Here’s a discussion going on back on this post that I think is worth elevating to a separate post, to bring in some more voices.
Someone named "msbobbie" wrote the following in response to this:
This legislation has two aims. The first being to encourage more
people to become dependent on government. Have you not heard anyone say
"The more I do for myself, the more they take away from me"? The second
being a continued push by the Democrats to paint Republicans as
uncaring and mean spirited. Have you not watched the way they smirk
every time they introduce something like this?
I have no problem with helping people who need a helping hand, but I
think it should be temporary so they will be encouraged to do more for
themselves instead of remaining dependent on the taxpayers.
What "msbobbie" says SOUNDS very sensible, which is why a lot of people say it.
But I’ve never been able to subscribe to it, if only because of personal experience. My entire adult life, I have been right up against the ragged edge of not being able to pay medical bills — no matter how much money I was making or how hard I was working, and that’s WITH medical insurance every step of the way.
I have therefore always been acutely aware of how easy it would be to be caught perpetually in a cycle of NEVER being able to pay for necessary medical care, as opposed to it being a temporary condition.
This doesn’t sound right, but I’ll go ahead and say it to make my point: If you go by just about any objective measurement you choose (educational attainment, scores on standardized tests, etc.) I have more on the ball than the average person. That means the MAJORITY of people in this country are a little less able to cope with the complex challenges of maintaining health and paying for it.
If you take those factors, and then take away any kind of private insurance coverage, it boggles the mind. How on Earth can people in that situation EVER expect to get their heads above water?
Mind you, I’m assuming a certain amount of medical costs. People who spend their lives in good health, never needing a doctor (a situation as alien to my experience as being from another planet), often don’t understand what I’m talking about. Maybe they have one big crisis in their families, they get through it, and put it behind them. I’ve never been blessed that way, and there are an awful lot of people like me. We work hard, we contribute, but we have medical expenses ALL THE TIME, and they get heavier and heavier year after year, WITH insurance. Anybody in a similar situation — and there are so many, many people who are MUCH worse off than I have ever been, thank God — who doesn’t have insurance is likely to be stuck in a financial hole for a lifetime.
Boy, did I bomb today at Rotary! My face is still red, and I have a powerful urge (an instinct left over from early childhood, I believe) to lay my head down and pretend to take a nap, but in the interest of the no-holds-barred ethic of blogging, I come here to confess my failure to you, o my brothers (and sisters).
I agreed to do another year on the Health and Happiness committee of the Columbia Rotary. I did this because it is a form of "service" that does not require attending meetings. All you have to do is show up about once a quarter, step up in front of the largest civic organization in South Carolina (more than 300 members), and try to be funny.
This is especially difficult, because it has to be clean and wholesome — suitable for all audiences. The kind of stuff that may crack us up in an editorial board meeting, or in the State House lobby, won’t work. It has to be everyone-will-laugh-and-no-one-will-feel-bad humor, which is a tough destination.
The thing is, I’ve done this with success in the past — compared to today, wild success. I step down off the podium, and collect handshakes and grins all the way to the back of the room. This track record builds upon itself, because such positive feedback creates confidence, and confidence is essential to getting a big crowd of nice people to crack up over fairly bland fare. Well, I’ll be in the hole, confidence-wise, next time I get up in front of this crowd.
That confidence, I believe, was my undoing, because it led me to step boldly to the lectern with what I knew was sorry material, believing that I could sell it with my delivery, no matter how bad it was. And then, when I saw it wasn’t working, I just totally fell to pieces. In the world of comedy, there’s nothing worse than bad material, badly delivered.
How bad was the material? Well, if you demand it, I’ll send you the full routine as I had it written out before me. But believe me, you don’t want to suffer that much. Basically, it was one extended bad joke — which meant I had nothing to fall back on once it started going bad. Real high-wire stuff, but I was so cocky I thought I could carry it off.
The joke was, I know y’all are tired of all these people running for president (got a little applause on that), so I’m going to save you from choosing from all those people by running myself.
I had thought about being halfway serious and pushing either the Energy Party or the UnParty, but decided to be completely (and, I hoped, obviously) satirical, as follows:
I am seeking the nomination of the Birthday Party. Elect me, and every day will be just like your birthday. And that’s not just because after I finish raising taxes on you, all you’ll have left is your birthday suit…
Yes, it was that bad. In fact, that was probably the height of it. But as bad as it was, I still might have sold it, but I just wasn’t feeling right. I think I was just a tad over-caffeinated or something. (Or it might have been an attack of conscience — I was bothered a bit by the fact that the "humor" depending upon trashing the world of politics, and I feel like we media types have done too much to give public service a bad name. I had tried to brush this off by thinking, "They’ll all know it’s a joke," but I had qualms all the same.) Anyway, I had a very negative attitude from almost the first line, and the dead silence with which I was greeted shattered what ability I might have had to salvage it with a sterling delivery. I fell to pieces. I started just reading, rather than riffing, not looking people in the eye, and racing through it as fast as possible to get it over with. Once that happens, you’re dying a thousand deaths, and it gets worse with each second. Talk about your cold sweats.
Fortunately, this is a very polite crowd, so there were no spoiled vegetables flung at me. But the silence was just as bad. And it was all my fault. These are people who want to laugh, and will meet you more than halfway. When you bomb with these folks, you’ve really bombed.
When I got down, someone brushed past me and said — in order to have something nice to say — that he liked my column Sunday. Wow. Then Dr. Sorensen, who was our main speaker, set up something he was saying by mentioning my "Birthday Party," and adding only "As Forrest Gump would say, ‘That’s all I have to say about that.’"
Doug Ross brings to my attention this rather well-crafted test that measures how well the taker understands the foundations of our society and how it works. He adds his own facetious suggestion in passing it on:
Doug also shared his score with me, but I’ll leave it up to him as to whether he shares it with you. Here’s how I made out:
You answered 56 out of 60 correctly — 93.33 %
Average score for this quiz during September: 74.5% Average score since September 18, 2007: 74.5%
I was reasonably happy with that, because a number of questions in the last third or so of the test dealt with economics, and I was making some guesses on those, educated and otherwise. This test will lull you. The first 10 or 20 or so are so easy as to make you think you’re going to get a perfect score, but then it gets trickier.
