On the day of the Republican presidential primary in January 2008, I dropped by the office to check on things, and wandered through the newsroom to see what they knew, if anything.
I was wearing one of those “I Voted” stickers that the Palmetto Project gives out to encourage civic engagement. I’ve always proudly worn one on election days as a visible symbol of being one who cares enough to make the effort, without revealing anything inappropriate (for a newspaper editor) about how I voted.
But John Monk remarked upon it, saying, “I see you voted Republican.” Dang! I had completely forgotten the insane fact that the parties had insisted upon having separate primaries a week apart (yet another reason to hate parties). Flustered, I just said, “Well, of course I did.” If I had thought there was any danger of Barack Obama losing the Democratic primary, I would have had a dilemma on my hands. But while I thought McCain would win the GOP contest, I wasn’t sure of it, and I was damned if I was going to fail to do my bit to prevent my state from committing the travesty it had in 2000, when it gave George W. Bush to the world. It just had never occurred to me not to vote in that primary.
Of course, if you live in the Quail Hollow precinct in Lexington County, you’re accustomed to voting in Republican primaries, if only because that’s the only way you get any choices at all. This morning when I asked for a Democratic ballot, I could not remember ever having done so before since I’ve lived there.
And of course, as a result of taking that ballot, I was disenfranchised in terms of who will be my congressman, my lieutenant governor, my treasurer, my attorney general, my SC House member, and my county councilman. In every one of those, there was no Democratic contest, and in two of them (treasurer and county council) no Democrat at all; in those two this WAS the election (and in several of the others it might as well be).
But it was worth it to cast a positive vote. Yeah, I guess I could have held my nose and hoped that Henry McMaster would govern the way he has served as attorney general, rather than the way he has run as a candidate, and thereby minimized Nikki’s margin of victory. But by taking a Democratic ballot, I actually got to vote for someone I actually want to be my governor, without any reservations. And as I’ve said over and over again, electing the right governor is FAR more important than what happens with any other office. We have got to turn this state around, and as weak as the office of governor is, it’s the one office with a bully enough pulpit to make a difference. No matter how perfect my House member may be, he’s just one vote out of 170, and can’t make news (and thereby influence policy) with a mere word.
And I feel good about it. After all the slime we’ve been dragged through over on the Republican side, from talk about who’s bedding whom to “Vultures” to … well, I just don’t even want to think about it. After all that, to vote positively, without reservation, was a great relief.
Today, I find myself in a bit of an ethical dilemma. And as y’all know, I am Mr. Ethics, although I do have a certain penchant for placing myself in … ambiguous… circumstances.
Y’all also know that I’m a member of The Capital City Club, of quite a few years’ standing. I’m quite proud of the club and its heritage, since it was founded to provide an inclusive alternative for certain other clubs that somehow hadn’t gotten around to admitting any black or Jewish or female members. Not only am I a member, but I serve on the club’s board.
In that capacity I know that, with the economic downturn, we can use all the special events we can get. At the wonderfully low price of the club’s “Breakfast Club,” my eating grits and bacon there every morning isn’t exactly paying the light bill. With that in mind we held my great-aunt’s 100th birthday lunch there recently, and a lovely time was had by all. And if your family has a wedding coming up and you need a reception venue, let me know and I’ll see what I can arrange…
So it is with a mixture of grateful welcome and wry amusement that I look upon this item, which a colleague shared with me with the observation, “Interesting choice of location for our little populist …” Here’s what the press advisory said:
(Columbia, SC) – Today, the Haley for Governor Campaign released information regarding location for the campaign’s primary night celebration.
What: Haley for Governor Primary Night Celebration
Where: Capital City Club, 1201 Main Street, Columbia, S.C.
When: Tuesday, June 8th
Event begins at 7:00 pm. Media will have access beginning at 5:30 pm….
###
Personally, I think it’s absolutely fine that Nikki chose our club for her event. I may swing by to welcome her and her entourage. I’m sure they’ll find it an enjoyable experience, especially if the election returns break as I think they will, with her at least in a runoff.
And I doubt her populist fans will object. I don’t think they’re that kind of populist.
Tim Pearson with the Nikki Haley campaign just sent me a message saying,
The Michael Haley twitter account you’re quoting on your blog is not Michael Haley. Just someone with too much time on their hands.
Tim
YIKES! Sorry about that.
In an earlier version of this post, I had announced that as of last night at 11:12, MichaelHaleySC had been following me on Twitter, and had posted the following:
One week everyone! Don’t forget to go vote for SC’s next Governor, Nikki Haley! I’d be honored to be your “first dude!”
about 11 hours ago via web
Check out the campaign’s latest TV ad!……I might have made an appearance! http://www.youtube.com/user/nikkihaley2010#p/u/6/RsXz0BjEG00
about 11 hours ago via web
Larry Marchant is a liar, plain and simple. Thanks for all your prayers.
about 1 hour ago via web
None of that struck me as the usual kind of spoof you see on Twitter, so I was taken in and actually thought it was from Mr. Haley.
Apparently not. Sorry. Thanks for the heads-up, Tim… assuming you ARE Tim…
Back on yesterday’s Virtual Front Page I made a passing reference to God the Creator. That inspired Phillip to respond:
The line in Genesis about God creating man in “His image and likeness” has troubled me since the day I first read it, as that idea seems to me to be a self-serving construct of man himself, which has in turn served to justify just about everything man has ever done, for ill as well as good.
To the extent that I believe in some kind of unknowable First Cause, I’d have to say that insofar as He-She-It created man in His image, He also created single-celled amoebae in His image, or igneous rocks, or airless space, or kangaroos, etc.
The whole Genesis thing implies that man is somehow the culmination of God’s creation, the highest plateau, which just seems dubious considering A) the blink of an eye which comprises the whole duration of man’s existence compared to the earth’s history, and B) the significant mathematical probability that highly intelligent and evolved life exists on other planets in the universe.
To which I respond…
Phillip, Genesis is evocative literature, albeit inspired. The “image and likeness” part is poetic language for the fact that we are creatures capable of contemplating good and evil, and choosing between them. Other creatures can’t, as much as we’d like to assign such moral values to them.
I had a reminder of that this morning. I got up to find that my dog — during the part of the night BEFORE he woke me up whining to go out — had gotten into the garbage and chewed and torn and spread it all over the kitchen and another room, in SPITE of the fact that I had put it in the cabinet under the sink and secured it with a big rubber band, specifically to keep him out of it.
He must have spent most of the night on it. I’m still not sure how he did it without opposable thumbs. I should have taken a crime scene photo to post here, but I wasn’t thinking straight.
As I was fuming and ranting cleaning it up, I was thinking (and saying aloud, though I was alone) how horrible and wicked, how thoroughly evil, it had been for him to do this so deliberately. so painstakingly. Which was, of course, idiotic on my part.
