Category Archives: Personal

Am I the only one who remembers the time BEFORE Kenny’s?

3 Replies

Today, we have a couple of letters, and our newsroom had a section-front story, that discuss what is to happen with the former Kenny’s Auto Supply site in Five Points, behind Yesterday’s.

And I find myself thinking, as I often do — am I the only one who thinks of that property as where the Winn-Dixie used to be? I still think of Kenny’s as the new thing. I’m like, way disoriented, as the young folks might say.

Or — and this would be worse — am I dreaming this? Did I never go there to buy my groceries, then walk with them all the back uphill on Blossom to the Honeycombs, which, come to think of it, also don’t exist any more?

And if not, where was I really back in the fall of 1971? Somebody give me a reality check here…

John1

Zyrtec update

6 Replies
Here’s an interesting twist on my Sunday column. As you’ll recall, I mentioned that my current group insurance has in recent years refused to cover Zyrtec, which I found to be effective in treating my allergies. So I got this message from Zyrtec’s PR firm:

Hi
Brad,

My name is Eric Tatro, and I’m with
Cohn & Wolfe public relations. Today I read your editorial about health
insurance that was posted on your blog, and noticed that you had some trouble
getting your insurance company to pay for prescription Zyrtec.

We are working with McNeil Consumer
Healthcare, who recently announced that the FDA approved Zyrtec and Zyrtec-D 12
Hour (which combines Zyrtec with a decongestant) for use without a prescription.
I thought you and your readers might find this interesting, since allergy
sufferers will soon be able to purchase Zyrtec anywhere over-the-counter
prescriptions are sold without first having to visit an allergist or health care
professional. Also, for many allergy sufferers, Zyrtec will cost up to one-third
less than prescription Zyrtec. Both medications will be available nationwide in
January 2008.

If you would like more information,
you can find a full press kit located at http://www.ZyrtecPressKit.com. The FDA
also issued a press release on the approval, which can be found at http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01750.html.
Of course, please let me know if you have any questions or if I can help in any
other way.

Sincere
thanks,

-Eric

I immediately wrote back to Eric as follows:

    Thanks.
Actually, I heard that last week, but it didn’t affect my column, since it
didn’t affect the fact that up to now, my insurance has refused to pay for
Zyrtec, and HAS paid for allergy shots, which was the point I was
making.
    Here’s an
irony for you, though: I had already learned that my NEW insurance (that for
which I’ll be paying $274.42 every two weeks) WILL pay for a Zyrtec
prescription. Now that it’s going over-the-counter, they might NOT cover the
prescription — I’ll have to check, but that’s my strong
suspicion.
    So if Zyrtec
is available to me only over the counter, and the price is only 30 percent less
than the amount that was so high my current insurance refused to pay (which had
to be really high, when you consider that they DID cover something that had a
co-pay — which would be no more than 50 percent of the total — of $81.95),
then I still won’t be able to afford it. With my high premiums, I will be very
much boxed into whatever my insurance will cover.
    The only
thing that might help me would be if a generic version came available. But from
what you’re telling me, this is one of those situations where the drug goes OTC,
but doesn’t go generic — at least, not yet. Am I right about that? I hope not,
but the fact that the company considers it cost-effective to hire a PR firm to
promote the brand seems to indicate that I’m right.
    Do you have
any idea of when the drug might be available in generic form? It would be very
helpful to know that.
I’ll let you know what he says back. I’ve also made a note to myself to find out at first opportunity whether I’m right about the insurance not helping if it goes OTC, but not generic. Finally, I’ve got a call in to the FDA to ask when Zyrtec will go generic. I realize those of you who don’t need Zyrtec might not care about this in the narrowest sense, but I believe this situation is what English majors (or sociologists or economists or somebody) call a microcosm. Anyway, I’ll be back to you as the plot sickens…

The elves are restless

1 Reply


On Thanksgiving, after the turkey, I accompanied my family — or the portion able to join us to visit my youngest up in Pennsylvania — to see "Fred Claus." (Vince Vaughan cracks me up, OK?) Anyway, we enjoyed it for the light entertainment it was.

The next day, we bopped up to NYC because my youngest had never been there. Yes, we visited the shopping capital of the world on the busiest shopping day of the year. We weren’t buying; looking was overwhelming enough. And it turns out that, while "Fred Claus" exposed certain problems with Santa’s toy production process, it failed to reflect the deep unrest among some of the elves — or at least, the elves we found on the sidewalk outside Macy’s. (Like an explorer drawn into the heart of darkness, I couldn’t resist leading the kids that way in awe and fascination, after we got off the New Jersey Transit train across the street at Penn Station.)

They were very angry — and unexpectedly tall, I found. Maybe they were Middle Earth elves, rather than the kind from the North Pole. In any case, they didn’t seem to have the ol’ Santa spirit.

In case you went shopping on Friday and think it was hectic, I share with you this video, which still doesn’t quite show what it was really like to be in that bedlam. As one of my daughters said looking over my shoulder at the portion of the video inside Macy’s (the part right after the angry elves), "You had to be there." A very different scene from during the parade the day before, but just about as crowded.

I really spoiled the hectic effect by throwing in some restful parts — the skaters at Rockefeller Center, for instance — because I’m a big believer in giving The Full Picture.

‘Health care reform?’ Hush! You’ll anger the Insurance Gods!

