Here’s where I was in the project last November. I had already eliminated 11 boxes.
I found what you will see belowlast night, when I resumed the ongoing, off-and-on, project of cleaning out our two-car garage enough that I can at least park one vehicle in out of the weather.
The problem isn’t the household items one or another of our kids have stored there, or the tools accumulated over the years. The toughest category of clutter is the result of my own packrat tendencies — mostly, the boxes of paper and other items that I packed up and brought home with me when I left The State 16 years ago.
It was a huge mountain to begin with, taking me two full weeks of hauling home in the bed of my truck every night of those last two weeks. (I had a big office, but that was just the beginning. The editorial department had a roomful of filing cabinets almost entirely devoted to my files, and I had a box here and there in other locations. There wasn’t time to sort through it all; I just brought it home.) This is my third time sifting through it all. Each of the first two times, I reduced the pile somewhat. This time, I’ve been throwing away most of what I find. But occasionally, I open a box that’s harder to give up, and I have to make my way through it sheet by sheet, reading some of the letters, notes and such all the way to the end. Those I tend to keep.
I was particularly interested to find this one. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but couldn’t find it to post. I wrote a lot of columns in long draft form over the years that I ended up trashing. Sometimes I found the premise just didn’t work once I had developed it. But usually it was simply that a better idea emerged at the last minute, and I wrote and ran that instead.
But this is the only one I can remember actually completing and having ready to go, and then spiking even though I didn’t write another one to replace it with. I think maybe it was already on the page and I yanked it off and replaced it with a syndicated piece. But I’m not sure, now that 30 years have passed.
I wouldn’t have done that a year or two later. But this was very early in my time on the editorial board. I wasn’t the editor yet, or even an associate editor. This was less than two years after I left news for opinion writing, and I was just an editorial writer. And at that early stage, I couldn’t see publishing an opinion piece that didn’t offer a solution. All I was doing here was describing the problem, and that seemed incomplete. I though it was my duty to prescribe a cure.
I should have run it. It was a decent piece. It had its flaws that jump out at me now, such as that jarring, sudden switch from past to present tense in the fourth graf. But it was worth running, and I wish I had — especially since it identified a problem that at that time was just starting to tear the country apart. It hadn’t fully metasticized yet. If I had known then how bad things would get — it’s one of the things that led both to Trumpism and to the Democratic Party being completely unable to counter it — I would have run it and perhaps even campaigned (unsuccessfully, of course, due to the fundamental division between news and editorial) to have it placed on the front page.
At that time, we were already becoming a country that couldn’t pull together to solve problems. Oh, a few things came along later that harked back to the “we’re all in this together” spirit of the Second World War or LBJ’s extraordinary string of domestic policy victories in the middle ’60s — such as Teddy Kennedy initially supporting George W. Bush’s effort to add prescription coverage to Medicare, or the bipartisan successes Joe Biden had in Congress early in his all-too-brief time in the White House.
But mostly, we have hardened the divisions between “my group vs. your group” that would do our country in. Young people have never known a time when we were regularly able to see each other as fellow Americans and pull together in common cause. For older people, the memories are dimming. Sometimes the problem is simply the rapidly growing party division that started getting bad in the ’80s, and just got worse and worse each decade. Sometimes it’s the inexplicable cult of Trump. Other times, it’s about what this column was about — the growing power of identity, which has fed both of those other two problems.
Look at it either way — that my black colleagues in that gym were blinded by identity, or I was, as the white guy who couldn’t wrap my head around how they could possibly identify with that rich celebrity who had so little in common with them or me. Either way, I found the cognitive divide between my co-workers and me shocking. I thought it was a problem we needed to talk about. I should have run the column.
To place this unpublished column in time: The Simpson verdict was announced on October 3, 1995 — my 42nd birthday. When I left that gym, I showered, headed up to the third floor and wrote the column quickly enough for it to run in the next day’s paper. But it didn’t.
Here it is, as it came off the dot matrix printer, like so many other things I saved from those times:
The evening of the day on which Charlie Kirk was murdered — a week ago today — I read an editorial about it in The New York Times that said everything that needed to be said about that appalling event.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk — the founder of a youth political movement that helped revolutionize modern conservatism — at Utah Valley University on Wednesday is a tragedy. His killing is also part of a horrifying wave of political violence in America….
Such violence is antithetical to America. The First Amendment — the first for a reason — enshrines our rights to freedom of speech and expression. Our country is based on the principle that we must disagree peacefully. Our political disagreements may be intense and emotional, but they should never be violent. This balance requires restraint. Americans have to accept that their side will lose sometimes and that they may feel angry about their defeats. We cannot act on that anger with violence.
Too many Americans are abandoning this ideal. Thirty-four percent of college students recently said they supported using violence in some circumstances to stop a campus speech, according to a poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression published a day before the Kirk shooting. Since 2021, that share has risen from 24 percent, which was already unacceptably high. Surveys of older adults are similarly alarming….
The intensity of our political debates will not disappear. The stakes are too high, and the country disagrees on too many important questions. But we Americans have lost some of our grace and empathy in recent years. We too often wish ill on our political opponents. We act as if people’s worth is determined by whether they identify as a Republican or a Democrat. We dehumanize those with whom we differ….
That was the penultimate graf. Since I’ve quoted so much, I might as well give you the last one:
…This is a moment to turn down the volume and reflect on our political culture. It is a moment for restraint, rather than cycles of vengeance or the suspension of civil liberties, as some urged on Wednesday. It is also a moment to engage with people who have different views from our own. When societies lose the ability to argue peacefully and resort to violence to resolve their political debates, it usually ends very badly.
(When I read that editorial that night, I retweeted it with this comment: “NYT ably describes the violent tip of the iceberg of hostility that is sinking America. But we’re all too busy despising each other to bother trying to find a way to save our ship. “)
As for the excerpts above — if the NYT lawyers call, I’ll just have to ask them how much I have to cut to suit their definition of Fair Use. But I just thought it was too important not to share. It was a grown-up editorial. It seems to me to have been written by someone mature enough to remember when this country was healthy enough that we could disagree strongly and vehemently, and then shake hands and walk away as friends — or at least as people who recognized each other as fellow Americans, and not as “the enemy.”
Of course, maybe it was written by a younger member of the board. If so, we have someone to thank for providing that person with an excellent education, and a firm understanding of what made America great, before our country’s recent tragic decline.
Evidently the faculty members who were suspended from teaching at Clemson were not the kind who provide such intellectual enrichment. Their grotesque fulminations are an embarrassment to anyone with. conscience. Doubt me? Here are some quotes from their outbursts. If that link doesn’t work, I’ll be happy for you, because you’ll be happier for not having read them.
Should they have been fired for it? Let me pose a different question. Should people who would have deliberately published such remarks at such a time have been employed in the first place, in jobs that involve shaping young minds? Such irresponsibility is inexcusable. They weren’t courageously outspoken; they were stupid, cruel and hateful.
You would think that in an atmosphere in which more than a third of college students believe violence can be justified to stop speech they don’t like, anyone who teaches them would understand that their responsibility is to model productive speech and behavior. And the responsibility of college administrators is to make sure they hire people mature enough to understand that.
At this point in our increasingly ones-and-zeroes country, we will now start hearing the “what abouts.” What about those GOP politicians who have demanded their firings? Are you defending them?
Are you nuts? Those people are cheap opportunists, trying to make themselves heroes to an angry crowd. Or, worse, they’re trying to make a merely grieving crowd… angry. Stir things up. Because they seek higher office, and Donald Trump has taught them that the approach taken by every president before him — striving with all their mights to pull us together in troubled times by invoking the values we hold in common — is for chumps. You can win by feeding division, by pouring gasoline on the embers, he has taught them. And they’re acting upon those lessons.
Just as others have learned that if you post something stupidly inappropriate — the more hateful the better — on social media in response to any news event, there are thousands if not millions of people like them who will regard them as brave and witty, and clap them virtually upon their backs in congratulation. A certain needy type eats that sort of thing up.
Both categories are unacceptable in a rational society. But they are so richly rewarded — in the currencies that matter to them — that they just keep doing it.
One final word: If you actually believe that anything those disgraced faculty members said about Kirk was justified by his rhetoric, you are just as much a part of the problem as those hungry GOP pols.
Personally, I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before the news of his murder. But I went and looked at a couple of videos of him speaking. The entire thrust of what he said, even in the milder comments, was wrongheaded and objectionable to me. In others, he was utterly offensive. But all that was what I expected, since Trump is trying to canonize him. And all of it is beside my point.
Y’all know I don’t believe in capital punishment. But even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t support summarily executing a man for saying things that offended me. I could never support that. And I could never support or worse, applaud anyone who mocks a human being who has died that way.
Yesterday, my iPad was dinging, so I glanced at the lock screen, and saw what you see above.
