If you’re here because of the correction on today’s editorial page, this is your shortcut.
For a rumination upon what happened with the error in my Sunday column, click right here.
For audio of John McCain explaining to me his actual position, instead of what I thought I heard him say, click right here.
Here’s a confessional memo I just sent to my associate editors here at the paper. While I await their responses (which could take a while, since one of them is out of the office), I seek your advice as well:
Folks, I need
your advice as to whether I need to do a correction and, if so, what in the
world it would say. Here’s what John McCain said last week during the debate, in
the context of general remarks on immigration, following an accusation from Tom
Tancredo that he (McCain) had favored "amnesty." (Note that he was not
responding to anyone else having said anything about the Fort Dix plot; he just
brought it up.):
My friend, the people that
came, that almost attacked us at Fort Dix — thank God they did not — these
people didn’t come here across our borders; they came with visas that were
expired. So, we’ve got to enforce our border, that’s our first and foremost
priority, but we also have to have a comprehensive solution and it has to be
bipartisan, and I believe we’re close to reaching that, and that’s what the
American people expect us to do. The status quo is unacceptable.
THIS is what I wrote in
my column Sunday:Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign
put out a statement purporting to address the proposal that was, to say the
least, oblique: “The recent Fort Dix plot is a stark reminder that the threat of
terrorism has made immigration an important matter of national security. We need
to know who is coming in and who is going out of this country if we are going to
deal with those who are here illegally.”As Sen. McCain had said during the debate, the
Fort Dix plotters didn’t sneak into the country illegally. The issues are
completely unrelated.Essentially, I was
expressing my objection to Giuliani linking Fort Dix and immigration, and I just
dragged in a paraphrase from McCain in which I had thought that he was agreeing
with me. Of course, I still think what I think regardless of what McCain said.
But I was wrong that none of the plotters had entered illegally, and I later
changed the blog version of the column to say, "the Fort Dix plotters didn’t all sneak into
the country illegally."That’s one thing that
would warrant a correction, if y’all think it’s worth it this late. But then, at
the start of the interview this morning, McCain said:First of all and foremost it
is a national security issue. Since 9/11 the issue has gone from one of either
social or economic or humanitarian to one of national security. The six people
that were apprehended that were planning on attacking Fort Dix were in this
country illegally; three of them had crossed our border illegally, and the other
three had overstayed valid visas, which also describes the dimension of the
problem as well. Now we can’t have 12 million people in the United States of
America who we don’t know who they are or where they are and what they’re doing.
So it has become first and foremost a national security issue, ,and of course,
border security and enforcing our border should be and is in this legislation a
first priority.Thinking uh-oh, I
screwed up, I said this when I had a chance to ask a
question:I’m
a little embarrassed because I think I misheard you last week in the debate; I
had thought that you were making the point that what happened at Fort Dix was a
separate issue from this particular immigration issue, but what you’re saying is
the opposite, is that you believe that they’re very closely
connected…And he
responded thusly:As I mentioned, three of the people who wanted to
attack Fort Dix came across our Southern border. Every nation has the
requirement to secure its borders; if it doesn’t, it’s not carrying out its
obligations to its citizens.… I don’t know what impression I gave you, but if we
have people who are able to cross our borders and come into our country without
us taking every step to prevent them from doing that and they do it in an
illegal fashion, then we’re not fulfilling our
obligation.After all
this, I still think it’s a stretch to conclude that the Fort Dix plot teaches us
that the 12 million people in our country illegally, mostly Mexicans, are a
threat. And that’s what I meant. But I think McCain is right when he points out
(as he did a moment later in the interview, but I’ll spare you THAT quote) that
while most of the illegals are no threat, how will we separate out any who ARE a
threat — and it only takes a few — and protect our country from them, if all
these folks are invisible and underground?So — what do
you think I should do, aside from posting all this on my blog, which I already
plan to do? And if I do a correction, how do I explain what I did wrong in less
than column length?Folks, I
can’t remember when I’ve screwed one short paragraph in a column this
thoroughly. I’m sorry, and embarrassed.—
BradBrad Warthen
VP/Editorial Page Editor
The State
Actually, I can’t remember when I’ve screwed anything up that thoroughly — particularly, I don’t remember ever having mischaracterized the thrust of what someone was saying to that extent. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to get that right, whatever my flaws. So yeah, ditch that one little paragraph and the column is fine; I stand behind what I said. But that doesn’t make me feel better about it.
I got an e-mail today from Kevin Bishop of Sen. Graham’s office, saying:
Lindsey Graham was about 15 minutes late for the debate…he didn’t miss the whole thing….
I wrote back:
Let me make sure I understand this….
I didn’t see him at the party at The Club House afterwards, and I asked Bob McAlister about that yesterday, after Bob mentioned having been up late talking to the senator. He said the reason I hadn’t seen him was that he was kept late in Washington. I took that to mean he got back AFTER McCain was looking out in the crowd for him.
So when DID he get to Columbia, and where was he when McCain was talking to supporters at the Club House?
I want to get this precisely right, and right now I’m confused.
HE wrote back:
LG was a few minutes late returning to Columbia from Washington for the debate. He was at immigration meetings.
He made it to the Koger Center about 5 minutes after the debate started but was not seated until about 9:35 during the first break.
Graham remained in the debate hall/spin room speaking to reporters after the event. He did TV and radio interviews.
He did not make it to the McCain post-debate party until McCain had departed.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
So there you have it.
Neither Mike Fitts nor I have cable TV — at least, not the kind that gives you those 24-hour news channels — so both of us were looking for a place to watch the GOP candidates’ debate tonight. We started calling around to the various campaigns with the intention of each of us going to one of the candidates’ supporters’ TV-watching parties.
I knew of three — McCain, Giuliani and Huckabee. I suspected my contact info on the S.C. staffs for those campaigns needed updating, so I checked around for fresh numbers on Adam Temple with McCain, and Elliott Bundy with Giuliani.
