Does Mark Sanford fully appreciate what Michael Jackson has done for him? I doubt it.

Of course, national interest in our gov was waning yesterday afternoon anyway. Lachlan Cartwright, who spent the day chasing around Sullivan’s Island yesterday for the New York Post, told me that right after the governor came out of the house and spoke to him and other media a little after 4:30.

But the confirmation came at 7:18 p.m. with this e-mail from the Post, which I will always treasure:

Hi Brad, We won’t be needing anyone tomorrow in Columbia. The King of Pop is dead.

Says it all, doesn’t it?

I also enjoyed this postscript in the form of a text message from Lachlan this morning:

Thanks for your help yday My phone died when we were chatting Im now on a flight to LA for Jacko so think we are done with the Gov…for now but do keep in touch with another Aussie

… followed by his e-mail address. Working with Lachlan was a blast. He’s all that you expect with a top reporter with a Rupert Murdoch paper, right down to the heavy Australian accent. The reference to “another Aussie” arises from the fact that I had been communicating with Peter Beattie, former P.M. of Queensland, earlier in the day on something unrelated. That caused me to mention to Lachlan that I had just been in touch with Beattie, which made me wonder whether he — Lachlan — hailed from Queensland.

No, he said — Melbourne. I apologized for any offense I might have given by incorrectly pegging his accent, to which he replied “No its cool Ive lived the last 5yrs in london anyways.” (He didn’t say it that time, but another time during the day, he actually said “no wurries.”)

This — and the fact that today he’s at Neverland — gives me the impression that Lachlan must be the Post‘s “on the spot while it’s hot” guy, always traveling to the hottest story in the world. Which sounds pretty exciting to a homebody like me. I once had a job like that on a much, much smaller scale — for a year, from 1979-80, I was freed up from all beat responsibilities to work on special assignments for The Jackson (TN) Sun, from Nashville to Memphis to the Iowa caucuses. Little papers used to do things big in those days, when newspapers actually had travel budgets.

But certainly nothing like Lachlan’s job. You journalism snobs out there may sneer at the Post and its ilk, but let me tell you they’ve got a business model that’s worthy of some respect — they go out and cover what the people want to know about, from moment to moment. They’re newshounds. They ride the hot horse, as a former editor of mine would put it.

And in that way, working for them for a couple of days, they helped me hark back to an earlier, more vital, more engaged time in the newspaper business. Used to be, we all had that sort of energy and immediacy. This week, even the good old staid State‘s got it.

By the way, after the rally, I heard a rumor that some sort of compromise on the stimulus was in the works between the governor and lawmakers.

I asked the first lawmaker I ran into, my homeboy Doug Jennings, and he said he hadn’t heard about any such, although he had heard Sen. Hugh Leatherman had met with the governor and the governor had gotten in the senator’s face on the subject. Treating that as another rumor, I went into the State House and asked Sen. Leatherman about it.

He said he had met with the gov, all right, at 4:15 at the governor’s request. And they spoke about the stimulus. His version of the meeting: The gov told the senator that he (the senator) had the power to bring the $700 million to SC. Leatherman said, essentially, How do you figure? He said all he had to do was pay down debt with $700 million from other sources (the bizarre “compromise” you heard about yesterday).

Leatherman was agog. He said he had no such power, that it would take a majority of the Legislature to agree to such a deal, and he assured the governor that there was NO interest in the Senate in such a “deal.”

The senator said the governor then leaned toward him and said he knew that Leatherman never wanted to pay debt down; that he was only interested in “growing government.” The senator said the governor actually lost his cool a little, which is a phenomenon I’ve heard about but never witnessed.

Anyway, the senator says he told the governor it seemed passing strange to him that the governor should be telling the senator what the senator thinks.

That seems to be about where they left it. So no, there was no meeting of the minds.

The senator said someone told him that the governor had been on TV in Charleston at 5 p.m. saying that the impasse was Sen. Leatherman’s fault. The senator wondered how the governor had done that so fast…

And no, I haven’t talked to the gov about it. This being after 7 p.m., and me not getting paid to run down a story or anything, I went home. I thought y’all would be interested in the part I DID hear, though.