My reaction was trite. It was highly unoriginal. It was what the writers for a B movie would have written for Walter Brennan to say, or Lionel Barrymore, or maybe Ed Asner in his MTM show period (Lou Grant!). I showed it to my wife saying, “Really? That’s the most important thing going on in the world at this moment?” Yeah, it was a lame response, but I was off my game. It threw me to see these publications prioritizing this news so much: The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Washington Post… even The New York Times! I guess those were the ones I saw because, well, I don’t have a People app to pump such notifications to me. But still. I felt like I was in yet another sequel to “Freaky Friday,” in which The Gray Lady switched places with, I dunno, Teen Beat.
After a few seconds mildly brooding over it, I forgot about it.
That was, until I saw today where someone I respect personally had tweeted about the news:
… and other people I respect just as much — see Mandy there? — responded in a similar vein. (You can see more of those responses below.)
Now, let me be perfectly clear, my fellow Americans… I do not want anyone to think for a minute that I show you this and say these things in order to criticize these smart people, or hold them up to any kind of ridicule. (Although “Never forget where I was” is what you say about the Kennedy assassination, or Pearl Harbor, if you were around for that. Come on, folks! Now back to what I meant to say…)
It’s rather the reverse. It kinda reminds me that lots of smart, analytical thinkers in this world are better-rounded human beings than I am.
Sometimes I worry about that. Not often, but sometimes. I wondered about it back during my days on the editorial board. All of my associate editors were smart people, and most of them were good at feeling and writing about things that moved so many millions of other humans, but tended to leave me cold. You know, like professional football and 21st-century pop singers (as I’ve previously explained, rock and roll died around 1993, when MTV abandoned its mission of showing music videos 24 hours a day).
For instance, when Princess Diana was killed and the commoners reacted in ways I found peculiar, I was entirely in agreement with Her Majesty the Queen: She kept her distance and did not publicly emote over the death of her former daughter-in-law. “Bloody well right,” I thought. “Her Majesty’s a pretty smart girl. She knows what she’s about.” But my man Tony Blair, exquisitely attuned to the Zeitgeist in his early days as PM, warned her she’d better change her mind or see the end of the monarchy. He was probably right — he usually was. But my gut reaction was with Elizabeth Regina.
But I was the editor of the editorial pages, and I had enough Blair in me to realize we should probably say something — and something far more empathetic than what I was thinking. So… who should write the editorial? It wasn’t going to be me. It had to be one of the people who knew how to “resonate” to the culture of the moment. But someone else on the board volunteered, and really got into the subject, just resonating like crazy. Which I knew I couldn’t do, and didn’t want to do.
Which probably made my colleague who undertood how people felt about the lady and could reflect it back to readers with complete sincerity a better person than I was. I dunno.
When I was younger, I could do that resonating thing. When I was younger, I was sometimes the one guy called upon to do it. At The Jackson Sun back in 1977, the paper’s editorial page editor, having no idea how to react to the death of Elvis (and John Lennon, three years later), came to me — and I was a news guy in those days, not an editorialist. So I knocked out those pieces, and felt honored to have the opportunity.
As you know, I still love pop culture. But I guess I’m picky about it.
I can’t work up excitement about a pop singer to whom I’ve never listened (seems like a sweet young woman, but I don’t even know her songs) and a man who plays a sport I generally ignore (but hey, how about them Red Sox?).
But just as Elizabeth was the queen, Elvis was the King. Even more so, in a way. One E was on the throne by birth and tradition; the other E was raised to that position by the will of the people of the world…
‘The umbrella guy: Were these images a cause, or an effect, of the panic?
We were having a family birthday party for one of my kids Sunday night when I got a call from my brother in Greenville. He called to make sure that we knew we shouldn’t venture near the USC campus. There was apparently an “active shooter” situation, and the campus was locked down.
I saw that one person at our party seemed to be about to leave, so I asked my brother to hold on a moment, and I made an immediate announcement to the entire household about the news, suggesting that no one head in that direction. I was very much in a mode that was a sort of cross between “Now hear this!” and “General Quarters!”
But everyone already knew. My wife informed me that everyone had been talking about it at the table. I had missed it competely, which is a frequent occurrence with the state of my hearing.
Anyway, by that time the folks in charge on campus were already stepping down the alert, and within minutes they had given the “all clear.” Not because the “shooter” had been arrested or otherwise eliminated, but because he hadn’t existed.
There were some reported minor injuries, however — people who got hurt in the stampede of students trying to evacuate the area.
He was a creation of the remarkable new technology that we enjoy in the 21st century. No, not AI. You didn’t need that to produce this panic.
I’m talking about such quaint things as Al Gore’s Internet, smartphones with ever-improving cameras, social media, and the resulting ability of practically everyone on the planet to pass information to everyone else on the planet, whether it’s true or not.
Which is all stuff I have enjoyed greatly over the last couple of decades. But I’ve also pointed out how this combination of items is destroying our country, and other countries devoted to liberal democracy. But enough politics; back to the subject.
Of course, this causes people to scoff at the old newspaper guy wishing for the good ole days. Well, let me tell you about the good old days. Over the last day, I was thinking about how this would have unfolded, say, 25 years ago.
Basically, it would not have unfolded. It wouldn’t have happened. Of course, it didn’t happen, but something else did happen — a campus full of thousands of kids, not to mention their folks back home, were scared out of their wits. And some of them got hurt (but not seriously, apparently) in the rush to the exits.
Of course, I thought of this first from the perspective of a newspaperman. Back when such things as daily newspapers existed and thrived, news happened all through the 24 hours, but it only got published once. Back then, when the word of possible shootings went out, reporters would have rushed to the campus, the way they did Sunday night, and reported what they found. And for an hour or so, the whole news structure would be in high gear to meet the challenge. But then, about an hour later, everyone would know it was a load of nothing, and calm down. There might be a story about how everyone got excited and worried for a time, but there would at no time be a story delivered to actual readers crying out about havoc on the campus.
But I’m not fully imagining what would have happened. The thing is, there wouldn’t have even have been a story about the big scare. Why? Because there would have been no scare, for a number of reasons.
First, the images of a harmless-looking guy ambling along carrying an umbrella would not have existed. If you’re young — very young — it might be hard to imagine that. But you see, a mere quarter-century ago, people didn’t photograph everything they saw around them. I was one of the few people who might have done such a thing, because starting in my own college days, I got into 35mm photography in a big way. But I didn’t shoot a tenth of the images I now shoot every day, for the simple reason that film — and the chemicals I needed to develop it and make prints from it — cost money. It also cost a lot of time. Even if you were one of those civilians who dropped off their rolls at the drugstore, it still cost you some time. And unless you went to one of those one-hour places, you wouldn’t be seeing your prints for some days.
But let’s suppose that, being the camera geek I was, I did shoot such images, and somehow made the finished image appear instantly (remember that not even Polaroids were instantaneous, and the quality was awful). And suppose I also had the poor judgment to decide I wanted urgently to share this image, and my wild imaginings, with the world. How would I have done that — physically, technically? And how many people would I have reached? I assure you I had a much greater chance than most of you to get my picture into print, but I’d have to wait some hours before the presses rolled. And after they rolled, there’d be a further wait of hours (usually) before readers beheld it.
And by that time, we would have known for some hours that the pictures showed nothing that needed to be shared with anybody. They would be worthless, and of no interest.
There is value in having time to think, time to assess, time to recognize the truth before something is shouted to the world.
But we’ve lost that precious resource, and I don’t see any way of getting it back again. So in light of the existence of these new technologies, how on Earth are we going to stop driving each other stark, raving mad?
[Editor’s note: After I wrote the above, reporting on this incident has shifted more in the direction of a deliberate hoax, part of a pattern across the country, with less emphasis on innocent mistake. That significantly reduces the role that social media played, but it doesn’t eliminated it, because it doesn’t change the dynamics of the way current technology cause panic to metastasize, far ahead of the ability of reasonable investigation to catch up. (Although authorities did an excellent job of sorting it out as quickly as possible.) Without the technology, there might have been a panic on campus, but not across the country, as occurred in this case. This explanation raises other questions — if the cause of the panic was a couple of false phone calls, what role did the photos of the guy with the umbrella play? Was that just already-panicked students shooting pics of everything they saw and sending them out? I don’t know. In any case, they played a significant role in the widespread stress, based on what I was hearing from various folks following the incident.]
I frequently say something here and there about what’s wrong with journalism today (as opposed to what non-journalists tend to think is wrong).
Yesterday’s New York Times offered some good illustrations of two of the main problems with the reporting we now receive from what used to be called “newspapers.”
Not that the NYT isn’t still an excellent newspaper (as the word is now used), and possibly the best left in the country. But while cranking out some wonderful content and doing a better job than most in employing new technology constructively, it still prominently displays some of the worst habits of the medium today.
Before naming them, let me mention the one guiding principle that guided journalism in my day — that is, the late 20th century (and maybe the first few years of the next, but from 2006 on, everything was falling apart). We saw it as our job to inform the reader as much as we could as quickly as we could.
