Category Archives: Television

Take a Look at the Lawman, or, The Trouble with Time Travel

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Seems to me we need a break from our exhausting (to me, anyway) discussion of civility, one in which I find myself engaged deeply in discussion with some of the blog’s worst offenders (Lee, “Mike Toreno”) because I feel like I have to consider them thoroughly, give them every chance, before tossing them out, if that’s what I’m to do to keep order. Oh, the fundamental fecklessness of liberal democracy! Perhaps I should just conjure a virtual Gitmo for them, and to hell with due process! One of my friends, a liberal Democrat (in the big D sense) through and through, says I’m guilty of WASPish diffidence, and perhaps I am…

We need some escapism. Let’s talk time travel.

Yes, I know Stephen Hawking says there’s no such thing (his proof: that there are no time tourists from the future — that we know of, I would add), and I figure he’s probably right. That doesn’t keep me from being a sucker for it as a plot device — “Back to the Future,” the H.G. Wells original, variations on the H.G. Wells original (such as the enjoyable thriller/romance “Time After Time,” which starred Malcolm McDowell as H.G. himself), and on and on. Not that it’s always satisfying: “The Final Countdown,” aside from having one of the least relevant titles ever, is probably the most disappointing movie I’ve ever seen. For two hours you build up to the 80s-era USS Nimitz getting ready to go up against the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then the battle is prevented by a plot evasion as cheesy as, “… and then he woke up.” All because the producers lacked the budget to stage the battle, I suppose. The earlier scenes, such as when the F-14s splash the two Zeroes and the confrontation between the Japanese pilot and the historian, are pretty decent though…

I’m always a little embarrassed to admit this, but one of my favorite novels to reread when I want to relax my mind is Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. Why embarrassing? Well, when you explain the plot — “It imagines what would have happened if the Confederacy had had AK-47s” — you sound like an idiot. But it really is GOOD.

Let me hasten to add that I like the more reputable A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court much better, and have ever since my first reading as a kid. But the Turtledove book is still enjoyable.

In real life, we all engage in a bit of time travel to the best of our means. We all think back to moments in our past when we might have done something differently. This ranges from bitter recrimination (“What I should have told him was…”) to tantalizing wistfulness. I suspect most guys have experienced in their heads some version of Steppenwolf’s “All Girls Are Yours” fantasy.

You run into trouble with such imaginings when you try to make them believable. First, there’s the device — time machine? bump on the head? For that matter, if it’s a machine, how does it work? It’s generally best not to explain it in too much detail. Michael Crichton made that mistake in Timeline. His characters explain that what they have discovered is actually travel between universes in the multiverse, which somehow magically ACTS like time travel in that if you leave a note for yourself in one universe, you can read it 600 years later (or what SEEMS later) in the other. I could explain further, but it gets more ridiculous the more it tries to be serious. Doc Brown’s “flux capacitor” is much more believable, and more fun.

Then, what are the rules — is history mutable, or not? And if not, why not? And let’s not even get into the grandfather paradox. And if you go back to a point within your own life, can you see your younger self as a separate individual (in which case you might have a lot of explaining to do to yourself) or are you back inside that earlier version of yourself, only with what you now know in your mind, like the Steppenwolf back with all his past loves?:

At the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in early Spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly…

Anyway, I’m thinking of all this this week because I rented the first two episodes of “Life on Mars” from Netflix. Premise: Cop in Manchester, England, in 2006 gets hit by a car, wakes up as a cop in 1973.

Promising. You’ll recognize it as the “Connecticut Yankee” device — physical trauma, followed by the time dislocation, which the protagonist can’t explain and at least at first doesn’t believe in, but has to come to terms with. In this case, the hero keeps hearing voices and other sounds that persuade him that he’s in a coma in 2006, but then he is beguiled by the richness of irrelevant detail in his 1973 existence. He keeps thinking, Why would I have imagined that?

I’ve enjoyed it so far, but ultimately it falls down on an important measure for time-travel fiction — the evocation of the visited era. The writers of the show seem unable to go beyond bell-bottoms and vintage cars. Their notion of the difference between being a cop in 2006 and 1973 is that back then the office was a lot grungier, and the cops liked to slap subjects around and disregard proper procedure. Oh, and it took longer to get stuff back from the lab.