I’m not sure whether the questions are the same for each taker, but on the version I took, I missed questions 19, 27, 43 and 58. All of them were questions I was unsure of, so it’s not like I thought I knew something that wasn’t so.
As for Doug’s suggestion — it’s tempting. Of course, it’s also tempting to require such a test before people are allowed to vote. And as long as we’re fantasizing, I’d want to present it to people just as it was presented to me — as a real test, out of the blue, of what I just plain know after 50-plus years in this country, not something you could cram for.
I’d be curious to know how y’all do, if you take the time to take the test. And please play fair — give us your first, unrehearsed score — not your "do-over."
Being a fan of history and an instinctive traditionalist to boot, it pains me to say this. There is a certain elegance and grace to the written letter, a quality that says, "You were important enough for me to go to this much trouble," that is the exclusive domain of the handwritten letter.
But while I appreciate the compliment, I simply don’t have the time to deal with
it. As a matter of fact, I am removed by about five degrees of separation from even being able to think about having the time to deal with it. I used to have a staff person to open the mail, deal with most of it on the front end, place in my IN box the very, very few pieces that absolutely needed my attention, and then do with it whatever I decided with it (respond, file, forward) after I glanced through it and then placed it in my OUT tray. And even then I didn’t have time to deal with it. The virtual mountains of e-mail, the press of constant meetings, the obligation to occasionally, when I could get around to it, do a wee bit of journalism, kept me from keeping up even in that system.
Now, I don’t have any of that support, so mounds of snail mail — most of it bound for the wastebin, but some of it actually in need of my attention — pile up on my desk, until such time as some emergency causes me to plow through it in search of something, and I push aside all more urgent matters just long enough to reduce the pile in one mad surge — and I promise you, if you sent me something, I don’t spend one percent of the time you spent sending it. And this makes me feel guilty, but I don’t know what to do about it.
And then, finally, there’s the problem that increasingly, I find it very hard to read. I find it hard even to read enough to determine whether I should read further. I go to the end to see the signature, go back, try to read it again, and just can’t make it out.
I don’t know whether this is because I’ve been spoiled by type, or I’m getting older and lack the mental elasticity to intuit meaning from few clues, or what.
But if you want me to read it, type it. And as long as you’re going to type it (since "type" these days means on a word processor; RARE is the note written on typewriter, and that is usually from some clinically insane person from the other end of the country), please send it electronically. Then I might, at some point, be able to get to it. I’ll do my best, anyway.
NOTE: The illegible (to me) sample I’ve included here is from someone from out-of-state; I didn’t wish to to embarrass a regular reader or anyone identifiable.
We were driving out of Lexington and about to get on the highway for Aiken, with B.J. Boling at the wheel, when it occurred to me that I was in a situation that felt familiar, though I had not encountered it for a long time. I thought back, and it was even longer than it felt:
1980 — that was the last time I found myself riding around with a candidate for public office, or his campaign. That last time was with Howard Baker (see photo at bottom), who was also running for the GOP nomination for president, and we were in Iowa in January of that year. It was the last year that I was a reporter. Before that, most of my experience along this line had been traveling with the candidates for governor of Tennessee, 24 hours a day, in the last weeks of the 1978 general election. In those days, we did things like that — travel, live, eat with the candidates. Few journalists do it to that extent today.
B.J. had asked if I wanted to ride along with John McCain on the famous bus, and I said sure, after a glance at my calendar. It would take me away from the office for half a day, which seemed doable. He was driving me and some colleagues to Aiken, and we were riding the bus back.
The ride to Aiken had been pretty much as I expected, as had the event at the VFW hall there. Things shifted a bit when I got onto the bus.
There were, of course, two buses. One held most of the media herd, the other held the candidate and his inner circle — in this case the candidates’ wife, his press secretary, a camera crew, and several of his old buddies from Vietnam War days. There were only about eight seats in the main compartment — those big, plush captain’s chairs that turn around. But we were put in the little room at the back, with one continuous, curved seat that shaped itself around a table, perfect for private meetings — or interviews.
I had not counted on an interview. I had just interviewed John McCain. I had no new questions to ask. I
thought being "on the bus" would be a matter of passively soaking up the ambience, collecting some color, and maybe exchanging a word or two with the candidate as he walked up and down the aisle. (Truth be told, this is my main reporting technique, when out in the field — the fly on the wall. I like to go into a situation, look and listen, and then write about what I saw and heard. I don’t like interacting with the subject out in the field, because it changes the reality of what I’m there to write about. In the office, that’s cool. I expect to conduct an interview in the office. But in the field, I like to blend into the woodwork.) I figured a guy running for president had stuff to do other than talk yet again to me.
But it wasn’t like that. I was to be jammed into that little room with the main guy, with him expecting questions, and a press secretary standing in the door as a witness. I had the feeling that the press secretary would crack me on the head if I didn’t keep coming up with questions: "Bradley, don’t be such a dunce! Ask a question!" And for all I know, she might have.
Worse, if you admit to being at a loss for questions when you have a golden opportunity like this — an hour with a guy who might become president, just waiting for your questions — you draw the ire and disgust of your friends and your readers (especially your blog readers; just watch the way I get nailed for this). To increase the pressure, I had a bad record pitching to this guy. That’s why most journalists just go ahead and ask questions, any damn questions, even foolish ones, in an effort to provoke the guy to say something, anything that you can write about.
So I asked questions. In fact, I probably asked the most questions, despite two reporters being in there with us, because that’s my habit in interview mode: I’m accustomed to directing the conversation when I preside over editorial board meetings, acting as a sort of host. One must keep the guest entertained. So I tried, lamely.
At one point I was tempted — and I’m very embarrassed to admit this — to ask him the Spin Cycle Question of the Day, which that day happened to be the "controversy" over whether he was an Episcopalian or a Baptist. But the veterans at the front of the bus had specifically razzed me in advance on that — You’re not going to ask him about that Baptist stuff, are you? — and that helped keep me in line. The thing is, I hate the Buzz Question of the Day; it’s one of the most idiotic things about modern political reporting. In fact, I avoid such things so assiduously that I didn’t even know about "the Baptist stuff" until they mentioned it and I looked it up on my Treo. (Even as I was looking it up, poor Jim Davenport was having to ask him about it. That’s the curse of being the AP guy on the spot — you have to ask the Question of the Day while your local colleagues are able to cover the actual event. I’ve written about this before.)