I had put in the garbage a paper towel with which I had wiped a plate full of juices from a steak dinner. The smell must have driven him half mad.
And he’s just a dog. He’s just like all the other creatures in the Garden. But if a grown human who had been thoroughly warned about this — say, Eve, or that slacker Adam — did the same, I’d be rushing to get my flaming sword…
The prime suspect in this morning's thoroughly nasty crime. So far, there are no indications of an al Qaeda or Taliban connection, but this is early in the investigation.
Sorry not to be forthcoming with a post on the Sarah Palin/Nikki Haley event last evening. I’ve been too busy — my baby granddaughter spent the night with us last night, my youngest daughter came home from Charlotte and my wife and I had a lot of errands to run this morning (including, alas, taking her car in for several hundred dollars worth of repairs).
So I was living life instead of blogging. But I should add that I was glad I couldn’t post right away, because I’ve been… depressed… since that event. As I’ve turned over what to say about it in my minds (I almost corrected that to the singular after typing the S, but then realized that plural is correct; I am of several minds on all this), I’ve been unable to think of anything constructive to say. And even when I’m going to be scathingly critical of something, I want it to be for a purpose. I want there to be a constructive point in mind, something to add to a conversation that would help us all move forward somehow.
But I haven’t arrived. Instead, I’m feeling a level of alienation that would make Benjamin Braddock and Holden Caulfield seem happy and well-adjusted.
Part of it, but just a small part, is this problem I’ve been wrestling with of my increased sense of alienation from Republicans in general. I don’t like it; it runs against my grain. To react with constant negativity to Republicans and all their works suggest partisanship, an affinity for Democrats, to most people. Not to me — Lord knows, I still find the Democrats off-putting enough, and am still pleased not to identify with them either — but to other people. And when you write a blog, how you are perceived by others matters. But I can’t help it. While the Dems are merely no more irritating than usual these days, the Republicans have so aggressively, actively offended my sense of propriety and my intelligence as they have flailed about since the 2008 election, that even tiny things set me off now. I no longer have to see one of those maddening TV commercials — like the two I saw last night, Andre Bauer talking first and foremost about the need for smaller government (as if THAT were the main problem facing a state that’s laying off teachers left and right) and Henry McMaster talking about the “radicals” running Washington (as if that were any less crazy than the claims of the birthers). Now, just small things send me deeper into my funk. This morning I saw a sign for a candidate who had only one thing to say about himself, that he was a “Rock Solid… Republican” — as though that identification were sufficient, that reassurance that I am not one of them; I’m one of us. The sheer, obnoxious, impervious smugness of it…
(If I were a Democrat, I wouldn’t worry about this. They can console themselves with the fantasy that all they have to do is win the election, and their troubles are over. I’m always conscious of the fact that as many as 40 percent of voters would still be Republicans — just as between 30 and 40 percent are Democrats now, even with a Republican governing majority — and you’d still have to deal with them and reason with them if you really want to move our state forward. Especially in our Legislative State, you sort of have to build consensus to get things done. So when either party seems to be trying to drift beyond reason — say, when Dems were in the grips of Bush Derangement Syndrome — that worries me.)
But the alienation I’m feeling standing in that crowd of Haley and Palin supporters is different. Partly because these women aren’t positioning themselves as Republicans. On the contrary, they are relishing their animosity toward the people in their party who already hold a majority of public offices in this state. They are proud to antagonize and run against those Republicans with greater experience and understanding than they have. They turn their inexperience and lack up understanding of issues from a weakness into a virtue. Their fans cheer loudest when they hold up their naivete as a battle flag.
A little over a year ago, Nikki Haley was just an idealistic sophomore legislator who was touchingly frustrated that her seniors in her party didn’t roll over and do what she wanted them to do when she wanted them to do it. It didn’t really worry me when I would try to explain to her how inadequate such bumper sticker nostrums as “run government like a business” were (based in a lack of understanding of the essential natures not only of government, but of business, the thing she professes to know so well), and she would shake her head and smile and be unmoved. That was OK. Time and experience would take care of that, I thought. She was very young, and had experienced little. Understanding would come, and I felt that on the whole she was still a young lawmaker with potential.
I reckoned without this — this impatient, populist, drive for power BASED in the appeal of simplistic, demagogic opposition to experience itself. It’s an ugly thing, this sort of anti-intellectualism of which Sarah Palin has become a national symbol. This attitude that causes her to smile a condescending, confident smile (after all, the crowd there is on HER side) at protesters — protesters I didn’t even notice until she called attention to them — and tell them that they should stick around and maybe they would learn something. If a 65-year-old male intellectual with a distinguished public career said that to a crowd, everyone would understand it was ugly and contemptuous. But Sarah is so charming about it, so disarming! How could it be ugly?
Her evocations — echoed by Nikki — of traditional, plain values (and complementary exhibition of contempt for anyone who disagrees) seem so positive and good and right to the crowd that cheers such lines as Nikki’s about how good it is that traditional politicians are “afraid” (which, coming from different lips, would send a chill down spines). They don’t see the ugliness. After all, see how lovely the package is! See how they smile!
The thing is, I probably agree with these people about so much that they are FOR — traditional moral values, hard work, family, patriotism. And mine isn’t your left-handed liberal kind of patriotism (you know, as in “I oppose the war and criticize my country because I’m a REAL patriot,” etc.). No, in fact, my own kind of patriotism is probably even more martial and militaristic than that of these folks, if that’s possible, given my background. And I would never take a back seat to any of them in my belief in American exceptionalism. I may not like the smug way they talk about these things, but the values are there.
It’s the stuff that they’re AGAINST that leaves me cold. Paying taxes. Government itself. Moderation. Patience with people who disagree. Experience. Deep understanding of issues. They are hostile to these things.
And their certainty, their smugness, is off-putting in the extreme.
But as I stood there in that crowd and listened to the cheers at almost every questionable statement those smiling ladies muttered, I despaired of ever being able to explain any of this to these folks, of ever having a meeting of the minds. It’s THEIR alienation that makes me feel so alienated…
And that’s what has me down. I hope it will pass. But it wasn’t a good way to spend a Friday evening.
Just now saw this e-mail from Rob Godfrey with the McMaster campaign:
Brad,
I realize you may not be in the loop, on top of the news or very well informed about the gubernatorial race these days, and that’s why I always hesitate to respond to anything that shows up on your blog. But I did want to point out that the Boiling Springs Tea Party endorsement of Henry was released both by the organization itself and our campaign before anyone knew anything about Sarah Palin’s trip to South Carolina. Thanks.
Rob Godfrey
McMaster for Governor
I immediately suppressed the irritation one would naturally feel at a complaint worded that way. I decided not to take his opening words as being deliberately insulting or anything like that.
