for 100 years was wrong or “a failure”. The public is just able to see how much they are being ignored and lied to right NOW, and Obama Worship is the latest and worst example.
Just as the only way to clean up politics now is to throw them all out, the only way to clean up journalism is to let the old newspapers, magazines and networks die if they refuse to clean up their business practices.