Category Archives: Personal

The opus is done; you’ll see it Sunday

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Well, I just finished writing what I consider to be my most provocative column of this long presidential election. At least, it’s the most provocative to me. You have to consider that I didn’t expect the John Edwards column to cause such a fuss. So maybe this one will be a dud; I don’t know.

But I do know it’s longer than any other column that I can ever remember publishing in the paper — twice as long as usual. It will jump from the Sunday editorial page to the op-ed page. But then, I’ve thought about it a lot longer than I do most columns — months, in fact. That’s something it does have in common with the Edwards piece, although this one is much more complicated. Even at this length, it requires the reader to understand more than I have space to say. And maybe, because of that, it will be unintelligible. But a lot of my columns attempt to say more than I can denote in a limited space. This one just has more than usual to say.

Anyway, I look forward to your reactions to it. I think.

No G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip!

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As Billy Ray Valentine would say, they are once again panicking out there. When I looked at my Treo while I was still at breakfast this morning, the market was down another 660 points, to below 8,000.

I remarked to my friend Jerry, who knows way more than I do about financial matters, that it made no sense for people to be selling at a loss when everyone knows that the rescue plan hasn’t been implemented yet, and was never supposed to have been felt before several weeks had passed. He said he assumed it was because of automatic trading.

But the idea of setting a "sell" order for a LOW price seems counterintuitive to me. I have, in my extremely limited experience, set a number for when my stock got UP to a certain price, but why look forward to LOSING money?

Yes, I know that practical people think in terms of cutting their losses, but that is exactly my problem. I’ve never done that. When I would play touch football as a kid, I never wanted to punt. I didn’t care if it was 4th down with my back to the goal; I was still going to go for the score.

You may say the punters are wiser than I. But look at where their wisdom is taking the country.

Stop feeding off me! Give blood

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OK, I’m just kidding with the headline — chalk it up to my having put "Cool Hand Luke" into my DVD player after Paul Newman died. That is, I’m sort of kidding.

The fact is that those of us who do give blood regularly could use a little help from those who could, but don’t.

Night before last, my cell phone rang just before 9 p.m., when I was about to watch the presidential debate. It was a staffer at the local Red Cross, saying that there was a dire need, even greater than usual, for my blood type (O positive, the universal donor — anybody can use my corpuscles), and they needed me to come down right away. "Tonight?" I asked, which didn’t seem ridiculous given his urgent tone. No, he said with a chuckle — Wednesday would do.

So I showed up for my 6:45 p.m. appointment. During the extensive private interview in the little room ("Have you, since 1980, had sex with a little green woman from Mars known to inject drugs into her antennae?" "No… wait, you did say after 1980, right?"), I mentioned the late night call, and my interviewer didn’t understand why I was called so late. But they certainly needed my blood. They always do. The Midlands area regularly has to import from other regions, because folks here just don’t give enough to meet the need.

The guy who called Tuesday night said something else I hadn’t been asked before — he urged me to bring a friend. Well, I started to, right after I got off the phone. But my wife is a cancer survivor who still undergoes regular treatments, and my daughter is nursing twins. There were no other adults in the house. The next day at work, I thought about sending out a global e-mail, but I was unsure whether it was kosher for a vice president to ask fellow employees for their blood. I briefly thought of going downstairs to check with HR (they have a list of dos and don’ts that are not always intuitive), but got busy and forgot.

But I have no reservations about urging y’all to go give blood, so you can "stop feeding off me!" Just kidding. Kinda.

Busy reading Obama’s book

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Just so you know, I’m probably going to be posting a little less often this week, until I can get done reading Obama’s book about his childhood.

I think I’ve finished the parts that I really need to have read for the column I’m doing for this weekend, but I’m trying to go ahead and finish it. What column? It’s one about an idea, or set of ideas, I’ve mentioned before:

Talk about what the election of Barack Obama as a black man means
misses the point, since — as a lot of black folks asserted last year
leading up to the primaries — Obama simply is not a "black man" in the
sense that the phrase has meaning in American history, sociology and
politics. I’ve got a column I’m planning on writing about that, after I
read his autobiography on the subject. It will be headlined "Barack Like Me,"
and it will be rooted in the experiences he and I share spending part
of our formative years in Hawaii (where race simply did not mean what
it means here) and outside the United States — both in the Third
World, in fact. None of these experiences are common to the sort of guy
we describe when we say "black American." I hope to write that one
before the summer is over.

I’m a really, really, excruciatingly slow reader (but my retention is good, once I’m done). So I’m trying to grab those moments during the day that I would normally use for blogging.

And then tonight is shot because of the debate. I’ll try to post during or after that.