This is a blog experiment, ladies and gentlemen. I’m trying to see whether I can get video from my Blackberry, shot at the pro-stimulus rally at the State House this evening, to post on the blog. I’ve never tried this before, so stand back, and remember, don’t try this at home. I’m sort of doing it blind, because the file would not play on my computer at all. So I e-mailed it to myself, then loaded it directly onto YouTube. What you should see and hear is the crowd singing this familiar song (which some of you will remember from Steve Miller’s “Your Saving Grace” album)…

Well dont you let nobody turn you round Turn you round, turn you round Well dont you let nobody turn you round You got to keep on walkin, keep on talkin Marchin to the freedom land

… only with “Mark Sanford” substituted for “nobody.” It was that kind of rally. And I’d tell you more about it, except that I’m really tired, so I’m just going to post this experiment for now. Let me know how it works.

Well, as you can see, I am in the news today. In the morning you'll see a further message about me and about the editorial department from our president and publisher, Henry Haitz (I'll link when it's available). In case you
missed the news, here’s the short version: I’ll be leaving the newspaper after next
week, as my position has been eliminated in this company’s quest for deep
expense cuts.

I’m not sure what else to tell you, or how valuable such
commentary from me would be. As y’all know, I’ve tried to keep y’all in the
loop about the profound changes going on in this business, which have been accelerating
in recent days. I’ve written about everything from the departure of my longtime
friend and colleague Mike Fitts last year, to the really horrific news sweeping
the industry in recent weeks, with some newspapers going under entirely.

This has not a comfortable thing for me to do. For one thing
– I always wonder how much my readers will care. Someone I respected in college
– actually, he taught a course in editorial writing that I took – warned us
that when one talks about one’s own industry, one runs the risk of boring one’s
audience.

For another reason, I recognize my own lack of detachment in
writing about a subject that concerns me so directly. I’ve tried to be
completely candid, but I have to wonder how successful I’ve been. Finally,
there is such a delicate balance to strike between telling all that I know or
imagine I know, which is my instinct as a journalist, and respecting the
confidentiality of things I know only because I’m an officer of this company –
which gives me both an unfair advantage and a responsibility to those I work
with. It can be awkward.

Anyway, in spite of that, I’ve tried to keep y’all
up-to-date. Last week, however, I did NOT share with you the fact that my
colleague Denny Clements, the editorial page editor of the Myrtle Beach Sun
News, was losing his position. I just felt too close to it to address it
properly. I’ve known Denney since I was the news editor of the paper in
Wichita, and he was an editorial writer there. And while he and I have not been
personally close in the intervening years, I wasn’t comfortable getting into
that. Besides, it would have raised the natural question of what the
implications were for this newspaper, and I just didn’t know enough about that
to tell you anything, so I waited until now to mention it. Here’s how Denney
told his readers about it.

Now, as you can see, Denney’s situation was VERY close to my
own. My last day is March 20.

I leave here with a deep love for this newspaper, which I
hope has been evident over the last couple of decades. It seems to have been
evident to Henry, by the kind and gracious things he had to say about my
service in his note on tomorrow’s page. And I appreciate that.

What will I do next? I don’t know. Perhaps I should post my
resume here, and see what happens.

I can tell you this much – I have zero intention of
“relocating.” When I came to the state of my birth in 1987 after years in this
business in Tennessee and Kansas, I did so with the intention of staying for
good. My days as a newspaper vagabond were over. Either things worked out at
The State, or I would find some other line of work. And the thing is, things
worked out very well. The day I was interviewed here (for the job of
governmental affair editor) I told Tom McLean that my ultimate goal was to become
editorial page editor. I believed that position offered the greatest
opportunity to serve my state, which I believed needed its largest newspaper
to have a strong, frank, lively editorial page. I got my chance 10 years later,
and I could not be more proud of the team I have had the privilege of working
with, or the excellent job they have done – and which those who remain will
continue to do, if I know them (and I do).

Obviously, this is a stressful time, but beneath it all is
something that I don’t quite know how to describe, a sort of anticipation
driven by curiosity. I wonder, with great interest, what will happen next.
(That sounds either terribly trite or unintelligible; I can’t tell which, but I
explained it as well as I could.)

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about this today. Maybe
I’ll say more some other day. Oh, and if you wonder about the future of the
blog, or whether it has one – I don’t know. That’s one of a lot of things that
need to be figured out.