54 Replies

Redshirt1

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
EVERYWHERE YOU GO in South Carolina, if there is a presidential candidate nearby (and they do seem to be everywhere), you’ll see people in red T-shirts that say “Divided We Fail.”
    That’s the AARP’s way of drawing the candidates’, and everyone else’s, attention to the organization’s belief that “All Americans should have access to affordable health care, including prescription drugs, and these costs should not burden future generations.”
    You’ve heard about how one in seven Americans, or some such awful number, has no health insurance. But I’m not here to talk about that. Today, I’m talking about the other six of us who have coverage. If routine — not even catastrophic, but routine — health care is “affordable” for those of us with insurance, then somebody redefined the word while my brain was imploding from trying to figure out which health plan to pick for next year.
    As AARP’s Web site notes, “Whether we have good health benefits or not, it seems that insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-payments always seem to rise faster than our paychecks.”
    Not that I’m complaining! I love my benefits, and I love the job that provides me with them — love it love it love it. I’ll never, ever leave it, or even threaten to. I will pay no attention to that same AARP article when it moans that “Too many Americans are locked into jobs or stopped from opening their own businesses because of worries about affording or maintaining health insurance.” Hah! “Opening their own businesses?” I’ll let the saps who don’t have families and think they’ll never get sick engage in such crazy entrepreneurial tricks as that.
    To complain about our health insurance is to risk offending the Insurance Gods, and their ways are mysterious and terrifying.
    Just the other day I went to my allergist’s office to get the results of my first skin tests in 20 years. I’d been getting allergy shots based on the old tests all that time, and my allergist, being a highly trained professional, thought it might be a good idea to see if I was still allergic to the same stuff. Actually, I can’t tell you for sure that the shots ever helped. So why get them? Because my insurance pays for allergy shots, but won’t pay any more for me to take Zyrtec, which I know relieved my symptoms. The Insurance Gods say I don’t need Zyrtec.
    Anyway, at the end of my visit I went to pay my $50 copay, and the lady at the counter — one of those ladies who is neither a doctor nor a nurse, but one of the army of priestesses every doctor employs to perform arcane rituals all day aimed at appeasing the Insurance Gods — told me that I had a credit on my account, so today I only had to pay $17.45 cents. Timidly, I asked why I had a credit when I hadn’t paid anything lately. She shrugged and said she and her colleagues never ask, because no one understands why insurance does what it does.
    But … come a little closer so I can say this softly… there are times when the Insurance Gods are not so kind. For instance:
    Earlier this year, after surgery worked only briefly to relieve head-pounding sinus pain, my surgeon gave me a prescription for Allegra. I started to protest adding yet another drug to the 11 I was already taking, counting the prednisone he was putting me on, but then he said it was the generic version, so I said OK. My copay is only like $10 on generics; the Insurance Gods say generics are good.
    Then my pharmacy said my copay for my 30 generic pills would be $81.95. Stunned, I asked why? They shrugged and said no one knew; the Insurance Gods just said so. I shut up and paid it, even though it meant delaying paying on my mortgage or my electricity bill or some other frill. I think the pills helped, but I certainly wasn’t going to get a refill.
    I make more money than most people do here in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and I live paycheck to paycheck, in large part because of the cost of being an extremely allergic asthmatic, and needing to do what it takes to keep enough oxygen pumping to my brain to enable me to work so I can keep paying my premiums and copays. My premiums in the coming year — we’re going to a new plan — will be $274.42 on every biweekly check, not counting dental or vision care. And I’m lucky to have it. I know that, compared to most, I’ve got a sweet deal!
    I’m in the top income quintile in the U.S. population, and we can’t afford cable TV, we’ve never taken a European vacation or done anything crazy like that, we haven’t bought a new car since 1986, and aside from the 401(k) I can’t touch until I retire (if I can ever afford to retire), we have no savings.
    Yet I will pay my $274.42 gladly, and I will thank the one true God in whom I actually do believe that I have that insurance, and that I am in an upper-income bracket so that I can just barely pay those premiums, and that neither my wife (a cancer survivor) nor I nor either of the two children (out of five) the gods still let me cover is nearly as unhealthy as the people I see whenever I visit a hospital.
    Speaking of hospitals, I recently heard Mike Biediger, CEO of Lexington Medical Center, marveling that when he started in the business, health care soaked up 7 percent of the U.S. economy, and no one thought it could go higher. Now, he said, it’s 16 percent, and climbing.
    That’s why so many physicians and corporate CEOs who once would have bellowed in rage at the sound of “socialized medicine” now believe we’ve got to do something as a nation to get this mess under control. So we’re going to do something, right? Don’t bet on it. What I’ve seen from presidential candidates thus far seems very timid, and disturbingly deferential toward the Insurance Gods (who once got very angry at one of them), and the Big Pharma Gods as well.
    Mr. Biediger pointed me to a recent piece in the New England Journal of Medicine that explained that “no matter how much momentum it seems to have, no matter how many signs point to change, there is nothing inevitable about health care reform in the United States. In U.S. health policy, the status quo is deeply entrenched and, despite all its failings, the system is remarkably resistant to change, in part because many constituencies profit from it.”
    And there’s not a lot we can do about it — except maybe get one of those red T-shirts, and show up every time a presidential candidate comes to town. They’ve got boxes full of them at AARP headquarter
s, and they’ll give you one for free.