That meant telling the moderately interested reader everything he (or she) wanted to know about a story in the headline — and to tell a reader who couldn’t care less that this was not what he’d picked up the paper for. If you couldn’t do that in the headline, you did it in the first paragraph, the lede. By that time you had communicated the who, what, where, when and how, and maybe even a bit of why. The paragraphs after that were arranged in descending order of importance, in terms of the reader’s ability to understand what was going on. (Think “inverted pyramid.”)
This was based in respect for the busy reader. That respect is now gone, trashed, mutilated, completely irrelevant.
And so we have the present situation. The “murder of the inverted pyramid,” as one blogger has put it. I just ran across that after writing what I did above. Here’s what that writer said:
Once upon a time, when newspapers were both noble and strong, editors and publishers regarded readers’ time as very valuable. Editors and publishers understood that newspaper readers were trying to absorb as much information as possible in the least amount of time. They knew that most readers would not finish most stories. Readers would read until they had absorbed enough of a story to meet their needs, then they’d move on to another story, or move on with their day. Once upon a time, editors and publishers did not try to manipulate readers to rip off readers’ time and attention.
Indeed. Anyway, there are two maddening, insulting, stiff-arming ways that newspapers now play keep-away with the news, day after day, story after story:
The say-nothing headline. You know those little teasers that essentially say, We know something and you don’t, and you have to click just to start to get the tiniest hint of it. They tend to be shockingly frank about this, starting with such phrases as “What we know about…” and “What you need to know about…,” rather than telling you what you want to know.
The “live updates” structure. This is used on the biggest story of the day, and is usually played as the lede on a newspaper’s app or its main browser page. You know the form. You call it up, and the top item is the absolutely latest thing the reporting team (this tends to be on an “all-hands-on-deck” story) have learned. Which means the “story” leads with some low-interest detail that would have appeared in about the 20th graf of a normal, coherent news story — if at all. This is completely useless to a person who has a life, and therefore only a moment to learn about this subject. The only person who could benefit from it would be someone following every hiccup on this story since the instant that it broke — in other words, someone without a life, or someone who is somehow peripherally involved in the story. Everybody else is out of luck, and therefore uninformed, and so more likely, say, to vote for Donald Trump.
Whenever confronted with that second atrocity, if I really want to know the essentials, I look at a sidebar to the main story, and usually find something resembling a news lede within the first few grafs.
Anyway, to illustrate these phenomena, I offer you a big story out of New York from two days ago, as reported by, as I said, probably the best newspaper in the country.
It’s the shooting of three people in an office building on Park Avenue Tuesday evening….
And now, you are missing something you would no doubt find entertaining on a surveillance camera: my head is exploding. Because after starting this post yesterday and getting distracted, I’m going back to grab the screenshots I had saved yesterday to illustrate what I’m talking about. And they’re not on my iPad… or my phone… or my Mac. Well, one of them is… As for the others…
Since the image of the shooting story as it dominated the NYT app yesterday morning is gone, here’s a lesser example of it — the tariffs story currently at the top of the browser version of the Times:
You’ll see examples of what I’m talking about in the shooting case — the incoherent item labeled LIVE in red, and below it the sidebars, the related stories. It’s not a great example because it’s a calmer story; it hasn’t caused the paper to send every reporter all over Manhattan trying to discover what the hell is happening on the park. So it doesn’t lead with a breathless paragraph about the latest minor fact to slip out of a source during a press conference. It even has a nice lede-like summary at the top of it.
But it shows the typical layout. And here is the latest version of the “LIVE” story of the shooting, which now is much calmer than it was yesterday morning. But you see the pointless structure for anyone with limited time — the latest developments, rather than a summary of the important points.
Anyway, with the shooting story, I was more motivated than usual to get to the fundamental facts, because two of my grandchildren were staying with friends in Manhattan. Turning away from the mess in the NYT, I texted my daughter, their mother, who told me that their hosts lived a good distance away. That was reassuring. Not so reassuring was the fact that their daily routine up there took them right by where the shooting happened. But they were fine, thanks be to God.
Meanwhile, I had turned to the sidebars, in search of news. And I found a perfect illustration of the “say-nothing headline:”
After that, it was kind of like a real news story, except for being broken up by subheds into chunks, instead of rationally assembled in inverted pyramid. Subheds like “What happened?” and “Who were the victims?” and “Who was the gunman?” Note how the subheds also conform to the “say nothing” principle.
It was only by accident that later in the day, I happened to run across a real news story about the shooting, with a real headline, in The New York Times. I wasn’t looking for news. I had clicked on the “SECTIONS” link on my app, as a quick way to get to the opinion content
What’s that I see? A real news story?
Look, right there next to Gwyneth Paltrow! A headline! Not a “say nothing” headline, but one that actually relates the essentials! Here’s the story, so you can judge for yourself:
Presumably, lots of people had managed to find it, or else it wouldn’t have made the “Most Popular” category. But how? I had been looking at both the app and the browser version of the paper, and had seen not a hint of it — at least, not at the times I was looking. All I can guess is that people weren’t looking at the digital version of the “newspaper” at all, but coming in by direct links from social media.
Still, I was glad to see it. It was like discovering an old friend I had thought was dead. Of course, the headline was a bit long, because headline writers today are no longer restricted by limited space. I would have said something more like “Gunman kills four, self, in New York.” You could cram that into a one-column, three-deck format if necessary. It was good that they got the police officer in, though.
I was curious to see what they had done in the print version, under those restricted conditions, but I ran into another depressing fact about newspapers today. Here’s the front of that morning’s paper. If you click on that, don’t bother searching for the story; it isn’t there.
The shooting broke at 6:28 p.m. on Tuesday. But people who bought a paper the next morning wouldn’t see a word about it. That’s because putting out a print version is today an afterthought, something for those few doddering ancients (as opposed to with-it 71-year-old youths like me) who still demand a dead-tree paper. And, to save some of the ungodly cost of producing such a product (that insane $4 rack price doesn’t cover it, folks), the paper rolls off the presses at a stunningly early hour. (Maybe not “stunningly” to i, but to a guy who spent all those years working until 2 a.m. getting out the city edition containing the very latest, it’s unreal.)
(By the way, I currently subscribe to six newspapers, and read them all on my iPad. I’m not going to deal with frustration, not to mention expense, of having a hard copy delivered to my house, just so I can see what happened two days earlier.)
Anyway, as a postscript… of course, the story leads today’s print version. But it now has a second-day, or perhaps I should say third-day, headline. It was still worth four columns, giving more room than the usual one-column lede in the NYT.
Bottom line, as a reader who subscribes to six newspapers, I don’t think it’s too much to expect at least one of them to show me, at the top of its homepage, what I most want to know about the biggest news of the day. But that’s not what the business is about any more…
Baseball wasn’t just always there for me, it was always there for my family. That’s my grandfather squatting to the right in this picture. He had been the captain of the team at Washington and Lee, and after college he was always playing on multiple teams in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. He only worked for the Post Office so he could play on this team. You’ll notice that others on the team played for other teams as well — they wore the wrong uniforms on picture day, without the Post Office ‘P.O.’
When I was a kid, baseball was always there.
It didn’t matter my age or where I was. As a preschooler, I always had one of those skinny little wooden bats that were later outlawed by the worrywarts. I think it came with those old solid rubber balls that didn’t bounce much, but since my Dad was a tennis champion, there were always cans full of balls around the house that really traveled when you hit them. I loved that, although Ring Lardner, the enemy of the “lively ball,” would likely have harrumphed.
When we lived in Ecuador from the time I was 9 until I was 11 and a half, I missed out on a lot of critical time for developing basketball and American football skills (which I regretted when I started 7th grade back in this country, in New Orleans), but I didn’t lose ground on baseball. We played it — or at least softball, at recess — whenever were weren’t playing fútbol (which is what we used the school’s concrete basketball court for).
My one regret was that I didn’t get to play Little League (on account of my family always traveling during baseball season) until I was 15, my last year of eligibility for Senior Little League (in Tampa). And by that time, I just hadn’t had the practice trying to hit a ball that someone was deliberately trying to throw past me. The point of “pitching” in sandlot play had always been to let somebody hit the ball, and put it in play. I did manage on one occasion that year to break up a no-hitter in the fifth inning, with a solid base hit to the opposite field. I couldn’t have hit it to left or center, because the red-headed southpaw I was up against had the sort of fastball that nightmares are made of. But I got my single, and they took that pitcher out of the game. It was my one, brief moment of baseball glory.
After that, I stuck to slow-pitch softball — in college intramurals, with the Knights of Columbus team in Jackson, Tenn., and with the Cosmic Ha-Has, a self-deprecating name for the loosely organized team of journos from The State (mostly), sponsored by the now-defunct Mousetrap restaurant and bar. That was more my speed, in the literal sense.