But in my desperation not to ask him some variant of a question I had asked him before, I almost stooped to ask about that one, and for once I had sympathy for the desperation of the traveling press corps, who grab desperately at any new wrinkle, however inane or irrelevant.
Fortunately, I was NOT in the traveling corp. I was Local Media, which means I was not expected to be hip to the latest. I could ask about anything in my ignorance, and it would be forgiven. At one point the candidate misunderstood me and thought I had asked a question that — coming from me and directed at John McCain — would have been particularly idiotic. I asked him whether he thought the U.S. had made a mistake in not going in and toppling Saddam in 1991. He thought I had asked whether we had made a mistake to go in and topple Saddam in 2003. (It was noisy, as you can see on the video.) So he started patiently offering his boilerplate defense of that, before I corrected him and gave him another chance at it.
Several thoughts ran through my head: Does he think I would ask that, when I have written in defense of our going into Iraq so many times? But he doesn’t know that… but he is aware that I’m the guy from The State, and he always seems to remember my name, and … oh, man! I hope he doesn’t think that I’m doing the reporter thing of getting him to say what I want to say, so I can quote it — editorialists don’t have to do that; we just say what we think…
In any case, it was disorienting, and I didn’t do a very good job. So I think I went away with John McCain thinking I’m an idiot who can’t come to an interview with some good questions. And I guess he’s right. But at least he probably didn’t expect any better. After all, I’m just Local Media.
Aw, geez, I just remembered — I went blank almost exactly that same way (worse, even, since I was a rookie then) during an interview op with Howard Baker on his campaign plane over frozen Iowa, the last time I was in this situation. I should just leave the campaign trail to the reporters.
This post will serve as both a daily (sort of) contact report and a reflection on my changing image, as determined by the blog.
Twice this week I was contacted by people who apparently thought of me primarily as a blogger. Since I have a well-over-40-hour-a-week job that puts me in the public eye much more prominently than the blog (so I thought), and seeing as how the blog is just something I do when I can grab a minute — much of it late at night and on weekends — this sort of blows my little mind.
Peter had wanted to talk with me about the campaign — I thought because of my position as editorial
page editor, because I’m used to that — so I asked him, as I did Doug, to meet me for breakfast Wednesday at the Cap City Club. I ran late, but when I called Peter he was late, too, and as it happened I was the first one there. I settled in to read the paper in the club’s foyer, and looked up each time the elevator let another passenger off on the 25th floor. Once, I saw this kid with the beginnings of a beard get off, start into the foyer, then turn back, and start pacing like he was waiting for somebody. I went back to the paper. Several minutes later, my cell phone rings. It’s Peter. He said he had arrived at the Club, but realized he was wearing sandals, and that that might not be appropriate. Where are you now? I asked. "At the entrance, next to the elevators." Peter was the "kid" with the beard. I told him we’d muddle through somehow, flip-flops or no, and we went on in.
I learned that he was living here until after the primary, that he had time on his hands because the candidates were spending their time in Iowa and New Hampshire these days, so he was trying to write a piece about how McCain was doing. He had found that several of the people he talked to seemed to expect McCain to do better here than conventional "wisdom" — that I wasn’t the only one, in other words.
But the thing that got me was that at one point, when I had been speaking of candidates who had visited with us, Peter asked whether was a member of the editorial board of the paper. And then I remembered that, going by his initial e-mail to me, he had first come to me through the blog:
My name is Peter Hamby … I moved to Columbia 2 weeks ago to cover the primaries for CNN. I’ll be here until January writing, reporting, shooting video, etc … Anyway, I dig your blog, and wanted to use you for some analysis in a piece I’m writing for CNN.com about John McCain’s chances of winning in South Carolina, in advance of his visit next week…. What do you think?
So I explained who I was. It was weird.
Then, today, I got this e-mail:
Hi Brad,
I’m working on putting together a blog guide of the most
influential political blogs in the early primary states and delegate-rich
states. Anyway, your blog comes highly recommended, so I will most likely be
including it. What are some of your biggest coups (picked up by national media?
breaking news? causing someone to resign?) on the blog, and what,
approximately, is your average daily hits? I’m on deadline, so I hope to hear
back from you soon.
I responded (and failed to save the response), making sure to drop in the fact that I actually have a job
on the side at the newspaper. I mentioned the recent noise over my Edwards column (190,000 page views on the version on thestate.com, which is the version Drudge linked to), and the week when Thomas Ravenel was indicted (heaviest blog traffic yet). And she wrote back and asked me for a picture, and so I sent her the one shown here, which I thought made me look newspapermannish, rather than like a blogger — even though I’ve never used that photo in the paper, but only on the blog.
Lately, I’ve been bringing a Styrofoam cup of coffee in to the office with me most mornings, and I’ve noticed a disturbing phenomenon — tiny coffee-colored beads of "sweat" pop out on the sides of the cup during our morning meetings.
This is indicative of a lack of structural integrity, it would seem to me — coffee actually leaching through the cup, like tritium through soil.
The question this suggests is, What is leaching from the cup into the coffee?
Today was the most dramatic manifestation of this phenomenon I’ve yet observed. During a meeting with
folks from Providence Hospital, the tiny beads turned into huge drops that started running down and filling up the ashtray I was using as a coaster. (Sorry about the poor, Loch Ness-monster-quality focus in the picture. I was trying to shoot it without my action being noticed, because I didn’t want Sister Judith Ann thinking "this wacko’s taking pictures of his coffee," and hauling me back to Providence’s psych ward — if it has a psych ward. Diagnosis, Dr. House? Styrofoam poisoning.)
Finally, I had to excuse myself to go fetch my "Office Space" mug.
So, what can Styrofoam, ingested this way, do to you? Does it affect the brain? If so, that would explain so much about this blog, wouldn’t it? All of my detractors — and quite a few of my friends — would go away satisfied that at last, they had found the one factor that accounted for a vast range of previously inexplicable behavior.
Regular readers know that I struggle to manage my time, and in keeping with that, whenever I file a comment, or answer an e-mail, with anything more than a "thanks for writing" or "you got that right," I try to turn it into a separate post. And so it is that I pull out my evasive response to Randy’s good-faith question:
Brad,
with the vacations on the sand, dining at the CCC and writing an article each week where do you find time to maintain a blog?
Kidding aside, what is a typical day like for you?