Redshirt2

The terror of having to let our kids out of our sight

16 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
No man could have missed her. Dressed, if you want to call it that, in a hot little “nurse” costume — snug white dress covering not a bit of her long legs, pert little cap pinned atop blonde head, high-heeled white boots — she caught my eye from a block away.
    “Somebody’s got her Halloween costume on,” I started saying to my wife with the least-interested tone I could muster. But something was wrong. The girl was teetering in a way that went beyond the impracticality of her boots. She barely made it across Main Street to the northwest corner of Main and Blossom, where a temporary tunnel guides pedestrians past high-rise construction.
    As she disappeared into the tunnel, my wife said, “Pull over.” My first chance to do so was beyond the construction, almost to Assembly. My wife hopped out and headed back, in full Mom-to-the-rescue mode.
    She found the girl with her dress hiked up to her waist, panties fully exposed, looking for a place to relieve herself.
    “No!” my wife ordered, reaching out her hand. “Honey, you just can’t do this. You cannot walk down the street staggering in a little nurse uniform in Columbia, South Carolina. I’m going to take you home.”
    The girl obediently dropped her skirt, took my wife’s hand and cried, “Oh, thank you, thank you for helping me!”
    Seconds later, I glanced in the rearview mirror to see my wife marching that statuesque woman-child by the hand toward the car as though she were a preschooler who had wandered away from the group. I reached back to clear space for her on the back seat. She got in, my wife got in, and I pulled back into the traffic on Blossom, moving toward the river.
    I asked the “nurse” whether she had been headed to one of the nearby sorority houses. No, she slurred, her dorm was beyond the Greek Village. I pondered that in confusion. My wife got her to tell us the name of her dorm — which was three or four blocks back, at the heart of the campus, 180 degrees from the direction in which she had been staggering. I did a U-turn at my first opportunity.
    “I’m so sorry,” she kept saying, alternating between that and “Thank you, thank you so much!” She was extremely grateful. She had been one lost little girl, and she knew it. She was a freshman, just weeks away from home.
    “All my friends are older, though,” she offered as an explanation of her condition. She said something vague about guys making assumptions, which seemed to be her way of accounting for being alone.
    My wife, determined to have the girl learn something from this experience, pointed out that young girls have disappeared from the streets of Columbia. “Oh, I know! I’m so sorry,” she repeated, adding plaintively:
    “I’m trying to be a responsible freshman!” She was so earnest that we didn’t laugh, not until later, after we had deposited her back at her dorm and could feel like maybe, for tonight at least, the child was safe.
    But it was only a feeling. She wasn’t safe, in the way a parent would define it. Just before we let her out, she was on her cell phone trying to tell a friend how to come to her dorm — the place she couldn’t find herself. Despite having just been so lost and frightened, despite being so grateful for her deliverance, somewhere in her besotted mind floated the idea that the night was young.
    Once they leave home, we never can tell ourselves that they are safe, can we?
    That same night, six of the “nurse’s” fellow USC students, and another from Clemson, would die in a beach house fire in North Carolina.
    That may seem a wrenching transition, from seriocomic little episode that ended well (we hope) to a tragedy that has consumed our community for a week and touched hearts across the nation, but to a father, the two things have an awful lot in common. They both evoke the constant, gnawing fear that comes when your children are no longer in your sight, no longer under your protection.
    That “nurse” was exactly the age of the youngest of my five children, who is off on her own and far away. Just over a month ago, our daughter’s boyfriend — her only close friend in the entire state of Pennsylvania — was killed in a car wreck. He was a passenger in a car with three other boys. It was broad daylight, and they were moving safely and legally down a quiet, Shandon-like residential street when another car ran a stop sign and hit them broadside. David was thrown from the vehicle.
    When the third of my five kids was 3 or 4 years old, he had a maddening habit of slipping away on little adventures. But after mere moments of sheer terror, we’d find him and scoop him into our arms, and the universe would resume its proper shape.
    It’s so easy when they’re little. It’s when they get tall, when they take on a deceptive semblance of being men and women — like the “woman” I thought I saw in the nurse costume — that it gets really tough. It’s when they have every excuse to be out of your sight, and everybody tells you that you have to let them go, that the real terror begins.
    My mother used to have a quotation cut out and taped to her kitchen cabinet, to the effect that having a child was “forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
    That is exactly true, and of course it is impossible to go on living like that. But we do. I don’t know how. God somehow suspends the physical laws governing the universe to make it possible for us to get up, put one foot in front of the other, walk on ice thinner than an eggshell, and keep doing it as though we actually believe what we’re doing is within the realm of possibility.
    And most of the time, it works. It worked that night, for two parents somewhere in the Upstate. That little “nurse” was going to be picked up by somebody, because she was never getting home on her own. Why did she take my wife’s hand? Is it because she recognized her as a Mom? I hope so. On behalf of her real parents, out there walking on their own thin ice, I sincerely hope so.

Words fail

1 Reply

Beach_house_fire_wart

You may have noticed that I haven’t had anything to say about the kids who died in the fire. That’s because I don’t know what to say, beyond the fact that it’s awful.

More importantly, we haven’t said anything editorially. At least, we haven’t said anything that’s been published. We forced ourselves to do an editorial for tomorrow’s paper. Warren Bolton, God bless him, volunteered to write it after Cindi and I (remember, Mike’s out) both said we didn’t think we were up to it.

Part of this is that Cindi and I are not the world’s best empathizers. Of those currently on the board, Warren (who is almost, but not quite yet, an ordained AME minister), is the best. At times such as this, we really miss Claudia Brinson, who was really good at it. She said the right thing, and said it beautifully. Back when she and John Monk were on the board, they were always the first to say we needed to say something about something like this. I would agree with them; I just wouldn’t know what to say about something like this — something that everyone was talking about, but which did not have an obvious editorial point. No matter of policy or anything like that, which of course is the usual province of editorials. (The term we use under such circumstances is that we just need to "resonate" to the news, something I’m not that great at.)