Just in case you doubt what I say about how partisan Democrats' symbiotic, co-dependent relationship with Rush Limbaugh, note this gleeful ode of adoration from from Brad Hutto and John Land, who are probably the most unapologetically partisan Democrats in the S.C. Senate:

Need I say more?

Political parties are just SO unbelievably obnoxious….

Just got around to reading the cover leader in this week's Economist, and I don't think I've read an editorial condemnation of anything this strong in quite some time.

Note the cover, above. The prose is scarcely less lurid. This is from the leader:

The Economist sees a number of causes for alarm, but the most immediate seems to be the "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill, especially the House version.

It notes that Obama has expressed his displeasure with the protectionist provision: "That’s good — but not enough. Mr Obama should veto the entire package unless they are removed."

The Economist believes that nothing less than the entire global economy is at stake:

When economic conflict seems more likely than ever, what can
persuade countries to give up their trade weapons? American leadership
is the only chance. The international economic system depends upon a
guarantor, prepared to back it during crises. In the 19th century
Britain played that part. Nobody did between the wars, and the
consequences were disastrous. Partly because of that mistake, America
bravely sponsored a new economic order after the second world war.

Once again, the task of saving the world economy falls to America.
Mr Obama must show that he is ready for it. If he is, he should kill
any “Buy American” provisions. If he isn’t, America and the rest of the
world are in deep trouble.

At first, I thought Derrick Jackson of The Boston Globe was trying to win the prize for most extreme case of gushing about the "The One" (easily swamping my own piece about the specialness of the occasion) when I read this:

IF YOU felt a tremor, it might have been more than just the multitudes chanting O-BA-MA. It just might have been the rumble of roots, tree trunks swaying like hips, and branches stretching outward to praise the heavens. If you heard a song, it might not just have been the crowd when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said to Obama, ''Congratulations, Mr. President.'' It might have been the birds serenading as if let out of a cage, soaring to perches to applaud with their wings.<
   If you heard a roar, it was every stone lion coming to life in front of museums, libraries, colleges, and other ornate buildings around the nation. If you were on the Mall and felt something on top of your feet, it might not have been other people stepping on them. It might have been millions of ants and other insects who marched from their undergrounds to wave leaf particles and blades of grass like American flags.<
   For it was not just a human message when President Obama said in his inaugural speech that we can no longer ''consume the world's resources without regard to effect.'' The greatest effect is, of course, on untold species mowed down for our consumption.

… but then I saw he didn't mean to describe the moment in religious terms — at least, not in a conventionally religious way, as in writing the Revelation According to St. Obama — but he did mean to invoke one of our growing secular religions, in this case the anthropomorphizing of animals to the extent of imbuing them with rights akin to those of humans.

But Mr. Jackson was the soul of restraint compared to this piece that moved on our opinion wire this morning:

By Paula Moore
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
    Feel-good stories about centenarians are nothing new, but a recent harrowing tale with a happy ending about one long-lived fellow named George may have taken some readers by surprise. George was abducted from his home in Newfoundland, Canada, taken to New York City, where he was imprisoned in a small enclosure for 10 days, and then, after his captors had a change of heart, released in Maine. George was last seen swimming to freedom. <
       Did I mention that George is a 20-pound, 140-year-old lobster…

No, you didn't, but somehow I knew something like that was coming.

Sorry I can't link to the latter piece (apparently, no one has actually picked up and run the piece yet), but you can read more on the subject at lobsterlib.com, where among other things you can order "Being Boiled Hurts" stickers — as many as you need. You can also read where Mary Tyler Moore says, ""If we had to drop live pigs or chickens into scalding water, chances are that few of us would eat them. Why should it be any different for lobsters?"

To which I'm tempted to say, "because they're like, big BUGS?"

I'm really not as mean or insensitive to critters as I sometimes seem to be. It's just that, when somebody seeks to portray a crustacean as being just like people — going BEYOND saying don't eat them, to "don't even confine them," it sort of sets me off. I guess I'm just in a mood today. All sorts of things I'm incidentally running across in looking for copy for tomorrow's op-ed page is setting me off.