Lousy. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t consider chucking the blog entirely, but I simply don’t have time for it. No sane person with even rudimentary time-management skills would ever start one.
But wait… I’m not supposed to be frank about such things. I’ve always tried to hold to the ethic that Hemingway wrote of in The Sun Also Rises:
"Come on down-stairs and have a drink." "Aren’t you working?" "No," I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: "Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables," and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. "This is a good place," he said. "There’s a lot of liquor," I agreed. "Listen, Jake," he leaned forward on the bar. "Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?" "Yes, every once in a while." "Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?" "What the hell, Robert," I said. "What the hell." "I’m serious." "It’s one thing I don’t worry about," I said. "You ought to."
So I hope you’ll excuse me now, but I have to go get off some cables…
Survival would be impossible in this doggy-dog world without friends to give us a heads-up when danger approaches. Here’s one I got today:
I have eight tickets for
this Saturday’s football game – and we are making them available for members
of Senior Staff to purchase if any of you are interested.
First come, first served.
Email me back. The tickets are $35 each.
Thanks.
Kathy
Of course, as a veteran of 20 years of this craziness, I knew just what to do. I immediately scribbled,
By BRAD WARTHEN Editorial Page Editor “NEWS IS whatever happens to, or interests, an editor,” a wise colleague named Jerry Ratts once said. Actually, he said it more than “once,” which is why I remember. I would insert a corollary: “… or to the editor’s wife….” For the past year, my wife has traveled a lot back and forth between here and Pennsylvania. So have I, for that matter. She and our youngest have been up there so that our daughter can study ballet with extreme intensity. My wife has worked up there as a pre-school teacher to help pay for keeping two households, not to mention all the travel. She’s spent a lot of time in airports — enough that when she comes home this week, it will be by train. A trip back up there in May was the last straw. She recounted her ordeal in an exclusive interview with this correspondent: She had to fly out of there early Mother’s Day afternoon, and given the airlines’ rule about early arrival, there was no chance to celebrate the day over lunch. She intended to have a nice dinner with my youngest up in the Keystone State, but that was not to be, either. She wouldn’t get home until after 1 a.m. Monday. Miraculously, she left Charleston on time. But she had to make two connections to get to Harrisburg. Things seemed fine when she arrived at the gate for the first connection. They still seemed fine — the sign at the gate still brightly proclaimed that her flight would be on time — when she and other passengers noticed that the flight after theirs was boarding, and they weren’t. Somebody had the temerity to ask, and was told, “Oh, we canceled yours.” No apology, and apparently no intention of making an announcement. It was either on that leg of the trip or the next (“Can’t remember… so exhausting…”) that she found herself wandering about a terminal after having received no helpful advice at the gate. She learned by chance that another passenger was going to Allentown, with a promised 75-mile bus ride to Harrisburg. She went back to the apathetic agent at the gate to ask about that, and was told yeah, we could get you there that way if that’s what you want. The alternative was a flight to Harrisburg at noon the next day, so yeah, she’d like a bus ride. She reached her bed about four hours before time to get up and go herd 4-year-olds all day. “So I’m not flying any more,” she said with that dangerous emphasis that I know not to contradict. “They don’t care how much they inconvenience you, or how much they lie to you. I’m just not doing it any more.” Of course not, dear. Especially since, between her experiences and my own, this was the third trip in a row that could have been completed more quickly by driving. That haul up interstates 77 and 81, passing through six states, is a stroll in the park compared to these aeronautic nightmares. I’ve been on the verge of writing this column a number of times in recent months, but have held back, remembering what Jerry Ratts (the Sage of Wichita, quoted above) said about editors and their sense of perspective. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was right for the opinion pages. It had happened to us several times, and the Sage was also known to say: “That’s twice. Once more and it’s a trend, and we can send it to Lifestyles.” Then I saw Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, which had a bona fide news story about how many passengers had become fed up with air travel and were taking Amtrak: “Airplanes are getting stuck in lots of traffic jams this summer, but Amtrak is on a roll.” Then I realized USA Today — the paper whose only “home town” is the nation’s airports — had been all over it: “By virtually every measure, this is shaping up as the worst year ever for air travel. (That is, if you’re a passenger. Some of the airlines are actually making profits for a change.)” Good thing my wife swore off air travel in May, because things have only gotten worse since: “There’s really something different this summer,” said a frustrated traveler who blogs on the subject (at TakingtheKids.com), which is almost as authoritative as being an editor. “Not only can’t you count on the airlines giving you anything to eat, but you can’t count on a three-hour flight actually being a three-hour flight. It’s a whole new paradigm.” (Journalists find it soothing to describe their personal frustrations with words like “paradigm.”) And if you’re the old-fashioned sort who wants facts rather than anecdotes, USA Today supplies this: “In June, 462 aircraft sat for at least three hours awaiting takeoff after leaving the gate, more than tripling the 137 such delays during May. DOT says it’s the highest monthly number since at least 2000.” Why has all this happened? Disgruntled scribes differ on that. There’s an air traffic control system that isn’t using the latest technology. There’s the increased number of short-hop flights, taking up more gate time and creating more chances to get tangled up. There’s the cutbacks in airline personnel, who are getting cranky and increasingly unlikely to give you the time of day, much less fluff your pillow. But who cares about the why when the answer to when is, “Not any time soon, so sit down and shut up or we’ll call security”? In any case, it’s clear that my better half swore off air travel just in time. So I won’t mind a bit hauling myself out of bed at midnight to drive my pickup down to the railway station and wait for my woman to come home. I’ll take along a notepad and a harmonica, ’cause if that don’t get me halfway to a country song, I ain’t got one in me:
Well, I went down to the station; I was feelin’ kinda sore… Yeah, I went down to the station, mama; I was feelin’ mighty sore… Mah woman, she done tol’ me, She ain’t gonna fly no more… (Honka wonka waw-waw-wahn)…
Those who know Energy Party Adviser Samuel Tenenbaum realize that the 55-mph speed limit is not the only thing he obsesses about, not by a long shot. For instance, there’s puppies who lack a good home (which is why he and Inez have opened their home to quite a menagerie).
At tremendous personal risk, I dared
today to forward his latest message to my wife, with the subject line "Look at the puppy!" and carefully worded intro,"Samuel passed on this message, with pictures. Not that I would dare suggest anything; I just thought they were cute…"
Basically, I’ve been warned by my better half that if I so much as suggest that we take on another dog, I’ll be looking for a good home for myself.