Earning that first piece of plastic

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Credit used to make sense to me, and now it doesn’t. Here’s the way it once worked, according to my sepia-toned memories:
    When I got out of college in 1975, I went to work for The Jackson Sun in West Tennessee as a copy editor for the lordly sum of $130 a week. That’s $6,760 a year. After a three-week trial period I got a $15-a-week raise, which was quite a thrill at the time. I was married, my wife was in graduate school, and our first child would arrive about a year later.
    My first week, a woman who also worked on the copy desk, taking me under her wing, told me her husband worked at one of the banks, and to contact him if I needed help in that line. As it turned out, I did soon need a loan to pay for a used Vega (yes, I know, a bad call there).
    After the baby came, we decided we needed a credit card to help us through the weeks when my pay (by then $160!) didn’t meet the necessities. So I went to see Paul at the bank, but he said I couldn’t get one until I had established more of a credit record. The car loan helped, and so did the fact that we paid the hospital for the baby in installments. But that wasn’t enough to get a BankAmericard.
    Paul suggested I go to Sears, because they’d give a credit card to anybody. So I did (after which we rewarded Sears’ faith in the proletariat by buying most of the children’s clothes, and all tools and appliances, from there for years to come). Once I produced my Sears card at the bank, I got my “real” credit card.
    My wife, who handles the accounts and pays the bills at our house, now curses the day that piece of plastic came into our house — she has told me more than once in the past week, and apparently will keep telling me until it sinks in, that at our current rate of payment, we will not live long enough to pay off our credit card debt, according to all the actuarial tables or something like that (in one ear, out the other).
    But back then the card was helpful, and actually earning the privilege of having one seemed a sort of milestone. I was now someone deemed worthy of credit.
    In the intervening years a lot has changed. For instance, the Sears card morphed into a Mastercard that I no longer use (under threat of bodily harm) because the usurious rate is high even for a credit card, but that I carry in my wallet for sentimental reasons: It still says “member since 1976.”
    That’s a distinction that wore off long, long ago, though. Today, on the rare occasions when I get to the mail before my wife does, there is always at least one offer of a new credit card, and usually more than one. My children have been getting those come-ons at our house since they entered their teens. Even with all of them moved out, they still come. And my wife still throws them away.
    But that’s credit cards. Let’s talk mortgages.
    My understanding of mortgages does not extend beyond the explanation offered by George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which Robert Ariail lampoons in his cartoon today. Here’s the original dialogue:

    No, but you’re… you’re, you’re, you’re thinkin’ of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. Th-th-the money’s not here… why, your money’s in Joe’s house, that’s right next to yours, and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Maitland’s house, and, and a hundred others…. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then they’re gonna pay it back to you as best they can, now what’re you gonna do, foreclose on them?

    That I understand. And while my mortgage might not be with ol’ George down the street, I did take it out with a very nice person in an office that I could go to and ask questions later if I needed to. But before long my mortgage and yours got bundled up with a thousand others and turned into a financial product that greedheads would buy and sell back and forth across the country as though the biggest contract I’ll ever enter into were merely another drop in a barrel of oil.
    Meanwhile, mortgages were being extended as casually and promiscuously as those credit card solicitations, without regard to the buyers’ ability to pay back, which eventually, as near as I can make out, led to this bizarre situation in which the president of the United States went on the TV last week to tell us that if we don’t come up with $700 billion in one quick hurry, we’ll all soon be living in Pottersville instead of Bedford Falls.
    Apparently, this happened in part because as a nation we decided that everybody ought to have a mortgage, whether they could afford one or not. That sounds really nice and egalitarian and everything. It also sounds just like the arguments I hear from the payday lending industry — that they have to exist because everybody needs to be able to take out loans, and you don’t want to be all paternalistic and tell them they can’t afford it.
    But I’m of the paternalistic school, I guess, if that’s what you want to call it. For years, I was on the local Habitat for Humanity board, and we didn’t sell those houses to just anybody. We made sure that while the families were low-income enough to need our service, they had enough income to make their payments. We provided counseling. We required that they pile up sweat equity by working to build other people’s houses before their own foundation was laid.
    Those hurdles existed to keep the unwary from getting into debt over their heads, just as Paul’s bank once required certain demonstrations before I could have that card.
    And now, apparently the whole nation is being sucked into a vortex of bad decisions chasing each other ’round and ’round.
    And to me, that just doesn’t make sense. But that’s because I don’t understand credit. Not anymore, anyway.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

No more op-ed pages Mondays, Fridays

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Well, there’s just no way to sugar-coat this, so I’ll go ahead and tell you what I’ll be telling you on the Friday editorial page:

No separate op-ed page today
     Starting today, The State will not have separate op-ed pages on Fridays and Mondays. This is a cost-saving measure, reducing our newsprint expenditure. Instead, we will frequently run a syndicated column on this page on Fridays, and a local guest column on the Monday letters page. We also invite readers to explore our offerings at thestate.com/opinion, and Brad Warthen’s Blog at blogs.thestate.com.

             — The Editors

This is a continuation of the painful recent cutbacks we’ve experienced in personnel and operational funds. As I’ve mentioned before, Mike Fitts’ departure brought the editorial staff down to less than half what I had at the start of this decade. Our elimination of Saturday pages earlier this year was a reflection of both the staff cutbacks — so few people can only do so much — and newsprint savings. This one is pretty much all about the newsprint.

You don’t like this? Well, guess what? I’m pretty sure I hate it a lot more than you do. All of us do. There’s nothing we can do about losing these pages, so we struggle constantly to figure out what we CAN do instead to keep serving readers. (What do you think this blog is about, for instance?)

Consider the earlier "cutbacks." When we eliminated staff-written editorials on Mondays, we gave you a full page of letters that otherwise would not have been published, and added the blograil feature. You’d be surprised how much staff time those take.

Then, when we eliminated the Saturday pages, we launched the Saturday Web-only super-op-ed page, with a whole lot more content than we could get into the paper (plus video). Yeah, that’s been an unpopular move with many — but the people who complain about the Saturday feature don’t seem to understand that it’s not a choice between that and having our pages in the Saturday paper, it’s a choice between that and nothing. And believe me, it takes a lot more trouble to produce that Web page than "nothing" would.

Now this, the loss of those half-pages on Monday and Friday. What that means is that on each of those days, we’re losing two columns (one syndicated, one local) and maybe a syndicated cartoon. So far, our best idea for compensating for that is to put a syndicated column on the Friday page whenever we don’t have an overriding staff-written column (and that’s happened about once a week in the past; this just pushes that event to Fridays), and put a local guest column on the Monday letters page. That means in both cases fewer letters.

It probably will NOT mean fewer staff-written columns. Our first and foremost priority is always South Carolina — you can get news and commentary about the rest of the world from a thousand sources, but what Warren and Cindi are able to say about local and state issues is something you can’t get anywhere else. But since we "frequently" have one weekday without a staff column — today’s page was an example of that — we’ll just try to push that vacancy to Fridays, and run a syndicated column there instead of the long letter and the secondary cartoon.

