Category Archives: Confessional

Out amongst ’em

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    Just a few more minutes — a precious few — and the mob will be sufficiently distracted by their bread and circuses that I can make my escape. Until then, I’m trapped…

Forgive me, but this situation brings out the very worst, most prejudiced, least tolerant elements of my character.

I was out amongst ’em today. By "’em," I choose a semi-articulate means of expressing my strong sense of "otherness" when compared to a certain very broad swath of the folk of our land.

I’m talking about football fans. Yes, yes, I know, many football fans are otherwise good and decent people in whom I would find many fine and admirable qualities. Many of them are friends of mine. (But we bigots always say that, don’t we?) But when they are in fan mode, I find them intolerable.

I suppose this is to some extent, like all prejudices, an irrational response. I have an excuse, though. I think I’m suffering from a mild form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Football has been very, very bad to me.

I haven’t been a football fan myself since 1969, when that snotty Joe Namath led the Jets to beat my team, the Baltimore Colts, in a drastic distortion of the natural order. I had waited what had seemed like forever (a year or two is like forever at that age) for Johnny Unitas and company to prevail over the hated Packers, and they finally had. That meant they had achieved their rightful place as the best team in the world. Sure, there was that mere formality of a post-season exhibition against the AFL, but everyone knew that the AFL was profoundly inferior to the NFL, so it hardly counted, right?

What that stunning experience taught me was that football is an unforgivably capricious sport. Too much rides on the uncontrollable flukes of a single game. In baseball, as in life, you’ve got to be good over the long haul to achieve the pennant. That builds character. In football — because the game is so insanely harsh upon its practitioners’ bodies — there are so few games that every single one is all-important. You can’t afford to lose a single one, if you want to be the champs. Such inflated stakes make each game ridiculously overimportant to fans. They lose all sense of proportion, which is very off-putting.

But I didn’t really learn to hate the game until I came to work at The State, and spent my first year here being the editor in charge on Saturdays. You can see where this is going, can’t you? It seemed that the sadists over in the Roundhouse had contrived to schedule every single home game that year to begin shortly after the time I had to be at work — meaning that there was no way I could get to work in less than an hour and a half. You’ll recall that back then, the newspaper offices were located in the very shadow of the Grid Temple. We’re a little farther away now, but not enough so to make it easy to get in and out on a game day. Oh, excuse me, isn’t that supposed to be capitalized — Game Day?

I would travel around and around a circle with a five-mile radius centered upon Williams-Brice, probing for weaknesses in the wall of flag-bedecked vehicles, looking for a way in to work, always frustrated. Up Bluff or Shop road? No. Around Beltline to Rosewood and back in? No. A frontal assault up Assembly? That was as mad as Pickett’s Charge. Through Olympia? Are you kidding?

By the time I was finally at the office, I was foaming at the mouth. Seriously, I wasn’t fit to talk to for hours, I was filled with such hostility for every single fan (you know the word is short for "fanatic," don’t you?) out there. I was in such a degraded, paranoid state of mind that I actually believed (temporarily) that they had all conspired to cause me this frustration intentionally (they couldn’t possibly be enjoying that gridlock themselves, so there HAD to be a nefarious motive somewhere). My embarrassing discourses on the subject to fellow employees were as profane as they were unwelcome. I think the worst day was the one when I was almost arrested by a Highway Patrolman who refused to let me up Key Road to The State‘s parking lot when I had finally worked my way to within 100 yards of it — an obstinacy on his part to which I responded with a distinct edge of barely-contained rage.

This afternoon, I had to go out a little after 1 p.m., and had to pass twice through the heart of the fan encampment. Folks were already tailgating. There was no yardarm in sight, but I’m quite certain the sun wouldn’t have been over it if there had been, and these folks were already getting a six-hour jump on the liquoring-up process. (They couldn’t really like football, if they need that much anesthetic before a game.) This shouldn’t have bothered me, but I couldn’t stop thinking thoughts such as these: This is Thursday, a workday. I’ve got more work waiting for me back at the office than I can get done by the weekend, and there’s a war going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Gulf Coast from Texas to Alabama has just been essentially wiped off the map, the price of fuel has jumped practically 50 percent in a matter of days, and these people can’t think of anything better to do with their time.

But they’re not the problem. It’s me. My response is contemptibly irrational. I’m only harming myself. Case in point: I’ve been ranting about this so long, I’ve almost lost my window of opportunity to escape before the fair-weather types start slipping out at halftime and clogging Shop Road.

Gotta go. Bye. I’ll try to be more civil and tolerant of my fellow humans in my next posting. But I’m not promising anything.

Boy, did we screw up

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His name is Jim St. Clair.

He is a member of the Lexington 4 school board, he works for U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, he is a major in the S.C. Air National Guard, and he is running for the Republican nomination for the District 1 seat on Lexington County Council. And his name is Jim St. Clair. His name most assuredly is NOT "Jim Sinclair," as we said today in what is the worst mistake we have made in a political endorsement within my memory.

