Here’s where I was in the project last November. I had already eliminated 11 boxes.
I found what you will see below last night, when I resumed the ongoing, off-and-on, project of cleaning out our two-car garage enough that I can at least park one vehicle in out of the weather.
The problem isn’t the household items one or another of our kids have stored there, or the tools accumulated over the years. The toughest category of clutter is the result of my own packrat tendencies — mostly, the boxes of paper and other items that I packed up and brought home with me when I left The State 16 years ago.
It was a huge mountain to begin with, taking me two full weeks of hauling home in the bed of my truck every night of those last two weeks. (I had a big office, but that was just the beginning. The editorial department had a roomful of filing cabinets almost entirely devoted to my files, and I had a box here and there in other locations. There wasn’t time to sort through it all; I just brought it home.) This is my third time sifting through it all. Each of the first two times, I reduced the pile somewhat. This time, I’ve been throwing away most of what I find. But occasionally, I open a box that’s harder to give up, and I have to make my way through it sheet by sheet, reading some of the letters, notes and such all the way to the end. Those I tend to keep.
I was particularly interested to find this one. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but couldn’t find it to post. I wrote a lot of columns in long draft form over the years that I ended up trashing. Sometimes I found the premise just didn’t work once I had developed it. But usually it was simply that a better idea emerged at the last minute, and I wrote and ran that instead.
But this is the only one I can remember actually completing and having ready to go, and then spiking even though I didn’t write another one to replace it with. I think maybe it was already on the page and I yanked it off and replaced it with a syndicated piece. But I’m not sure, now that 30 years have passed.
I wouldn’t have done that a year or two later. But this was very early in my time on the editorial board. I wasn’t the editor yet, or even an associate editor. This was less than two years after I left news for opinion writing, and I was just an editorial writer. And at that early stage, I couldn’t see publishing an opinion piece that didn’t offer a solution. All I was doing here was describing the problem, and that seemed incomplete. I though it was my duty to prescribe a cure.
I should have run it. It was a decent piece. It had its flaws that jump out at me now, such as that jarring, sudden switch from past to present tense in the fourth graf. But it was worth running, and I wish I had — especially since it identified a problem that at that time was just starting to tear the country apart. It hadn’t fully metasticized yet. If I had known then how bad things would get — it’s one of the things that led both to Trumpism and to the Democratic Party being completely unable to counter it — I would have run it and perhaps even campaigned (unsuccessfully, of course, due to the fundamental division between news and editorial) to have it placed on the front page.
At that time, we were already becoming a country that couldn’t pull together to solve problems. Oh, a few things came along later that harked back to the “we’re all in this together” spirit of the Second World War or LBJ’s extraordinary string of domestic policy victories in the middle ’60s — such as Teddy Kennedy initially supporting George W. Bush’s effort to add prescription coverage to Medicare, or the bipartisan successes Joe Biden had in Congress early in his all-too-brief time in the White House.
But mostly, we have hardened the divisions between “my group vs. your group” that would do our country in. Young people have never known a time when we were regularly able to see each other as fellow Americans and pull together in common cause. For older people, the memories are dimming. Sometimes the problem is simply the rapidly growing party division that started getting bad in the ’80s, and just got worse and worse each decade. Sometimes it’s the inexplicable cult of Trump. Other times, it’s about what this column was about — the growing power of identity, which has fed both of those other two problems.
Look at it either way — that my black colleagues in that gym were blinded by identity, or I was, as the white guy who couldn’t wrap my head around how they could possibly identify with that rich celebrity who had so little in common with them or me. Either way, I found the cognitive divide between my co-workers and me shocking. I thought it was a problem we needed to talk about. I should have run the column.
To place this unpublished column in time: The Simpson verdict was announced on October 3, 1995 — my 42nd birthday. When I left that gym, I showered, headed up to the third floor and wrote the column quickly enough for it to run in the next day’s paper. But it didn’t.
Here it is, as it came off the dot matrix printer, like so many other things I saved from those times:
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I just realized that’s not the original that came off the dot-matrix printer. There are no green-and-white lines. This was a photocopy of the printout; I frequently saved multiple copies of things — I’m that obsessive.
Some things about it puzzle me. It ought to say something about Oct. 3rd, but it seems to have been printed on a later date. Also, I don’t know why it has Claudia Brinson’s login on it. Maybe she had edited it, and I asked her to send it back to me after I decided to spike it.
She wouldn’t have been the only person to have seen it. I assume I showed it to Tom McLean, who was then the EPE and my boss. And I recall that I showed it to one of the people who had been cheering in that gym, a woman down in Advertising I knew pretty well and whose opinion I respected. (A very unusual and off-the-record thing for me to do, contrary to the rules of the game. I couldn’t have cared less what Advertising thought because it was none of their business; but I didn’t want to offend her personally.) I don’t remember her objecting to it. In the end, the qualms were all mine…
I remember that moment very well. I was working in Bennettsville in a diverse workforce setting. It taught me,or reminded me of a very important lesson; we never really know what others are thinking or understand what it’s like to walk in their shoes. Same thought today; how can someone become Trump fan, or hold certain religious beliefs. I just finished reading a post where people were debating whether or not Noah’s Arc was real. The human mind is fascinating…and scary.