I had a cell number for the last guy to contact me with regard to Huckabee, but somebody gave me a new one. I tried it, and got voicemail. I asked whether this was the right number, sought a current e-mail address, and said I wanted to make sure he was still with Huckabee. Then, on a whim, I tried the old number.
He answered right away. I apparently caught him in the middle of some kind of transaction — it sounded like a checkout, or drivethru, or something. So he was trying to deal with somebody else while I first asked the stupid question, "Is this a good number to call?," immediately thinking "Doh!"
Then I asked the really stupid question, the prizewinner: Are you still with Huckabee?
"NO," he said, completely turning his attention to me. "I’m the executive director of the Republican Party!"
Wow, I said, I knew that. I knew that. I was so sorry…
"MAN!" said Hogan Gidley. I could see him shaking his head through the phone connection.
Well, you see, I was running down a list, and not really stopping to think WHOM I was talking to…
"Again, MAN!" He had obviously never heard anything so stupid, so utterly clueless in his life. Neither had I, so what was I going to say?
Here’s the worst bit: I left him a message saying the same thing on that other line. He’ll be sharing that with Katon Dawson and other folk who think I’m a big fat idiot anyway. So here’s their confirmation.
If it makes him feel any better, I can’t think — without looking it up — who his counterpart over with the Democrats is right now. I think I know, but it’s not coming to mind. I know their new chair is Carol Khare. Or Fowler, now. (Although on the Web site it’s still Joe Erwin.) But the executive director — no.
I’ll go look now, and say, "Oh, yeah," and feel all stupid again.
(Footnote: That’s Hogan "Chuckles" Gidley in the photo above right. It’s a slightly-enhanced detail from the below photo from our primary interview with Karen Floyd. Almost every time I talked to Mrs. Floyd last year, Hogan was lurking in the background, with an expression almost exactly like that one.)
This happened a few minutes ago.
I’m rushing around trying to do 10 things and running late on all of them when Nature Calls, and I run into the Men’s room and say "Hi" to the two cleaning ladies in there, step around their cleaning cart on my way to the urinal, start to reach for my zipper a couple of steps out so as to avoid delay, and it hits me:
"Cleaning ladies?"
I pull hand away from zipper just in time, turn on my heel and start babbling apologies on my way back to the door, "Oh, I am so sorry I wasn’t thinking I’m just running around doing so many things that I don’t know what I’m doing and …"
But I’ve hardly taken a step back when I see they’ve both thrown their hands up, and they’re saying, "Oh go ahead take your time we were just leaving we’re going out…" And they fly out the door ahead of me, leaving their cart behind.
Wow. That was really embarrassing. I’ve never been that absent-minded before. It was a new depth.
I’m going to have to slow down, and start considering what I’m doing. And starting next week, I will.
Gasp! Sputter! Snort! Hachh! Ptui!
Ah! Air! I’ve broken the surface! I’m back in the world!
Three days without broadband service — partly because I’m on vacation and not trying very hard, partly because whenever I did try, I had trouble connecting. First I tried a coffee shop where I’d never been before, and no dice — the laptop wouldn’t pick up a signal. Finally, I came back to this place where I have blogged before, and blogged well — but still no signal. So I wimped out and called the gurus back at the office, and while they were busy talking me through various solutions, I finally noticed the button with the little broadcasting tower icon, and switched it back on.
So here I am. Duh.
And I have to say, I am grateful and humbled by the fact that y’all have taken my invitation to dialogue seriously enough to run the comments up to 202. That’s like the second-most ever. Sure, I realize it wanders off the subject here and there, but that’s OK.
Now that’s a pretty intimidating string for any interested party to wade through, so I’m going to see if I can put together a Cliff Notes version, and make it my Sunday column. In the meantime, the conversation continues for the appointed fortnight.
Yours in el blogando verdadero,
Brad
Well, it happened again. I went to give blood at the Red Cross — as promised in a previous post — and they wouldn’t take it.
I walked in, signed the register, and the lady at the desk gave me a cool hat. Then she said they’d been waiting for me, and handed me the binder full of stuff you have to read before you give.
And there, on the first page, I saw that if you’re taking antibiotics, you can’t give.
I said well, I’m taking an antibiotic, but it’s no big deal. I’ve just had this sinus headache for years, and it got worse in recent months, and they took a CT scan a couple of weeks ago, and decided it was a sinus infection. So they told me to take these expensive (my co-pay was $148) pills for a month.
I haven’t had fever; I haven’t been sick. I don’t think I’m contagious. But I couldn’t give anyway.
They let me keep the hat, though. They said it didn’t matter, because "your editorials" caused hundreds of extra people to give blood over the last couple of days. Well, I’m pretty sure that it would have been the news story
that ran the same day, because that was much more prominent. But in any case, the effect seems to have been dramatic. In a period in which 40 people would normally give at the Columbia Red Cross facility on Bull Street, they had had 200.
I hesitated to mention that, because I don’t want people thinking, "Well, then, I don’t have to give then." No, they need people to keep giving at that rate. This rate was just enough that in another day or so, they expected to no longer have to ration certain types. And blood only lasts 40 days or so; they have to keep getting more.
To schedule your appointment, call 1-800-GIVELIFE, or do it online.
Anyway, they said I could give as soon as I quit taking the antibiotic. I will.
Nobody else is likely to notice this, so I’ll just go ahead and tell it on myself.
I realized that in my Sunday column, I was referring to an anecdote I had used once before, so I boiled it down to as brief a reference as possible:
I was once told that someday I would have to decide whether I wanted to be right or effective. There is no doubt which paths these two have chosen.
Only after the page was gone on Friday did I realize I had told this story twice before, once toward the bottom of a column on July 6, 2003 …
One of the many long-suffering bosses I’ve had in my career, thoroughly exasperated with the bullheaded way I tended to play with others, said that if I wanted to be successful, I would have to make up my mind: Did I want to be right, or be effective?
This was at least a decade ago, so I don’t recall exactly how I responded. But I remember being torn between saying either, "Both, of course," or "If I have to choose, I’d rather go down in flames being right."