There is absolutely no excuse for that happening. The associate editor who wrote it knew better, I (who edited it) knew better, and yet it still happened. And we are deeply sorry. Warren Bolton and I have both called Mr. St. Clair to apologize. (Incidentally, anyone else who read these proofs had no reason to doubt Warren and me — since we’ve never fouled up quite like this before — and therefore no reason to suspect that something was wrong. "Snclair" would have looked wrong to them, but "Sinclair" did not, since they had never met or heard of Mr. St. Clair.) A correction will run on Sunday’s editorial page. We’re doing that because it has higher readership than Saturday. In the meantime, this blog item is all I can do.

Why are we so embarrassed by this one misspelling (aside from the fact that ALL errors are embarrassing)? Because Mr. St. Clair is one of three highly qualified candidates for this position — all of them with good records for community service — and we endorsed one of his opponents, Pelion Mayor Charles Haggard (the third candidate is Jim Kinard, also a member of the Lexington 4 school board). So by misspelling his name, we added insult to injury, which makes it worse than making the same mistake under other circumstances. As Mr. St. Clair himself said, the misspelling bothered him more than not being endorsed. I understand that, given the importance of name recognition in a political race. Politicians aren’t usually joking when they say, "Write what you want about me; just spell the name right."

(By the way, I keep saying this was a "misspelling" rather than "the wrong name" because it occurs to me that "Sinclair" is actually derived originally from "St. Clare" or "St. Clair." People with that particular Scottish name can claim kinship to one Henry St. Clair, who fought alongside Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, according to one Web site. That’s no defense; it’s just as bad either way. I didn’t even think of it until the error was pointed out to me this morning. I have irrelevancies run through my head in times of stress — and the rest of the time, too — and in this case, as my eyes focused on the error like a laser beam as they failed to do yesterday, I thought, "Those names MUST be from the same root." I looked it up, and I was right. Which doesn’t make it any better; I just thought it was interesting. We didn’t make the mistake because we thought it was the same name spelled differently; we made the mistake because it looks roughly like the right name, and since we didn’t know this gentleman or write about him before this week, we didn’t have alarm bells go off automatically in our heads saying "That’s wrong!" the way we would if someone wrote "Sandford" or "DiMint.")

Anyway, we screwed up, and this is the best I can do today to make it right. I realize it isn’t enough.

Prejudice lurks within us all

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In this posting I shall lay bare, for all to see, not only my embarrassing ignorance, but rank prejudice on my part. Blogs are a place for confession, right? A place where we honestly confront the demons we find within ourselves? Well, here goes:

My wife and daughter are flying home from Memphis as I type this. Well, not directly, of course — they’re going to Charlotte at the moment. Then they’ll come home.

Anyway, I took a moment from my work (which I shouldn’t have done: time management rule No. 1) to look up their itinerary on this laptop. I’m now regretting that action because I saw they are flying on something called an EMBRAER JET.

So I further wasted valuable time (I mean, what was I going to do with the information at this point?), by Googling that term, and was punished with a fresh dose of anxiety for doing so.

Turns out Embraer is a Brazilian aircraft maker.

I had no idea Brazil made jets. There’s the abysmal ignorance of the aircraft industry, which I obviously need to bone up on what with Vought Alenia and all that.

I was instantly uncomfortable that my wife and my little girl were — are — flying on a Brazilian jet. If they can’t fly on a Boeing, an Airbus would be OK. Or maybe something German — say, a Fokker. There’s the rank prejudice. And yes, I was instantly ashamed in addition to being uncomfortable. Quite a mix.

I couldn’t help thinking: I hope they didn’t make this one during Carnival.

I’ll say only one thing in my defense: This bigotry is not entirely my fault. Brazil doesn’t exactly market itself as a country full of engineers in white coats and hardhats, peering through safety goggles at the production process while checking off quality-control boxes on a clipboard (Oh, I suppose some ministry or other in Brasilia does try to sell this image, but I’ve missed the ads). Brazil markets itself as a place that knows how to party.

Hey, I used to live in South America — the Spanish-speaking parts, at least — and I still picture nearly nekkid beautiful women with towering feathery headdresses dancing in the streets if you say, "Rio." (Well, that and the statue of Jesus on top of Sugar Loaf. Now that’s an odd juxtaposition.)

Look, I’m sure they make fine jets. And the Brazilian people I actually know (as opposed to the ones I see in those pictures from Rio) would probably be at least as good at building aircraft as anyone else I know. This just took me by surprise, that’s all.

Tom Friedman’s right: The world is flattening out, and we’re all just going to have to get used to our loved ones flying on jets from countries we didn’t know made jets, and being OK with that.

Otherwise, we end up looking like the idiots who used to sneer at Toyotas back in the ’60s.