Yup.
I was never under the impression that all people are good or smart or decent. I was a newspaperman. I had to cover some pretty nasty stuff. And later, as editorial page editor, I saw a lot of bad stuff in “letters” that never made it into print, for the simple reason that they were never signed. This gave readers a more optimistic view of humanity than I had. But even I had a more optimistic view than I do now. At least back then, those folks were ashamed enough that they hid themselves behind anonymity. Then Trump taught them you should shout your wickedness and your ignorance (and the question remains, is it evil or just ignorance?) to the skies. And they love him for it.
It’s all way more complicated than that, but that’s one, simple way of expressing at least part of what happened….
How long had you been in B’ville in 1995?
1989-1996. Supply Chain Manager at an automotive parts supplier. Terrific people I worked with.
“Then Trump taught them you should shout your wickedness and your ignorance (and the question remains, is it evil or just ignorance?) to the skies. And they love him for it.”
I had a “Conservative” tell me this past week that he fully supported the US Military (not just the Guard) being sent to US cities and actively arresting people along with law enforcement.
Now, this “Conservative” is someone who I use to work with and has a nice, professional career. He is well read and could talk in detail about Reagan’s political philosophy and was a big fan of William F Buckley.
I didn’t argue with him but asked how someone who considers himself a Conservative would ever want the US military involved in law enforcement in US cities based on the whims of a president. He, somewhat angrily, accused me of not liking Trump.
I reminded him that I hate Trump. It’s not just a dislike. But that had nothing to do with how a so called Conservative- a person who use to believe in a limited federal government would justify the Army trying to arrest people in Columbia, SC on the directions of the president.
My opinion is- conservatives are fake as hell and have zero principles – NONE. They are robots i a cult. I tell them that to their face when given the chance.
Tell that “conservative” that it is a violation of U.S. law — specifically, the Posse Comitatus Act.
The U.S. military is absolutely NOT intended for enforcing laws in this country. Start doing that, and you’re on you way to — well, the place where we are, with a president with the inclinations of a Banana Republic dictator.
I’m not advocating this at all, because I don’t want us to be in a shooting war with Russia… but a FAR more legitimate place for those troops to be is in Ukraine.
Actually “far more” is a misstatement. Sending troops to Ukraine would simply be legitimate (if not wise), while sending them to U.S. cities is simply illegitimate. It’s one of those rare situations where it’s OK to apply ones and zeroes…
I am surprised you haven’t been approached for your papers by USC, especially since they have a school of journalism. As an archivist, I would consider getting the papers of the Vice President/Editorial page editor of the largest newspaper in the state would be an important acquisition.
Yeah, I don’t know about that. I can’t imagine anyone deeming these things worth the trouble. The stuff I save only means anything to me. And if I share something with y’all, it only makes any sense if I do a bunch of explaining. Or at least it seems so to me…
Yeah, we archivists get that a lot. “Nobody could possibly be interested in my papers.” “I’m not anybody important, so no one would care about what I have to say.” Etc., etc. Archives now do more than collect the papers of the high and the mighty. We are interested in preserving the documentary and cultural history of our area, and that includes *all* members of society. Your post is a case in point: not just the editorials that make it to print, but those that do not, and the changes that an editorial might go through before it is finally published. there are certainly historians, etc. who would be interested in that, not to mention documenting how past events were viewed by people at the time.
James, I just sent you an email saying that if you know somebody who would take all this off my hands, let me know. It would same me a lot of trouble…
I was working at Blue Cross. I remember we stopped and heard the verdict which I thought was odd. I think someone had a radio or something.
I don’t remember cheers – or anything except some hushed comments that I couldn’t really make out.
I followed the case some- but not every day. I don’t recall even anticipating the verdict.
I did have a friend at work who was a black female and she told me soon after the verdict that she was happy and she didn’t think he did it.
I told her I thought he did it – but that we’d both know for sure in how hard he worked to find the real killer in the years to come. She agreed.
I told her I expected him to act like John Walsh, whose son Adam had been abducted and murdered and John and his wife had dedicated their lives to finding the killer and then helping other families in the same situation.
A year or so later I left Blue Cross and lost touch with my friend. (The verdict didn’t impact out friendship at all)- especially since I don’t recall having a strong opinion on the case anyway. But I could feel the reality that there did seem to be big divide with white people and black people.
I’ve often wondered what my friend thought about Simpson as the years went by- if she ever thought about what I mentioned to her would tell us both if he did it not being based on how hard he searched for the real killers. We know that, instead of looking for the “real killer or killers,” he spent his time gambling, chasing young white women, and playing golf while seemingly thrilled and happy.
In 1994, from the Ides of April to the first Friday in November, I was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I would occasionally have lunch at a dive bar named O’Maggies Pub. The TV was tuned to the OJ trial. Hearing testimonies about multiple stab wounds, well, that’s not exactly a topic during lunch.
The last week of October, South Carolina was in the news about a carjacking with two young boys in the car. I stopped for gas in Illinois and saw a newspaper headline, “Susan Smith Arrested”