But there’s more to it than that, at least for me. As I said in our meeting this morning, I don’t even know what to say in a case like this when I’m intimately involved with it. When my youngest daughter’s boyfriend died a month back, I drove up to Pennsylvania to be with her, and was there for the visitation and funeral, and I still didn’t know what to say — to his mother, his friends, even to my daughter. Warren says that sometimes you don’t have to say anything; you just need to be there. And that’s true, which is why I drove up there. But there’s still a moment that demands something be said — such as when I was introduced to David’s mother at the funeral home — and I am struck dumb.

I continue to want to comfort my daughter over the phone, but I continue to be at a loss. I just tell her a lot that I love her.

Pretty lame, huh? I’m at no loss for words when it comes to total B.S. — such as chatting with a celebrity about nothing, in the "Seinfeld" sense of nothing — but wordless when it comes to the things that matter most.

Anyway, we have an editorial for tomorrow — a short editorial, fleshed out with a photo, because there are just so many words you can come up with even when you’re trying hard. Warren wrote it, and I tried to improve it in the editing, but I just finally had to let go and put it on the page, dissatisfied.

Words are just so inadequate.

I do have a column rattling around that is peripherally related to this tragedy, but I think it’s one that would be better a few days from now, so I’m saving it for Sunday. A column is easier than an editorial under such circumstance. An editorial demands authoritative pronouncements; a column allows for vagueness and uncertainty. But I’m going to let that one gestate.

In the meantime, if you have words — perhaps there are some Claudias out there among you, who possess the words I lack — you may put them here. Or better yet, go to this page at thestate.com. That would be more respectful. A blog just seems like an awfully frivolous, useless thing at a time like this.

The Colbert Endorsement, Director’s Cut

Leave a reply


Yesterday was an historic occasion for this blog — and I’m not talking about the Stephen Colbert endorsement that has helped drive my traffic today to an all-time high for a Monday. It was the first time someone besides me was behind the camera. I enlisted the aid of a colleague from our newsroom whom I found standing around, not being sufficiently useful in my opinion. Just a little tidbit there for you extreme trivia buffs.

Anyway, here is my encounter with the "candidate" in its entirety. As you can see, I was shameless in my self-promotion. I didn’t even bother chatting about the weather, just straight into what Stephen Colbert could do for me, not what I could do for Stephen Colbert.

Why don’t candidates ask us for more than our votes?

21 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win….”
       — John F. Kennedy, 1962

WHAT WOULD we do if one among the horde of candidates seeking to become president of the United States in 2009 challenged us as a nation to do something hard?
    Most Americans alive today can’t remember a president or would-be president doing anything remotely like that. The ones we’re used to are all about what they’re going to do for us, not what we should do for our country. Republicans want to cut our taxes; Democrats want to give us more programs and, to hear them all talk, at no cost to us.
    But I believe that if the cause were worthwhile and the proposal made sense, we’d rise to it. Maybe not all of us, but there’s a critical mass out here who would follow someone courageous enough to ask us to do our part.
    I, for one, am sick of being treated, by people who seek my vote, as some sort of “gimme-gimme” baby, lacking in any sense of responsibility for the world around me. Those of us who are grownups are used to accepting, in our personal lives, challenges that are by no means easy to meet — going to work day after day, paying our bills, raising children. Why would we not understand a president who said, “Here’s a challenge that concerns us all, and here’s what each of us needs to do to rise to it”?
    Young people among us want to pitch in and accomplish difficult things a lot more than we give them credit for. Part of Barack Obama’s appeal among the young is his call to service, his challenge to build a better nation. But unless I’ve missed it, he has not asked us, as a nation, to do anything hard.
    Don’t misunderstand me, as did a colleague who wrote:

    The feeling I get… is that you’re so frustrated that you just want the government to demand SOME SORT OF SACRIFICE, on something, anything. Whether it’s needed or not. Doesn’t really matter what.

    Well, yes and no. Sure, there’s a part of me that just wants to be asked for a change to do something, if only for the novelty: Buy bonds, save scrap metal, whatever.
    But there’s more to it than that. The truth is, our country faces a lot of challenges that demand something or other from all of us, but political “leaders” have a pathological fear of pointing it out to us.
    Back when JFK challenged us to go to the moon because it was hard, we did it — even though there was no practical reason why we needed to do so. Sure, it gave us the creeps to think of “going to sleep by the light of a communist moon,” but it was a symbolic competition, with only marginal applications to the true, deadly competition of the arms race. We couldn’t stand not to be No. 1.
    But today we have very real, very practical challenges that have tangible consequences if we fail to meet them.
    Take just one of them: our dependence on foreign oil.
    Sen. Joe Biden had a great speech a while back about how President Bush missed the golden opportunity to ask us, on Sept. 12, 2001, to do whatever it took to free us from this devil’s bargain whereby we are funding people who want to destroy us and all that we cherish. And yet, his own energy proposals are a tepid combination of expanding alternative fuels (good news to the farmer) and improving fuel efficiency (let’s put the onus on Detroit).
    A broad spectrum of thinkers who are not running for office — from Tom Friedman to Robert Samuelson to Charles Krauthammer — say we must jack up the price of gasoline with a tax increase, to cut demand and fund the search for alternatives. It makes sense. But the next candidate with the guts to ask us to pay more at the pump will be the first.
    My friend Samuel Tenenbaum is on a quixotic quest to build support for restoration of the 55-mph speed limit. It would be hard (for me, anyway), but the benefits are undeniable. It would conserve fuel dramatically, starving petrodictators from Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would save thousands of lives now lost to speed on our highways.
    Samuel pitches his idea to every candidate he can corner. They smile and move away from him as quickly as possible.
    But you know, when I wrote a column a while back proposing the creation of an Energy Party — that would among other things demand that we jack up the gas tax by $2 a gallon (to fund an Apollo-style project on alternatives), institute Samuel’s 55-mph limit, ban SUVs for anyone without a proven “life-or-death need to drive one” and build nuclear power plants as fast as we can — I got a surprising number of positive responses. I think that was less because my respondents thought those were all good ideas. I think they just liked the idea of being asked to do something for a change.
    Energy independence is just the start. Add to it the urgent needs to stop global warming, win the war on terror, make health care affordable while at the same time avoiding the coming entitlements train wreck, and you’ve got a list of things that require a lot more audience involvement — and yes, sacrifice — than our current candidates have been willing to ask us for.
    And while you may not feel the same, I’m dying to be asked. Not because it would be easy, and not even because it would be hard, but because these hard things actually need doing.