… and, in an expanded form that actually led the column, I wrote about it again on April 4, 2004:
I ONCE HAD a boss who, in the throes of frustration with me (not an uncommon state among bosses I have known), told me that one of these days, "You’re going to have to make up your mind whether you want to be right, or you want to be effective."
Of course, I wanted to be both. But if absolutely forced to choose, I would dig in and choose the former, and go down in flames if necessary. Hence his frustration.
He was definitely on to something. I’ve had a number of setbacks in my career based on that very propensity. Still, I tend to want politicians to exhibit a similar trait. I keep wanting politics to be about honestly advocating what you believe at all times, and stoically accepting the consequences if your ideas prove to be insufficiently popular to have the effect you desire.
Both references were to make a point about Gov. Mark Sanford, by the way.
You know, the former boss in question — Gil Thelen, who ran The State‘s newsroom back in the long-ago days (more than 12 years ago, now) when I was a part of that department — would probably feel gratified that his point comes to my mind so frequently. Maybe that’s because I still struggle over which one I want more. My answer still tends to be, "both."
Sure, I could just not have mentioned it at all in the first place, but it seemed the
quickest way to introduce the whole organizing dichotomy of the column. And it was in that context that the idea struck me.
And I didn’t think it was worth the wasted money of redoing the page, when I found out I had done it twice. If I had realized what I was doing sooner, I might have introduced the idea another way. I could have said,
I’ve written more than once that Gov. Mark Sanford must choose whether he wants to be right or be effective.
… and so forth. Then I would have felt a little less like a bore. Too late now, though. And here I’ve gone and bored you again with this pointless explaining. Oh, well. You didn’t have to read it.
What barren D?
Sorry. Mike Cakora just distracted me (in commenting on a recent post) by saying the letters in my name could be rearranged to say either "when drab art" or "brawn hatred."
He signed off, "I make a rock."
Har-de-har.
I had never explored those possibilities. I am more than aware, however, of the various ways Microsoft Word wants to spell "Warthen." There’s "War then," which is actually how it’s pronounced. Then we have:
Wart hen
Earthen (which has a reassuring solidity to it)
Wathena
Warden
Writhen
And the ever-popular "Wart hog."
The last may be my favorite, as I’ve always thought the A-10 was a fine aircraft. The Air Force hates it, but it provides fearsome ground support, and they’re almost impossible to shoot down.
The spell-checker on Netscape e-mail adds "Wrath" to the list. That’s pretty cool.
Unimaginatively, Outlook adds "War" and "Wart" (like young Arthur in The Once and Future King).
Typepad, the fanciful and perpetually irritating software I’m using at the moment, comes up with:
Warren
Marthena
Within
Weather
Athena
Athene
Heathen
Wrathing
Then
Warn
Waylen
Wharton (very popular with humans who misspell it)
Worth
Withe
Withing
Waken
Whether
Worthier
Farthing
Northern
Worthies
Warner
Worthy
Wither
Wooten
Worden
Whiten
Withed
Withes
Worsen
Whither
"Northern!" Prepare to defend yourself, suh!
And why Waylen, but not Waylon?
And what’s a Wathena?
Meanwhile, for "Cakora" we have:
Capra (love your movies, man!)
Cara
Cora
Kora ("Kora Kora Kora")
Caria
Clara
Camera
Caro
Kara
Okra (my favorite vegetable)
Kira
Korea
Cake
Cobra (That’s bad, Mike. As in "good." Like "phat.")
Cairo
Accra
CARE
Care
Cari
Carr
Cori
Cork (faith and begorra)
Cory
Kore
Kori
Kory
Coca (so that‘s where he gets the energy to write like that)
Core
Corr
Cookery
And now, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll go over and take a look at the view from our…
Okra Ike Cam.
OK, I should probably admit to you where I was going when I drove by the girl who was talking on the phone while jogging. I mean, if I don’t face up to my problem, how am I ever going to get better?
I was on my way to … well, to this place again. What’s so bad, or noteworthy about that? Well, this was the first time ever that I left work and drove halfway across town and back for no other purpose than to fetch myself a cup of coffee. In the past, it’s always been, "Hey, I think I’ll go book-browsing," or, "I have an errand to run in Five Points," or, "I need to go to a hotspot to do some blogging" — and pretty much always on a weekend.
(Oh, and for those of you keeping score on my time management: Except for that 20 minutes, which substituted for a lunch hour, I was very productive the rest of the day. Especially after that last coffee. So judge not, lest ye also become a blogger.)
This time, I didn’t even pretend there was an excuse. I had been thinking about my next cup of coffee ever since I had my last one, at breakfast (unless you count that half a cup I got at mid-morning, after begging the guy in the downstairs canteen to open back up just for me to get a refill, and then draining what little was left in the insulated carafe thingie). So first chance I got between meetings and such, I put on my coat, muttered something about "an errand or two to run," and drove straight there.
Here I am acting all bemused at the idiosyncracies of youth (my last post) one minute, then the next I’m standing in a long line of them waiting for a caffeine fix. I listen to them rattle off elaborate, absurdly complex orders that sound like litanies chanted in a foreign tongue — with repetitive responses intoned by the help behind the counter — and edge forward, waiting for when I can order my "plain coffee." The lad in front of me actually asks, "What do you have?" The reply is, "Depends on whether you want hot or cold." Everyone — except me — is hugely entertained when he asks for something in-between, and is informed that’s one thing they don’t have.
By the time he removes his inconvenient self and I belly up, I’ve scrapped plans for "just a small one," and order the "grande." The counterman overfills it — no objections from me there — and I ruin a perfectly good dress shirt and pair of gray pants trying to drive back. Ah, but it’s worth it. It tastes lovely. I even find myself tearing away the insulating wrap to savor the inanity of "The Way I See It No. 49." I am utterly lacking in discrimination at this point.
