A reader — one who happens to work in this building — asked me whether the Jan Collins who wrote this letter (actually, it’s the second letter in that link) "is the same Jan Collins who writes the ‘Flying Solo’ column, which appears in the Life&Arts section on Sunday."

As it happens, the answer is "yes."

Although she’s on vacation, we managed to track her down by e-mail, to which she confirmed that, "Yes, I’m one and the same who coauthors the Flying Solo column."

Basically, I’m just passing this information on because if I’d had it to do over, I would have included an editor’s note pointing out the fact, since some readers would quite naturally wonder. I guess I read proofs too quickly that day, and the name didn’t register on me. (There’s a certain cognitive mode I catch myself in sometimes in which I will catch misspellings and bad grammatical constructions, but fail to raise questions of substance. Evidently, I was in one of those states that day. It was quite a week.)

So consider this my belated attempt to sate whatever curiosity you may have had.   

My column will address recent attempts by political parties in South Carolina to disenfranchise those of us who refuse to join their clubs and play their games. (Does that wording sort of give away how I feel about it? Oh, well, if you read the paper, you knew that already.)

I will elaborate on the subject here on the blog as well…

I sent the following e-mail out to the roughly 500 employees of The State on Tuesday. Now I share it with you:

This definitely goes under the heading of bad news for us, good news for her.

Nina Brook, who has been an associate editor on the editorial page ever since we stole her away from Gov. Jim Hodges five years ago, is leaving for an exciting new opportunity. And in her case, that’s not a euphemism.

After taking the point in our fights to restore state funding to schools and to hold off the current governor’s efforts to divert said funding through tax credits, Nina is putting her principles into action: She’s going to be a schoolteacher.

But not just any schoolteacher. She’ll be teaching cutting-edge journalism at Richland Northeast, with an emphasis on media convergence. The school has a newspaper and a TV station already and is developing a Web presence. Her job will be to help the kids make it all work together.

It would be pretty much impossible to find anyone as qualified as Nina for this challenge. After having worked in Macon and St. Paul, Nina joined us in 1991, first as Kershaw County bureau chief. She went from that to become a star legislative reporter, bringing depth of understanding to everything from the state budget to the Confederate flag controversy. Then, we lost her to television when she became easily the most knowledgeable on-air "personality" at WIS. Television lost her to politics when she became Gov.
Hodges’ press secretary right after his 1998 election victory. She left our good friend the ex-gov two years later to join our editorial board, where she developed the strongest voice in South Carolina for public education.

Now, her multiple talents and omnivorous interests are taking her to a new sphere, and she’s so excited about it, you just want to smack her. But they said in some management seminar that I can’t. So join me in giving her your hearty congratulations. Sincerely. Because she deserves just as much success in her new endeavor as she has enjoyed in her previous incarnations. And the kids deserve her.

— Brad

I make it a rule not to spike any of Robert Ariail‘s cartoons. Well, maybe it’s more of a guideline than a rule, but I can’t remember any time in the last several years when he wanted to run something, and I just said "no." Occasionally, I talk him out of a cartoon, usually because I just don’t think it works. Just as often, I egg him on, persuading him to go with an idea that he’s not sure about.

We have a close working relationship based on mutual respect of each other’s respective senses of what makes an editorial cartoon work. We don’t always agree, though, and when he is certain about a cartoon I have doubts about, my standard procedure is to get out of his way and let him go with it. After all, I consider him to be one of the top five, maybe even top three, cartoonists in the country. Who am I to stand in the way of genius? I might have a good sense of what makes a good cartoon, but he actually has the talent to turn an idea into reality. Most of the time, you have to bow to that.

Which brings me to the matter at hand. Thursday morning, I was rushing about, and Robert (pictured at left) decided to consult with Associate Editor Mike Fitts about an idea. I remember being vaguely aware of Robert standing in the doorway of Mike’s office as I hustled by down the hallway. The sound of Mike saying the word "salacious" sort of half-registered on me, but I quickly forgot it, intent on my errand.

Shortly afterward, Robert blocked my passage back down the hall and showed me a sketch. It wasn’t quite the same as the one pictured below. In the first version, which was simpler, the woman holding the pot of coffee was the wife of the man, and the scene was set in their kitchen. Shortly after this first conversation, Robert would produce yet another version that had the same couple sitting on a sofa watching television. As we went back and forth on the subject that morning in a series of brief exchanges, I convinced him that the sofa scene was too static, and that it would be funnier if the woman were a stranger to the man, sort of coming out of nowhere to startle him with her off-point observation. So he made her a waitress, and set it in a diner.