We’re still scrambling to figure out what else we can provide, and I’ve been really pleased at the initiative shown by my colleagues under these circumstances. Warren Bolton, who just became a proud Papa for the second time and took some family leave, surprised me with an editorial (which ended up on the Sunday page) and a column written from home last week. I’m grateful to Cindi for suggesting today (and making it happen, which is more valuable) that we post the Charles Krauthammer column that I almost used on the Friday page (we used Kathleen Parker instead) online. We’re going to have to start doing that more systematically, not just on Saturdays.

Robert Ariail today offered up an extra cartoon for the Monday letters page. Randle Christian, our letters editor, came to me while I was typing this post to suggest a better way to use the Web to provide more letters on the election. More work for each of them, of course.

There aren’t as many of us as there were, but I’m proud and privileged to work with each of the folks I have. They’re all striving harder than ever to fulfill our mission of providing a forum for discussing the issues of greatest importance to our community.

And we welcome your suggestions as to how we can do that better.

Curses: An election about the economy

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Well, my worst nightmare for this election year has been realized. I had thought that this was a no-lose year for me. I liked McCain and I liked Obama, so what could happen to mess things up?

But if you’ll recall, back in January I said that this was shaping up as a very good year, except for one thing — the possibility that we’d be talking about the economy.

I freaking HATE talking about the economy. My entire career, a newspaper front page that leads with an economic story has always been, to me, a signal that nothing interesting is happening in the world.

It’s not the economy per se. It’s money. It bores me to moaning, retching tears. Talking about it, or being forced to hear other people talking about it, is torture, torture of a sort I’d hope even W. would disapprove of. (I suspect some of y’all feel the same way — the post I reluctantly put up about it has drawn only seven comments so far — even though I tried to dress it up in Looney Tunes language.)

And now, this mess on Wall Street, whatever it’s all about, has BOTH candidates for president — guys I used to like — talking about it. So it looks like McCain HAS flip-flopped on torture…

How did this happen?

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

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Over the weekend, going through some of the stuff my daughter brought when she moved home from Pennsylvania, my wife found a travel case full of CDs I’d about given up on. Some of them were favorites — albums I had bought on vinyl in my youth, such as Steve Miller’s "Your Saving Grace" and The Band’s "The Band."

I put The Band’s master opus into the player in my truck yesterday, and it transported me back. I love those indescribable autumnal tones and word imagery. Over the weekend, we had watched the odd, uneven "I’m Not There," and the scenes with Richard Gere wandering through the faux old-timey (vaguely western, vaguely country) landscape and town were obviously an attempt to evoke that very same feeling, especially the parts around the bandstand. Far less successful, of course.

But you know how it is when you read or see or listen to something from your youth, and you see a flaw you didn’t see back then, and you’re sorry you noticed it? An extreme example of this was the time about 20 years ago when "The Dirty Dozen" came on television, and I said to my in-laws, "Oh, let’s watch this; this is good," and then minute after awful minute dragged by until I felt constrained to apologize for it? When I had seen it at 14, it had been good; I assure you.

This was more subtle. I’m listening to "King Harvest (Will Surely Come)," which makes the October wind blow like no other, and I’m suddenly struck by the incongruity of these two lines:

I will hear ev’ry word the boss may say,
For he’s the one who hands me down my pay.

Which makes perfect sense on one level — the words being spoken by a failed farmer who wants to make a go of his new job. But, with its suggestion that the worker’s position and future are dependent upon doing the will of the boss, it’s wholly inconsistent with the repeated theme that he is now "a union man now, all the way."

This later passage is more consistent with that attitude:

Then there comes a man with a paper and a pen
Tellin’ us our hard times are about to end.
And then, if they don’t give us what we like
He said, "Men, that’s when you gotta go on strike."

But wait — maybe the "boss" is the union boss, not management. That way it works. I feel better now. (Come to think of it, I believe that’s the way I sort of unconsciously understood it years ago.)

In any case, I still love the song, and the whole album. I stopped it in the middle of the second play this morning, and put in the Steve Miller, to keep myself from getting tired of it. (It’s much better than the Steve Miller, but perhaps that’s an unfair comparison — especially since I haven’t heard the much stronger second side yet.)

All you gotta do is rag, Mama, rag, Mama, rag…

Who’s this Tommy when he’s at home?

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One of the things expected of someone in my job is that I know things — lots and lots of things, enough to reach critical mass so that I can deal with complex issues against a fairly massive context. (More than that, of course, I need to know how the things I know fit together and interact, but that’s another subject.) That means knowing history, but being very up to the moment as to what’s happening now.

And generally, I meet that test — sometimes quite literally. I have a very good working knowledge of history and of political systems, but also popular culture. I’m good at tests of broad knowledge, and also at Trivial Pursuit. But every person’s knowledge is finite. I only know the things I know by NOT knowing a lot of things that other people take for granted. Sometimes, the things I don’t know are things people would assume I do know, such as who’s who on TV news. Other times, it’s something that other folks just keep up with without thinking, such as sports.

A couple of days ago, there was this big headline in our paper, "Bringing up Beecher," and I got this strong impression that I was supposed to know, without being told, who this Beecher was. There was a large photograph that made me think he was a football player, judging by attire, and assuming that was him. (Of course, I could have read the story, but that would be like cheating, wouldn’t it?) My eyes moved on, and I thought no more about it. Coincidentally, the next day, I was a captive audience in a meeting in which someone happened to mention that someone named "Tommy Beecher" was a relatively untested USC quarterback. Ah. Good to know. This will save me from embarrassing myself if I am surrounded by people who dwell in this alternative universe called Gamecock football (this has been known to happen). It will save me from asking my reflexive question:

"And who’s this Beecher when he’s at home?"