Which, I’m sorry, is pretty inadequate… I was in college in 1973, and people were just as insistent upon rules and standards then as now (despite their really, REALLY bad taste). And ultimately, watching this show, I don’t really FEEL like I’m back in that era. And I realized why when I watched a bit of the “making of” video — the writers and others who made this flick were too young to remember that date, which still seems pretty recent to me. The protagonist would have been 4 years old in 73, and the writers and producers seem to be his contemporaries.

Not only that, but they get their idea of what the 70s were like from watching cop shows of the period. In other words, since Starsky and Hutch bent the rules, that’s what real-life policing was like. Sheesh.

The soundtrack’s pretty good, though. The sequence in which the cop is hit by the car and goes back happens to the strains of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” (hence the title):

Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

… first on an iPod, then on an 8-track.

I’m going to watch the next disc; I’ve got it ordered. To see if he wakes up or whatever. But I’ve seen time travel done better…

Dead-blogging the GOP debate

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Just some scattered thoughts as I listen to the GOP debate last night via the Web. Can’t call it “live-blogging,” but it’s kind of like that, so I’ll call it “dead-blogging,” which sort of reflects my level of enthusiasm about the candidates so far, a few minutes into it. Some random observations:

  • These people aren’t running for governor of South Carolina. They’re running for the GOP nomination for governor, which is entirely different. Every word they’ve uttered so far has dripped with Republican jargon and catch phrases, and none of them has communicated the slightest desire for MY vote. Anyone else feel that way? I mean, it’s like listening to old-line Marxists talk about “running-dog imperialists.” These phrases don’t communicate or inspire, they just help us pigeon-hole the speakers…
  • Did Larry Grooms just say that DHEC regulates too aggressively? In what state, in which universe?
  • Seems the panel should have some folks on it with more of a statewide perspective, such as, say, the editorial page editor of The State. Oh, wait; there isn’t one any more…
  • Nikki’s sweet (oh, the women are going to come down on me for that one, but she is), but she really shows she’s out of her depth whenever she starts comparing government to a business. Inevitably, she betrays a lack of understanding of one, or both. For instance, she just decried the fact that the state lottery spends $7 million on advertising. She says that should go to education. Well, fine, so far. I don’t like the lottery spending to sucker more people into playing; I don’t think the lottery should exist. I would not, of course, try to make people think that the lottery is in ANY way an answer to our school funding needs. But that’s not the problem with what she said. The problem is, she says a business would not spend the money on advertising to keep the customers coming. Ummm… yes it would, Nikki. It would have to. I mean, duh, come on. It’s hard to imagine a type of business that would be MORE dependent on ad spending to keep its product front-of-mind for prospective players, to constantly whip up interest in its “product.” It has no substance, so it’s ALL about generating buzz…
  • Interesting how it is an accepted truth among these GOP candidates that the current administration has totally dropped the ball on economic development. There’s nothing new about it — Republicans have been griping about it for years — but it’s interesting because it sounds for all the world like these folks are running for the nomination of a party that has NOT held the governor’s office since 2002.
  • Which is dumber or more off-point — a TV watcher asking when we’ll eliminate property taxes, or Larry Grooms saying we shouldn’t tax either property or income? Which of course only leaves taxing economic activity as the last major category. And given our current economic situation, how stupid is that? And is he unaware that we’ve already tilted our tax system far too far in that direction already? Where’s he been the last few years?
  • Gresham Barrett tries to deflect a question about the Confederate flag by saying we need to concentrate on sending the signal that we are serious about moving forward on economic development in this state. Well, getting the flag off our state’s front lawn is the easiest, simplest, most obvious step we can take in that direction.
  • Here’s another odd question from the public — Would you oppose more stimulus funding for SC if South Carolinians didn’t have to repay it? What relationship does that have to reality? None. There has never been, and never will be, such a major expenditure that we as taxpayers won’t be on the hook for. Of course, Nikki’s reply acts as though that’s the very situation we had with the stimulus that she agreed with Sanford on, which is the opposite of the truth.
  • Henry at least gets a plug in for comprehensive tax reform…
  • Grooms is right to say across-the-board is not the right way to cut the state budget, but then he retreats into quasi-religious ideological gobbledegook about how the problem is too much spending to start with. (More specifically, he says we shouldn’t institute programs — as if we’ve instituted new programs lately — that we don’t know how we’ll pay for. And yet he’s the guy who wants to make sure we don’t have the revenues we need, by taxing nothing but economic activity.)
  • Just watched Bill Connor’s Gov Lite campaign ad, which reminds me: If I ever do run for office, and I start blathering about how you should vote for me because I’m not a “professional politician,” will one of y’all slap me? Not hard, mind you, just to sort of reboot my brain so I can come up with something other than cliches…
  • Nikki says she supports “all education reforms.” So basically, if you call it a “reform,” she’s for it. Talk about failing to be discriminating…
  • Henry doesn’t seem to be aware that we are a national leader in demanding accountability of public educators. Lack of accountability isn’t the problem. We’re et up with it. In fact, we just had an insurrection over the PACT test, because so many parent agreed with the teachers that they’d had enough of it. I’m with him on merit pay, though.
  • Andre just came out for consolidating school districts. Good for him. Of course, Mark Sanford has always said he was for it, but hasn’t lifted a finger to make it happen. He also said he doesn’t want to spend money on football stadia, which I certainly applaud.