This is madness. I managed to quit Vicodin when I had taken it day and night for weeks after I broke my ribs kickboxing several years back. (And believe me, I felt its pull. No wonder it’s the favorite addiction of TV writers, from "House" to "The Book of Daniel.") So what’s with this? Why does this dark brew charm me to greater foolishness each day?
Well, I’m going to summon what shreds of self-respect I have left. Tomorrow, one coffee with breakfast. A big one. But that’s it. Or maybe another small one, if they’re just going to dump it out anyway. But no more mad, mid-day quests.
Today I hit rock-bottom. There’s only one way to go now.
OK, now that I’ve filed a post criticizing the governor’s rhetorical style (but not his substance, please note, Lee‘s non sequitur about my reviewing his speech in advance notwithstanding), let’s detail some of my own gaffes in the course of this day preceding the State of the State. (I’d go ahead and tell you something of the substance of the speech, but it’s embargoed.)
How many ways can one man screw up in one day? Let us count them. Or some of them — I’ll let myself off the hook on a few things:
— I was late for the annual pre-speech briefing for editorial page editors. Not my fault, but then you have enough such incidents that "aren’t your fault" and you develop a certain kind of reputation anyway. I have one of those reputations. In fact, my boss, the publisher, has mandated that I have a weekly session with our VP for human resources, one of the most organized people I have ever met, in an effort to straighten myself out. At our last meeting, my coach said my assignment for the next meeting would be to think about what I want to get out of these meetings. This caused me to make a note to myself not to spend the next meeting free-associating.
— Anyway, I comforted myself with the thoughts that the luncheon was set for 11:30, and no one would actually start eating that early, and in the past these things have featured 20 or so minutes of standing about with drinks (generally soft in recent years, despite the guest list) before getting down to business. Also, I recalled that at the first such meeting after his election, lunch had been buffet-style, which gave me a little more wiggle-room. I was wrong, as you’ll see in a moment.
— An aside: I should count myself lucky that the guard outside let me pull my disreputable ’89 Ranger through the gates at all. I’ve come to appreciate the mere fact of actually getting into the governor’s mansion ever since one evening in 2002, just before the election. I was at the time a member of the Columbia Urban League board. It was the night of the CUL’s biggest event of the year, and as a minor part of the festivities I was to be honored with the organization’s John H. Whiteman Award for "outstanding leadership" as a board member (sort of a nice going-away present, really, since I was about to cycle off the board). Gov. Hodges had agreed to hold a reception at his place before the banquet out at Seawell’s. The guards looked at my invitation, heard my name, and said I wasn’t on the list, so I couldn’t come in. I remonstrated, and they made a phone call, and told me I definitely was not to be let in, and that I could take it up with the governor’s office in the morning, if I were so inclined. Worse, they wouldn’t let Warren Bolton in, either, apparently because he was with me. Well, I was cool and mature about it. I decided we should stand just outside the gate, and give a straight answer to any arriving or departing guests who asked us why we were standing there. They all shook their heads in apparent disbelief. It didn’t stop them from going in, though, as I recall.
— Anyway, after I pulled into the grounds, another guy in a Smokey the Bear hat waved me into a space. I hopped out and headed in. He said, "Your license plate is expired." I said, "What?… Oh… yeah… I think that sticker’s at the house somewhere." He told me he didn’t mean anything bad by telling me: "I’m just trying to save you fifty bucks." OK, uh, thanks, I said as I kept going toward the front door, but then I slowed down as it occurred to me that it was an ethical violation on my part to accept such a discretionary reprieve when I was a guest of the governor. I was about to turn around when I remembered: These governor’s Protective Detail guys dress like Highway Patrolmen, but they’re not actually troopers, and don’t have powers to enforce highway laws anyway. That is, I don’t think they do. I went in. I was late enough.
— And even though I couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes late, I’m sure, they were
already well into the salad course — everyone seated at the formal
dining table — and in mid-conversation regarding the governor’s
agenda. The only good thing was that I slipped in quietly enough that
the governor didn’t notice me until I had asked my first question, well
into the main course.
— Of course, my question turned into one of those mini-debates with the governor, which went on an embarrassingly long time before I could make myself stop arguing with his answers. Meanwhile, everyone else sat quietly waiting to ask their questions, and probably thinking about what an ass I was making of myself at their expense. I don’t know why I do that, but I do it everywhere I go. I can’t just make like a reporter, write down the answer, and shut up. But I should. Sometimes I should.
— I almost left the digital recorder I had turned on and slid down the table, but the governor called out, "Somebody leave a recorder out here?" Mine. Thanks. At a previous such lunch during the Hodges administration (before I was barred from the grounds), I had left my recorder. I never saw it again. This one was its replacement.
— To make up for my performance inside, I decided to make friends with the governor’s dogs on the way out. One consented to be petted; the other stood off and regarded me with healthy suspicion. Warren and Cindi Scoppe, who had come in a separate car in order to be on time, waited for me. I finally realized they were waiting because we needed to have a quick huddle to decide what, if anything, we wanted to say about the speech for the next day (to avoid interfering with the production of the news pages, our pages need to be done well before time for the speech), and they knew I was planning to go to Harry Lightsey’s funeral at 2:30. I told them I had time to meet them back at the office and discuss it there before heading for Trinity Cathedral. Then I stepped over to my truck, and realized I didn’t have my keys.
— Warren and Cindi waited while I barged back into the mansion without knocking (the faux pas just keep piling up, don’t they?) and searched around under the dining room table while the staff was clearing it. They said they hadn’t found anything. I guessed the answer to the mystery on my way back to the truck. Yep, my keys were in the ignition. Don’t even ask why I had thought it necessary to lock my truck
inside these well guarded grounds, because I don’t have an answer.
— Fortunately, Warren and Cindi were still waiting — they know me well — and we had the opportunity to fully discuss the next day’s editorial while I rode in Warren’s back seat back to the office. I had explained the situation to the guard at the gate, and he said it would be OK to get the truck later. I knew there was an extra set of keys in my desk.