I am, of course, channeling George Harrison’s wonderful scene in "A Hard Day’s Night," when he’s surrounded by people for whom "Susan" is the center of the universe, and they assume she’s the center of HIS universe, and comedy ensues from that disconnect.

I often feel like George when in the company of sports fanatics. They can’t believe I don’t know who they’re talking about (although I try harder than George to hide the fact, because I don’t like shocking people; nor am I trying to be "too cool" for their enthusiasms a la George). For my part, I’m amazed they don’t get the movie allusion if I do say, "Who’s this (blank) when he’s/she’s at home?" For that reason, I seldom say it any more. I just stay quiet and try to infer what in the world they’re on about, and hope my ignorance isn’t plain to see. Because I’m supposed to know stuff.

How is coffee affecting me? It’s none of your blasted BUSINESS, that’s how! So BACK OFF, Jack!

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Recently, I’ve gotten a number of e-mail releases from a "Dr. Mike Magee," and in the split-second I spend deciding whether to delete an e-mail or save it to look at later, I had saved these, under the vague impression that they were from someone I actually knew, namely the erstwhile USC athletic director.

But noo-o-o-o-o! These messages are from some busybody stranger who’s asking me nosy questions such as:

The Coffee Fix
How is coffee affecting your life?

By Mike Magee, MD
Is coffee part of your daily routine? If it is, you are like millions of Americans, who start their day with a cup – or two or three – of coffee. But even if it’s part of your daily routine, it makes sense to stop and ask a few questions. How much do you know about your morning pick-me-up? Do you ever think about where it comes from or how it’s affecting your body?

First, he hammers on my conscience:

Most small farmers sell their coffee directly to middlemen exporters
who pay them below market price for their harvests and keep a high
percentage for themselves. This forces these farmers into a cycle of
poverty that keeps working conditions poor, wages low, and often
involves child labor. Coffee workers are usually paid the equivalent to
sweatshop wages and they toil under harsh conditions.

With all
of this in mind, we’re left with two major questions about coffee. One,
is it good or bad for your health? And two, what about the health and
well-being of the coffee farmers and workers around the world?

Then, just as I’m turning away, he lures me in with nice thoughts:

On question one, you might be shocked to find out that coffee is full
of antioxidants that dampen inflammation and are believed to be
positive and preventive when it comes to chronic diseases. Studies by
major journals have confirmed that coffee is a major contributor of
antioxidants in the diet of Americans.

But just as I’m thinking this guy might be OK, he hits me with this:

But there’s the caffeine to consider. Once it’s ingested, it’s rapidly
absorbed into the blood stream in 30 to 45 minutes, and takes 4 to 6
hours for most of it to be eliminated. At low to moderate doses it
increases well being, happiness, energy, alertness, and sociability –
but at higher doses it can cause adverse health effects.

Arrrghhh! Who do you think you are, you imperfect stranger? You can’t even spell McGee, and you’re lecturing to me about my coffee?!?!? Back off! Where’s the pot? I need just one fresh cup to calm me down and clarify my mind…

Slight error in Sunday column

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My pastor, Msgr. Leigh Lehocky, gently corrected me this morning. My column said St. Peter’s "Parishioners live in something like 35 ZIP codes." He told me the number is now 46.

I probably remember the 35 figure from back when I was president of the parish council, back in the early 90s. I’ve heard different numbers since then, and consider it one of those wobbly numbers that can never be perfectly correct — even if you give the precise count for right now, based on parish registration, registration itself is a fuzzy thing — not everyone who attends our masses is registered, and some who are registered could have left us.

My point was that it was a bunch of ZIP codes, and I knew I would not be exaggerating if I said 35, so I covered myself by saying "something like." Bottom line, I’m right — it’s a bunch.

Msgr. Lehocky reminded me of something else I’d forgotten. Speaking of The Big Sort, the book that inspired the Robert Samuelson column that inspired my column, he said, "That’s the book I was telling you about a couple of weeks ago." Monsignor had been reading it, and recommended it to me. All I knew was that when I read the title in the Samuelson piece, I knew that I recognized it from a recent conversation; I had forgotten with whom.

Msgr. Lehocky said the book beats up on churches for the usual MLK thing (about 11 a.m. Sunday being the most segregated hour in America), but agreed that St. Peter’s was something of an exception to that "rule."

"And thank God for that," he added.

And perhaps our parish — and particularly the sub-community of those of us who habitually attend the only Mass that is bi-lingual — is an exception. But it’s the only church community I have, so my point that I don’t have the kinds of associations Mr. Bishop writes of — at least, not in any form that comes to mind — holds true.

Do you hang with people ‘like yourself’? (column version)

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    Yes, you’ve read this before, if you keep up with the blog. There are some editing changes, but it’s about as close as I’ll usually come to a direct copy-and-paste from the blog to the paper. I just post it here in keeping with the theory that some folks will come here looking for the blog version of my Sunday column, and I hate to disappoint.

    While this is an example of Dan Gillmors’ suggestion to  "Make the printed pages the
best-of" what’s been on the Web, it’s slightly more complicated than that. I was thinking "column" as I wrote this on Wednesday, and consciously made sure it had an ending that I thought would work in a column. Unconsciously, I also wrote it to precisely the length of a column, which is remarkable — particularly since, when I’m deliberately writing a column, I always initially write it 10-20 inches too long, and have to spend as much time trimming as I did on the initial writing.

    Obviously, this is a method I should employ more often — at least, I should do so when I don’t feel the duty to write something fresh, and something with added local value. I can let myself get away with musing and riffing off someone else’s column during the Dog Days, but once we pass Labor Day and start interviewing candidates and chugging toward the general election, I’ll feel obliged to do more with the columns.