OK, I’ve got to stop watching now… lunch appointment. More later, if I get time…

Am I cut out to be a Mad Man?

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madmen_widescreen

When Kathryn corrected me on the title of the TV show “Mad Men” (and she was right; it was two words), I went to the official site to check — and ran into a thing where you can build your own Mad Men avatar.

So, being unemployed, I did. Well, there’s more to it than that. Being unemployed, and having recently taken a couple of mild forays into consulting in the advertising field (in fact, I’m sitting in the offices of an ad agency as I type this), I thought I’d see how I looked in that milieu.

Not so great, as it turned out. But I did manage to get myself into a scene with Joan Holloway, if only in caricature…

Christina Hendricks: Our Mrs. Reynolds is back!

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Joan Mad Men

Not being a guy who watches much TV — I tend to watch shows after they’re canceled, on DVD — I was very pleased when I started watching “Mad Men” (which hasn’t been canceled yet, but with me watching it it’s only a matter of time) and saw Christina_Hendricks“Joan Holloway.” And pleased for reasons other than the obvious.

This was the only time I had ever seen her other than her two appearances on the tragically short-lived “Firefly,” as “Our Mrs. Reynolds” — a.k.a. Saffron, a.k.a. Bridget, a.k.a. Yolanda — and “Trash.”

So my reaction on seeing her in the current series was to think, “Where’s she been?” Turns out she was on TV all the time.

Her specialty is playing a “bad girl” with a certain amount of wit. For instance, she’s the only actress I can think of offhand who can pull off a line like “But I’m really hot!” (spoken to Capt. Mal Reynolds) in a way that makes you laugh and agree with her at the same time (and yell at the TV, “Look out, Mal!”). Anyway, I’m glad to see she’s working…

Peter, you left out the “lashing” part

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Hmmm… After taking up the cudgels for John O’Connor and others in the media whom my friend Peter Hamby says the governor “lashed out” at and “blasted” today, I saw the video clip above.

What I saw, and what you will probably see as well, is the usual, casual, lollygaggin’ Mark Sangfroid delivery, delivered complete with little chuckles thrown in — not exactly a foaming rant. (Which means that, while I hear the guy really has a temper, I still have never really seen it fully on display.) More of a passive-aggressive sort of delivery.

Missing is what in text seems like the worst part of the session, which is what really set me off (everyone knows I have a temper), and which Peter describes thusly:

Sanford singled out John O’Connor — a political reporter for South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The State — and accused the newspaper of covering the political back-and-forth over the travel controversy while skimming over Sanford’s arguments defending himself.

Sanford took one question, but refused several others. But when O’Connor asked a question about private flights that Sanford failed to report on public disclosures, the governor became irritable.

“John, we’re not going to play your game,” he said, jabbing his finger in the reporter’s direction. “I don’t work for you.”

Wish that part was on the video.

Now, I just think Sanford was taking unfair advantage of his bully pulpit to make the press the issue rather than his own misconduct. But he did it without the ill grace of a Spiro Agnew. He was affable about it. Which means he still has his equanimity. Which you can see as good or bad. Personally, I’d like to see a guy who was feeling that pressure and moving a little closer to changing his mind about himself. But I don’t see that, either.

What do y’all think?

Our governor certainly doesn’t lack for gall

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Today, our governor, increasingly detached from reality, lashed out at the media. At least, he did according to CNN’s Peter Hamby:

(CNN) – South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford lashed out at the media on Friday, admonishing reporters at a press conference for their coverage of the multiple investigations into his travel expenses.

“One of the frankly disappointing things I’ve seen in several instances here over the last 60 days of my life since I’ve been through this thing is that in some cases it’s not been about objective journalism, its been about advocacy journalism with an agenda,” he said.