Instead, I immediately acknowledged his point and promised to pass it on to my readers here on the blog. (Golly, I’m grown up — don’t you think?) Since I was seeing it all on Friday, I had failed to notice that the item on the campaign Web site and the Tweet that drew me to it were both dated the 13th — the same day as Nikki Haley’s announcement that Sarah Palin was coming to endorse her. I was certain, there for a moment, that he was wrong, because I was sure that when I saw that Tweet it was only one or two down on his Twitter account — but I guess they don’t post that often, because sure enough, it was the 13th.
So, sorry about that. Of course, it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve known for some time that Nikki has been pulling out all the stops to be THE Tea Party candidate. Nor does it change my long-standing disappointment with Henry for refusing to distance himself from his party’s recent drift to the fringes — for, instead, pursuing them with his outrageous rhetoric about those “radicals” in Washington destroying our American way of life. And I realize that this would be most irritating to one in the trenches trying to get Henry elected. If I were on his campaign, I would be really ticked at someone like me. I would see that person as “out of the loop” to the extent that he was unrealistic about what it takes to get nominated in a Republican primary. I mean, doesn’t that washed-up, clueless Brad Warthen understand that Henry is the best of the Republicans, that he’s really a Graham Republican instead of a DeMint Republican, even if he dare not come out and say so right now?
Thinking about it, imagining that point of view, I almost get mad at myself.
In fact, I AM mad at myself for getting the sequence of events wrong, and attaching importance to it. And I’m truly sorry.
Last night after I posted the thing about Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley, I did what I usually do, which is post the headline and link on Twitter. But as I also usually do, I said a little more in the headline than I do here, as a way of drawing readers in and letting them know more about what the post is about. So instead of just “Sarah Palin coming to SC to back Nikki Haley,” I Tweeted:
Sarah Palin coming to back Nikki Haley — as if we really needed to start IMPORTING crazy here in SC… https://bradwarthen.com/?p=5456
Then, an interesting thing happened. Frequently I see my Tweets retweeted by others, and sometimes by a couple of people. This time, five different people (they were PaigeCoop, blogitch, tylermjones, JaneFredArch and sccounsel) retweeted that little come-on.
This sort of viral response, quite naturally, causes the more reptilian parts of my brain to go, “How can I get this kind of response again?” Because that many reTweets means that many more people I would not ordinarily reach are attracted to the blog, which means I get to report even bigger numbers (last month, 132,000 page views) next time I try to sell an ad — not to mention, of course, gaining a richer and more diverse conversation here on the blog, of course, which is what we’re all about here, of course. Ahem.
So it is is that I was rewarded for saying “as if we really needed to start importing crazy here in SC.” Which means my natural response is to describe MORE posts in similar terms, so as to get this same reward.
But the thing is, I wasn’t totally happy with that wording. Basically, I wanted to say that we have enough problems here in SC without bringing in a person who is a flashpoint for all sorts of conflicting emotions out in the national political buzz machine. And we have enough of our own demons here in our beloved state. There’s also the problem that we have every bit of our share of the anti-intellectualism that runs through American politics, a strain of which Mrs. Palin has rightly or wrongly become the symbol. We’ve got enough of it not to need to import the latest, flashiest, most Reality TV-esque version of it. Anyway, I’m not at all sure that “crazy” captured all that, although all that and more was what I was seeking to suggest.
But it certainly grabbed people. I was instantly rewarded for it. Which is maybe not a good thing. I have a certain knack for lurid language, which I generally try to keep in check, but not always successfully. People could often tell when I wrote an editorial at the paper (which I didn’t do all that often in recent years) because of that knack. Here is a sample of it, according to people who point these things out to me.
I really don’t need encouraging on this score.
And it occurs to me that this is the dynamic that has produced the particularly nasty morass of political rhetoric in which people think they are being hip and relevant and pithy when they call people “wingnuts” or otherwise engage in insult and calumny in the course of expressing themselves politically.
All those other blogs out there that serve hyperpartisan causes, that draw and feed anger, that thrive on treating those with whom their readers disagree with contempt bordering on dehumanization… the blogs to which I have always wanted this one to be a civil alternative … probably started down the road that they’re on by getting rewarded for getting a little punchier and a little more extreme with each post. Stimulus and response.
So… how do I grow the blog and resist that trap? Perpetual vigilance, I suppose — on my part and yours.
Stan Dubinsky sends out an interesting-looking article about whaling (someday I’ve got to get ME a gig that allows me time to read all the cool stuff that Stan sends links to… I couldn’t even do it while unemployed… but then I’m a freakishly slow, deliberate reader), and it reminds me:
Remember back when I was talking about how cool Moby Dick was, because I had finally started reading it (40 years after I had gotten an A+ on the final essay test in my advanced English class despite not having read ANY of it, based purely on my talent for BS and listening in class)?
Well… I didn’t finish it. Again.
The thing is, while the opening chapters are pretty engrossing, after Ishmael and Queequeg actually ship out, once the Pequod is underway… it begins to drag.
I just totally lost interest, long before the Great White Whale shows up. Maybe it’s because I was getting to the draggy bits at about the time I got laid off, or something. I don’t know.
Mind you, I could have gone the rest of my life still giving the impression I had read it, and discussing the characters and themes with great insight and fluency upon demand, the way I always have…
But I just had to level with y’all.
Maybe I’ll take it up again; just not right now. Right now I’m making my way through Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley. On a related note, I almost bought myself a copy of Robert Leckie‘s Helmet for My Pillow over the weekend — but it turned out that I only had less than a dollar left on the Barnes & Noble giftcard that I thought I hadn’t used. So no dice.
Speaking of which, Burl: I’m still going to write more about “The Pacific,” once I’ve finished watching it for the second time, as you recommended.
They’re wearing out my name before I’ve even adopted it.
I was leaning strongly toward “The New Normal” as the name for my band — you know, the band I’m going to start once I get the name and the playlist all worked out, after which I’ll start recruiting bandmates — but it seems like everybody’s using it every time I turn around, such as here and here and here. If only I had copyrighted it earlier — I would have licensed it to be used only by the band itself, and other people who have paid for the right by, for instance, losing their jobs in this Great Recession. Yeah, I know we have this free speech thing in this country, but I think there should be a rule that you don’t get to say “The New Normal” unless you’ve lost your job.
But I didn’t act quickly enough, mainly because of my great indecision when it comes to picking a name. I could probably decide to go to war, were I a president or a king, a LOT more quickly than the almost four decades I’ve been pondering band names.
Over the years, I’ve considered:
The Cotton Pigue Mentality — This was inspired by a certain county official in rural West Tennessee back in the late 70s or early 80s. Trouble is, this would have to be a bluegrass or progressive country band, which would eliminate a lot of my playlist. Also, I would have to have my friend Richard Crowson, the best picker of banjo, mandolin and guitar I know, and he lives plumb halfway across the country, in Kansas. Richard was there when we came up with the band name, so he shares the rights.