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
FIRST, READ this from a column by The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, which ran on our op-ed page last week:

    People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people favor friendships with those who share similar backgrounds, interests and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is nearly universal. It’s human nature.

    Then ask yourself this question: Is this true for you?
    What Mr. Samuelson is saying is accepted as gospel, as an “of course,” by so many people. And you can find all sorts of evidence to back it up, from whitebread suburbs to Jeremiah Wright’s church to the book that inspired the column, The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.
    Here’s my problem with that: I don’t know any people “like me,” in the sense under discussion here. I don’t have a group of people who look and act and think like me with whom to identify, with the possible exception of my own close family, and in some respects that’s a stretch — we may look alike and in some cases have similar temperaments, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to being alike in, say, political views.
    Oh, but you’re Catholic, you might say. Do you know what “catholic” means? It means “universal.” At the Mass I attend, we sometimes speak English, sometimes Spanish, and throw in bits of Greek and Latin here and there. The priest who often as not celebrates that Mass is from Africa. Parishioners live in something like 35 ZIP codes. There are black, white and brown people who either came from, or their parents came from, every continent and every major racial group on the planet. My impression, from casual conversations over time, is that you would find political views as varied as those in the general population. Sure, more of us are probably opposed to abortion than you generally find, but that’s not a predictor of what we think about, say, foreign policy.
    I may run into someone occasionally who shares my background as a military brat. But beyond a comparison of “were you ever stationed at …,” there’s not a lot to hang a sense of identity on.
I belong to the Rotary Club, which means I have lunch with 300 or so other people once a week. I can’t think of any attitude or opinion I have as a result of being a Rotarian; nor — to turn that around — did I join Rotary because of any attitude or opinion I held previously. Wait — there’s one thing that’s different: I started giving blood as a result of being in Rotary. But I don’t feel any particular identification with other people who give blood, or any particular alienation from others who don’t give blood, the selfish cowards (just kidding).
That’s not to say anything bad about Rotary, or anything good about it. It’s just not a predictor of my attitudes. I suppose people who have an objection to singing the National Anthem and “God Bless America” every week might stay away, but that still leaves a pretty broad spectrum. Rusty DePass, who worked hard for Rudy Giuliani last year, plays piano at Rotary. Jack Van Loan, longtime comrade and supporter of John McCain, is our immediate past president. Another prominent member is Jim Leventis, who is the godfather of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, the filmmaker Alexandra. Not one of them is any more or less a Rotarian because of his political attitudes.
    Reaching for a generalization, I can point to superficial sameness at Rotary — a lot of members are among the 6 percent of American men who still wear a tie to work every day, although many are not. And the membership is notably whiter than South Carolina, but that seems to correlate demographically with the tie thing. In any case, this is a place where I spend one hour a week; it does not define me.
    Bottom line: I cannot think of five people not related to me, with whom I regularly congregate, who share my “backgrounds, interests and values” to any degree that would matter to me.
    This is a barrier for my understanding of people who do identify with large groups of people who look alike and/or think alike and/or have particular interests in common that bind them as a group and set them apart from others. I don’t see how they do it. If I tried to be a Democrat or a Republican, I’d quit the first day over at least a dozen policy positions that I couldn’t swallow. How do others manage this?
    Maybe I’m a misfit. But the ways in which I’m a misfit helped bring me to support John McCain (fellow Navy brat) and Barack Obama (who, like me, graduated from high school in the hyperdiverse ethnic climate of Hawaii) for their respective nominations. Sen. McCain is the Republican whom the doctrinaire Republicans love to hate. Sen. Obama is the Democrat who was uninterested in continuing the partisan warfare that was so viscerally important to the Clintonistas.
    Coming full circle, I guess I like these guys because they’re, well, like me. But not so most people would notice.
    It’s going to be interesting, and for me often distressing, to watch what happens as the media and party structures and political elites who do think in terms of groups that look, think and act alike sweep up these two misfit individuals in the tidal rush toward November. Will either of them have the strength of mind and will to remain the remarkably unique character that he is, or will both succumb to the irresistible force of Identity Politics? I’m rooting fervently for the former, but recent history and all the infrastructure of political expression are on the side of the latter.

Does Mr. Samuelson’s observation apply to you? Tell us all about it at
thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Raskolnikov, blogger

20 Replies

The upstairs bathroom, the one most convenient to the home "office" where I set up my laptop on weekends, has three books balanced atop the tank behind the throne, books which I have grabbed off a shelf on the landing on my way in there at different times, in different moods:

  1. A paperback copy of Spy Hook, part of Len Deighton’s wonderful Bernard Sampson trilogy of trilogies.
  2. A simplified-for-children paperback of The Adventures of Robin Hood.
  3. An elegant little hardbound edition of Crime and Punishment, published by Barnes & Noble, with gilt-edged pages and a built-in ribbon bookmark (original price: $4.95, with 10% off for members).

Just now I was in there and scooped up the Dostoevsky masterpiece (which I would have listed as my favorite novel when I was in college, but which I haven’t read all the way through since), and opened to this passage:

  When the soup had been brought, and he had begun upon it, Nastasya sat down beside him on the sofa and began chatting. She was a country peasant-woman, and a very talkative one.
  “Praskovya Pavlovna means to complain to the police about you,” she said.
  He scowled.
  “To the police? What does she want?”
  “You don’t pay her money and you won’t turn out of the room. That’s what she wants, to be sure.”
  “The devil, that’s the last straw,” he muttered, grinding his teeth, “no, that would not suit me … just now. She is a fool,” he added aloud. “I’ll go and talk to her to-day.”
  “Fool she is and no mistake, just as I am. But why, if you are so clever, do you lie here like a sack and have nothing to show for it? One time you used to go out, you say, to teach children. But why is it you do nothing now?”
  “I am doing …” Raskolnikov began sullenly and reluctantly.
  “What are you doing?”
  “Work …”
  “What sort of work?”
  “I am thinking,” he answered seriously after a pause.
  Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill.
  “And have you made much money by your thinking?” she managed to articulate at last.