Sanford was in the town of Conway revealing his plans to waive confidentiality in a state Ethics Commission investigation into his use of state airplanes and taxpayer-funded travel, a move that will allow to the public to view the results of the probe.

But the governor, who has adopted an increasingly combative tone in recent days, also blasted members of the state legislature for being hypocritical, accusing them of spending state money on travel as well. He called on members of Senate and House to make their travel documents public.

Then he turned his sights on the South Carolina press corps, with whom he had a largely cordial relationship before he turned the state’s political world upside down in June by copping to an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman. He chided the media for its coverage of his travel record and said he has been an excellent steward of taxpayer money, unlike previous administrations…

… and I trust Peter’s account. He’s young, but steady.

The nerve of this guy Mark Sanford. With all of this insanity that he’s dragged us through because of his own narcissistic little drama, and which he keeps dragging us through, he has the unmitigated gall to lash out at the hard-working people who are merely reporting it to the people of South Carolina. Every day, he amazes me a little more.

I call your attention in particular to this passage:

Sanford singled out John O’Connor — a political reporter for South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The State — and accused the newspaper of covering the political back-and-forth over the travel controversy while skimming over Sanford’s arguments defending himself.

Sanford took one question, but refused several others. But when O’Connor asked a question about private flights that Sanford failed to report on public disclosures, the governor became irritable.

“John, we’re not going to play your game,” he said, jabbing his finger in the reporter’s direction. “I don’t work for you.”

Ah, but see, governor, that’s the thing — you do work for John. And you also work for the other four million-plus people of this state, which includes Andre Bauer, and most emphatically includes the many, many of us who believe your one great remaining chance to perform a service for this state is to take Andre up on his offer and resign. If you do that, we no longer have to be subjected to this farce of having you as governor, and will be spared the risk of having Andre elected in 2010.

But as each day goes by, with each outburst from you that we witness or hear of, our hope that you will come to your senses and do the right thing fades.

We deserve better than this.

Just look down at your shoes and walk away, gov

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Last night while channel-surfing and finding nothing good, I stopped for a moment on an old “Roseanne” episode. The plot was about as tacky as you can imagine: Roseanne was concerned about her daughter’s sex life, of all things, and was nagging her husband (John Goodman) to talk to the daughter’s husband about it (at least, I hope he was her husband).

Goodman, of course, refused. Under the Guy Code, that was not a permissible topic. Sports, cars, whatever, but not personal relationships. Roseanne was disgusted with him, but he was adamant.

Next scene, Goodman is in the breakroom at work, and another guy (I’m gathering he was Roseanne’s sister’s husband) starts trying to get a conversation going about relationships and sex. Finally, he’s so obvious about it that the daughter’s husband storms out, realizing the topic is his own sex life. Goodman reproaches the guy who brought up the topic, saying he knew Roseanne had put him up to it.

This causes an argument in which the other guy reveals something intimate that he knows about Goodman and his wife, and Goodman counters with something equally personal and inappropriate. Then he stops, shocked, and says something like “We know way too much.” A shocked pause, then he says (more or less), “There’s nothing to do now except to look down at our shoes and quickly walk away.”

Both men simultaneously break eye contact, jerking their heads downward to look at their feet, and walk quickly from the room via separate doors.

Which is what any man with any self respect would do. And it’s what Mark Sanford should have done some time ago — certainly before that bizarre interview that came out yesterday.

Der Führer pans the new “Star Trek”

Saw this video spoof earlier in the week and meant to share it. Since I hadn’t posted anything all day, I might as well post it now.

Think of the creative energy it takes to produce something like that on YouTube, and the site is just full of stuff like that.

This was brought to my attention by my high school classmate Burl Burlingame, who blogs out of Honolulu. He works for the Star-Bulletin. Aside from the fact that he still has his job, he and I have been on parallel tracks lately. He also just fell into the twin traps of Facebook and Twitter, so we have commiserated this week.

Burl and I graduated from Radford High School in 1971. You may recall I wrote something about those days in my column last fall, “Barack Like Me.” Burl got into journalism earlier than I did; he published an underground newspaper at Radford. The one thing I remember clearly about that was that he used to refer to our principal, who was virtually never seen by the students (I never saw him that whole senior year, although I knew people who said they’d met him), as “the Ghost Who Walks.” The principal’s name was Yamamoto. Not the admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack; another Yamamoto. (Actually, come to think of it, he could have been the admiral for all we knew, since we never saw him.)