Citizen Arcane — This was a sobriquet given me by the late Delores Ballard, my dear friend back at The Jackson Sun in the early days of my career. I got that handle because I knew a lot about really obscure, unimportant stuff, and I suppose I was kind of overbearing about it. Delores was generous with nicknames. She also called me “Wa-Wa,” which has possibilities for a band, and “Percival Pedant,” for my insistence as an editor on precision. That last was just way too uncool to make the list.
Prussian Blue — It’s a color. In fact, it was one of the first synthetic pigments, whatever that means. I think I ran across it in a dictionary once. I liked the tension between a word with harsh, militaristic overtones (picture a Prussian army officer with a Heidelberg scar) and the dreamy “blue.” Unfortunately, the name was taken by a white nationalist pop duo. I am not making this up.
Wireless Cloud — The dream that apparently will never be realized here in South Carolina, since all of our legislative sessions are all about Mark Sanford, rather than legislation.
The Irreconcilables — This was a band idea I had very briefly, but dropped like a hot potato after I’d thought about it for 30 seconds. It would have included such politically irreconcilable local musicians as James Smith and Will Folks. I decided that normal bands have enough trouble with artistic differences; why buy extra trouble?
The Romeo Clause — this was from a loophole in SC law on the age of consent, which essentially held that you couldn’t be charged for having sex with a minor if you too were a minor. You know, like Romeo and Juliet. Very South Carolina. Disgusting, but I liked the name.
Splash Blend — If you recall, there was a brouhaha between Big Oil and the jobbers over whether gasohol had to be blended by the oil companies at the refinery, or whether they could be “splash blended” in the wholesalers’ trucks. Sounded like a band name to me.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of the names. Maybe y’all have some better ideas.
Wrote this last night, but saved it in draft form, as I was too spacey to know whether I was making any sense:
Here’s why I haven’t posted today, and probably won’t tomorrow…
Things have been crazy at our house later because we’ve been trying to get our house ready to go on the market (anybody want to buy a house, by the way?). In the midst of all that, my wife — who’s been working on this project pretty much around the clock (around her job), with me trailing along in her wake being occasionally helpful — got some kind of horrible stomach bug last week. Not the flu, but it might as well have been. Wiped her out for most of a week, but she kept going.
Over the weekend, one of the twins got a mild case of it, but quickly recovered. Then yesterday, the other twin got it, and so did her mother, my daughter. My wife went over to try to help with all that last night, leaving me alone to work on a list of things to get ready for the fact that today, a Realtor was planning to show our house.
So I put some stuff on the stove to cook for my dinner, and went upstairs to do some of the things on my punch list. Then, I drifted over to the laptop and started a long response to some of y’all’s comments, and then… the smoke alarm went off downstairs. I had totally lost track of time, and hadn’t heard the kitchen timer go off, and a pot of field peas had run out of water.
The house was immediately, before I could get downstairs and get the pot out into the yard, saturated with smoke. I spent the next three or four hours with the attic fan on and all the doors open, wiping down every surface in the kitchen and cleaning out the hood vent, trying to get rid of the smell. My wife, who had planned to spend the night at my daughter’s house to look after sick folk, came home to help me deal with the mess. I was feeling pretty sheepish by then, I can tell you.
Right after she got home — well after 10 — my son-in-law called to say my daughter had gotten so much sicker that he was going to take her to the hospital. (I won’t go into detail, but she really needed some fluids by IV, and other complications addressed.) He woke up their big sister to watch the twins until I could get there. He ended up spending the night at the hospital and so did my wife. The staff was badly overwhelmed, so the smart thing was for a healthy family member or two to be there.
I spent the night on the couch at the twins’ house. They were fine, although I didn’t sleep much. Then today, I took care of them all day except for a couple of hours in which I grabbed a late breakfast, did some last-minute work on the house, noted with satisfaction that most of the smoke smell was gone, and just to be on the safe side put a frozen apple pie in the oven to get a pleasant smell going (crafty, huh?). And yes, I turned off the oven when it was done.
Then I went back to take care of the twins until about an hour ago, then came home and put some dinner on the stove. It’s cooking now. And yes, this time, I have the laptop in the kitchen. My wife’s spending the night in the hospital with my daughter (who still isn’t in a regular room), my son-in-law is with the babies, and I’m going to cop some Zs at home before going back to take care of the babies in the morning.
It’s 11:12 p.m. My dinner is ready.
Don’t expect me to post tomorrow.
To the most important point: My daughter is better, just not better enough to go home. She was really, really sick.
Since I wrote the above, the night has passed without incident — except that my youngest daughter, the ballet dancer, injured her foot last night and it looks like she might not be able to perform Saturday, which we were looking forward to. Her big sister is still in the hospital, the twins are in the care of my son-in-law, and I’m going to try to get some freelance work done this afternoon. Still probably won’t post before tonight, if then…
And here’s something else to make you feel better: Even though everybody and his brother is going on and on and on about the new book by Sarah Palin (there’s something oxymoronic in that combination of words, “book by Sarah Palin,” don’t you think?), I can assure you, with no doubt of ever breaking my promise, that I will read Faulkner before I read Palin. Trust me on this.
There are a lot of things I’m going to read before I get to Faulkner — that new Trotsky book I got for my birthday, that biography of Alexander Hamilton that’s been on my shelf for several years now (I asked for it for my birthday or Christmas after Fritz Hollings recommended it), the Bible from cover to cover, those last few books of the Aubrey-Maturin series that I’ve been saving, and definitely The Grapes of Wrath, which my wife can’t believe I haven’t read yet, to name but a few.
But there is no way that a book by Sarah Palin will ever make that list. For one thing, I never read those books that “everybody’s talking about,” especially books by or about current political figures. The only reason I read those autobiographies by Obama and McCain last year was as pegs for those two really long columns (“Barack Like Me” and “Faith of Our Fathers“) I was going to write anyway. In other words, purely for work and not for fun.
But even if I read books like that, I can’t imagine why I’d be interested in one by Sarah Palin. Not so much that I have an aversion as the fact that I completely lack any positive motivation to do so.
Did you see that list of Top Ten Southern novels of all time that Joey Holleman wrote about in the paper Sunday? Were you as outraged as I was to see Huck Finn down at fourth place? Seriously, folks — the only question to be asked about Twain’s masterpiece is whether it’s the greatest novel of any kind ever, much less best “Southern” novel.
Now, right off the bat, you have to figure that any mag that calls itself “Oxford” anything is going to be prejudiced in favor of a certain person, even if it is based in Conway, Arkansas. And sure enough, the list kicks off with a Faulkner work, Absalom, Absalom!
And here’s where we get into my own blind spot: I’ve never read Faulkner. Oh, I’ve tried, back when I was young and felt like I had to in order to be an educated person. But a page or two of Faulkner, and I felt like I needed oxygen. I decided that I must hold my breath until I reach the end of a sentence or something, which can be deadly with Faulkner. Anyway, I never got very far. I’ve got several of his books sitting on a shelf to this day, awaiting me. Personally, I intend to read Finnegan’s Wake first, which means Faulkner will have to wait awhile. Sorry, Bill.