Anyway, here’s the original message, as forwarded from Samuel. If anyone does have a good home for this mutt, I’ll be glad to pass you back to him, who will pass you back to this lady, who will pass you to the Battistes, I guess. (Animal lovers seem to have more layers of communication than the Mafia.):
My friends Luther and Judy Battiste found this puppy wandering near USC –
they have tried to find an owner with no success and are looking for a good
home. They said this is the sweetest puppy, about 7 weeks old and very well
trained already – seems to be housebroken! They already have 4 dogs and cannot
keep this one, despite getting attached to it – please help find a good home –
you can contact me if you or someone you know is interested. Please send out
to all your friends.
By BRAD WARTHEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR HOW ARE YOU supposed to do your job with professional detachment when every time you see one of the main guys running for president, every time you read about him, every time he opens his mouth or takes an action in public, you think, “Hero”? How are you supposed to keep your rep when you keep thinking, I admire this guy? Of all things, admire! It’s embarrassing. On top of that, how do you do it when so many of the smart, hip, unfettered, scalpel-minded professionals around you snort when the hero’s name is mentioned, and use terms like “has-been” and “loser” and “that poor old guy”? It’s not easy. Maybe it’s not even possible. It wasn’t possible on Monday, when John McCain visited our editorial board. I presided as usual, asking most of the questions and so forth. But I never quite hit my stride. I was uneasy; I stumbled in bringing forth the simplest questions. It was weird. I’d pitched to this guy a number of times before with no trouble, even in post-season play. And here he was stepping up to bat in my ball park, where the rubber on the mound has molded itself to my cleats, and I can’t put a simple fastball over the plate, much less a curve. I kept remembering our last formal meeting with him, in 2000, on the day that we would decide whom
to endorse in a GOP primary that would either slingshot him onward toward victory, or enable George W. Bush to stop his insurgency cold. I wasn’t out of sorts like this. I had stated my case — my strong belief that we should endorse Sen. McCain — several days before in a 4,000-word memo to my then-publisher, a committed Bush man. I was fully prepared to make it again to the full board once the candidate left the room. And I was ready to lose like a pro if it came to that. Which it did. But now, 9/11 has happened. The nation is at war, and bitterly divided, even over whether we’re “at war.” And I keep thinking — as I sit a couple of feet from the candidate, aiming my digital camera with my left hand, scribbling the occasional haphazard note with my right, glancing from time to time at the audio recorder on the table to note how many minutes into the interview he said such-and-such, so busy recording the event that I don’t really have time to be there — this is the guy who should have been president for the past seven years. The odd thing is, a lot of people who now dismiss the McCain candidacy also believe he should have been president — that we’d be less divided at home, more admired abroad, more successful at war. But they talk like the poor old guy missed his chance. It’s like candidates have “sell by” dates stamped on them like bacon, and his was several years back. Too bad for him, they say. But I think, too bad for the nation — if they’re right. The best thing for me, as a professional critic, as a jaded observer, would be for those people to be right. I have no trouble assessing the relative merits of the other candidates in either major party. I even like some of them. Life could be good, professionally speaking, if that old “hero” guy really did just fade away. But he doesn’t. There he is, sitting there, being all honest and straightforward and fair-minded and brave and admirable. Dang. Go ahead, get mad at him. He’s let the moment get away from him. You can’t take a man seriously as a leader when he’s blown all that money only to lose ground, when he can’t stop his hired rats from diving overboard. Focus on his mottled scars. Murmur about how even the best of men slow down with age. But then you think about how this guy aged early. You look at his awkwardness as he holds his coffee cup, and you think about how the North Vietnamese strung him up by his broken arms, and all he had to do to end it was agree to go home. But he wouldn’t. That was then, of course, but it’s just as bad now. Think about how you asked him several months ago why he thought he had to do something about immigration now, when the only people who cared passionately about the issue and would vote on the basis of that one thing were the ones who would hate him forever for being sensible about it. He had no excuse; he just thought it was the right thing to do.
You think of all the Democrats and “moderates” who egged him on when he was Bush’s No. 1 critic (which he still is, if you actually listen), but who now dismiss him as the president’s “lapdog” because he (gasp!) — supports the surge and actually, if you can stand it, thinks it’s working! These political goldfish forget that their favorite maverick criticized Bush for not sending enough troops, so of course he supports a “surge” when the president knuckles under and implements one. Oh, but don’t speak of such people dismissively. This ridiculously admirable guy at the end of the table, who long ago forgave both his communist torturers and the protesters at home who would have spit on him given the chance, won’t have it. When I speak less than flatteringly of the impatience of Americans on Iraq, he corrects me, and relates a list of perfectly good reasons for them to be fed up. So when it’s over, you try to produce a McCain column for Wednesday, but you can’t. Wednesday, Sam Brownback steps to the same plate, and your arm is fine. You interrogate the guy, assess him, reach a conclusion, and slap a column on the Thursday page. Three up, three down. You’ve got your stuff back. But Sunday’s deadline draws nearer, and it’s gone again. Desperate, you think: How about a bulleted list of what he said Monday? There’s plenty of it. Naw, that’s a news story, not an opinion column. And you know, you just know, that the one thing you can’t write is the truth, which is that you just admire the hell out of this infuriating old guy. The fans won’t stand for it. You can hear the beer bottles clattering around you on the mound already. But it’s no use. You just can’t get the ball across today.
For actual information regarding the McCain interview, and more, go to http://blogs. thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.
One of the most common criticisms aimed at my infamous Edwards column is that my "evidence" was "thin" or "flimsy"– a mix of casual personal observations and "hearsay" (God forbid we should trust anyone else’s account, right?).
Conventional "wisdom" puts a whole lot more stock in this kind of evidence, which was in the WSJ today:
Edwards, Foreclosure Critic, Has Investing Tie to Subprime Lenders By CHRISTOPHER COOPER August 17, 2007; Page A1
As a presidential candidate, Democrat John Edwards has regularly attacked subprime lenders, particularly those that have filed foreclosure suits against victims of Hurricane Katrina. But as an investor, Mr. Edwards has ties to lenders foreclosing on Katrina victims.