It’s particularly meaningful to me that Burl posted something making fun of Nazis. You may have noted that the lede story in The State today was about a high school prank. A particularly nasty, destructive high school prank, but still a senior prank. Our senior prank at Radford back in 71 was less destructive, but more creative.

About a dozen of us staged a revolution to take over the school. Or rather, in guerrilla fashion, we took over a classroom at a time and quickly moved on. We wielded water guns, and wore rather elaborate paramilitary costumes. Most of us had recently seen Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” and were largely inspired by that, only we were far more international. Our leader was Steve Clark, who was dressed in full military regalia as “El Presidente.” He spoke only Spanish in keeping with his character, which no one but I understood, so I translated all of his commands, being second in command. My character’s back story was that I had been a top officer in the Israeli Defense Force but had been drummed out for something or other and had turned mercenary. Overly elaborate, perhaps, and the nuances were probably not obvious to our audience, but we didn’t care.

Burl’s character was an unrepentant old Nazi whom we had found hiding in Argentina, loudly fulminating at everyone in a vaudeville German accent. He would particularly abuse me, since my character was supposed to be Jewish, and of course I would take offense, and our comrades would have to separate us to prevent violence. Yes, it was that politically incorrect. We wanted to be edgy, and thought ethnic humor, even ethnic humor that dark, to be funny, a la Mel Brooks with “Springtime for Hitler.” We were kids, and stupid. Or rather, a little too “clever” for our own good.

We were most successful in taking over Mrs. Burchard’s English class. Mrs. Burchard was my favorite teacher ever. You can see a picture of her on that same page that I linked to about Mr. Yamamoto, on the virtual yearbook that (I think) Burl put together a few years back. (Cute, isn’t she?) She was a real sport, and played along. When some of her underclassmen students failed to give El Presidente proper respect (as we defined it), we lined them up against the blackboard and hosed them down with the water guns — but only after Mrs. Burchard had fallen on her knees before us to beg us to spare them. She was awesome.

The revolution ended badly, as most do. Some juniors mounted a counterattack on our position, and I caught a water balloon in the groin. C’est la guerre.

Ya know what I think I might do?…

Surfing channels a few minutes ago, I ran into an Andy Griffith gem that I had to go to Facebook and share with my oldest friend in the newspaper biz, Richard Crowson (you know, the cartoonist who got laid off about six months before Robert and I did). I wrote to him:

You know what I just saw, not two minutes ago? Andy and Barney were just a-settin’ on the porch, talking about going downtown to get a bottle of pop. Andy allowed as how he reckoned it might be a good idea, and Barney he said the same right back at him, and they were poised to act upon the suggestion when they noticed the fella they were a-settin’ thar with had fallen asleep, and the episode ended on that high note.

Deeply satisfying.

May none of y’all will appreciate that the way Richard would, but I pass it on just in case.

Here’s the actual dialogue:

Andy: You know what would be a good idea? If we all went up town and got a bottle of pop?
Barney: That’s a good idea, if we all went up town to get a bottle of pop.
Andy: You think Mr. Tucker would like to go?
Barney: Why don’t we ask him…..if he’d like to go uptown to get a bottle of pop?
Andy: Mr. Tucker?
(No response from Mr. Tucker)
Andy: You wanna lets me and you go?
Barney: Where?
Andy: Uptown to get a bottle of pop?
(Camera pans to a sleeping Mr. Tucker, with a completly peeled apple skin dangling from
his hand.)

I’ll go to bed now and stop bothering y’all.

Getting paid to have a blast: Working with Robert

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
REMEMBER “The Dick Van Dyke Show”? For you younger folks, it was about a guy named Rob Petrie, the head writer for a fictional variety show (and if you’re too young to know what a “variety show” is, go look it up) called “The Alan Brady Show.”

There were these wonderful scenes of Rob and his colleagues at work, writing comedy sketches — a process that involved a lot of bouncing around the office, acting out and collaborative improvisation. Morey Amsterdam’s frenetic character would jump up and say something like, “OK, so Alan walks into the room…” and the other two would throw in various wild things until they made each other laugh, and the skit would take shape. It looked like the most fun a person could possibly get paid for having.

That’s what it’s been like working with my friend Robert Ariail over the past 15 years. Just like that.

Robert would come into my office after the other editors and I were done with our morning meeting (Robert doesn’t do meetings), usually with several sketches. Sometimes he’d come with nothing, but that was unusual. I’d react to the sketches, maybe suggesting dialogue changes, maybe an entirely different approach. Robert pays me the compliment of saying I think like a cartoonist. And I do. I have everything it takes — except the talent.