So basically, we have a problem in judging this list — no publication called Oxford American could possibly be unbiased with regard to Faulkner, and I’m not in a position to judge when they’re giving him too much credit and when they’re not. So we’re just going to have to throw all the Faulkner books off the list. Sorry again, Bill, but them’s the rules I just made up.
Since three of the 10 were thus tainted, that leaves us with a Top Five list plus two, and now that we have the Faulkner distraction out of the way, we can see more clearly that the list does, indeed, fall short:
1. “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren, 1946, 80 votes
2. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain, 1885, 58 votes
3. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee, 1960, 57 votes
See? Huck Finn still isn’t first. In fact, it comes in second to All the King’s Men. Now I’m perfectly willing to assert that All the King’s Men is a wonderful work, one of the best ever — for about three pages.
Seriously, you can read the good parts of All the King’s Men in the “LOOK INSIDE!” feature at Amazon.com, and be done well before they cut you off. I’m talking about the stretch that goes from that wonderful ode to Highway 58, and ends with the paragraph that tells you everything you need to know about Sugar-Boy, ending with:
He wouldn’t win any debating contests in high school, but then nobody would ever want to debate with Sugar-Boy. Not anybody who knew him and had seen him do tricks with the .38 Special which rode under his left armpit like a tumor.
Great stuff. (Never mind that it should be “that rode under his left armpit like a tumor,” or that there’s no reason a grown man would participate in a high school debate anyway. It’s still great writing.) After that, it’s kinda downhill with all that decadent Southern nobility and corruption-of-idealism-by-power stuff. Go ahead and stack the first few pages of Huck Finn up against it, why don’t you — and then tell me it doesn’t hold its own. Never mind that the whole tone changes to deep and dark in the middle part, or then shifts back to that broad farce tone when Tom Sawyer gets back into it at the end. The greatest Southern novel — indeed, the greatest American novel — should have unevenness and inconsistencies. I wouldn’t give shucks for any other way, as Tom Sawyer would say.
Beyond that — well, I’d put Mockingbird ahead of Warren, too. As for Walker Percy — while I’ve read The Moviegoer, and enjoyed it near as I can recall, I was never tempted to re-read it, which means it wouldn’t make it onto a top anything list of mine. (I actually have a clearer memory of Lancelot, which I did not like. That whole “Southern Man as severely dysfunctional loser” theme leaves me cold; a few pages of it is a gracious plenty, as my Aunt Jenny would have said. It’s why I didn’t read past the first chapter of Prince of Tides, and regretted having read that much.)
The absence of Gone With The Wind is of course a deliberate snub, based on its not being highbrow enough or cliched or politically incorrect or whatever. Perhaps it was too popular. And no such list would seem complete to me without either God’s Little Acre or Tobacco Road, if not both. What, the Oxford American folks don’t like books with hot parts? Or are we only concerned with the troubles of the upper classes, and don’t have time for working-class dysfunction? Caldwell’s novels were certainly way Southern; you’ve got to admit that.
We can’t blame the editors of the magazine entirely, since the list resulted from a poll of “134 scholars, scribes, and a few mystery guests.” There is something vaguely un-Southern about this. Subjecting things to a vote seems kinda Yankee to me, like a New England town hall meeting or something. A true Southern list should be drafted by one quirky individual who doesn’t give a damn what anybody else thinks. At least it wasn’t true Democracy, since the electors were hand-picked — in a process that helps us understand why the list has more than a whiff of snootiness.
So now that I’m done tearing down this list, I should post one for y’all to tear down. So have at it:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
God’s Little Acre, Erskine Caldwell
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
OK, one last admission — I haven’t actually read Gone With The Wind, either. But I heard about it so much from my eldest daughter when she was growing up that I feel like I have. And I wanted to put it on the list just to cock a snook at those pointy-headed types who ignored it in the OA poll. I thought about putting Pudd’nhead Wilson at No. 5, just to load my list up with Twain the way they did theirs with Faulkner, or even saying “a Faulkner novel of your choice” in that spot, just as a grudging acknowledgment. But I didn’t.
One of the really irritating things about Twitter is that it is a tease. Time after time, I follow links to things that I hope will be interesting and informative, only to find that they don’t really tell me much more than the original Tweet.
Derwood, Md.: Why do you keep Dan Schorr around? His analysis is reliably faulty, liberally-biased, and mean-spirited (yeah, I guess I’d feel the same way after what Nixon did to me). But still — he really knocks down any credibility you have of being ‘unbiased’, especially since he is a part of the news wing, not entertainment.
Vivian Schiller:
Dan Schor is a liberal commentator. I will not deny that is true. So what do we do about that? We balance his views with those of conservative guest commentators who frequently appear on our airwaves. Granted, they are not staff and you may think that makes a difference. But their voices are heard on our air, and I’m comfortable with that. We’re not planning to make 93- year old Dan Schor a freelancer at this point.
Not very satisfying. So I’ll add two cents worth of my own…
Excuse me for being disrespectful to the elderly, but I cannot abide listening to Daniel Schorr, even for a few seconds. And it’s not because he’s “liberal.” It’s because he’s so unpleasantly arrogant. It drips from every word he says.
Yeah, I get it, Dan: You were on Nixon’s enemies list. You were one of Murrow’s boys. You’ve been around, and had a storied career. Got it. It doesn’t make you God Almighty, and yet that’s what he sounds like he thinks he is with every pronouncement. And it’s not so much any particular thing he says; it’s the way he says it.
Bill Moyers is liberal, but he can be pleasant. David Broder has been around forever, but he acts like a normal, humble human being. Daniel Schorr is just obnoxious to listen to. It occurs to me, when I hear him, that any journalist about to express an opinion (or, allegedly, report) on radio or television would do well to tell himself, just before going on, “Don’t sound like Daniel Schorr.”
And yes, I admit this is probably an irrational prejudice on my part. Something about the frequency of his voice or something sets me off. He comes on the air, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard; I have to change the station away from NPR. Am I alone in this?
Hey, you think state employees in Columbia are eager to get away from work on a Friday afternoon? Try getting onto the Beltway around D.C. just before 4 p.m. on a Friday.
When we entered from I-95 coming up from S.C. it was fine, but as we approached the Potomac heading toward our destination in Maryland, it locked up. All six lanes. And we didn’t even get in the worst part. Half an hour later, and I think we would still have been there this morning.
Maybe my libertarian friends have a point. Maybe the federal gummint is too big. Just a tad, mind you…
Stan Dubinsky shared this item about the first message to travel over the ARPANET, which would become the Internet — 40 years ago yesterday.