— What I also knew, but forgot until we got all the way back to the office, was that I also carry yet another spare key to the truck’s doors in my wallet, for just such emergencies. Sure enough, as I found standing stupidly back in my office and rummaging around through credit cards, there it was. In my pocket all the time. Great. No one would have ever had to know, if I had just remembered that.
— So I had to ask my boss, the publisher,…
Oops, just realized that if I don’t run home NOW, I’m going to miss the State of the State itself. I have to watch to make sure he actually delivers the speech we’re commenting on tomorrow. Have to finish this tale of serial humiliation later…
Two confessions:
Here’s an example, dubbed "The Way I See It #61:"
Imagine we are all the same. Imagine we agree about politics, religion and morality. Imagine we like the same types of music, art, food and coffee. Imagine we all look alike. Sound boring? Differences need not divide us. Embrace diversity. Dignity is everyone’s human right.
This is the considered opinion of one Bill Brummel (Beau‘s great-great-great grandson, perhaps?), identified thusly: "Documentary filmmaker. His programs focus on human rights issues."
Is there anything wrong with anything he said? No. But does it provoke thought? No. In fact, by the time he got to the bumper-sticker sentiment, "Embrace diversity," my brain had nearly shut down, grande coffee notwithstanding. Talk about boring.
Variety is the spice of life, and so on. We all agree on that. But when I see something this mind-numbingly obvious represented as profundity worthy of mass reproduction, I find I want to argue with it. I want to say something like, "You know, it would be great if we’d go ahead and all agree on morality. If there were fewer people out there disagreeing with the consensus on morality, we’d have lot a less rape, murder and child molesting going on. There would still be some of those things, of course, because it is tragically human to do things we know is wrong. What’s really unbearably outrageous is people doing things that we all pretty much know are wrong and defending them as being OK, and condemning those who would censure them as narrow-minded. Such people’s battle cry is "WHOSE morality?,’ as though there were no absolutes, when there are. Seriously, can’t you think of ANYTHING that is just plain wrong, no matter who says it’s right? What do you have to say about that, Mr. ‘Imagine there’s no heaven?’ How about the crimes I mentioned above? Couldn’t you draw the line at child abuse? And if you could, wouldn’t you have to admit that there IS legitimacy to drawing lines, meaning that diversity of thought and attitudes is NOT always good? Huh?"
OK, so maybe that wouldn’t fit on the cup. But I think it would be more worth the ink.
I’m really sorry about what happened yesterday. If you were frustrated not being able to access the blog or place comments on it, I know exactly how you feel. I was pretty panicked when I looked Friday morning and it looked like I’d lost a week of material. It was worse when I tried to get into the guts of the thing, and got an error message.
Anyway, I am particularly sorry if you tried to comment, and it got lost. Please give it another try; I think it’s working now. If you have any more trouble, please e-mail me at [email protected]. I won’t be there until Monday, but I promise to get right on it then.
Now that I’ve said my sorries, I’ll give my excuses: It wasn’t my fault! It was something to do with Typepad. I don’t understand it, frankly; something about routine maintenance that went awry.
Just don’t give up on the blog.
How exciting is tomorrow’s matchup between the Gamecocks and the Tigers? This exciting: Even I am caught up in it. Kinda. Sorta.
I am just about the last person you would ever call a football fan. Baseball, yes. Sometimes even basketball. But mostly, my interest in sports extends only to those that I can play, such as golf and tennis. And I have little interest in watching other people play those. If I watch a tennis match on television for five minutes, I want to turn off the tube and get out there myself. (Meaning that I’m either more of a doer than a watcher — which is doubtful, given my love for reading and watching movies — or I’m just a self-centered cuss.)
Anyway, I’ve been sufficiently caught up in the contact high of excitement about the Gamecocks — something that started about the time of the win over Tennessee, I believe — that I actually watched
part of last week’s game on the tube. And enjoyed it.
More than that, I actually read one of the advance stories about tomorrow’s big game in the paper this past week. Not a people feature or anything like that, but this story about a real football-geek facet of the game, built around stats. I started reading just out of curiosity, wondering what a "red zone" was (and unlike many such stories, geared only to the cognoscenti, it actually told me, once I got to the jump page), and then got caught up in the fact that it seemed Steve Spurrier’s approach to football was much like my approach to life (or what I like to think is my approach to life): Never give up, and never settle. He doesn’t go for the field goal when there’s a chance for a touchdown. Neither would I. Of course, I would never punt, either — but then, I tend to take things to obsessive extremes.
So, having done the required reading and whipped myself into an appropriate state of anticipation, I’m all set for the big game. And if I had ESPN2 on my TV at home, I’d watch it. I really would.
But lacking that, I’ll have to settle for the radio. If it’s on the radio. I assume it will be.
Anyway: Go, ‘Cocks.
One cool thing about the Blogosphere is that you can actually go back and change what you have published, rather than just running a correction later, when rectification is called for. In my last post, I had originally written the following:
But if Mr. Dawson is deluding himself as to whether he is one of the "bosses" referred to, that’s nothing compared to Sen. John Land. When he says "The voters, next year, will be demanding change, and the days of Mark Sanford’s embarrassing legacy are numbered," he’s ignoring the rather large fact that there is no alternative within electoral striking distance of Mark Sanford. In electoral terms, it really doesn’t matter whether the governor is strong politically or not, until there is a viable alternative.
Correspondent "Clint" correctly pointed out that the story didn’t back up the idea that Katon Dawson thought he was a "boss." So I went back and changed that paragraph to read:
But Democrats (and disaffected Republicans, for that matter) are deluding themselves if they think that means Mr. Sanford is finished. When Sen. John Land says "The voters, next year, will be demanding change, and the days of Mark Sanford’s embarrassing legacy are numbered," he’s ignoring the rather large fact that there is no alternative within electoral striking distance of Mark Sanford. In electoral terms, it really doesn’t matter whether the governor is strong politically or not, until there is a viable alternative.
Why am I bothering to tell you this? Well, for one thing, I want my commenters to know I’m serious when I make the following plea to readers at the top of my blog:
So if you see mistakes, say something so I can fix them.