The perpetual curse of the intellectual! It can be so hard to get any respect, especially from these pleasant peasant types…

But in that moment, taking a break from blogging as I was, it occurred to me: If Raskolnikov had had the outlet of a blog, maybe he wouldn’t have murdered the old woman and Lizaveta. Maybe he would have gotten it out of his system, clacking away at his keyboard there in his garret. Maybe he could even, with the help of his enterprising friend Razumikhin, have sold some ads on his blog; who knows?

But then something else occurred to me: In his own, tortured, 19th-century way, Raskolnikov was a blogger, or had been before he had shut himself off from the world. Wasn’t that his undoing? Hadn’t Porfiry read his rantings about Napoleon and other rare, "superior" creatures stepping over their inferiors to achieve great things? Wasn’t that just the kind of indiscreet stuff that people put on blogs today, with little concern for the consequences of revealing their madder thoughts?

There’s a blogging thread that runs all the way through Dostoevsky, isn’t there — from Notes from Underground to the collection of atrocities that Ivan Karamazov kept?

Civilian golf

8 Replies

Shield1

When I was very young, I spent large chunks of my summer days playing golf at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. That’s one of the nice things about being a military brat during the Cold War, back when this country went to any and all lengths to provide for servicemen and their families — you could play a LOT of golf for practically no money at all. As I recall, at some base courses all I had to do was sign my name, provided my Dad had paid a nominal monthly fee, which he always did. Some people grew up on farms, or in suburbs. I grew up playing golf on military courses from Florida to Hawaii, or playing basketball with sailors at the base gym, or bowling in a high school league at the base lanes, etc.

Now, with bases closing, and bases that aren’t closing cutting back on amenities or opening them to the public to help pay for them, things are different.

In some ways, this is good, from my perspective. I figured out several years back that I can play at the course at the former Naval Air Station in Millington, Tenn. — where I spent even more hours back when I was still a dependent — even though I no longer have a military ID. That course is almost exactly as it was in the early 70s. It’s still run by the Navy, but it now bears the civvy sobriquet "Glen Eagle."

But last week, I had occasion to play the MB course (civilian name: "Whispering Pines") for the first timeCup since the base closed, and the experience was for me sadly different. Part of that was that I played it back in the days when there were only nine holes — the "back 9" consisted of playing the same holes from different tee boxes. There were days in my youth when I played — walking, and carrying my clubs on my back — 27 or 36 holes, and was none the worse for wear. Can’t do that any more.

There are 18 holes now (and I think there were before the base closed). So this time, I went to play the front nine and found only two holes to be as I remembered. I still had a nice time, but … I hate to see anything that was once military turn civilian (correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think this course is now run by local government). You may think that’s weird, but it’s what I grew up with. ForPad
instance, there were the concrete pads in little hidden cul de sacs in the woods on the drive into the course, which were once there to hide warplanes from the Russkies in case we ever went toe-to-toe with them in nuclear combat. Those are now overgrown (right). To folks who grew up in the civilian world, particularly those of a pacifist stripe, this change might be seen as a positive development. To me, it’s a piece of ground that is somehow less purposeful, even less noble, than it was.

I did find the old Tactical Air Command shield etched into the glass of the door to the pro shop. But it’s companion shield, emblazoned with "Valor in Combat" had a paper sign taped over it urging visitors to "ASK US ABOUT 10% OFF MDSE…" This seemed just a bit tawdry to me.

But that’s just me.
Shield2

NOW you tell me…

5 Replies

Several people have now pointed out to me the fact that the NRDC backed down on its previous assertion about S.C. beaches being so dirty.

Yeah, I know. I saw the news story. It ran the day I was packing up to leave the beach. So thanks a lot for the heads-up there, you environmental hammerheads. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

And to add insult, in that very day’s paper, as I’m heading back home to the Midlands, I’m greeted by this news:

With temperatures approaching 100 degrees today and Sunday, hundreds of
people would normally flock to the Saluda rapids at Riverbanks Zoo to
cool off.

Bad idea this weekend.

A
combination of high runoff pollution and a sewage leak from an upstream
treatment plant have caused state health officials to continue urging
people against swimming, wading or tubing at “the rocks,” as the area
is known.

“Stay out of the water at that area,” said Adam Myrick,
spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
“And keep your pets out of the water and keep them from drinking the
water.”

Great. All of this goes to back up that the best thing to do on vacation is sit in the house and read a good book. I spent a great deal of my time last week finishing this book and starting this one. It seems appropriate at this point to consider the opening passage of the latter:

Standing at the frigate’s taffrail, and indeed leaning upon it, Jack
Aubrey considered her wake, stretching away neither very far nor
emphatically over the smooth pure green-blue sea: a creditable furrow,
however, in these light airs. She had just come about, with her
larboard tacks aboard, and as he expected her wake showed that curious
nick where, when the sheets were hauled aft, tallied and belayed, she
made a little wanton gripe whatever the helmsman might do….

Fortunately for Capt. Aubrey, he didn’t have to worry about the ocean being to polluted to sail through — at least, not unless she were becalmed, and floating in her own waste…

Welcome to the beach

13 Replies

Generally, I make a point of keeping up with the local news wherever I am. Hence my occasional reports in this venue from Memphis, or from up in PA (where over the weekend the biggest news seemed to be the question of whether Joe Paterno would retire).

Today, I’m at the beach in SC, where I am greeted by this lovely news in The Sun News:

    South Carolina’s beaches, including those in Horry and Georgetown
counties, are the sixth most polluted in the nation, according to a
report released Tuesday by a nonprofit environmental group.