It was two letters: “lo.” It was supposed to “login,” but the system crashed after two letters. Oh, what a familiar feeling.
Do y’all realize that two weeks after this massive foul-up with Outlook, I still can’t send e-mail through that application? In fact, I can’t even call up my calendar or contacts on my laptop without being driven nuts by a dialogue box that pops up every few seconds asking me to log in to the server again.
This is very bad, because I depend on Outlook — particularly the interactivity between the e-mail and my contacts — to help me keep in contact with prospective employers and other nice people. I can send via Webmail, but by comparison that’s like trying to type from across the room with a 10-foot pole.
My usual technical adviser tried to help me but finally threw up his hands. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook several times. No dice; the bug is still there. And has been, ever since that ill-fated mass mailing I attempted.
So while we’ve come a long way in 40 years (and thank you, Al Gore, for inventing it), in some ways it feels like we’re right back where we sta….
At Rotary yesterday, at the beginning of the Q-and-A session with our speaker, I got a look from blog regular KBFenner (on this blog, we’ve definitely got anything that happens at the Columbia Rotary covered) that seemed to say “Are you going to ask a question, or what?”
But I don’t ask questions in those settings. One reason is habit. As a longtime newspaperman, I always felt like I could ask this or any other source any question I might have at some other time. I felt like Q-and-A periods should be left to the laypeople who didn’t have such opportunities.
Maybe I should change that habit now that I no longer have such opportunities — or no longer have them without trying, anyway. But I still feel like if I really WANT to ask a newsmaker a question, I can get it answered without taking up precious Rotary time.
There’s another reason I don’t ask questions: I tend to ask quirky questions that in such a setting might not be taken the right way. In an hour-long conversation, you can give a quirky question context (although I certainly embarrassed Cindi a few times, I’m sure), but when you raise your hand in a big group and stand to ask it, there’s no way to make it come out right.
For instance… Monday, our speaker was Brig. Gen. Bradley W. May, commanding officer of Fort Jackson. He was, as all such officers have been in my experience, a really impressive guy. Good command presence, cool, calm and collected even in the adverse circumstances of being subjected to civilians’ questions. The kind of guy whom you meet and think, “Why can’t this guy be our congressman?” Or something like that. (And the answer is, because guys like this don’t run.) Not everyone who is or has been an officer in the U.S. military is like this (ex-Marine Rob Miller, for instance, lacks that presence, as does reservist Joe Wilson), but people who rise to this level generally (no pun intended) are.
Anyway, people were asking all sorts of questions, none of which was anything I would have asked. They were either things I felt I already knew the answer to, or things that I wasn’t wondering about. What I WAS wondering about was this: How come soldiers come to Rotary in their BDUs?
Now you see, there’s no way that would have been taken right. It would have been seen as disrespectful. And I would never want to communicate disrespect, because I deeply respect and admire Gen. May and the soldiers who accompanied him, and am as grateful as all get-out for their service.
But I DO wonder about the fatigues. I mean, fewer and fewer Rotarians are wearing suits, but for the most part, it’s a business dress kind of thing. Now I know Gen. May meant no disrespect to us whatsoever; I’ve grown accustomed to soldiers dressing this way — as though they’re going into combat, or about to police the area for cigarette butts, rather than sitting behind a desk all day or going to business meetings. It’s official; it’s accepted. This is the way they dress.
What I wonder about is WHY they dress that way when they’re not in the field. They didn’t used to. I grew up in the military, so I grew up with dress codes. I know that within my lifetime, a soldier couldn’t leave the post without being in his Class As. It was all about spit and polish. Can’t let those civilian pukes see you looking sloppy, and so forth.
And while I was never in the military myself (the general on Monday referred to the fact that only 3 out of 10 Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are qualified to serve in the military; I was one of the 7), it touched me. Here’s an anecdote from my youth that I related in a column back in 2001:
One balmy night in Hawaii 30 years ago, I drove up to the sub base gate of Pearl Harbor Navy base.
I was in high school and still an inexperienced driver, and I forgot something: I didn’t click off my headlights so the guard could see the sticker that would assure him this ’58 Oldsmobile was cleared to enter. Not realizing this, I failed to understand the guard’s gesture that I douse the lights, at which point he proceeded to get my attention as only a Marine sergeant could do.
Fully understanding his command to halt, I did so and started rolling down the window. He leaned in to demand some ID, but then stopped, and gave me a stare that made me feel like a boot who had called his rifle a “gun.” In a voice like Doomsday, he demanded to know, “Are you out of uniform, sailor?”
In an instant, all of the following ran through my mind:
I was wearing a Navy-issue denim work shirt, the kind sailors wore to swab decks (not what they wore on liberty). It was in my closet, and I had put it on without thinking.
I had recently gotten my hair cut — not to Marine standards, but short enough to look to Marine eyes like a particularly sloppy sailor.
Over the shirt, I was wearing a maroon jacket that was, to say the least, decidedly non-regulation.
I had no right to wear that shirt. The sergeant had instantaneously enlightened me on this point. Though I had grown up in the Navy, I was still a member of that lowest of all categories of humanity — a civilian.
Could they throw you in the brig for just looking like a sailor out of uniform? The sergeant sure looked like he had that authority — and the inclination.
Despite appearances, there was nothing routine about entering a U.S. Navy installation. This facility was guarded by the U.S. Marine Corps, and I had to be prepared at all times to give an account of myself.
“But … but … I’m a dependent, Sarge,” I finally managed to explain as I dug my ID out of my wallet. After examining the card carefully, the gyrene waved me in, still eyeing me like the worm that I was.
A dependent. Some excuse. I drove away wishing I had been a sailor out of uniform. He would have put me on report, but I would have been less embarrassed…
Sometime between 1971 and the present — maybe about the same time that Army officers started addressing sergeants as “sar’unt” (which, as near as I can tell, they picked up from Dale Dye), all that went away. You could still see Marines dressed like that sentry — impossibly crisp shortsleeved khaki shirt with the collar open to reveal a T-shirt, dress blues pants, etc. — on recruiting duty. But soldiers, right up to commanding generals, dressed like they were on the front.
I’m not sure when it changed. The 80s, or earlier.
The funny thing is, they still HAVE the Class As. In fact, a soldier who spoke to Rotary two years ago wore his. I don’t know why the regulations would require him to wear his while speaking to Rotary, but not other soldiers under similar circumstances (I’m assuming there’s a regulation involved, of course). Not only that, but they have those blue dress uniforms that look like they’re in the Union Army circa 1863, which are pretty sharp.
But enough about the Army. Let’s talk about something I theoretically understand — appropriate civilian attire. Recently, I’ve had it impressed upon me that I am among the few, the proud, who still wear a coat and tie every day. I do this even though I’m unemployed. In fact, I do it particularly because I’m unemployed. People with secure (they think) jobs can afford to look like slobs; I have to look like I’m constantly being interviewed. That’s the way I think of it, anyway.