Garage sale! My place. Hurry!

3 Replies

We’re having a garage sale NOW at my house in Quail Hollow. Theoretically, it doesn’t start until 8, but of course people are already here. LOTS o’ stuff to sell, including a couple of big items like a kitchen stove/oven and a John Deere lawn tractor.

It’s at 100 Otter Trail. Quail Hollow is sort of behind Lexington Medical Center — between it and the Saluda River, off Sunset/378.

Gotta go.

Last day of the fair

1 Reply

Yesterday, I mentioned something about having a religiously diverse family — Catholic, Jewish, evangelical and mainline protestant — but added "no Muslims yet, though."

That wasn’t exactly right. I had forgotten about the Bantu.

My wife was, before going up to Pennsylvania for the past year, the leader of our church’s team that worked with the Somali Bantu family that St. Peter’s sponsors. In those days, she spent a huge amount of time becoming as close to them as though they were family. Others took up that mantle while she was away, but she has started helping out again, tutoring one of the children during the week.

This morning, she and some other members of the volunteer team took several of the children to the Fair. I joined them in the afternoon, after Mass (my wife had gone to an earlier service).

After rides and pizza, I proposed we go check out the livestock. I thought they would get into that, because I knew how much their mother prized goat as an cherished part of their diet (my wife used to regularly score them a goat from a local butcher) — and there were some big ones to be seen. I thought vaguely that it would be an echo of their people’s pastoral past — which is another way of saying I wasn’t thinking. America changes immigrants, and in any case, these kids were far too young to remember any semblance of normal life before the refugee camps. You know what they seemed to dig the most? The heavy machinery from Joe Blanchard’s company that was on display out toward the horse show arena. The little boys especially, but also the one young girl in her robes and headscarf, really enjoyed climbing up and pretending to operate them.

For my part, I got what I go to the Fair for — Fiske fries, and a bag of cotton candy. Not exactly health food, but it only comes round once a year.

Jews know what they’re about

Leave a reply

As a Roman Catholic, I’ve got to tell you that the Jews have got it going on. We should be so focused on what we’re supposed to be about.

Today we ran up to Greenville for a naming ceremony for my young niece at a local synagogue (I have a diverse family — Catholic, Jewish, evangelical protestant, mainline protestant — no Muslims yet, though). Anyway, during the two-hour Shabbat service, we heard a couple of times about the fact that this was a special weekend in which synagogues and churches across the country are focusing on children’s health care.

And when I say focus, I mean focus. No vague platitudes. The rabbi stepped aside so that a local pediatrician could give the homily. He addressed himself to the kids in the congregation, and explained to them why it was important to make sure all children had access to health care. But he and other speakers went beyond that — they explained why the S-CHIP bill veto should have been overridden, and made sure everyone know that their congressman (Bob Inglis) and both U.S. senators had voted with the president. He told the kids it was their responsibility to urge their parents to vote for officeholders who cared more than that about children’s health.

Why? He told them three reasons why: Because their own children might someday not be able to afford health care. Because they had friends in school who had no coverage. And finally, the best reason of all:

"Because you’re Jews." In other words, because you believe in doing the right thing by other people.

He explained to them that the Jews had been blessed by having been enslaved in Egypt. It taught them what it was like to be without the basic necessities of life, and served as a lasting lesson that they should always care about people who were deprived of such fundamental things.

So why should they care about the 10 million kids whose moms and dads can’t afford to take them to the doctor when they have a sore throat? "Because you’re Jews."

We Christians could definitely do with such straightforward, blunt reminders of what we’re supposed to believe in.

Hyper-intense eye candy

5 Replies

Football2

        Way, way more intense than this…

Followers of this blog may or may not have picked up on the fact that I am not a football fan. In fact, it would not be unfair to call me an anti-fan. I mean, I’m glad everyone is such a good mood in Columbia these days because of the Gamecocks’ fortunes (bread and circuses do, indeed, have a practical point), but I’ve also seen them drunk, angry, and up close, so I take these good vibes with a full lick of salt.

But Saturday night, I found myself in a local pub actually watching college football — and being drawn into it. It was less a cultural phenomenon than a neurological one. It was the effect, previously unknown to me, of wide-screen HDTV.

I commented to my wife that someday, when our perpetual state of pecuniary strangulation has subsided somewhat (I’m a perpetual optimist), I’m gonna have me one of them. The idea, for me, is that I’ll then be able to get full the effect from all those DVDs I’ve been collecting in widescreen format (even though I realize they won’t fully use the features of the screen). That’s why I have a TV set, after all — to watch movies on.