    Local
and state experts denounced the report, saying area beaches are safe.
Officials with Horry County, North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach and the
state Department of Natural Resources all complained of inaccuracies
and misinterpretation of data in the National Resources Defense
Council’s report….

That second paragraph makes me feel SO much better, doesn’t it you? Well, of course YOU feel better; you’re not at the beach, are you?

As I left to come to my favorite blogging spot at the beach, I told my daughter not to go near the water until I got back. I told her it was because of the buddy system of aquatic safety. I didn’t want to freak her out totally.

However we pay for it, we all need a better transit system

120 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

On Wednesday, my truck was in the shop. This sort of situation may mean slightly different things to different people. Here’s what it meant to me:

Wednesday morning, I needed a way to get from home — out west of West Columbia — to work, if for no other reason than I needed the paycheck to pay for getting my truck fixed.

Fortunately, my eldest daughter was staying at our house with her children — her husband is remodeling their home — and she works downtown. So she drove me way south of downtown to my office, before turning around and going back to her office.

(My wife couldn’t take me because she had my daughter’s six-month-old twins, and her car isn’t set up to accommodate the Apollo-capsule-type arrangements that they call baby carseats these days.)

From that point, I was stuck. I knew I was going to have to stay late at the office that night — later than anyone in my department — because I was going to be off Friday and needed to get at least a week’s worth of work done in the four days available. Besides, no one in my department lives anywhere near me. In fact, I started writing this column on Wednesday to get ahead, and as I typed this sentence at 5:23 p.m., I had no idea how I’d get home.

As it happened, my daughter got me at 8 p.m. Fortunately, she and her children had to go back into town anyway; otherwise picking me up would have involved a long round trip for somebody, with gasoline at $4 a gallon. I wasn’t quite at a stopping place when she arrived, so she waited downstairs for me with, as near as I could tell over her cell phone, at least one of the twins screaming.

Then, on Thursday morning, my truck still wasn’t ready. So we improvised a whole new plan, in which I drove my wife’s car into town, and my daughter left work at midday to take her car out to my wife so that she could go to work in the afternoon. But at least I was covered in case the job required me to be somewhere else in the course of the day, which sometimes happens.

This is ridiculous, folks.

Yes, I know: Poor me. These are decidedly spoiled American, middle-class problems.

But never mind me. The truth is, if you are less fortunate, you have a harder time owning a vehicle, fixing it when it’s broken, filling it with gasoline, or paying to park it. Nor can you afford to do without that job that the vehicle would take you to.

There are many places in this country where folks don’t have these problems. I have a New York subway card in my wallet from my last trip there, which I can’t bring myself to throw away because of the wonderful thing it represents: freedom from driving and pumping gas and finding a place to park, simply ducking down a few steps, and moments later finding myself in whatever part of town that I need to be in.

In the Columbia metropolitan area, we have our own sort of mass transit system, in theory. But it isn’t fully adequate to anyone’s needs. It doesn’t go from enough places to enough places often enough, and it’s tough for someone who just needs it occasionally to find out quickly and easily how to use it.

What we need is a better transit system, but what we’re in danger of having now is a worse one, or none at all. That’s because Richland County — the one local government that’s done the most to step up to the challenge of funding said system — is going to stop stepping up in October. That’s when the vehicle tax the county levied for that purpose runs out.

Last week, the County Council ditched a plan to hold a referendum asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax increase to fund the buses and other transportation needs and wants. I don’t blame the council. As we said in an editorial before the action, the Legislature has jacked up our sales taxes too high already. And besides, some of the things in that transportation proposal were more wants than needs, and only in there to get people who don’t ride buses to back the proposal.

No one knows where we go from here. The County Council doesn’t know. The citizens group that put together the plan the council rejected doesn’t know.

And just in case we got the notion that the city of Columbia would be taking up the slack, I got a preemptive call from Mayor Bob Coble Thursday morning to tell me that the options range from few to none. (While the mayor didn’t say so, that’s largely thanks to the Legislature’s tireless efforts to make sure local governments can’t pay for any local need that they aren’t paying for already.)

About the only person offering new ideas last week was regular contributor “bud” on my blog, who suggested using the city’s and county’s shares of the “hospitality tax,” a lot of which currently goes for things a whole lot less essential than a mass transit system.

As I write this, I don’t know what the best way to pay for a better transit system might be. What I do know is that Midlands governments need to find a way, for the sake of:

  • Those who have no other way to get to work now.
  • Those of us who would like a better way to work than we have now (and sometimes need one).
  • Those “knowledge workers” who are supposed to make the planned Innovista work, and who have the option of working instead in a community where it’s easier, and cheaper, and cleaner to get around.

For more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Driving slower

55 Replies

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
            — the late George Carlin

When I drove to Memphis a couple of weeks ago, I did a new thing — I drove under the de jure speed limit. Normally, I do what most people do, stay under the de facto limit — staying carefully under a speed that is 10 mph over the limit.

This change on my part wasn’t due to some newfound respect for the law. We know that here in the United States, no state actually means for us to drive below the stated speed. If they did, the police would stop and ticket us for exceeding it. We all know that a trooper will sit right there and watch you go by if you’re doing 78 in a 70 zone, for instance. But go 85, and he’ll get you. (One exception to this may be the Mississippi patrolmen, who are apparently too busy speeding themselves to notice anyone else doing it.)

Nor was I doing it to help fight the War on Terror. I agree with Samuel Tenenbaum that we should lower the limit to 55 and enforce it, but in the meantime, driving that much slower than the surrounding traffic is not only unsafe, but will not have a sufficiently measurable impact on energy independence to make taking your life in your hands worth it. We’ve all got to do it for it to help.

No, I drove below the limit because my family was packed into three cars, and one of those contained my wife and daughter and the six-month-old twins, and they had to stop frequently. My wife said it made her nervous to try to stay within sight of each other, so I went on ahead, but tried not to get too far ahead.