The Wall Street Journal has identified 34 New Orleans homes whose owners have faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress Investment Group LLC. Mr. Edwards has about $16 million invested in Fortress funds, according to a campaign aide who confirmed a more general Federal Election Commission report. Mr. Edwards worked for Fortress, a publicly held private-equity fund, from late 2005 through 2006….
Well, I don’t roll that way. D-Brad doesn’t roll that way. Most of my colleagues do. They treat "Deep Throat’s" suggestion to "follow the money" as some secular equivalent of Holy Writ, brought down on stone tablets from Mt. Vernon.
My problem — and it is indeed a problem, as you can see by watching me struggle with such basic tasks as paying monthly bills — is that I don’t find money very interesting. I don’t find it solid and meaningful the way most hard-headed, sensible folk seem to do. To me it is ephemeral, abstract, gossamer stuff. It’s slippery. Its very fungibility causes me to feel like I’m gazing into a shifting cloud when others see sharp outlines.
I prefer personal observation of an individual’s behavior. Preferably my own observation, but the reliable accounts of others as well. And reliability depends upon the circumstances. When my discrete, reserved assistant, whom I trust absolutely with all that money stuff that so befuddles me and who never says a bad word about anybody, is so struck by a candidate’s callousness that she says something about it, that has meaning to me. When a guy tells me about the candidate jogging by his house after an event was supposed to start, it’s just interesting. But when an independent source sufficiently unimpeachable that he will never speak on the record because it would ruin the connections that give him such access backs it up without my having mentioned it, and even throws in such unnecessary details as the wetness of the candidates’ hair from his post-jog shower, and there are hundreds of sweaty witnesses to the fact that the candidate was two hours late to said event — well, it becomes memorable, and gathers meaning.
But if the WSJ wants to document the candidate’s insincerity by following the money, fine. Better them than me.
You seem like a nice man Brad– but you need an education in real people. Put down your latte, your copy of the NYT, and park your Saab. Now take a walk somewhere around real people, the real other side of America.
Well, I drink my coffee black, and I don’t drive a Saab. In fact, I need me a truck. I need a truck on account of what happened to me last year. See the above photo. My ’89 Ford Ranger was tooling along up I-77, just short of the Forest Drive exit, when all of a sudden it caught fire for no good reason.
This happened to me because I was doing a bad thing: I was on my way to play golf during the working day. I had never done this before. I have certainly never done it since. All of a sudden, a mile or so short of the exit mentioned before, I lost power — the truck just couldn’t mount the hill. Smoke starting billowing from under the hood.
I stupidly assumed the smoke was steam, and that it signaled a busted hose. But it was smoke. After I pulled over, I made a couple of phone calls to let folks know I would be late for the golf game (which in truth was in a good cause — a golf game with Executive Editor Mark Lett and me had been auctioned off for United Way, and surprise of surprises, a couple of people had actually paid for the experience), and to get a tow truck on the way.
Anyway, after I’d made the calls, I noticed the "steam" was still pouring from under the hood. So I got out, and opened it — there was a fire around one of my spark plugs, bigger than the flame from a candle, but smaller than a flaming breadbox.
So I did what anyone would do — I blew it out. And it worked. Then I poured a bottled water on it. That meant I would be quite thirsty as I waited for the next two hours. You can see in the photo at right where a portion of the actual engine block burned away around the plug. Ugly.
Anyway, I’ve been making do with a sedan that I’m about to turn over to my wife, and seeing as how we don’t have a subway system around here (which we should, but nobody listens to me on this), I need transportation, which means I need a nice, small, used pickup.
So I’m looking at two, and I’d like your advice. I think I’ve made up my mind, but I haven’t quite, so your advice might be helpful. I’m going to buy one of the following (both advertised in The State by their owners):
A 1999 Toyota Tacoma, single-owner, "lady-driven" (I loved that detail), 175,000 miles, but in beautiful
condition — not so much as a speck of rust on the undercarriage. Being sold from a parking lot of a Food Lion; the owner’s ex-husband meets me there for tire-kicking and test-driving. No toolbox or hardcover over the bed, but a plastic bedliner $5,995
A 2002 Ford Ranger, second-owner (current owner has a Carfax report from first owner), 74,000 miles. Owned by a state official (I didn’t figure out who he was until after my second test drive, which was embarrassing, because he has an important job). Beautiful paint job. Hard cover over the bed, which I don’t need, but could use or remove as I saw fit. $5899
I test-drove the Ranger first, and felt like I had a little trouble getting it into first and second gear smoothly. I didn’t know whether that was the truck or me, as my last truck (unfortunately) had automatic transmission, and it had been seven years since I had driven a stick regularly. (Both trucks are 4-cylinder manual, 5-speeds, which is what I’m looking for, seeking the best possible gas mileage.) Other than that, it seemed fine, although I’m used to an extended cab and bucket seats, and this had neither.
The Toyota seemed to shift more smoothly for me from the start, reinforcing my impression that the Japanese are better at trannies than Americans or Germans (my wife’s 1982 Mazda GLC shifted much better than the ’78 Rabbit I was driving at the same time). But I keep worrying about the mileage. Yeah, I know you can give a Toyota at least 100k over most American cars, but that’s still a lot of driving during which something that is thus far undetected could go wrong.
I went back and drove the Ranger again, and guess what? It shifted beautifully, so it was just me the first time (I think). Also — I took it on the highway, and it stayed smooth in fifth gear. The one place where the Toyota was NOT smooth was over 60 mph ("lady-driven," and the lady never went over 55, I’m told), when it developed a very noticeable shimmy — you can see the steering wheel shaking.
The Toyota’s passed the ultimate test — my mechanic looked at it a couple of days ago, and pronounced it good. I’m about to leave the office to go pick up the Ranger and take it to the mechanic. Assuming it passes, too, I think I’ve made up my mind.
Actually, they took it last time, but my iron was too low then to do what I went for — double red cells. It’s cool — literally. They take out a couple of pints of whole blood and remove the red cells. Then they pump it back in. As it goes back in, it’s clear. And not quite as warm as it was before. Quite refreshing on a hot day. (I hope that wasn’t one detail too many for you. Hey, at least I didn’t headline this, "My Blood Runs Cold." I could have, you know. I’m not proud.)
Also — and I haven’t fully figured out why this is — even though there are two channels, the needle itself is smaller, and therefore less painful. It takes longer, though.