And wonder of wonders, she didn’t contradict me! She actually spoke of the thing as though it were a possibility, wondering where it might go in the house. She was thinking along the lines of the same location as my hypothetical pool table. I suggested it would be hard to fully extend a LaZboy with a pool table in the way, but I did it gently, so as not to break the spell.

I think she was, at least to a slight extent, in the grip of the same thing that grapped me — the extreme, deep intensity of those hypersharp colors dancing around on the screen. I actually got, sort of, in a way, caught up in the games on the screen.

Looking at one of the two giant screens, I pointed out that everybody seemed to have on makeup. She said they DID have on makeup. Well, yeah, the sportscasters in the studio had on makeup — I imagined I could see each grain of powder caked onto their base — but even the fans in the stands seemed to have on makeup. I think it was just that every feature on their faces was so ridiculously clear and sharp, that it was as though they were artificially accented.

But then, I looked over at the other screen, and everybody looked just as intensely clear and sharp, but they didn’t seem to have on makeup. They looked explosively natural. I then realized that there was a tiny flaw in the color tuning of the first one, imposing a slight bronzing effect on European skin tones, suggestive of makeup. But it looked so good anyway that if I hadn’t had the other screen to compare it to, I would have said the color was beyond perfect.

Yeah, I know "beyond perfect" is an oxymoron, but what do you say about colors and shapes that impress themselves on your brain in a way that goes beyond colors and shapes as they are commonly understood. It’s like those old detergent commercials from when they first started adding phosphorus or whatever to the powder, and the ads said "whiter than white." These uniforms on these players were redder than red and bluer than blue and turquoiser that turquoise.

At one point, we encountered some folks we knew — friends of one of our daughters. And as my wife was speaking to them and I was looking over her shoulder trying to listen, it hit me that their faces were so dimly lit, so flat in their coloring, that my eyes sort of slid off of them, with little to grab onto.

My senses had become jaded that quickly. We had been there less than an hour, and the intensity of color had already made real people and real life insufficiently stimulating. I was appropriately embarrassed, ashamed and appalled at this realization. Time to leave.

Sirens_2
But it occurred to me leaving that if I had one of those things at home, I might not just watch movies on it. I might even watch football. But don’t worry, I won’t let me or mine get corrupted or anything. I’ll get my men to stick beeswax into their ears and tie me to the mast before hitting the "power" button.

Football4

        … and way bluer than this.

The cognitive divide between black and white

14 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE TIME of the week has arrived at which I look at some problem or other and confidently pronounce, as though I knew, just what we should do about it. But I have no solutions today.
    Today, I’m just sad, and solutions seem scarce. Part of it is personal. I just returned a few days ago from Pennsylvania, where my youngest daughter’s closest friend had died after a traffic accident. But there are other causes.
    As I write, my wife is on her way back from Memphis, where she had been, tending to family business, when the awful news came about David. She had to fly back there after the funeral to get her car, and drive it home.
    A few minutes ago, I checked on her by cell phone. I told her I was groping about for a column idea, and she said I should write about how lucky we were to be living in South Carolina rather than Memphis. She cited what she described as the painfully divisive victory speech Mayor Willie Herenton had delivered after his re-election a few days ago.
    I just saw the video, and she’s right. Lord knows we have our own demons here in the state that was first to secede, and would do it again if some had their way. But there is a rawness to racial tension in Memphis that is hard to describe if you haven’t been there.
    There was a time — 16 years ago, when he became the first black mayor of that city — when Willie Herenton was a sign of hope: a black man elected with both black and white support.
    It was the sort of thing we had wanted and expected to see for a long time. Back in 1974, when we were students at Memphis State, Harold Ford — senior, not the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year — ran for Congress against incumbent Republican Dan Kuykendall. My wife and I were totally for Ford, even though Rep. Kuykendall was her Dad’s friend and business partner. He had been all very well and good for the folks his age, but our generation was going to change things. And that race thing? Our kids would only know about that from history books.
    So it was sad, here in the next century, to hear Mayor Herenton tell his supporters in his hour of victory that “I now know who is for me, and I also know who is against me,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd applauds, because they know just what he means.
    For a man just re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term, Mr. Herenton had a huge chip on his shoulder. “There are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis,” he said to much cheering. “There are some haters…. I know about haters, and I know about shaking ’em off.”
    He went on to tell about “two sad occasions” from the campaign. “I’m gonna let you know about the sickness in Memphis.”
    He spoke of a basketball game at which he had presented the key to the city during halftime, and “the fans showed so much disdain and hatred… and that place was full, 90 percent white.”
    Another time, while appearing live from Memphis on “Good Morning America” along with Justin Timberlake, “I get up on the stage, and it was 95 percent young white kids, they booed me on national television.”
    “But what they want to say is, can Willie Herenton bring us together? I didn’t separate us.”
    “Memphis got a lot of healing to do. But see, I don’t have that problem. They’ve got a problem.”
    We’ve all got a problem, and not just in Memphis. What is Memphis but a great, big Jena, Lousiana? Another town where there are no heroes, just a place full of people, black and white, all messed up over race.
    Mayor Herenton isn’t just some isolated megalomaniac. Judging by the reaction, every person in that room saw what he saw, just the way he saw it. And whites, watching on TV, saw a guy who was calling them racists.
    The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper the mayor dismisses as the voice of the white establishment, harrumphed that “contrary to the innuendoes he made during his speech, the 58 percent of voting population who opposed him can’t all simply be dismissed as racists.” No, they can’t, especially since one of the two candidates who split the anti-Herenton vote was also black. But Herenton supporters can stew over the fact that in the whitest precincts, his support was in single digits.
    It’s this cognitive divide between what white folks and black folks perceive, when both are looking at the very same thing, that keeps us from putting this mess behind us. And I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion.
    Somewhere — maybe in a box in my attic — is a manila folder containing a printout of a column I wrote in 1995, but never ran in the paper. I wrote it in a state of bewilderment on the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I hadn’t followed the trial and didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but I had found myself in a room with a television when the verdict came in, and a crowd had gathered to hear it. You know what happened next: The black folks watching cheered; the whites stared in silence. To me, another rich guy’s lawyers had gotten him off; big deal. But that wasn’t the way my black friends in the room saw it at all, and I was shocked at the contrast. But because I had no solution to offer, because the column just chronicled my shock, I didn’t deem it worthy of publication. I’d hold it until I could come up with an answer.
    I’m still holding it. And now, here we are. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I just think it’s sad. Don’t you?