Now, I’m at an age when I’m finally ready to enjoy my sport vicariously. I’m ready to watch the games on TV, the way my elders did when I was a kid. Back then, even though we seldom lived in a place with the three basic channels (and sometimes only one, and that barely visible), baseball was always on the tube. And it was free. But at that age, I considered it boring to watch other people play a game — I wanted to go out and play it myself. Oh, I watched it sometimes, but I wasted a lot of time not watching it, back when it was so easy to find. My parent, grandparents, uncles and such got full enjoyment from it, but I was probably out in the heat whacking at a tennis ball — or inside reading a book. I was a mixed-up kid, right?
And then I grew older, and started wanting to watch it all the time, and it was gone. Especially if you’re like me and long ago cut the cord to cable. (Not being a consumer of TV ‘news,” I had little use for live broadcasting, other than baseball, which was too seldom on offer). Suddenly, even if you still consider it the national pasttime (the pasttime of the country that I love, anyway) you could find no evidence of it by turning on the tube.
You’ve heard me complain about this multiple times on the blog, but not lately. Because now, I have access to more baseball that my elders ever dreamed of, and on a 4k color flat screen rather than a snowy black-and-white that only worked if someone (often me) stood outside turning the antenna atop the house back and forth.
It started late last August, when I saw a promo from MLB.TV offering to let me watch the rest of the season — meaning 10 or twelve Big League games a day, for $29. It seemed worth it, and it was, even though “season” didn’t include the playoffs and World Series — which was OK, because those actually get shown on other platforms that were free to me.
A few months later, I thought a couple of times whether I ought to go in and quit that subscription to keep from being charged for the following season, which I figured would be a LOT more than $29. But I sorta kinda forgot to do it, accidentally on purpose, and next thing I knew, I was informed that $149.99 had already been taken from my account by MLB. Which was bad news. But they also told me I now had access to the whole MLB 2025 season, which was great news. I then confessed to my wife, who is responsible for handling money in this house (on account of being married to a doofus who does things like that), about my failure to prevent it from happening. But as I hoped, she didn’t make me go demand the money back, probably because she knows how much I’ve missed baseball.
I also pointed out that $150 was a lot less than it cost us to see one game at Fenway in 2022. Two seats in the right-field bleachers for about $200. That was just to get in; I paid extra for the peanuts and Crackerjack, and the Polish sausage I had for dinner. But we got to watch the Sox beat the Yankees that night, and beat them soundly! And we had either Jackie Bradley Jr. or Aaron Judge playing right field right in front of us! So it was worth it. But not something we could do every day, or perhaps ever again. Whereas with the MLB deal, I see baseball every day. So, you know, we’re saving money. You see why I don’t handle the accounts?
Anyway, it was and is really great news.
It’s been wonderful. It really has. I’ve loved it, and there’s far more there than I can ever hope to watch. I feel blessed by that. So I just watch a few teams, as I can — the Red Sox, the Phillies, the Dodgers and the Yankees, mostly. What I don’t watch is the Braves, which a few years ago I would have said was my favorite. I don’t say that now because I’m so out of touch with them that I’m not sure that I can name or picture any current players.
Why, you wonder, have I turned away from the Braves? I haven’t. They’ve turned away from me. Or rather, the MLB has separated us. All of their games are blacked out. I thought that at first they were doing that because I live so close to the ballpark. It’s only an 80-hour walk from my house, after all, according to Google Maps. But it’s more complicated than that. MLB also blacks out other games occasionally, ones that I might really, really want to watch — like the Sox playing the Yankees.
But I’m still having a great time. Alas, this is the first of a pair of posts on the subject of baseball, and the other will be less cheery, with the headline beginning “The bad news…”
That’s partly because of a piece I read in the NYT by Joon Lee, headlined “$4,785. That’s How Much It Costs to Be a Sports Fan Now.” It’s not just about the money, or the blackouts. It’s also about how the new business model of professional sports has destroyed the sense of community across the country. In other words, Mr. Lee takes a communitarian approach, as I would. More on that in a day or so…
A picture from our expensive bleacher seats in right field at Fenway. We had a great time.
I haven’t posted much lately, but of course I feel compelled to say something about this.
But what should I say? I don’t feel qualified to express an opinion about it — yet. I might have in the past, but I’m hobbled by two things:
Donald Trump is president of the United States. He and Pete Hegseth are the main sources available right now as to what just happened, and I can’t trust a word either one says about it. When I say “can’t trust,” I’m not so much talking about lying — although we all know Trump does that almost each time he takes a breath. The thing is, he and Hegseth could be tellling the absolute and complete truth. And from everything I’ve seen, neither one of them understands what’s going on — especially not Trump (I don’t know Hegseth nearly as well).
Second, the way news is reported these days, it’s difficult to get a coherent picture of what has happened from major newspapers. A few years ago, those papers spent the hours before their daily deadline distilling all that was known into a single, coherent story arranged with all the key information in the first paragraph (the lede). You read the first few grafs of a story back then, and you had a pretty decent idea of what had happened. Now, whenever something big happens, you get these moment-to-moment update strings, such as this one and this one. You have to read every update from the last to the first (sometimes stretching over 24 hours) to get anything like a handle on the story, and even then it’s difficult. When something of moderate importance happens, you still get the one, coherent story — with new ledes added as necessary. With the big stories, such as this, newspapers are little help, because you get the “updates” string instead. They no longer focus on helping readers understand; they’re too busy making sure they throw out the latest factoid.
So… that means I turn to the journalists who still write in the old style — and that means opinion writers. Of course, since I know who they are, I look for the ones I know are trustworthy — again, not so much in terms of not being liars (although, of course, that’s a prerequisite), but because they have consistently displayed deep understanding of such matters in the past.
Unfortunately, not many have weighed in yet. For the moment, I recommend checking out Nicholas Kristof (“The Three Unknowns After the U.S. Strike on Iran“) and Max Boot (“Iran badly miscalculated. Now it’s paying the price.“). And while he’s not one of my trustee regular voices, you might want to read this piece (“Why Israel Had to Act“) by Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence. It was written before the U.S. joined in, but I still learned some things from it that help me understand Max Boot’s points.
That’s of course assuming you can read them. If you can’t and you want to, I can try to give you “gift” links. (I’ve tried in the past to share those with you, but I haven’t gotten enough feedback on them to be sure whether they even work when sent to more than one person.)
So I’m waiting to read a lot more, from smart people who’ve been following all this far, far more closely than I have.
But I should say something, right? But all I have now is random, chaotic, piecemeal reactions — which is probably what you’ve seen elsewhere at this point, whether those offering such reactions tell you that or not (especially if you’re someone who forms your impressions of such events by watching television, God help us).
So here you go:
I’m very, very worried. Smart leaders (pretty much everyone who’s been in relevant office before Trump was elected) have avoided war with Iran for very good reasons. One of the biggest is something Kristof mentions: By and large, the Iranian public is quite pro-U.S. What they need is new leaders, if they can manage to get them. And the fastest way to turn them against us is military action. That change in Iran public opinion would be disastrous.
That said, it is indeed essential to make sure that Iran, whose current leaders hate the U.S. almost as much as they do Israel, does not obtain nuclear weapons. If you look at that and only that, these U.S. strikes are good news — if they were effective, by which I mean they set Iranian nuclear efforts back many years without killing civilians. That’s a big “if.”
The one thing that makes me tentatively optimistic (and only slightly) on that last point is that Iran can’t hide facilities essential to its own Manhattan Project in tunnels under civilian dwellings, hospitals and schools — they way we know its ally Hamas does. At least, I don’t think so. But I don’t know that.
As much as I may search for reasons not to be terrified at this point, I know that even if all the steps taken up to this point by Trump and Netanyahu (and there’s a fragile liferaft to cling to), have been wise and correct, I know that Trump, at least, is capable of turning in another direction in a split-second, prompted by something as idiotic as a social media post he doesn’t like.
That’s the situation that a majority of U.S. voters put us in on Nov. 5, 2024. And the only recommendation I have for dealing with that is to pray. If you don’t know how to do that, it’s past time to learn…
I ran across this (slightly poorly cropped) photo of the reaction of Chicago’s two newspapers. I only ever worked at papers that took the Tribune’s approach — proper, sober, respectful, matter-of-fact. A bit of local pride expressed, but cool about it.
And that’s still the way for me.
But I got a kick out of The Sun-Times approach.
Too bad Chris Farley is no longer with us. SNL could have had some fun with the news. “Da Bears!”…
That’s a depressing thing I listened to on Tuesday, a thing that told me that after almost a decade (80 percent is “almost,” right? or at least almost almost) of setting an example for us all, Gail Collins and Bret Stephens were going to stop doing their weekly Conversation feature in The New York Times.
You’ve heard me praise it before. Here’s one example of the hagiography I’ve heaped upon it.
But if you’ve somehow missed it, here’s a brief explanation of what it was (you can read a longer one at that last link above): A weekly demonstration of how intelligent, civilized people discuss things about which they disagree.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but such things are rare as hen’s teeth. Encountering such a feature is like finding a flawless diamond buried in a trash heap — the trash heap that is current political discourse in America.