Friday, I had lunch with Jim Foster (of the state Department of Ed, formerly of The State) at Longhorn Steakhouse (that’s what I was doing while some of y’all were freaking out over the multiple e-mails). As we sat down, he said, “Why are you dressed like that?” I brushed off the question, because there was nothing remarkable about the way I was dressed: starched shirt, bow tie, jacket. But he persisted: No really, why are you dressed like that?
Well, I said… I always dress like this. Doesn’t everybody? Well, obviously HE didn’t. Neither did anyone at the surrounding tables. Finally, when someone walked in wearing a suit, I almost pointed him out.
Then yesterday, I dropped in on Bob McAlister over at the offices of his consulting business. You know, the former chief of staff to the late Gov. Carroll Campbell. A guy with pictures of himself with George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Jack Kemp and other GOP luminaries all over the office. He was wearing a rumpled blue sport shirt (untucked, I believe) that looked like he’d gotten if from L.L. Bean about 15 years ago. He had taken off his shoes — no, excuse me, his bedroom slippers, which had also seen better days.
He said he didn’t wear a tie except under the most exceptional circumstances. It was easier, and he saved a lot on dry cleaning. He said when he was about to go to a business meeting in D.C. recently, he was told to ditch the coat and tie so he wouldn’t stand out. With some trepidation he did, only to be relieved that he had. We discussed it for awhile, and agreed that in other parts of the country, the phenomenon is more advanced than here. We’re slower to change. I mentioned to him how offended I’d get when Knight Ridder executives would come visit the paper in the years after the corporate move to California — here would be these guys who make a million dollars a year meeting with us, and we’d all be in coats and ties (the men, anyway; the women wearing some distaff equivalent), and they’d be wearing unbuttoned shirts with no ties. Yeah, right, like you guys are all Bill Gates or something just because your office is close to Silicon Valley. I hated it.
At the advertising agency where I’m hanging out (and where I’m typing this), no one but me wears a tie most days. Not exactly Mad Men.
At the Capital City Club, the rules were relaxed over the summer to allow gentlemen to have lunch in the main dining room without jackets. Ties haven’t been required for some time. These must be the end days. Next thing you know, we’ll have dogs and cats living together…
So today, I succumbed to the pressure. For the first time this season I donned my black camel-hair jacket, with white dress shirt and hounds-tooth slacks — but didn’t put on a tie. I felt like I was going skinny-dipping in public or something, but hey, if this is the style.
Then, as soon as I got downtown, I stepped onto an elevator, three other guys got on with me — and they were all dressed in suits and ties. They would have put Don Draper to shame. And I looked at my reflection in the mirrored door, and I looked like I’d just gotten out of bed or something. I wanted to ask myself, “Mister, are you out of uniform?…”
That’s it. Soon as I get home, I’m putting on a tie. I might sleep in it.
I tried to send out an e-mail to several dozen people — former blog readers, people I’d like to BECOME blog readers — telling them about the new comments policy and urging them to give it a try.
And it happened again — some people have received the message 12, 15, even more times. This is from Kathleen Parker:
ad, thanks for including me. I’ve received this email about 20 times now. 🙁
I think she’s kinda ticked at me. Do you think she’s ticked? I think she’s ticked. I’m going by the frowny-face thing at the end… Which I’ve got to say, I REALLY regret. If she ever mentions me in her column again (something which seems increasingly doubtful right now), I don’t even want to think what she might say…
The GOOD news is, I think I’ve stopped it from sending… but now I can’t send e-mail at all, except via Blackberry. And it’s pretty tedious to send that many apologies via e-mail. I’m doing it anyway, but I know there are people out there who won’t even SEE the redundant messages until hours from now, and just in case they come to the blog to see what sort of idiot would do something like that, here’s an apology for them.
This is just so maddening…
The upside is that the guys I’ve banned from the blog under the new policy have gotta be loving my discomfiture over this. So I don’t have to feel bad for them, anyway.
Do you pick up pennies? I do, and this morning I struck a bonanza (not the one with Hoss, though).
I was plugging the meter with quarters when I dropped one. As I bent to pick it up, I remember having read or heard someone saying that, with inflation, it’s not worth the trouble. Well, it is to me. For that matter, I still pick up pennies. I like to say to myself, as I straighten back up, “And all the day you’ll have good luck.” It’s just, I don’t know, a little gesture of faith in life, an optimistic way to look at things. Bright penny, bright outlook. It pleases me.
Well, today, not 10 seconds after I picked up my own quarter, over across the street I came upon another quarter on the sidewalk — a 2007 with Montana on the back (why does “Montana on the back” ring a bell? Oh, yeah — Montana Wildhack). So I picked it up and put it in my left pants pocket, where it couldn’t get mixed up with the ordinary coins for spending.
Twenty-five days good luck. This could not have come at a better time for me. I resolve to make the most of them.
It occurred to me that I’d have even better luck it I gave it away, but no panhandlers came up to me. When one does, I’ll give it to him or her. Of course, I’ll have to hope it’s not one of those picky panhandlers who turns his nose up at a dollar. Maybe if I explain that it’s a lucky quarter… ah, but I can see the look of withering contempt now…
No, no… it’s a positive vision of the future that we’re embracing here. Bright quarter. Bright immediate future. This is great…
Now that I’ve actually tried to implement the new comments policy for nearly a full day, I’m realizing something more fully than I did before. Yesterday, I wrote of my dilemma:
I see, for instance, that WordPress provides the option of “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” which sounds nice, but what good is it really? I prefer to judge a comment by its own merits, not by who posted it. Lee, for instance (and Lee really resents being picked on, and he’ll probably see this as being picked on, but let’s face it; his name is the one my readers most frequently bring up as an irritant), sometimes posts perfectly fine comments that add to the conversation. I’m not saying it happens every day, but it happens. So, going by my own preferred standards, I would approve that one good comment — and under the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” he would then have carte blanche to return to his habitual ways.
See, at that point I was undecided: Under this new approach, should I reward Lee, or “Mike Toreno” or “BillC,” by posting their comments when they behave themselves? Or should I just ban them for their past sins?
When I first posted the new rules, I was leaning toward the former. But I find I’m implementing the latter.
That’s because my goal is to make this a more comfortable place for people who are not shouters or trolls or flamers or whatever to air their thoughts without being dismissed or insulted, which has kept a LOT of good people away. The three I mention above — Lee and “Toreno” and “BillC” — sometimes seem like the only readers of my blog, because of the way they dominate conversations. Especially Lee, who posts early (generally first) and often (alarmingly often). After awhile, they have more impact on the general tone and feel of the blog than I do. Which will sort of make a guy wonder why he’s bothering.