Also, while it is really cool to be able to go back and change what I’ve published after I’ve published it, it still seems a little like cheating to an old dead-tree guy such as myself.
‘Disinterested observer’
corrupted by a can of soup
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
BIG BROTHER is about to step in and make my life — and the lives of a tiny handful of others — better by imposing broad regulations that will probably cost the food industry billions without benefiting the overwhelming majority of Americans one whit.
And I’m fine with that. But the fact that I’m fine with it does make me a tad uncomfortable.
I’ve never wanted to be part of an interest group. That’s why I throw away those membership solicitations from AARP (even though I sometimes feel a wee bit envious of the discounts my wife, who lacks such scruples, enjoys).
For one thing, it’s a liability in my business. Even though I write opinion these days rather than “objective” news, I value detachment. Like the human computers called “mentats” in Frank Herbert’s novels, I prefer my judgments to be generally untainted by “feelings” or self-interest.
I can be passionate about issues, but they tend to be fairly abstract (say, government accountability) or involve groups to which I don’t belong — such as poor, black, rural children who get the short end of the stick on educational opportunity.
I cling to the great self-delusion of the Average White Guy, which is that I don’t belong to a group. If there’s a group trait among us white guys, it’s that we don’t see ourselves as having group traits, or interests in common. I look at a rich white guy and don’t celebrate his success (he’s not sharing it with me). And when he goes to the slammer for insider trading or whatever, I’m as likely to feel Schadenfreude as a member of any other ethnic group.
You can’t even characterize me as a WASP. I’m a half-Celtic mutt, and I’m Catholic. But I refuse to feel aggrieved when secularists (vicious, slanderous dogs that they are) attack the Church. I tend to snort at whiny releases I get from the Catholic League For Religious and Civil Rights (“Yahoo! Displays Bias Against Catholics”), and sneer at politicians’ ham-handed efforts to corral the “Catholic vote.”
Not that bias against Catholics doesn’t exist. It’s just that I refuse to join the pity party.
But there are limits to my detachment. I’m no mentat, but a three-dimensional human being, and to fail to recognize that is to fail to see the world accurately (as any mentat would tell you).
I think it would be great if somebody really did do something about the trains that keep me and others who work on Shop Road from getting downtown and back in a timely fashion. And as an asthmatic, I welcome all the restrictions recently placed on smoking in public places.
But I can rationalize those. Eliminating train delays would also benefit football fans (a group to which I definitely don’t belong), fairgoers, Farmers Market shoppers, folks trying to get to I-77, and the residents of Arthurtown, Taylors and Little Camden. And everyone is harmed by cigarette smoke; those of us who suffer more immediately are merely the canaries in the coal mine.
But this latest thing I just can’t rationalize away. On Thursday, I finally became corrupted by the unoriginal sin of narrow interest. That was the day I read in an article (it wouldn’t let me link directly; search for "Zhang" and "allergens") from The Wall Street Journal that a new federal food-labeling law taking effect Jan. 1 will not only cause packagers to highlight the presence of milk, eggs and wheat (to which I am allergic, in the first two instances to a life-threatening degree) and other major allergens, but it will go to the next level — letting the less-savvy know that “whey” and “casein” mean milk just as surely as do butter and cheese. (I was an adult before I realized why I was getting sick from consuming “non-dairy” products containing traces of sodium caseinate.)
Best of all — and this is the really sweet part — some manufacturers are going so far as to simply eliminate the allergens from their recipes, when they are not key ingredients. You may ask yourself why the allergens were even in there if they were not essential. If so, congratulations! You have finally thought to ask a question that has driven me nuts my whole life. I have to remove my bifocals and press labels against my nose to read the fine print on every packaged product I consider consuming. And more often than not, I find that some innocuous-sounding product such as beef-vegetable soup, or an oat-based cereal, has been inexplicably poisoned with whey or another form of dairy. It doesn’t look creamy, and you can’t taste it, but it’s there.
And there’s no acceptable explanation for it; the soup or cereal would taste fine without it. As often as not, a competing brand right next to it is made without the offending materials, and with no damage to quality.
So how to explain it? Why would a food processor go to the expense of buying mass quantities of an irrelevant ingredient, arrange to have it delivered, and put it in the product? Other interest groups have their paranoid conspiracy theories, and here’s mine: This country has for decades been run from behind the scenes by the dairy industry. Don’t try to “reason” with me on this; no other explanation satisfies.
Yet the iron grip of Big Cheese must be loosening. How else could the FDA be getting ready to enforce these new regulations? How else could Campbell Soup Co. — an outfit that produces a gazillion products, of which I can safely consume about four — be on the verge of purging its products of unnecessary allergens?
In any case, it’s wonderful news. To me. Suddenly, grocery store aisles are going to seem a lot less like minefields. To me.
And there’s the rub. I just can’t get around the fact that in this case, I am a member of a hyper-narrow interest group. Sure, millions have “allergies,” in the sense that they get seasonal hay fever, or suffer a little rash when they eat strawberries. But not that many of us have real allergies, in the sense of a clear and present danger of going into deadly
anaphylactic shock from exposure to a common food. Oh, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has “this bizarre thing about peanuts,” but that’s about it. The Journal article says about 150 people die from food allergies a year. So in one sense, the entire food industry is going to be retooled to save about one in every two million people.
And I think that’s great.
So I’m human. Sue me. But don’t try sneaking any of your spoiled bovine secretions into my tucker. If you do, Big Brother’s gonna getcha.
Issues, and people, are too
complex to describe with labels
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
IF YOU GO to my blog — the address is at the bottom of this column — and click on the “comments” link for any given posting, you’ll find a whole lot of opining going on, but the quality of dialogue often leaves something to be desired. Not always (in fact, many of my electronic correspondents are thoughtful enough to make me regret my own superficiality), but often.
The Internet has done much to facilitate the creation of “communities” of narrow interest, from Monty Python fanatics to shoe fetishists. But it has militated against community in the broader sense. Because you can spend all day talking with people just like you, you tend to be less motivated to understand those who view the world differently. And the more that happens, the more facile our world views become.