Our world in the Year of Our Lord 2025 is desperately short of intelligent people (or at least, they’re very quiet and hard to find). And almost no one has any idea how to engage in civil discourse. So when you find two people who possess both those qualities demonstrating an exercise in the amicable, mutually respectful exchange of ideas, you’ve found a seam of gold.
And folks, this is not just about being nice to one’s neighbor, although in truth there’s nothing finer than that. This sort of sharing of thoughts is a necessity in this country — or at least it was, when the system our Framers gave us was functioning.
Ours is a deliberative form of government. For it to work, people with different ideas have to listen to each other, and learn from each other, so that they can come up with solutions that may thrill no one, but that address the issue before them effectively, and in a way that makes the country better.
The way this system is made to function, it is the precise opposite of tribalism. It is the opposite of huddling into groups, and never speaking to people in other groups except to tell them how much you despise them.
I started this blog long ago to provide a place where people could come together and converse in the way Bret Stephens and Gail Collins have been doing these last few years. You may think that was overly ambitious, or at least overly hopeful, of me. But not really. When I started in 2005, such things were still possible, and we had a lot of really good exchanges. Oh, there were a few people who came to win battles, to demonstrate how much smarter they were than everyone else, or simply to shout insults.
But most participants weren’t like that. It was normal for a post to have 100 comments, or 200, or even 300 on rare occasions. I was startled when I realized that I was getting more comments in a day than The State got letters in a week.
At first, the trolls were very few, and I simply ignored them. But then, some of the very best commenters — the ones most like Gail and Bret — started falling away. Frequently, they would say that what caused them to quit was the rising tide of negativity. And we were starting to get more. So I tried various approaches to a civility policy. But the tide just grew higher. Something quite corrosive was destroying the collective American mind. And now, we live in a country and a world that is shockingly different from what we had in 2005.
I got discouraged myself, and eventually spent less and less time here. The days when I quite normally posted 10 times and more are long gone, and hard to imagine now. I’ve posted a couple of times this week, but it’s been a few days since I’ve glanced at the pending comments, and I see that there are 18 of them (what a sad harvest after the 300 a day of years gone by!). I know that a number of them will be of the unpleasant sort. Hear me when I say that I will not approve any of those. If they don’t show at least a hint of the attitude I find in one of those NYT Conversations, they’re gone.
As for Collins and Stephens themselves, what’s their excuse for stopping this constructive collaboration? They’re not discouraged. So why? Well, it’s the usual answer we get when favorite columnists go away for awhile — they’re writing books! Well, these are fine folks, and I’m sure these will be fine books.
But I don’t see how they’ll do the country nearly as much good as The Conversation…
Lately, I’ve heard it said a couple of times on NYT Audio that their content — or some of their content — is free to nonsubscribers.
It might just be the blogs, like “Matter of Opinion,” and “The Ezra Klein Show.” I’m wondering whether it might also apply to the newspaper’s other content (like The Daily and Headlines), and to some of the stuff they carry from other publications, such as The New Yorker.
This matters to me because so much of what I read and hear — and would like to share with you, so we can have a fully informed conversation about the things I’m thinking about. Which is, you know, what a blog is about — unless I just cut off comments and write a “personal journal” that I simply allow others to read. Or not. Which I’ve thought about.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that I include quotes to an extent that some might say goes beyond Fair Use (I would not say that, but we all have our own views, don’t we?), too often the conversations don’t go any deeper than the headlines, which means they don’t go beyond the usual conversations people have about politics or culture or anything in this social media age. And every statement is drawn directly from the current talking points from the two sides — the only two sides too many people perceive.
And if we don’t get beyond that, there’s little point to blogging.
So… let’s see if this works. Here are links to some recent items from NYT Audio. I initially tried to give you something from each category — blogs, opinion and news content from the paper (some read by the writers, some by ersatz voices), and some from other sources.
I’ve also tried to share a variety of topics. But after the first two or three, I ran into a bit of a challenge. Read on:
OK, that was more complicated than I thought. I couldn’t even find links to most of the dozen or so items I wanted you to listen to. And I’m pretty sure that the last of those three goes to the text content, not the audio. NYT Audio doesn’t give, on the app, direct URLs to specific content. So I was trying to grab those from the browser on my Mac. And even then, I couldn’t find links to outside content that appears on the app, such as The New Yorker and Foreign Policy.
Bottom line: You may have to download the app onto your phone or other device. It’s obvious they want everyone to do that. It’s worth the effort if they give you free access, because there’s good stuff there on a wide ranged of topics and interests. Here’s where you download it.
You would be rewarded by being able to listen to some of these other pieces I was originally going to link to here:
Carlos Lozada: Stop Pretending Trump is not Who We Are
The New Yorker: The Improbably Rise of JD Vance
The Culture Desk: Why Was 1999 the Best Movie Year (No, that’s not a typo; the second 9 wasn’t supposed to be a 3. But as silly as the proposition sounds, it’s an interesting listen while walking.)
NYT Interview: Al Pacino is Still Going Big
Foreign Policy: What a U.K. Labour Win Means for the Global Left
Hard Fork: Apple Joins the A.I. Party, Elon’s Wild Week and HatGPT
The Daily: A Conversation with President Zelensky
Or maybe you’d be thus rewarded. I can’t tell from my end, since they recognized me as a subscriber. But still, if you have any success with anything I’ve offered above, please let me know. I’d really like this blog to feature deeper and more intelligent discussions about … whatever the subject at hand might be… than are likely to be fueled by free media…
From the bottom of page one of The Boston Globe today.
I dunno if it’s “historic,” though. That’s one of the more overused words we see in headlines these days, although not as overused as “iconic,” of course.
But it’s pretty fascinating. And nice work by the photog. Makes it looks like he’s magically changing uniforms in the middle of the same swing. Cool.
As history — well, it’s one for the record books, all right. But as history, it’s only maybe slightly bigger than Moonlight Graham’s major league career consisting of a brief appearance in one game in 1905. Which was interesting enough to appear in Ray Kinella’s book, and the movie based on it.
And I found today’s picture interesting enough to share…
As we approached JFK on our return, I wondered why a guy can’t take a little time off from the madness down there…
What, a guy can’t go spend two or three weeks traveling abroad without the whole country going stark, raving mad behind his back?
Apparently not.
I’ll write about the trip later. I’d rather write about that, because the topic is more pleasant, and it interests me more. But this is sorta kinda a political blog, or was. Frankly, I’m less and less interested in that stuff every day, because politics has gotten so insufferably stupid. But most of the craziness back in the States had to do with presidential politics, and that seems to be all that occupies the country’s collective hivemind in years bearing numbers that can be divided into whole numbers by four — no matter what’s going on in Ukraine, or Israel, or China. Or Venezuela, for that matter.
So let me try to get it all out of the way, and once we’re caught up, we’ll move on to other matters.
Oh, one other thing — the years numbered as I described are also known as “Olympiads.” And that was going on, too, during our travels. I was reminded vaguely of it when we turned on a TV in our waterfront room in Calais (I think that was the only time we touched a boob tube during the trip), and saw apparently unending coverage of some event having to do with the Olympics. The arrival of the torch in Paris or something. Huge crowds in the streets and uninteresting popular music performed on an outdoor stage. Which, we recalled, was why we had decided to avoid Paris on this trip. (I mean because of the crowds, not so much the blah pop music.)
“La grand soiree” goes on and on about “la flamme olympique.” Which was why we were avoiding Paris…
But onto the politics. Now mind you, we’re not talking “politics” as the word was used during the first 60 or so years of my life. You know, relatively sane candidates vying seriously for serious offices by offering their credentials and their character to a discerning electorate. It’s a far weirder thing now. But you know that already. Social media, and all that. So on with it…
Trump weirdness goes into overdrive
Let’s take it in chronological order. Nothing back home intruded upon my vacationing consciousness while we were in London. But then in Canterbury, just as I we were trying to drop off to sleep (it being five hours later than here), the news popped that someone had taken a shot at Donald Trump, clipping his right ear. Which, you know, was like all we needed. I turned off audible notifications on my phone and iPad, and being extremely tired — as tired as if we’d walked all the way there with Chaucer’s pilgrims — went to sleep.
That didn’t mean it would leave me alone over the next couple of days. I kept seeing this kind of stuff:
I found out that kid with the rifle, who couldn’t hit his target squarely despite being given minutes to aim in an ideal sniper’s position — but tragically managed to kill an innocent bystander, and seriously wound others — was also dead himself. I guess that’s the way it goes with deadly weapons fired from four to five hundred feet by someone who never received Marine training….
Oh, hang on — don’t get the impression I wanted him to kill Trump. No way. Total nightmare scenario, that. Worst thing that could have happened. Things went plenty crazy enough without that. Meanwhile, we were hearing how much the whole thing would help Trump get elected. Which I suppose we should expect, since “sympathy voting” is an old tradition. Voters in general are easily swayed by emotion, that goes especially for voters who might be susceptible to voting for this guy.