Robert has truckloads of that. He can sketch an idea as quickly as you can describe it, and many of those initial sketches could be published as they are. But was he satisfied? No way. He might go through 10 versions in the course of the day, coming back to my office several times to seek further feedback. This was fine, although more often than not, his first instincts were the best. He would refine, and it would get better and better, but he usually had it nailed from the start.

As you know, Robert and I are both leaving the paper. Today is our last day. Such is the state of our industry. So much for getting paid to have fun, for a collaboration that almost daily, for years on end, had both of us laughing like a couple of hyenas on nitrous oxide. How many people get to do that for even one day? We’ve had 15 years, and for that I feel blessed.

But it hasn’t been just about fun. What Robert has done has mattered, to South Carolina and the nation (which is why he’s won every national award except the Pulitzer, and he’s been a finalist for that twice). Robert can pack more punch into a cartoon than I can get into a hundred columns. There’s just something about a funny picture with a point.

That’s why the prestigious Calhoun Lecture Series at the Strom Thurmond Institute at Clemson University had Robert deliver the last talk of the term, just last week. He spoke of the history of cartooning in general, and at The State in particular. Among other things, he told this story:

Robert is the second cartoonist actually to be employed (rather than contributing on a freelance basis) by the paper. During the 1910 gubernatorial campaign, the first one did a cartoon on the race-baiting populist Cole Blease. It was hard-hitting. The surviving Gonzales brothers (original editor N.G. Gonzales had been gunned down five years earlier) didn’t see the cartoon before it appeared in the paper. The cartoon was seen as so harsh that it was widely believed to have helped Mr. Blease win the election, by causing voters to feel sorry for him. The Gonzales brothers apparently decided that having a cartoonist was a risky thing, because they never hired another one.

In fact, the position remained vacant until Robert filled it in 1984. Before he started, he was interviewed by the late Ben Morris, then the publisher, who just had one thing to tell Robert: “Don’t surprise me.” It wasn’t until Robert read the history later that he understood the reference.

Here’s hoping cartoonists aren’t like comets. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take another 74 years for another one to streak across the sky.

Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic. After all, Robert will still be around. He has a new Web site, robertariail.com — just being set up as I write this — where he will post new cartoons, and where you can find links to his old ones. And he will still be syndicated nationally, which provides him with a monetary incentive to keep ’em coming.

Beyond that, I’m happy to have reason to believe Robert will be just fine.

You see, Robert is not my first close cartoonist friend. Richard Crowson and I were at Memphis State University together in the early ’70s. The first column I wrote for the editorial page of the journalism department lab paper was illustrated by a Crowson cartoon. After college, he and I worked together for a decade at The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun. After I became news editor at the much-larger paper in Wichita, Kansas, in 1985, I persuaded Richard to pull up roots and join me out West.

So imagine how I felt when The Wichita Eagle laid Richard off six months ago — for the same reasons Robert and I are leaving The State. I was so torn up about it that I didn’t call Richard to talk about it until two days ago. And guess what? He’s happy as a clam. “For me personally, the layoff has just been great,” he said as he was driving to a recording session (he’s the finest bluegrass musician I’ve ever known). “I don’t have any money, but… how do you put a value on peace of mind?” He doesn’t miss the daily pressure one bit.

And after all my worrying. Robert’s, too. We knew he was not long for this newspaper. Sadly (for me), it has cast a pall over our daily brainstorming sessions, sometimes making me impatient and crabby — although Robert kept cranking out wonderful cartoons anyway.

But the past few days, since the news broke, have been great. With the pressure off, the old fun has returned. That may sound odd, but it’s true.

And this is the way I’m going to remember it.

Robert and I will still collaborate at every opportunity. Find his future work at robertariail.com. My new address is bradwarthen.com.

robert2

Well, that would be a radical departure

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Headline from the Greenville News site:

I also enjoyed this quote from the AP story (which we also ran, under a more realistic headline), which in Mark Sanford's book is a major admission:

"Throw enough money at any problem and you're going to help some folks."

Watch now — Lee's going to start calling him a socialist…

One more thing… you notice how, if you want to know what Mark Sanford is doing or saying, you have to go to Washington or tune in to national media? He's never been very interested in South Carolina, much less in governing it, but he's definitely gone to new extremes in recent weeks.