It’s not just the Internet. You don’t even want to get me started (again) on the 24-hour cable news channels, with their shouting matches between opposing partisans substituting for meaningful commentary.
Nor are newspapers blameless. We have tended to cover politics as spectacle, as a sport with only two sides to each game — winner and loser, left and right, black and white. That makes issues easy to write about on deadline. But it doesn’t help citizens solve problems.
When issues, and people, are presented as caricatures — that dumb Bush, that flip-flopping Kerry, that skirt-chasing Clinton, that crook Nixon (this is not an entirely new phenomenon) — we can’t truly understand them.
I try to avoid this by interacting personally with newsmakers as much as possible, whether I need something for publication from them at a given moment or not.
But “as much as possible” isn’t always enough. Consequently, I still sometimes make facile assumptions.
Case in point — Perry Bumgarner. Before last week, here’s what I knew about Mr. Bumgarner: He was a founder of We the People of Lexington County, the antitax group. He was running for County Council as a Democrat, after having failed to get elected as a Republican. It seemed highly unlikely that we would be interested in endorsing a person whose only previous interaction with local government was to complain about taxes — especially when he was up against Republican Jim Kinard, a man with practical experience dealing with the day-to-day realities of governing on the Lexington 4 school board.
We had interviewed Mr. Kinard at length back during the Republican primary process (which had led to not one, but two runoffs), so when he came in to see us last week, we had few questions. Besides, he was up against a two-time loser who apparently was only running as a Democrat to avoid having primary competition. This one was going to be easy.
But then Mr. Bumgarner came in, and I had to learn for the thousandth time that you can’t assume such things. There was, as always, more to him than the two-dimensional picture in my mind.
At first, he seemed to fit the caricature. A retired homebuilder, he was dodgy on the subject of impact fees. Asked why he had switched parties, he was startlingly frank: “Because they had three Republicans running, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in that thing.” Yep, a political opportunist who knows nothing about government beyond the fact that he doesn’t like paying for it.
But then we kept talking, and the caricature took on three-dimensional human form. His U.S. Navy tie tack led to questions, and I found he had served with the Marines as a medical corpsman in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. (“It was cold,” he said, at the “Frozen Chosin” Reservoir. No kidding.)
He may not have had much to say about impact fees, but he had spent so much time observing county government in recent years that he had something knowledgeable to say about almost everything else. Some of his positions were surprising, coming from an antitax activist. He said he would advocate a half-cent sales tax to support the regional bus system if it would expand into Lexington County beyond its three current routes. Rare is the local politician willing to go out on that limb while seeking office. In fact, rare is the candidate who has thought much about the buses at all. (One GOP primary candidate we spoke to last month didn’t even know there was such a thing as a regional transit authority.)
He even favors letting the school districts retain the authority to tax — which is certainly more than I would allow. (So who’s the anti-tax activist?) But we found agreement on the need to consolidate school districts, and on the lack of accountability of the special purpose districts that run the county’s recreation facilities.
When Mr. Bumgarner left, my colleague Warren Bolton and I looked at each other, and each knew what the other was thinking: There’s more to this guy than we thought.
So we endorsed him, right? No. But we seriously considered it. In the end, we went with Mr. Kinard, for several reasons: his experience as a school trustee, his more specific ideas about what his district and the county needed, his broad community involvement and his relative youth and energy. I gave him points for being willing to face a crowded primary field, rather than taking the easy route. And he knows where he stands on impact fees: He’s for them, as a sensible alternative to higher p
roperty taxes.
But it was no slam-dunk. Politics, and life, get complicated when you take the time to see past initial assumptions.
Maybe I need to get some of those partisans who shoot at each other on my blog together in a room, face-to-face. That could be dangerous, but who knows? We all might learn something.
A regular correspondent name of Phillip observed in a comment on this post (it’s the fourth comment) that "the President’s comments to the UN get my vote for the most encouraging words I’ve heard from his mouth since he took office."
What I’d like to do here is pose this question to Phillip and others: What did you think of his speech last night from Jackson Square?
Of course, I’d like to know anyway, but I will sheepishly admit that I have an additional motive this time for seeking your input: Unbelievably, I forgot about the speech, and therefore missed it — I didn’t get home and start eating dinner until after 9, and started reading a book while I was eating, so it kind of got away from me. Now I’ll have to go back and read it, and watch it via streaming video on C-SPAN or something — which I haven’t had time to do yet, but will get to later.
(This is particularly vexing because this is one of the two things I have a TV for. I don’t watch TV "news," but I do watch speeches and debates and other live, newsmaking events in which I want to pick up on nuances not available from reading the text. And I watch movies. Oh, yeah, I recently picked up a third reason to turn on the boob tube — my wife and I like to watch "House." Now there’s a guy who would make a perfect blogger — rapid-fire, cutting opinions, without the slightest worry about pleasing anybody.)
Anyway, a colleague who is no fan of the president was telling me the speech was a good one. I’m curious what others think. If this is one of those moments when partisans agree on something, I’d like to cherish the moment. If it isn’t — well, there would be nothing new about that, would there?
Imagine this in Andy Rooney’s voice, only with an edge…
Didja ever have one of those days when you were utterly convinced that those experts out there are right, that evolution has not prepared us in any way for modern life — especially of the white-collar variety? A day when you reach the realization that Ron Livingston‘s character did in "Office Space" — that Man was not meant to sit in cubicles (or offices) doing TPS reports?
I mean, our bodies — and particularly our central nervous systems — were just not made for responding to stress by smiling and being being all civilized and diplomatic and constructive and filling out the proper forms. We’re hard-wired to fight or flee, and all the rules nowadays say we can’t do either.