Where we were, the usual response tended to be “those crazy Americans and their guns,” from a column my wife read in Le Monde to the African Uber driver who took us across Amsterdam several days later. (We’d left England, and were not subjected to The Guardian, which adores that line of discussion.) We could ignore Le Monde (I could especially, since I don’t do Paris talk), but we felt we had to be polite to the driver — he was a very nice, intelligent guy — so we said things like, “Yes, you have a point, and it’s hard to explain, and no one knows what to do about it,” while thinking, Can we talk about windmills or something?…
That mass of crazy sort of blotted out our awareness of the GOP Convention over the next few days, although at one point I did stop to think, wasn’t he supposed to be sentenced by now? Wasn’t the sentencing date just before the convention? I even looked that up briefly, and saw an explanation having something to do with the recent Supreme Court decision, which made no sense, and I moved on. Fortunately, I had lots to distract me…
Wow, this post is taking some time, innit? That’s why I hadn’t written it yet. But to move on…
Joe drops out
Well, I had sort of expected this to happen before I got back. The pressure bearing down on my main man Joe, no matter what he did or said, was reaching a level that no one could withstand. Not even the kind of guy who would step up to save his country — and knew how — despite being at an age when he had served enough, and richly deserved to stay at home and enjoy his grandchildren.
But people weren’t interested in that anymore, if they ever had been. They were too busy twitching in response to things that mattered more to them than the unavoidable fact that a qualified alternative hadn’t emerged in 2024 any more than it did in 2020. And Kamala Harris, who would be the obvious replacement at this date, had been about halfway back in that pack of 2020 also-rans, in terms of qualification for our highest office.
Y’all know very well what my position was: The country, and the world, needed him to stay in office. Not that it would have been good for him — it was the worst possible thing for him personally, and I’ve felt guilty for years for my willingness to exploit his willingness to put himself through it. But Americans, and the rest of the world, needed him to keep his hand on the tiller. Because there was no one else.
It might help you to understand my long-held position if you reflect that my mind doesn’t center around such questions as “Who can win the election?” For me, the question was “Who should win the election?” Of course, you need someone who both should, and can. That’s the trick, and Joe knows it as well as anyone. Which was why he dropped out.
Which means we now ask ourselves other questions… but I’m going to have to take a break and do some paying work, or none will get done today. I’ll try to get back and finish this before the day is over, because I really want to put this stuff in my rear-view mirror…
…OK, I’m back, and now I want to correct what I just said. We don’t need to ask ourselves any questions at all, old or new. The world may be nuts now, but it’s a lot simpler.
Now, the choice is between Donald Trump and… somebody else. Kamala Harris, with close to zero experience that applies to the job of president, is a bit of an unknown quantity. But that’s OK, because it clearly brings us to a simple point. I’ve often said that anyone would be better than Donald Trump. Kamala Harris doesn’t quite qualify as “someone chosen at random off the street,” but she shares a characteristic with that person — I don’t know anything bad about her. She’s basically a neutral character in this situation.
Well, I do know one bad thing — the way she stabbed Joe in the back in that first debate in 2020. Major cheap shot. But Joe forgave her, so I feel obliged to do the same.
So, no bad things (maybe you know some bad things about her, but I don’t). And she’s running against a guy with more bad qualities than anyone who has ever reached this point in American politics.
So there’s nothing to think about. You vote for Kamala, and you hope she keeps Joe’s team in place — people like Anthony Blinken and Merrill Garland. People who know the job. That way, there’s a chance for things to be OK.
Whereas, with the other guy, nothing — at home or abroad, on any level — will be OK.
So there’s not a lot to discuss. Vote for Kamala.
To be more encouraging…
That’s not sounding like a really enthusiastic endorsement, I realize. Let me try to offer something better.
Back before we headed to London, some smart, thoughtful people — not just the freakout crowd, or the people who never liked Joe anyway, like the Bernie Bros and the editorial board of the NYT — were starting to suggest that maybe someone else could take Joe’s place, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Sometime way back on July 5 — a few days before we left the country — he did a podcast titled, “Is Kamala Harris Underrated?” This being based on the assumption among smart, thoughtful observers that she hadn’t shown us much yet. But he suggested that now that we’re in this fix of the abundantly qualified and accomplished incumbent’s numbers plummeting, maybe she possessed qualities that made her better than we thought. Among other things, he said:
There are ways in which Harris seems perfectly suited for this moment. She’s a former prosecutor who would be running against a convicted criminal. She’s the administration’s best messenger on abortion by far, running in the aftermath of Dobbs. She’s a Black woman with a tough on crime background, running at a moment when crime and disorder have been big issues in American politics.
And unlike Joe Biden, who I think has very little room to improve from here, the American people don’t really know Harris. The opportunity for her to make a different impression if she was speaking for herself, rather than for the administration, is real. Now, that doesn’t mean she’d be able to pull that off. That’s a hard political job. But she’s a lot sharper in interviews and debates than I think people are now prepared for.
She has a résumé and some skills quite well-suited to this moment. It definitely doesn’t seem impossible that she could rise to the task. There is a reason she was considered so strong in 2019 and in 2020. Wouldn’t you want to see her debate Donald Trump?…
OK, that’s not a really ringing endorsement, either. But he said enough good things — or at least potentially good things — about her that I felt a little better about the situation as we prepared to take off. I felt like Joe might not be running when I got back, and I was glad I was going to miss those last days before that happened. And Klein made me feel like maybe things would be OK. At least, after January, Joe will finally get the time off that he has so richly earned. (About time he had a little Joe time.)
And so far, they have been pretty OK. She seems to have done OK with her first big test — picking a running mate. I’ll probably write more on that subject in coming days.
But I don’t think I’ll be writing as much about the presidential election as I might have otherwise. Maybe because it’s all so simple now. We’ll see. In any case, I look forward to writing about other things. And now that I’ve dealt with this stuff, I can go on and do that.
I don’t think it will be another month before you hear from me…
I’ll come back soon to tell you about our trip. Until then, enjoy the flowers…
Today I saw part of an old Jon Stewart video that had a couple of sharp bits, and it reminded me there was something I wanted to share with you a week or so ago…
It’s the video above, commenting on the idiotic spectacle of the breathless coverage of the first Trump criminal trial — before it started.
This is another one of those things that is a major flaw in today’s news media — particularly TV, which is what brought the term “media” into being. (Before, it was just “the press” — if you conveniently ignored radio.”)
This kind of nonsense is TV’s stock in trade. Not that the press isn’t frequently guilty of much the same. It just looks stupider, and more obvious, on TV.
Things have been like this since… the late ’90s, by my memory. In this instance, Stewart compares the breathless — and I mean gasping — coverage of nothing (occasionally elevated by “pretty much nothing”) to an “event” of that decade. I mean the O.J. Simpson Bronco episode. Stewart says the video image of Trump’s motorcade driving to the courthouse was no O.J. chase. (I forget exactly how he said it and don’t want to watch the whole thing again — this is why I should post these things right when I see them.) Well, the O.J. chase was no “chase,” and was in fact nothing even remotely interesting, beyond the fact that a celebrity was involved. If you care about that sort of thing. Which a shockingly large number of people do, alas.
I remember, in real time, the people who stood watching the stunningly meaningless O.J. scene with their mouths hanging open. My mouth was hanging open too, observing them, the watchers.
At this point I could go off on a long tirade about how this was caused by 24/7 cable “news.” TV news, like traditional press, used to cover news. But there’s not enough news to fill 24 hours. So ya gotta love a slow car chase, right?
But the breathlessness of it all owes something to another TV form — the “reality” genre. I wouldn’t mind people having talent shows, although I probably wouldn’t watch. What I mind is all the garbage between the performances — the dramatic, and yes, breathless, with the participants and those who love them, droning on about how this competition is the most important thing that has ever happened to this person, or ever will happen. In fact, NOTHING has ever been so critical, in the history of the world!
Or do I have it backwards? Does this style of “news coverage” get its breathlessness from reality TV, or was reality TV simply aping the approach of the “news coverage?” I dunno. I suppose they feed off each other.
In any case, it was a good, funny piece about a serious problem in the way we communicate today.
OK, I’m going to conduct an experiment here. Please help me out.
The last couple of weeks, E.J. Dionne has had two really excellent columns. There’s nothing unusual about that. But there’s something new — or something that I hadn’t previously noticed — about them. Here’s the first:
In 2024, Joe Biden is the conservative & the progressive. He’s trying to preserve our institutions against Trump’s onslaught & is the most progressive president since the Reagan Era. He needs to show that safety & progress go together
My column free access https://t.co/LQ2hCrwi50
Did you see that at the end of the tweet — “my column free access?” I’m asking y’all to try to link and read the column, and let me know if you’re able to do so without being a subscriber. Then, leave your thoughts on the column.
I loved the piece, because E.J. is getting to the heart of my great appreciation of Joe Biden. Because I am both liberal and conservative myself, I see Joe as the only hope left to the country. We had plenty of such people to choose from in the decades after 1945. And we needed them. We need them more than ever now. But now there’s just Joe.