The Meter Philanthropist

5 Replies

Perhaps today will be a good day; it started out well.

Columbians all know the mathematics of parking downtown. In the early morning, if one stops for breakfast, there is a calculation to be made: Will I still be parked here at 9 a.m., and will the meter be checked between then and the time I return? (There’s no charge before 9.) If I arrive at 8:30, I generally end up putting in three quarters to allow myself an hour, thereby paying for half an hour more than I actually will owe. My sense of injustice at this is tempered by the knowledge of all the times I didn’t put money in at that time (for lack of change, let’s say), and yet did not get a $7 ticket.

There’s a second calculation: How long will I be? Will I have a second cup of coffee? A third? Will someone interesting join me at my table, and will the time fly? How long should I pay for?

When I’m feeling generous, I’ll put in a quarter more than my best guess. If I don’t take that long, then I’ve made a gift of 20 free minutes to the one who parks behind me. I feel most philanthropic.

But I’m a mere piker. This morning, as I stood before the meter and dug into my pocket for the coins, a changing digit on the meter caught my eye. The meter had just ticked down from 1:54 to 1:53. A free hour and fifty-three minutes!

As I crossed the street, I calculated my good fortune: Someone had put in an extra $1.50 in coins — or at the very least, $1.40. How long had that person been gone? Had he arrived for a long meeting, then realized he had to go home for something? Had an emergency come up?

My favorite theory is that some October Santa Claus, some person overflowing with loving kindness for his fellow man, had walked that block of Assembly with a sack full of quarters, filling each meter to the brim, chuckling softly to himself all the while, thinking what joy he would bring.

I could have gone back to walk up and down and check the other meters, but I didn’t. I like to leave that image intact.

When I came back, there was an hour and 20 minutes left. I smile to think of the next person to park there, and the pleasant surprise he or she will encounter.

Losing David

18 Replies

David

Some of you may have noticed that I sort of went off the air the last few days. That’s because I had to go up to Pennsylvania for a funeral — and that doesn’t begin to describe it. I’ve never experienced, or been affected by, one like this.

David Michael Doody, 19, who befriended my youngest daughter as soon as she arrived up there to spend her last year of high school while studying ballet, died last week from injuries received in a car crash. He was a passenger in a vehicle with three other boys, heading down a serene residential street in broad daylight, when another car came out of a side street and broadsided them. David was thrown from the car, and hit his head on the pavement. One other boy suffered a concussion, and his arm is in a sling. The other two seemed OK. But David died two days later.

David was my daughter’s one, closest friend up there. That’s them above at their high school graduation in June. My wife spent the year with her, just comingDavid3 home last month, and David was always there for both of them. He shoveled their car out of its parking space when they were immobilized. He brought them leftover bread and pastries from Panera, where he worked (left). He essentially became a member of the family, a fixture in the tiny apartment they were living in, filling some of the void left by the rest of us who were still down here in S.C.

The first thing I heard about David was at the beginning of the 06-07 school year, when my wife told me how great it was that my daughter had a friend who was friends with EVERYBODY. This was reinforced these past few days. I learned that David transcended the cliques of high school; he was a member of all of them. As he walked the halls ofDavid4_2
the school, everybody wanted to talk to him, and he’d stop and speak to them all, without favoritism. He liked everybody. Eulogists spoke of something I had noticed, and which my wife had reinforced — David
was utterly unaffected. He was himself with everyone. My wife mentioned going into a restaurant with him and my daughter, and a kid from special ed at the high school was there and got excited, shouting, "It’s David Doody! DavidDoody! DavidDoody!" David just said "Hey, man," and paused to chat, acting like that was the most natural greeting in the world.

The funeral home the night I got up there was crammed and overflowing with his friends. Weeping girls AND boys spilled out into the parking lot, and collapsed on the curbs. The next day, the funeral procession was the longest I ever drove in.

On my several visits up there during the year, David was always around, and he was always an uplifting presence. I can’t picture him not smiling.

The world suffered a terrible loss last week, and you may not have known it. But there’s a small town in Pennsylvania that is acutely aware of its loss.

David2

I needed this

1 Reply

Well, I got a small smile out of this bit of unsolicited e-mail:

I enjoyed your article about “dying is easy, humor is hard”. I think you might be interested in our organization!.  AATH is an international organization dedicated to supporting our members as they advance the benefits of laughter and humor.  Your web site indicates that you provide programs that are aligned with the philosophy and mission of AATH.

My last week or so has been really rough, and I’ve seen little to laugh about. Good to know there’s an organization out there willing to help out with that.

 

Less than six degrees of Harry Dent

3 Replies

All right, I didn’t know Harry Dent personally. So I urge you to read the op-ed piece we ran today from Bob McAlister, who did. We’re considering other submissions about him now.