And you know what? I kind of liked it. It was … more relaxing.

Anyway, when I was getting ready for this trip, I ran into Samuel, and he said "Drive 55!" And I said I didn’t think I could do that, because I had to drive to Pennsylvania, pack my daughter’s belongings into my truck, drive back from Pennsylvania with all the stuff, and unload it at the place where she’s going to be living back in South Carolina, all between Friday morning and Monday afternoon. But I did promise to stay below the posted limits. "But that means you’ll be driving 70!" Actually, no, I assured him — since so much of the trip is in Virginia (limit 65), and the limit in PA is 65 or 55, and the small bit of Maryland is 65 or 60 (around Hagerstown), and the first 50 miles of North Carolina is 60, my average would be far below 70.

So I did it yesterday, and the results were good.

I drive a 2000 Ford Ranger. And for those of you who wonder why the founder of the Energy Party doesn’t drive a Prius, consider three things:

I can’t afford a Prius. I don’t foresee a time anywhere in the near future when I will be able to afford a Prius.

I am the designated truck owner in the family — my large, extended family. No one closely related to me owns a large, truck-type vehicle of any kind — certainly no SUVs, I’m happy to say. Whenever one of my 20-something children has to move from one apartment to another, or building materials are needed, or an attic full of stuff has to be hauled either to Goodwill or the dump or whatever, I’m the guy; I’ve got the truck.

I’ve done everything I can to be responsible about this truck-ownership thing. I went out of my way to find a 4-cylinder, manual transmission. (What this means is that I’m not only the designated truck owner, but the designated truck driver, since no one else has confidence with the manual shift, and I prefer to drive my own truck anyway.)

This brings up an ironic digression. We looked into renting a truck for moving my daughter from PA. It was going to cost more than $700 — we tried several vendors — plus the cost of renting a car to get up there. So we decided to give away a lot of her stuff — my daughter’s fine with that — and haul back only what I could get onto my Ranger. (To get your mind around this, picture the Beverly Hillbillies, only we opted not to take a rocking chair for Granny.) But I needed new tires. So I splurged and bought (via credit card) four new tires. Changing the tires revealed bearings that needed repacking, the need for new tie rod ends, and original shocks that were overdue for replacement at 110,000 miles. Total: $1,450 dollars. Samuel and Jerry Whitley, who is a CPA, told me that at least I was investing it in my truck instead of wasting it on a rental. So I guess that’s something. And it drives really well down, without that shimmy every time I went over the slightest irregularity in the road.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, my point: I drove under the speed limit the whole way. Normally, my truck gets about 22 mpg in town. I had never had it on the highway for an extended period before. Driving below the limit, I got 27 mpg on my first tank of gas. I refilled when we finally rolled into Carlisle, PA, last night, and I had gotten an awesome 28.7 mpg on the second tank. Not as good as the 31 or so we had done in my wife’s car on the Memphis trip, but this is a truck — and as we know, Detroit has put zero effort into making the things efficient, on account of their being exempted from CAFE standards all those years.

So I think it was worth the extra hour and a half or so it took — or whatever. I didn’t want to actually do the math, because that might make me want to hurry on the trip back. It’s like a Zen thing. We left Cola at 10 a.m., stopped several times, and got to Carlisle at about 8:10 p.m.

And it was also a more relaxing drive. Once you drop the usual "Gotta get there! Gotta press the guy in front of me!" mode, your head gets into a better place. I noticed this on the Memphis trip as well.

OK, who dropped the Agent Orange?

3 Replies

Herbal2

Remember how I told you about the Vietnamese cilantro that was taking over the little herb garden I had planted in my office in an effort to make it look a little less bleak?

Well, I actually took another picture of it a couple of weeks ago (above), and meant to post it to show y’all how much more it had grown, but I figured there’s a limit to how much minutia you can throw at people, even on a blog.

Well, there’s been a dramatic new development. I’ve been watering it — actually, watering it a ridiculous amount, but still, it would look thirsty on Mondays.

Here (below) is how it looked when I came this Monday. Actually, this is how it looked Tuesday, after I had given it lots of water to try to revive it.

So… either there is a limit to how much water this stuff can soak up, or somebody dropped a significant amount of Agent Orange in my office over the weekend.

Or maybe somebody put a curse on me — did ya ever think of that?

Still no coffee since 9:37 a.m….
Agentorange

Product placement on TV ‘news’

5 Replies

Mcstarbucks1

Don’t know what y’all think of this, but these must be some pretty unassertive "news" people who stand by while their station collects revenue for product placement, and they don’t even get any free coffee out of it!

What a raw deal:

    Oooooooh, they’re calling out your name.
    Two cups of McDonald’s iced coffee (BUY!) sit on the Fox 5 TV news desk, a punch-you-in-the-face product placement (BUY!) to chase down your morning news.
    They’ve been on the Las Vegas station set for about two weeks, following the lead of a few TV stations across the country, and they’re still looking every bit as frosty and tantalizing (BUY!) as they were the first day you laid your eyes on them.
    But wait, here’s the best part: They’re not real. Fake coffee on the real news, two plastic cups permanently filled with some kind of bogus drink. The anchors aren’t even supposed to acknowledge them, McDonald’s reps explain. That’s part of their genius, my little lambs! They get into your mind without you knowing it. So they just sit there, two logo-emblazoned plastic cups, percolating into the psyche. Made-to-scale models that weigh something like seven pounds each — refreshing, and bottom-line boosting!…

By the way, if Starbucks would like to pay a bunch of money, and give give me lifetime free coffee, for ads on my blog, what’s stopping you? I mean, I’m drinking the stuff anyway.

Also, as you can see above and below, I can sometimes get my guests to play along…

Mcstarbucks2