But E.J.’s piece also shames me a bit. I say the same things he’s saying here all the time, but I tend to present them as truth without the careful documentation and explanation. This is possibly because I grow weary of repeatedly explaining how I arrive at conclusions that have taken seven decades of thought and observation to reach. And people shrug it off, because they think it’s just the ranting of an alter cocker.
But I guess it’s also because I don’t get paid anymore to put in the time to dig up all the evidence supporting conclusions I reached long ago. So I don’t. Too much time spent doing what little I do to make a modest living. And doing it around those naps that are the residue of my stroke in 2000. I can do all the things I used to do, but I have less time in which to do them.
In any case, I’m very appreciative to E.J. for taking the time to explain it to his readers, especially since I know he’s busier than I am.
Now, the other column, which features the same “free access:”
Trump’s immunity claim tells us all we need to know about him. He’s saying what no other candidate has ever said: That the only way to be effective is to be willing to break the law—that it takes a criminal to be a good president.
My column, free access https://t.co/MRvqzDBspb
First, again, please let me know if you can read it. Beyond that…
Another good piece. There are, of course, many things that, considered alone, tell us “all we need to know about him.” You could compile a lengthy list of things that, considered singly, should cause any voter to run the opposite way. But this should be, if not the top item, at least very close to it.
Anyway, I wanted to share these columns because they’re important, and I’m thinking E.J. gets these points across batter than I do.
Beyond that, though, I really want to know whether those links work for nonsubscribers.
This is one of the things that concerns me most about blogging these days. To me, almost everything worth discussing these days is from things I subscribe to. This was fine 10 or 15 years ago, before everybody got so serious about pay walls. Now, it’s a huge problem — I bring up something, and I want everyone to read it so we can have a discussion with everyone fully informed, but most people can’t open it. Because normal people don’t subscribe to four or five newspapers.
So when I get a chance to share, I seize it. But please let me know if it worked for you…
First, while I was working out on the elliptical right after getting up, I watched the above video for about the hundredth time, and once again thoroughly enjoyed it.
Then, going through my email just now, I found one from The New York Times, with the subject line “Opinion Today: How the deep state works for you.”
It Turns Out the ‘Deep State’
Is Actually Kind of Awesome
As America closes in on a major election, mistrust is brewing around the mysterious government entity that’s now denounced in scary-sounding terms — “the deep state” and “the swamp.” What do those words even mean? Who exactly do they describe?
We went on a road trip to find out. As we met the Americans who are being dismissed as public enemies, we discovered that they are … us. They like Taylor Swift. They dance bachata. They go to bed at night watching “Star Trek” reruns. They go to work and do their jobs: saving us from Armageddon.
Sure, our tax dollars pay them, but as you’ll see in the video above, what a return on our investment we get!…
I haven’t watched the accompanying video, because I don’t need to. I already know what this piece is trying to communicate to me. These are things I’ve known all my life, which is why I’ve watched in horror as the absurdly childish hostility to government has spread like a plague through our society, and is now threatening to end our republic.
Some people seem to need to have these things explained. And this writer is trying hard to explain it as simply as possible, with such pop-culture silliness as “They like Taylor Swift.” Personally, I think this next paragraph says it a bit better:
When we hear “deep state,” instead of recoiling, we should rally. We should think about the workers otherwise known as our public servants, the everyday superheroes who wake up ready to dedicate their careers and their lives to serving us. These are the Americans we employ. Even though their work is often invisible, it makes our lives better….
This reminds me of a regular feature that I inherited when I arrived at The State in 1987. As governmental affairs editor, aside from daily political and government coverage, I had the duty of filling a full page every week in the Sunday viewpoint section. One of the features we ran there each Sunday was something we internally called “Bureaucrat of the Week.” Nobody liked writing this feature — it took them away from keeping up with their own beats — and we spread the pain across the newsroom, beyond that team that actually worked directly for me. The reporter on the schedule for that week would have to go out and find a state employee — preferably one with a job different from others recently featured — who was willing to be profiled in this way.
I liked the idea behind it — let people know what these unsung folks are doing for you. But I thought it was unnecessary. Sure, we’d had several years of Ronald Reagan fanning the embers of anti-government sentiment, but the flames weren’t all that high yet, and I still assumed most grownups understood that their taxes paid for people to do things that were pretty essential to living in a tolerable civilization.
I later realized I was wrong in giving the average voter out there that much credit. That was a good feature. We should have done a lot more of that sort of thing. A few years later, a lot of us realized that, which is where things like “public journalism” came from. That generated a lot of seminar discussions, but not a lot of effective work — probably because even the advocates of the movement didn’t really understand the problem.
The problem was that it was the nature of news people to report what’s wrong. You had to tell people about the airliner that crashed. You didn’t have to tell people about the thousands that did not crash. Apply that principle to covering government, and every day, newspapers were giving people the very strong impression that everybody in government was embezzling, or lying about his resume, or doing something else nasty. Journalists knew better, because every day they dealt with the thousands of honest people in government who were dedicated to public service. Trouble is, they weren’ making news.
And we would never have the resources to cover them the way we covered the scoundrels. (No news organization that ever existed had the people and time to cover all the planes that land safely.) And we also knew people wouldn’t read it if we did. And somehow the less-thoughtful readers — never got the obvious point that we were telling them about the crooks because their behavior was a shocking departure from the norm. So we have the mess we have today.
But I digress. I just thought I’d share the fun video from Monty Python pointing to the absurdity of the kinds of people who go about ranting about things like, well, the “Deep State”…
I’ve been wondering what to think about all the hullabaloo over the Princess of Wales and her picture. You know what I mean:
Why haven’t we seen Kate? Is she dying? Has her beauty been marred by her illness? Why did the Palace release a doctored picture? Why did Kate say she was the one who doctored it? Was she covering up for somebody? Who really did it and why? Why haven’t we seen the unedited version? When was the original taken? Couldn’t she just lay this all to rest by making a public appearance? Yadda-yadda…
And in her case, I find myself wondering why people don’t just chill. Of course, maybe they will chill now, with the release of that video. But why didn’t they do so earlier?
I mean, what is the legitimate public interest in her health status and how she’s looking at the moment? She’s not a public official. She’s not ever going to be the monarch, although she’s married to someone who will, and is the mother of someone who will, assuming the monarchy lasts that long. And even if she were going to be the monarch someday, what does that mean, in terms of modern expectations of transparency? The main duty of a modern British monarch is to make sure that he or she has no effect on public policy. Any member of Parliament has a greater effect upon the lives of average British subjects. And even if she were going to be the monarch someday, she’s not the monarch now.
So how does anyone feel they have the right to intrude on her health problems, assuming she’s still having them. What’s at stake to the public?
On the other hand (and this is why I’m still pondering it), the whole reason folks are interested is that this young woman married the heir apparent and has born his children, thereby willingly adopting a huge public role, however we might argue about where the limits of that public interest should lie.
So there’s that question. Another has come up, in my reading of The Boston Globe.
The governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, tooka four-day trip out of state last month. During that trip, her executive powers constitutionally shifted to the Massachusetts secretary of state.
Despite transparency promises when she ran for the office, she has resolutely refused to share any information about that trip. From the Globe yesterday:
The first-term Democrat told reporters Monday that she intends to share information publicly about her “work-related travel.” But she suggested that even basic details about personal trips, like the one she took in mid-February, will not be disclosed — breaking from her predecessors and further narrowing the scope of what information Healey says she’s willing to make public, and when.
“My personal life is my personal life,” Healey said at theState House on Monday. “I’m going to work to make sure that privacy is maintained for my family.”
At least superficially, this seems creepily familiar to us South Carolinians — but at least she didn’t tell her staff to tell folks she was hiking the Appalachian Trail. And of course there was no wildly oversharing public confession when she returned, for which the people of Massachusetts should be grateful.
So… should she be allowed to make a distinction between private and public when reporting her whereabouts? I’m inclined to say yes, if she draws the line in the right place. Which means, since you don’t know whether she’s done that or not, you have to decide whether you trust her, based on everything else you’ve seen and heard from her.
Of course, you only have a reason to do that if you’re a Massachusetts voter. It’s none of our business down here. Maura Healey has zero obligation to me. But I do find the issue intriguing, in the abstract, from afar…
If you’d come today
You could have reached a whole nation
Israel in 4 BC
Had no mass communication…
— Jesus Christ Superstar
After persusing the various papers I subscribe to this morning, and finding little to engage my interest, I turned to my daily (well, most days) Bible readings for the day, and this was in the Gospel:
“If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true.
But there is another who testifies on my behalf,
and I know that the testimony he gives on my behalf is true.
You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth.
I do not accept human testimony,
but I say this so that you may be saved.
He was a burning and shining lamp,
and for a while you were content to rejoice in his light.
But I have testimony greater than John’s….
And it occurred to me that it would be great to know a lot more than we do about John the Baptist. We know he was this highly countercultural dude who lived in the wilderness and wore camel fur and ate locusts and honey. And he baptized people, most famously Jesus himself. And he came to a horrible end on this Earth.