I’ve only been allowed to do it once before. They have all these rules. Your iron has to be higher, your height and weight have to be at certain levels. (Women have to be bigger than men have to be for this, which seems weird.) Also, according to the sign in the picture, you have to be type B or O. Of course, most of us are O, aren’t we?
Last time, they said it was too low for the "Alyx" system, which is what they call the double-red-cell thing. But I could donate whole blood. I almost walked out, but stayed and did that. Guilt, you know. Fortunately, it’s been quite a while since my iron was so low they wouldn’t take any at all.
But today, the iron pills I’ve been taking, and the big bloody steak I had at lunch (which has caused me indigestion the rest of the day) worked! My iron was at 41, and it only had to be 40. Whatever that means.
It was cool. You should try it. I don’t want to be holier than thou on this, I just feel obliged to tell you that we’re always shorthanded in this part of South Carolina, and constantly have to import blood from other regions. That’s how I got started, after hearing that over and over. Guilt.
This is just to make sure you saw this important piece in the paper this week. Some people get all excited about taxing or spending or this or that public policy. But Robert Samuelson took the time to write about something that is very dear to my heart, and to my daily life. Study it, and become wiser:
We are, it seems, too busy to pause By ROBERT J. SAMUELSON – Washington Post
I have always liked commas, but I seem to be in a shrinking minority. The comma is in retreat, though it is not yet extinct. In text messages and e-mails, commas appear infrequently, and then often by accident (someone hits the wrong key). Even on the printed page, commas are dwindling. Many standard uses from my childhood (after, for example, an introductory prepositional phrase) have become optional or, worse, have been ditched.
If all this involved only grammar, I might let it lie. But the comma’s sad fate is, I think, a metaphor for something larger: how we deal with the frantic, can’t-wait-a-minute nature of modern life. The comma is, after all, a small sign that flashes “pause.” It tells the reader to slow down, think a bit, and then move on. We don’t have time for that. No pauses allowed. In this sense, the comma’s fading popularity is also social commentary.
It is true that Americans have always been in a hurry. In Democracy in America (1840), Alexis de Tocqueville has a famous passage noting the “feverish ardor” with which Americans pursue material gains and private pleasures. What’s distinctive about our era, I think, is that new technologies and astonishing prosperity give us the chance to slacken the pace. Perish the thought. In some ways, it seems, we Americans have actually become more frantic.
Evidence to support this hunch hasn’t been hard to find. Exhibit A is a story a few months ago in The Washington Post headlined, “Teens Can Multitask, But What Are Costs?” We meet Megan, a 17-year-old honors high school senior. After school, she begins studying by turning on MTV and booting up her computer. The story continues:
Over the next half hour, Megan will send about a dozen instant messages discussing the potential for a midweek snow day. She’ll take at least one cell-phone call, fire off a couple of text messages, scan Weather.com, volunteer to help with a campus cleanup (at the local high school), post some comments on a friend’s Facebook page and check out the new pom squad pictures another friend has posted on hers.
Whew! And remember, she’s also studying. Naturally, the story includes the obligatory quote from a brain scientist, who worries that so much multitasking will turn young minds into mush. “It’s almost impossible,” says the scientist, “to gain a depth of knowledge of any of the tasks you do while you’re multitasking.”
In reality, multitasking isn’t confined to the young. It’s hard to go anywhere these days — including restaurants and business meetings — without seeing people punching furiously on their BlackBerrys, cell phones or other handheld devices. More mush, maybe. At the least, serious questions of etiquette have arisen. In one survey, almost a third of the executives polled said it is never appropriate to check e-mails during meetings.
Next, there’s work. Unlike most rich nations, the United States hasn’t reduced the average workweek during the past quarter-century. In 2006, annual hours for U.S. workers averaged 1,804, barely different from 1,834 in 1979, reports the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By contrast, the Japanese cut annual hours by 16 percent to 1,784, the Germans 20 percent to 1,421 and the French 16 percent to 1,564. A study by economists Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas and Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan argues that long working hours, especially among the well paid, may be an addiction, akin to alcoholism and smoking. (The paper is titled “The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper.”)
I could go on, but the column is only 800 words, and more evidence would simply reinforce the point: de Tocqueville’s “feverish ardor” endures. There’s always too much to do, not enough time to do it. The comma is a small victim of our hustle-bustle. If we can save a few seconds a day by curtailing commas, why not? Commas are disparaged as literary clutter. They’re axed in the name of stylistic “simplicity.” Once, introductory prepositional phrases (“In 1776, Thomas Jefferson….”) routinely took commas; once, compound sentences were strictly divided by commas; once, sentences that began with “once,” “naturally,” “surprisingly,” “inevitably” and the like usually took a comma to set them apart.
No more. These and other usages have slowly become discretionary or unacceptable. Over the years, copy editors have stripped thousands of defenseless commas from my stories. I have saved every last one of them and piled them all on a secluded corner of my desk. They deserve better than they’re getting. So here are some of my discarded commas, taking a long-overdue bow: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,.
I’m not quitting quietly. By my count, this column contains 104 commas. Note to copy desk: Leave them be.
Mr. Samuelson also writes for Newsweek.
God bless Robert Samuelson. He is fighting a battle I’ve fought for over 30 years now. I thought I was alone.
Back in the early ’80s, I had a reporter covering the Jackson, Tenn., city commission who just wouldn’t use commas. She was in a hurry, of course — the commission met at midmorning, and it was our policy to have a story about that meeting in the edition that was actually on the streets downtown at noon. As I edited her story, I would call her over and point to all the places where I was inserting commas (among other changes, of course).
This was at the very tail end of the typewriter era. One day, she strode impatiently back to her desk — I can see her now — and sat back down at her IBM Selectric. Less than a minute later, she whipped out the paper, strode back over to me and handed the page to me with a flourish. It was a page full of commas. She urged me to hang onto them and insert them into her copy at my leisure, rather than bothering her about it when she was busy.
Ellen Dahnke went on to write editorials at The Tennessean. In the spring of 2005, I saw her at a reunion
of Sun staff from those days when everyone was young. That’s where I got this picture (with Wichita Eagle cartoonist Richard Crowson and Washington lobbyist Joel Wood). She was fighting breast cancer. She and my wife, a survivor since 2001, talked at length about it.
I like to think that on the editorial board, in those later years, Ellen had the chance to slow down and think. I like to think she had time for the commas. Silly, I know, but I think it’s a thought that would make Ellen smile.