Anyway, while most days I love my job and can honestly say that I wouldn’t trade it for any other (except maybe directing movies, and I don’t think that’s realistic at this point), there are days — and I’m not saying this is one of them, nor am I saying it isn’t — when I wish I were something like a soldier, or a boxer. Days when instead of saying, "Yes, sir, well, I’m sorry you feel that way about that column/editorial/blog item," you want, on an atavistic level, to just go out and take out the objective (or at least blow something up), or kick some butt.
Of course, neither of those options is any more realistic than my chances of directing. The Army wouldn’t take me even when I was young and relatively fit. As for boxing — well, I took up kickboxing several years ago, when I was 47, and in my very first (and last) sparring match, my opponent broke four of my ribs in the first round. I still went the full three rounds, even after he dropped me to one knee by hitting me again in the very spot where my ribs were broken. That one hurt. (I am proud of having gone the distance, even though it was only three rounds. Conversely, my wife sees it as final proof, as though she needed any more, that I am an idiot. Which isn’t my fault, since, speaking of evolution, my brain still hasn’t fully developed.) Basically, this guy didn’t get the idea of sparring; he seemed to think it was a real fight. Combine that with my inability to think defensively (as in, keeping my stupid elbows down), and I was in trouble.
So really, I’m pretty lucky that I do have a weenie job such as editorial page editor. Especially since someone just came in while I was writing this and gave me some good news that made this day a lot better. So I guess I’ll wait until another time to strip off my clothes and go running through the savanna — or the would-be Green Diamond project — looking to kill a wildebeest with a rock. For now, blogging is about as close as I’ll get to that.
Betsy experience in no way
prepared us for Katrina’s horrors
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
I THOUGHT I knew what to expect from Hurricane Katrina. Boy, was I wrong.
You see, I was there, at Ground Zero, for the last big blow to hit the Big Easy. That was Hurricane Betsy, 40 years ago.
In fact, that experience at such a young age — I was starting junior high — is probably why I have such a jaded attitude toward weather. Or at least did have.
I tended to sneer at people getting all worked up because a storm’s coming. And I definitely didn’t need those warnings that interrupt regular TV programming. Hey, I know when there’s going to be a thunderstorm — our remaining dog freaks out, yelping and demanding to come in. I did not share his attitude; as I saw it, the lawn could use the watering.
And when I saw folks evacuate in the path of a storm that may strike their domiciles, I sniffed in a superior manner and thought:
We didn’t run and hide back in ’65. We stood our ground — however untenable that ground may have been. We lived in an old barracks that had been converted into apartments for naval officers and their families — a big frame target that the Big Bad Wolf could probably have huffed and puffed away without trying too hard. It was located about a block from the Mississippi River levee, on a nearly defunct Navy base in Algiers, right across the river from the heart of New Orleans.
The base had most likely been a very busy place during in the war that had ended two decades earlier. But you sure couldn’t tell that at the time I lived there. The base’s vital purpose was a thing of the misty past, and of no interest to a preteen. The base I knew was mostly abandoned buildings (for exploring, if you could dodge the Shore Patrol) and huge, empty fields for playing ball.
My Dad was executive officer on the USS Hyman, DD-732, an old Sumner-class destroyer that was there to train reservists on weekends. That and an old diesel submarine were the only ships moored at the base.
The night Betsy hit, Dad was aboard his ship, firmly held in place in the river by cables fore, aft and amidships, and with the engines fired up and running. (There hadn’t been time to put out to sea.) He and the crew spent the night trying to avoid being hit by civilian craft that hadn’t taken such precautions. They still got hit a couple of times. He recalls the shock on the bridge as one freighter headed upriver at eight or nine knots — breakneck speed in that sharply meandering stretch — particularly when the watch realized it was being blown against the current, with no one at the helm.
My mother, brother and I spent the night in our rickety home with our flashlights and bathtubs full of water, listening to the wind tear and crack and howl around us. We experienced the eerie stillness of the eye passing over, then listened to the fury all over again, only in the opposite direction (at which point we closed windows that were now on the windward side, and opened the ones on the lee). I don’t recall being any more scared than I would have been on a ride at the Lake Ponchartrain amusement park. At my age, it was an adventure, and not to be missed.
The next day, we saw what the storm had done. Enormous, aromatic red cedar trees across the street in my best friend Tim Moorman’s yard — his dad was a captain, so they rated a big house — were snapped in two. (We pulled off big shards and put them in our closets.) The only damage our apartment sustained was a rip to the screen on our porch, although other apartments in the building suffered from holes in the roof.
I soon learned we had been among the lucky ones. Fifteen thousand civilian refugees — Ponchartrain spilled over that time, too — were housed for months in the base’s unused buildings and a mobile home village that filled the empty fields.
My Dad’s destroyer was for several days New Orleans’ only official communication link with the outside world. (We weren’t able to call folks in South Carolina to say we were OK for a week.) The ship was called upon to help find a barge full of chlorine that had been lost — which Dad remembers as the most fouled-up operation he ever took part in. After the ship’s sonar and divers had located about a hundred other barges sunk by the storm, the one they sought was found in the one place everyone assumed the civilians had already looked: Right where it had been moored. The chlorine containers were intact.
So all was well in the end. We had withstood nature’s worst (I thought), and life went on.
I had thought Katrina would be pretty much the same — especially with all the advance warning that modern technology provides. Sure, it was almost a Category 5 while Betsy was merely a 3, but the city only got brushed by the back side of the storm this time.
And yet, as we’ve tried to take in the scope of this disaster in the last few days — thousands dead, devastation of apocalyptic proportions across several states — it overwhelms the mind.
This has to be the worst disaster to hit the mainland United States in my lifetime. When was the last time a major city of this proportion had to be abandoned, possibly for months? And we still don’t fully know how bad things are in the less-populated areas that took the main brunt of this nightmare.
This horror is so wide and profound that I really don’t know where to grab hold of it for an editorial point. Certainly, we should all seize any opportunity we can identify to reach out and help the victims. Beyond that, I really don’t know what to say.
But from now on, I’m going to be less nonchalant about weather. Next time the dog starts yelping about a rising wind, rather than telling him to hush and calm down, I just may join him.