But that isn’t enough to fully explain how big a deal he was in his day. Or apparently was, anyway. To a lot of people who lived in that place and time, it seems like he was even a bigger deal than Jesus for awhile. I infer that from the fact that so often in the New Testament, Jesus is explained to people in terms of his relationship to John. There seems to be an assumption at times that the writer of the Gospel or epistle knows people knew about John, and uses him as a launching point. For instance, The Gospel of Mark starts with John.
It would be great to be able to read a biography of John that’s as in-depth and detailed as a modern book such as Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, or David McCullogh’s John Adams, or Edmund Morris’ Theodore Rex. And then go from there to fully grasping the foundation of Christianity.
But we can’t. The sources just don’t exist. And not just about John, but about any historical figure from before, say, Gutenberg came along. In fact, we should be grateful that we have more info on John that we do a lot of the more obscure Roman emperors.
Still, to a modern person, it’s frustrating. So we can all dig Judas’ complaint in “Superstar,” about Israel in 4 B.C. having no mass communication. Or even a printing press.
But you know what? That’s what makes Jesus more impressive. You don’t have to be a believer to grasp how awesome his achievement was. This rabbi from the boondocks took a local religion that was only embraced by this one tribe on the borders of an ancient empire, and made it into the dominant faith of the world (yes, Islam is big, but…). And he did it with word of mouth, for the first generation. That, and a few letters written by others.
Which, to me, is exactly the way God would do it. It’s more impressive (and certainly more dignified) than building a rep on “American Idol” and inspiring a billion tweets.
It’s sort of like the way I view evolution. I shake my head at all the arguments between creationists and Darwinists. Of COURSE evolution (and geology and cosmology and all that other stuff) is the way God would make the world. The abracadabra opening of Genesis is a great way to tell an allegory, but come on, people. Look at the sheer, gradual majesty of doing it through subtle changes over billions of years.
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking while doing today’s readings…
St. John the Baptist Preaching, c. 1665, by Mattia Preti
I used Twitter a couple of days ago to bring this to the attention of the two biggest Patrick O’Brian fans I know — our own Bryan Caskey and my old friend and colleague Mike Fitts (who got me interested in the books to start with). And they politely gave me a “like,” which I appreciate.
I thought I’d post it here as well for anyone else who’s been to Boston and checked out this attraction — I know you have, Bud!
I enjoyed seeing it myself so much — how could I not, since it’s the oldest ship still commisstioned in the U.S. Navy, the Service in which I grew up — that on the one day that my wife’s unfortunate back problem prevented her from sightseeing with me, I went back to see it for the second time in three days. That first day had been glorious — we both went aboard with our twin granddaughters, and that night we went to Fenway to watch the Red Sox beat the Yankees! Boston doesn’t get better than that.
And if I lived in Boston, I’d probably go see the Constitution every week or so. (It’s a lot more affordable than ballgames at Fenway — I’d have to save that for special occasions.)
Y’all know I’m really into military history and as historical sites go, Old Ironsides can’t be beat. She’s alive! She’s still afloat! After seeing her that second time, I hiked up through Charlestown from the Navy Yahd to check out the Bunker Hill site. That was nice, and I learned things from it, but nothing compared to walking the living deck of one of America’s original Six Frigates.
Months after we’d been there, I found myself again rereading The Fortune of War, and really got a kick out of being reminded that USS Constitution was the ship that captured Jack and Stephen when it took HMS Java, and transported them to Boston as prisoners. There are several pages in which they walk the decks — and so did I!
This is just me griping about media again, like in the last post. This one is about headlines.
I’ve been enjoying my NYT Audio app, but some content is better than others. And today, I’m ticked because earlier this week, I found something that sounded intriguing, headlined “Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?”
Well, that grabbed me. Especially since I’m a longtime (since my teens) fan of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which begins:
So yeah, I wanted to know the answer to the question. Was Heinlein right that “the greatest danger to man was man himself?” And could that challenge be overcome? SPOILER: All that work to build a compatable crew didn’t work out so well in the story.
But would it work better in real life? This NYT Magazine story was heavily hinting that somewhere in its thousands of words, there would be an answer to the question. So, even though it would take 43 minutes and 45 seconds, I thought it would be worth the listen.
It wasn’t. I mean, I was on a long walk, and it was interesting and passed the time. But no answer. Yet I kept expecting it, even when, at the beginning, it went into this long examination of how two people who had applied to be “crew” members felt about being chosen for the experiment. (I put “crew” in quotes because they’re just going to be locked up together here on Earth to see how they deal with it.)
They were excited, by the way. But torn about being away from loved ones for more than a year. There. Now, you can skip the first 30 or 40 minutes. Then, at the very end, one of the two excited folks gets cut from the program and replaced just before the experiment begins. She is devastated.
She goes home, and watches the beginning of the mission on TV, and starts trying to get over her disappointment. Which she gradually starts to do. The last sentence of the story is:
Then she baked a whole-wheat sourdough pizza, and she and Jake ate it, together.
Really. That was it. I think I yelled “WHAT?!?” as I walked down the street. Not a hint of an answer to the question posed in the headline.
Admittedly, the experiment isn’t over. The people went into the biodome thingy back in June, and they have months to go yet. But how about an update? How are they doing? Anybody crack up yet? I searched and found a progress report on the NASA site, and this was the most exciting paragraph in the post:
Over the past 200 days, the crew grew and harvested its first crops grown inside the 1,700-square-foot habitat, including tomatoes, peppers, and leafy greens, participated in a host of simulated “Marswalks” with relevant time delay, tempo, and activities consistent with future Mars mission concepts, and took part in science investigations in biological and physical sciences…”
No word on whether anyone has gone bonkers. Which, I suppose, is something they might not want to report until it’s all over. I get that.
But still. I don’t like it when a headline creates expectations that the story — especially an extremely long story — fails to fulfill.
So don’t do me like that…
The day back in June when the “crew” entered the “ship.” As the story said, “It was not a special hatch with airlocks or anything: It was just a plain white office door.” So it appears to have gotten that right.
OK, here’s another point I’ve made many times before, but the reporting on the Michigan Democratic primary offered another illustration of it.
There is one predominant “bias” in news reporting, and it’s very harmful to the country. It’s journalists’ addiction to conflict. This is very harmful to the country. (Another one that may be just as harmful is the tendency to explain and interpret everything, from global security to pop culture trivia, in terms of the next election. But that’s somewhat less relevant to what I’m writing about today.)
I don’t think reporters and editors are doing it on purpose. Their brains are just stuck in this mode. When they encounter a story that lacks significant conflict, they instinctively exaggerate what little they can find. It happens on a subconscious level, I believe. At least I hope it’s never conscious.
Anyway, we saw it in Michigan, where Joe Biden won the essentially uncontested primary with 81 percent. It was a victory margin Trump would kill for (and assume his MAGA mob would still support him, of course).
And yet what sort of coverage did we see, over and over and over? On the GOP side, it was about how Trump continues to crush his opposition. And as he always does, he gloated and boasted, and everything he said was dutifully reported.
On the Democratic side, headline after headline after headline said “Biden wins, BUT…” (The one you see above from my NYT Audio app — “Biden Takes a Hit in Michigan…” — was the most disproportional, unhinged hed I saw. Most stuck with the milder “but” construction.)
The “but” is a reference to the small number of Democratic primary voters who opted to vote “Uncommitted.” How small? 13 percent. This is attributed to a campaign in that state to protest the war in Gaza.
So, what do you think that means? Not much, as I see it. These voters did not choose to vote in the Republican primary.* They would have been crazy to do so, if their goal is to stop the fighting over there. They apparently realize that Trump is FAR less likely to do what Biden is constantly doing — trying to restrain Netanyahu (which is an uphill battle, since Netanyahu’s best chance of staying in office is to prolong the war). But of course, lots of voters do entirely irrational things — a phenomenon you can see amply demonstrated over in the Republican contest.
And they didn’t vote for another Democrat, presumably because one who will magically make them happier about Gaza doesn’t exist.
Mind you, this small “but” isn’t some harbinger of what will happen elsewhere. Michigan has the largest number of Arab-Americans in the country. This is the one place you would expect such a protest. But what if it did happen elsewhere? What would that 13 percent mean in this primary or another? Nikki Haley got twice that percentage in Michigan, but where’s the foreboding language about what a problem that is for Trump?
The only remotely plausible reason I saw or heard presented anywhere for making a big deal of this was the idea that Michigan is a swing state, and anything that might cut into Joe’s vote even slightly could be important in November. But that’s not gonna keep this Biden supporter up nights between now and then. (This brings up a third harmful “bias” we see in political reporting these days — the obsession with trying to predict WHAT WILL HAPPEN far in the future rather than simply reporting what actually has happened.)
Anyway, I just thought I’d point this out before the memory fades. Media outlets were desperate to find a fight somewhere in this boring non-contest, and this is all they could come up with…