Anyway, you can use this intermediate version as a fair guide to what I first saw, and from that you can judge how stupid I was when I first looked at it. Aging newshound that I am, I still think of Watergate as current events. I’m aware that many people have little or no memory of it and see it as dim history, but that seems ridiculous to me. So I particularly appreciated what I saw at first as the one and only point of the cartoon: Robert was making fun of people who, their attention spans drastically curtailed in our TV-shaped world, can’t remember past the most recent scandal, and get their recent history all fouled up. To put it more charitably — in a way, that’s all of us, because we’re so overwhelmed with information, who can truly be blamed for mixing up the facts a little?

Well, I was already pronouncing the cartoon a winner when the half-heard word from a few moments before crept hesitantly out of a corner of my mind, and certain connections started to be made. The all-too-slow process sort of went, "Salacious… Monica Lewinsky… stained dress… ‘Deep Throat’ — the movie, dummy, not the source… Oh." Still, the sexual double entendre struck me as just a secondary level on which you could react; it was by no means the main point.

I told Robert I was going to have to think about this one. I sought Mike’s opinion, and was a little surprised when he said that while he thought it was a good cartoon, and really funny, if he were me, he wouldn’t put it in The State newspaper. Reluctant to reject a good cartoon just because a lot of nice folks would be offended (assuming their minds were dirtier than mine), I decided to seek other opinions.

I did something I do fairly frequently, although usually only when I’m sure I’m going to go ahead and run something: I gave Publisher Ann Caulkins a heads-up. After all, you don’t want your boss getting a bunch of angry phone calls without knowing ahead of time that they were coming. Ann reacted about the way I did. She appreciated it on the level of a standard misunderstanding gag. But since she knew there had to be a reason I was showing it to her, she examined it more closely, and then it dawned on her, too. She was immediately concerned, but she wasn’t about to forbid me to run it; she doesn’t do that. She just let me know she didn’t feel good about it.

Anyway, a little later, Robert came to me and said he was letting me off the hook by just sending the finished cartoon (below) to his syndicate. He didn’t seem entirely sure he wanted it to run in The State himself. (After all, it’s one thing to e-mail a funny, but somewhat prurient, cartoon out to strangers, and another to have your mom and everybody else in your own community see it and share their reactions with you.)

Somewhat later (mind you, all of this is going on in brief episodes as we’re all doing lots of other things on the last day of the legislative session) I told Ann about Robert’s plan, and told her I didn’t like it. If other newspapers were going to have a Robert Ariail cartoon, I wanted us to run it. So she urged me to consult the rest of the board before I made a final decision. Meanwhile, Robert had come up with a different cartoon for Friday’s paper, so I just decided to bring it up at the next morning’s staff meeting.

Things didn’t go so well for the cartoon the next morning. I passed out copies of the sketch, and heads started shaking all around. It was unanimous; nobody thought it would be a good idea to put it in our newspaper. In fact, they all thought I was daft — the dirty joke was the point, and only a wonk like me could have thought it was mainly about something else.

Well, I’m surrounded by smart people for a reason, and that is to listen to them when they’re this adamant about something. So we didn’t run the cartoon. The last straw was when this occurred to me: We had run Ariail cartoons that I considered just as suggestive back when the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was dominating the headlines. The difference is, you couldn’t avoid the unsavory nature of the whole thing then. But to drag it into this completely unrelated situation for the sake of a joke seemed gratuitous, and therefore less excusable.

And no, I don’t consider putting it on the blog for the sake of discussion as being the same thing. One of the reasons I started this forum to begin with was to have an even more wide-open, transparent dialogue with readers than is possible in the finite constraints of newsprint. Letting you in on our decision-making process (even ad nauseam, it occurs to me as look back at the length of this posting) is an essential part of that for me.

Anyway, what would you have done?

IN THE STATE:
My Sunday column sets forth the premise that Donnie Myers is a dangerous man, and not just because he tools around in the taxpayers’ Lincoln Town Car with a blood-alcohol level as high as .14, but for reasons that are a lot bigger than one man and his problems with accountability.

ON THE BLOG:
Take a look at the Robert Ariail cartoon we wouldn’t run in the paper, read our reasons why, and then let us know what you think about the decision we made. What was it about? OK, one hint: It had to do with "Deep Throat," and it was not the cartoon pictured here, which we did run in the paper.

Also, as the first installment of a new feature called "Deleted Scenes," read the original beginning of the Donnie Myers column. It was a rather long anecdotal lede, and I just didn’t have room for it. Besides, it slowed down getting to my point. Still, I thought it to be a mildly interesting story worth telling.

Be sure to read Bob McAlister’s guest column on our Thursday op-ed page. He makes some interesting points that some of his conservative confreres should consider, if they can pause for a moment in their relentless hammering on poor ol’ Lindsey Graham — some of which can be seen in our letters to the editor on the same day.