So — even though they may be trying to post some comments that provoke thought without insulting anyone, so as not to be barred, I’m reluctant to approve anything by those three. And so I haven’t. If I let them back in now, I know that gradually they’ll push a little more, and a little more, and my attention will wander, and pretty soon we’re back where we were. I’ve been here before with repeat offenders, and I know the trajectory that these things follow.
If one is of a legalistic mind, this will seem unfair. After all, the judge and jury are only supposed to consider whether the accused committed THIS crime, rather than convict him on the basis of his past offense (right? you lawyers, feel free to jump in at this point).
But folks, I am not obliged to approve anybody’s comment, ever. I don’t even have to allow comments. I do it because I want to. And if somebody has created an ugly disturbance in my living room too many times, I’m not going to invite that person any more, lest my more desirable guests stop coming (and who would blame them).
So I haven’t approved anything by the three I mentioned above, even though they have tried several times. Not for the foreseeable future. They will no doubt find this frustrating. Well, they can go start their own blogs, and dedicate them to trashing this one, if they are so inclined. And if they can get anybody to read them, then more power to them. I’m not going to let them feed off of, and undermine, my ability to draw an audience any longer. They are personae non grata.
(And yes, I know that they can always come back under a new pseudonym — actually, I suspect one of the three of having done so quite a few times before — but that’s why I’m also monitoring the content of comments, rather than simply barring those names.)
Now, for the rest of you, you’re being judged by each comment. Yeah, some others among you aside from the banned three have contributed to ugliness on this blog. So, many of you will accuse, have I. But you’ve also contributed positively, and by approving some of your comments and not others, I hope to get all of us into the habit of listening to our better angels, and reflecting that in our writing.
If it seems like I’m making up the rules as I go along, then you’re very astute. But I’m doing the best I can. If you don’t like it, again: Go to another blog, or start your own. But if you want to be part of building a better public forum, welcome.
Seems to me we need a break from our exhausting (to me, anyway) discussion of civility, one in which I find myself engaged deeply in discussion with some of the blog’s worst offenders (Lee, “Mike Toreno”) because I feel like I have to consider them thoroughly, give them every chance, before tossing them out, if that’s what I’m to do to keep order. Oh, the fundamental fecklessness of liberal democracy! Perhaps I should just conjure a virtual Gitmo for them, and to hell with due process! One of my friends, a liberal Democrat (in the big D sense) through and through, says I’m guilty of WASPish diffidence, and perhaps I am…
We need some escapism. Let’s talk time travel.
Yes, I know Stephen Hawking says there’s no such thing (his proof: that there are no time tourists from the future — that we know of, I would add), and I figure he’s probably right. That doesn’t keep me from being a sucker for it as a plot device — “Back to the Future,” the H.G. Wells original, variations on the H.G. Wells original (such as the enjoyable thriller/romance “Time After Time,” which starred Malcolm McDowell as H.G. himself), and on and on. Not that it’s always satisfying: “The Final Countdown,” aside from having one of the least relevant titles ever, is probably the most disappointing movie I’ve ever seen. For two hours you build up to the 80s-era USS Nimitz getting ready to go up against the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then the battle is prevented by a plot evasion as cheesy as, “… and then he woke up.” All because the producers lacked the budget to stage the battle, I suppose. The earlier scenes, such as when the F-14s splash the two Zeroes and the confrontation between the Japanese pilot and the historian, are pretty decent though…
I’m always a little embarrassed to admit this, but one of my favorite novels to reread when I want to relax my mind is Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. Why embarrassing? Well, when you explain the plot — “It imagines what would have happened if the Confederacy had had AK-47s” — you sound like an idiot. But it really is GOOD.
Let me hasten to add that I like the more reputable A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court much better, and have ever since my first reading as a kid. But the Turtledove book is still enjoyable.
In real life, we all engage in a bit of time travel to the best of our means. We all think back to moments in our past when we might have done something differently. This ranges from bitter recrimination (“What I should have told him was…”) to tantalizing wistfulness. I suspect most guys have experienced in their heads some version of Steppenwolf’s “All Girls Are Yours” fantasy.
You run into trouble with such imaginings when you try to make them believable. First, there’s the device — time machine? bump on the head? For that matter, if it’s a machine, how does it work? It’s generally best not to explain it in too much detail. Michael Crichton made that mistake in Timeline. His characters explain that what they have discovered is actually travel between universes in the multiverse, which somehow magically ACTS like time travel in that if you leave a note for yourself in one universe, you can read it 600 years later (or what SEEMS later) in the other. I could explain further, but it gets more ridiculous the more it tries to be serious. Doc Brown’s “flux capacitor” is much more believable, and more fun.
Then, what are the rules — is history mutable, or not? And if not, why not? And let’s not even get into the grandfather paradox. And if you go back to a point within your own life, can you see your younger self as a separate individual (in which case you might have a lot of explaining to do to yourself) or are you back inside that earlier version of yourself, only with what you now know in your mind, like the Steppenwolf back with all his past loves?:
At the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in early Spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly…
Anyway, I’m thinking of all this this week because I rented the first two episodes of “Life on Mars” from Netflix. Premise: Cop in Manchester, England, in 2006 gets hit by a car, wakes up as a cop in 1973.
Promising. You’ll recognize it as the “Connecticut Yankee” device — physical trauma, followed by the time dislocation, which the protagonist can’t explain and at least at first doesn’t believe in, but has to come to terms with. In this case, the hero keeps hearing voices and other sounds that persuade him that he’s in a coma in 2006, but then he is beguiled by the richness of irrelevant detail in his 1973 existence. He keeps thinking, Why would I have imagined that?
I’ve enjoyed it so far, but ultimately it falls down on an important measure for time-travel fiction — the evocation of the visited era. The writers of the show seem unable to go beyond bell-bottoms and vintage cars. Their notion of the difference between being a cop in 2006 and 1973 is that back then the office was a lot grungier, and the cops liked to slap subjects around and disregard proper procedure. Oh, and it took longer to get stuff back from the lab.
Which, I’m sorry, is pretty inadequate… I was in college in 1973, and people were just as insistent upon rules and standards then as now (despite their really, REALLY bad taste). And ultimately, watching this show, I don’t really FEEL like I’m back in that era. And I realized why when I watched a bit of the “making of” video — the writers and others who made this flick were too young to remember that date, which still seems pretty recent to me. The protagonist would have been 4 years old in 73, and the writers and producers seem to be his contemporaries.
Not only that, but they get their idea of what the 70s were like from watching cop shows of the period. In other words, since Starsky and Hutch bent the rules, that’s what real-life policing was like. Sheesh.
The soundtrack’s pretty good, though. The sequence in which the cop is hit by the car and goes back happens to the strains of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” (hence the title):
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
… first on an iPod, then on an 8-track.
I’m going to watch the next disc; I’ve got it ordered. To see if he wakes up or whatever. But I’ve seen time travel done better…
inappropriate (for a newspaper editor) about how I voted.