But this is South Carolina, and everybody in South Carolina touches everybody else. We don’t have to play "Six Degrees" around here, even with Kevin Bacon. We are usually no more than a degree or two away. That’s true even of someone like me who didn’t grow up here, except in the summers when I was with my grandparents in Bennettsville and Surfside. All you need is to have your roots here, and three-fourths of my family tree grows out of our poor soil (my father’s father’s people are from Maryland).

Harry Dent — the one who died last week, not the son — was my Dad’s fraternity brother at PC. In fact, in keeping with his pursuit of worldly superlatives in his early life, he was the president of the fraternity. My Dad wasn’t close to him, and even wondered how he ended up among the Pikes, since he wasn’t a jock. Dad was there on a tennis scholarship in the days when the Blue Hose were a tennis powerhouse, and most everybody in the fraternity played ball of some sort. (Dad informs me that his football-playing brothers were in the "smart" positions; the linemen belonged to Sigma Nu.)

But I had never heard of him when I left Hawaii for my one semester at USC in 1971. I first heard of Mr. Dent one day in Prof. Dolan’s world history class. A student had asked the prof during class whether a certain historical situation he was describing (I forget what) didn’t have an interesting parallel with the Nixon Administration. The prof had brushed the question aside. After class, the questioner went up to the prof and asked why he hadn’t answered the question. He said, "I’m not answering a question like that with Harry Dent’s kid sitting there in the class."

I don’t know which son that was because I don’t remember his first name. But after having him thus pointed out, I made the connection when it turned out he lived on the same floor of the Bates House — which was brand-spanking new that semester — with several friends of mine I referred to collectively as the Bates House Gang. (I lived in the honeycombs, with the hard core.)

Once after I came to work at the paper, Harry Dent came to see us about some worthy cause or other he was promoting, and I got to chat with him briefly. I can’t remember now whether he already knew of our connection (the one through my Dad) or not.

One more thing: Whenever his name has come up, Dad has always referred to him as "Harry Shuler" — first name and middle name. I asked him why the other day. He said he didn’t know why; he just always had.

I guess it’s kind of a South Carolina thing.

‘Historic Myrtle Beach’

1 Reply

One of the pitfalls of being attention-span-deprived (and also one of the blessings, since it makes life so much more entertaining), is that the smallest thing can cause me to miss entirely the "important" parts of a message or document or presentation or whatever. I’m always too busy digging the one little thing that grabbed my attention.

Today, when I read this from the S.C. Republican Party…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   CONTACT: ROB GODFREY
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2007

2008 South Carolina Republican Party Presidential Candidates Debate media credential request form released
COLUMBIA, S.C. – The South Carolina Republican Party today released the 2008 South Carolina Republican Party Presidential Candidates Debate media credential request form…
    “We are extremely excited to extend a warm South Carolina welcome to journalists from across the country and the world to our historic event,” said South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson.  “Last May, our debate attracted hundreds of members of the media worldwide, but this next debate will attract even more.  Journalists understand the significance of having a debate just nine days before our primary election, and they know the 2008 presidential election could be decided on our stage that night.”
    In August, the South Carolina Republican Party announced that it had partnered with FOX News Channel to present a live, nationally-televised Republican Party presidential candidates debate on Thursday, January 10, 2008, in historic Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  The debate will be held at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center….

… the only thing I got out of it was "historic Myrtle Beach."

What an odd modifier to choose. "Historic Charleston," sure. "Historic Beaufort," certainly. Maybe even "historic Columbia," although that’s a stretch.

But Myrtle Beach? Historic? There are other modifiers I could think of, both complimentary and un-, but that one wouldn’t crowd out the others on the mad rush to the tip of my tongue.

And yet, when I think about it (which I can’t help doing, such is my curse and blessing), I realize that in terms of history that is truly relevant to my life, the moniker sort of works — if you think of "history" as the changes that come with passage through time.

Charleston is what it was when I lived there as a baby. "Historic," but in a static way — sort of frozen in time, like a museum exhibit. Yes, Joe Riley has done a lot to make it better, but a lot of what he’s done has been to revitalize what was once there — essentially, to make the museum livable, vibrant and dynamic.

But Myrtle Beach has been like America — a rowdy, hand-over-fist, unruly thing growing and changing like a weed and just as ugly, but always with an eye to what the people want right NOW. (And yes, the America I love is many other things as well, but this is a facet of America.)

I remember when there was the Pavilion amusement park and arcade, Chapin’s department store, and ONE hamburger joint, as far as what I took notice of…

It was the place kids growing up in South Carolina wanted to go, a la "Shag: The Movie." A generation before the time when that movie was set, the place we think of essentially didn’t exist. Then, it was the center of this youth culture, the one place in South Carolina that reflected the Southern California car culture of "American Graffiti." It was also a low-rent but picturesque resort of homey, idiosyncratic hotels and shacks and bungalows — a far more warm, inviting place than what it became after Hugo, with nine identical "houses" on stilts jammed together on a lot that previously would have held one battered low-slung getaway.

In the early 80s, the growth started to metastasize, the scrubby foliage that once surrounded beach homes giving way to condos by the thousand. And the equally scrubby stuff that gave the place its charm started disappearing. For me, the greatest blow came when the little family-oriented amusement park down in Surfside gave way to a high-rise Days Inn, but for most of us the ultimate crash didn’t hit until after the turn of the century, with the demolition of the Pavilion at the heart of the city itself.

It’s history that has certain visual styles to accompany each phase of my life, old pictures you can dig through like archaeologists  digging through strata of an abandoned aboriginal village.

So yeah, I guess "historic" works.