Got a phone message and this e-mail a little while ago:
Hello,
I am a reporter for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, working on a segment for tonight. We are trying to assemble a cast for a studio discussion on public opinion about the Iraq war – whether there is in fact some sort of sea change going on, what actual people are saying rather than Senators in Washington. We are hoping to find three or four columnists or bloggers to discuss not so much what they personally believe, but what they have been hearing from the public in general, the military community, the area he or she is writing from.
We air live between 6 and 7pm eastern time. Is this something you might be interested in? Give me a call when you have a moment, and I look forward to talking with you.
The call came in while I was juggling, being three people, trying to put out tomorrow’s pages with QuarkXPress in Mike’s absence, and wondering whether I should be satisfied with those few tortilla chips that I had snarfed, or run by Mickey D’s (and Starbucks, of course) after sending the pages to the printer whenever I get done. Maybe nobody would miss me for a few minutes. I had canceled my weekly meet with the publisher, so the lunch thing was looking like a maybe, when I got an IM from the newsroom saying somebody wanted me to be on the show, so would I fix my phone so it would ring so they could sent her to me.
Anyway, she had called because of my column last week, but she said they didn’t want to talk so much about what I think, but about how opinion on the war is running in S.C., and I said in essence kind of like nationally only not as much so. I went on about how I could hardly quantify it; I could talk about commenters on my blog (comparing and contrasting then and now) but that’s hardly representative, and then I went off on a pedantic tangent when she committed the faux pas of calling me "conservative," yadda-yadda, and pretty soon I had talked my way out of the interview.
Then I felt bad, and started saying I could glance over letters and look at a recent poll and actually think about the subject for a few minutes, and maybe they could still use me, but it was too late. My original strategy had been too successful. If only we could say that about the Bush-Rumfeld strategy in Iraq, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we.
Dang. And I like doing live TV. I like radio better, but still…
Got back late last night from a quick drive up and back to Pennsylvania. As I mentioned I would be doing, I had a brief interview with Barack Obama while on the road Friday. Unfortunately, since I was entering mountains near the North Carolina/Virginia border, it was briefer than either of us anticipated.
One thing I know for sure is that he is a polite man for a big shot. The last word I heard from him amid the crackling was a puzzled, "Sir…?" as I faded out. (I’ve tried to imagine, say, John Kerry being that polite. I can’t.)
But I certainly appreciate the effort on his part, and the campaign aides who labored first to establish, then to re-establish, the connection.
Now, what were we talking about? We were talking about his proposals for cleaning up the executive branch of the federal government. I found the proposal — I had received a 12-page PDF in advance — to be thoughtful, principled and fairly comprehensive. (And I would have posted it in advance, but it was embargoed then. It no longer is.)
A lot of the 12 pages went into modest detail on the sins in this regard of the Bush administration. So cynics might dismiss it as a way of saying once again to the Democratic primary base, We all know how wicked the Bushies have been; well, I won’t be like that at all!
But let me defend the senator against that charge on two counts. He didn’t make this stuff up; there are plenty of actual ethical sins for this administration to answer for. Secondly, these are perfectly sound things to promise to do.
In a way, the proposals are probably a bit boring to most people: So you’re going to be a good steward and avoid corruption? Well, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Shouldn’t that be the default position?
But I think the candidate deserves credit for his proposals to actively pursue integrity in his administration. It’s less "I promise not to steal the spoons," and more, "here’s how I’m going to keep the spoons safe."
I am reminded of the way Jimmy Carter promised to clean up government, post-Watergate. And I mean that in a good way. The pursuit of virtue and honor in government were what I liked best about Jimmy. But I am reminded of an anecdote I heard about the days after Carter’s 1976 election victory. One of his people met with South Carolina supporters to thank them for their efforts in the campaign, and to say that any hiring for administration positions would be handled in an open, above-board and merit-based way. There would be no jobs handed out "in smoke-filled rooms."
One of the South Carolinians — an African-American officeholder, something you need to know to make full sense of the comment — protested, "But I just got in the room, and I just started smoking." (This is a certain person known as a bit of a wag, so he probably wouldn’t mind my using his name in connection with this third-hand account — I’ll ask him about it next time I see him and check the story before I do that, though.)
Anyway, I was starting to tell that story to Obama, and to ask whether he’d gotten any pushback from supporters or other Democrats saying they didn’t like such promises as this:
Barack Obama will issue an Executive Order asking all new hires at the agencies to sign a form affirming that no political appointee offered them the job solely on the basis of political affiliation or contribution. The Executive Order will also require that all employees engaged in and making hiring decisions also certify that they will not take political affiliation into account as they make hiring decisions for career positions.
Of course, it hit me as I was asking about this that that sort of thing is more likely to come up in the general election — or right after a victory, when you’re dealing with "supporters" who are not necessarily True Believers in your ideals. But I thought I’d ask anyway.
I was in the middle of that convoluted question when we lost the connection.
Anyway, I’ve linked above to the entire position paper. Here it is again. It’s a PDF. Let me know if you have trouble reading it, and I’ll post it as plain text. Let me know if you have any questions I should ask him about it, and I’ll try to work them in next time I speak to him.
A few days ago I visited my wife’s preschool class and someone — my memory is confused on this point, but I suspect it was my wife — suggested that I read to them. I sat down and within about 5 seconds had 8 books in my lap. I said I would read a page or so from each, and proceeded.
Audience participation was excellent —
they seemed to know their letters and numbers pretty well — and I found myself wondering, why can’t I get the Legislature to pay attention like this? For that matter, why don’t more of our lawmakers know their letters and numbers this well?
The first time I met these kids, it happened to be "W week," so my wife introduced me as "Mr. W," which is the way the kids greet me now. I think that gives me extra cachet with them — I’m not just some guy, but the guy behind the famous letter.
Anyway, it was nice to have such a civil audience, although a brief fight did break out over who had chosen the book I had just read from. That kind of behavior we do see from lawmakers.
Since I posted this (or since I thought I posted it; just realized this morning it didn’t work), I’ve been not only in Pennsylvania, but in New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. Got in about 9 p.m. from a 569.2-mile drive (that’s just from PA), and I’m now trying to read papers, read messages, etc.
I’ll try to post some things from while I was gone before I go to real-time.
A 
to be at certain levels. (