Speaking of critters, I even got slightly grumpy reading this piece, which frets about the Asian market for turtle meat depleting wild species in the U.S.:

    As global wealth rises, so does global consumption of meat, which includes wild meat. Turtle meat used to be a rare delicacy in the Asian diet, but no longer. China, along with Hong Kong and Taiwan, has vacuumed the wild turtles out of most of Southeast Asia. Now, according to a recent report in The Los Angeles Times, they are consuming common soft-shell turtles from the American Southeast, especially Florida, at an alarming rate.
    Some scientists estimate that two-thirds of the tortoise and freshwater turtle species on the planet are seriously threatened. Some of that is secondhand damage — loss of habitat, water pollution, climate change. But far too many turtles are being lost to the fork and the spoon.

And the thing is, I actually agree that we need to protect endangered species. But having been goaded into an insensitive mood by the first two pieces, I couldn't help thinking that I was less concerned about what the Asian appetite for turtles was doing to wildlife than I am, say, in the African market for the body parts of actual human beings who happen to be albinos:

According to the Tanzania Albino Society, at least 35 albinos were murdered in Tanzania last year to supply witch doctors with limbs, organs and hair for their potions. The violence of the attacks and the prejudices they reinforce, both about albinos and Africa, have prompted Tanzania’s government to act. It has appointed an albino woman as a member of parliament to champion the interests of some 200,000 albinos in the country. The albinos, for their part, have applauded the intervention as well as other measures, such as attempts to stamp out the use of the Swahili word “zeru” (meaning “ghost”) for albinos. Nonetheless, they say that efforts to convict albino-killers have been thwarted by a rotten judicial system, with witch doctors using bribery or threats of spells to escape trial.

Tell you what — let's work on putting a stop to that, then worry about the turtles, and then, if we have any energy left, talk about the lobsters, OK?

You know that I've written and said a number of things since the election about how hopeful I am that Barack Obama can do exactly what he promised to do in terms of leading us past the stupid, pointless partisan bickering of the Clinton-Bush years. As you know, that was probably my biggest motivation for endorsing him in the primary here — and for endorsing McCain as well, as the one guy on the GOP side able to transcend the partisan garbage that has so sapped our nation's ability to cope with anything — from war to peace, from foreign to domestic — constructively.

So imagine my joy upon reading that story about Obama and Lindsey Graham in today's paper, the one by James Rosen on our front page.

Naysayers and cynics will dismiss it as feel-good rhetoric. The haters on the right will cite this as another example of Lindsey Graham selling out right-thinking (pun intended) folks everywhere to his own aggrandizement and greater glory. But they'll be wrong. The story is replete with evidence as to why they are wrong.

Barack Obama has no credible reason other than the reasons he claims for asking Lindsey Graham — best pal of John McCain, staunch advocate of our nation's mission in Iraq, most articulate proponent of the Surge strategy Obama himself had dismissed (he's the one who sold ME on it) — to accompany Joe Biden on his important mission to assure our allies in the region that the new administration is not a bunch of ideological crazies who are going to abandon them. He didn't have to do this, but it was absolutely the right thing to do.

And Graham didn't have to go along. He could have been a typical loser partisan plotting how he can tear the new guy down and get some of his own back. That would have been stupid, and Lindsey Graham isn't stupid, but it would have been typical. Yes, Graham sees the opportunity to stay at the center of power even though his guy lost. But he also sees the opportunity to have a constructive impact on our nation's ongoing strategy in the war on terror.

And Obama didn't have to say the things he said quite as strongly as he did. He didn't have to publicly thank Joe Biden "for having the wisdom and foresight to invite Lindsey Graham," or declare that he was "drafting" him "drafting as one of our counselors in dealing with foreign policy." He won the election. Graham lost. Usually, that's end of story.

In addition to the encouraging fact that we have such a good bipartisan vibe going, Obama's choice of Graham as the object of his bridge-building speaks to another good thing about the president-elect: He's smart. Graham has a masterful grasp of the policies he advocates, and you can get smarter just listening to him, even if you end up disagreeing with him. If you're going to have a guy with a different perspective to bounce ideas off of — a la Lincoln and his Team of Rivals — you couldn't choose better than Lindsey.

There's the additional fact that, since Graham has been, as much as any other Republican including John McCain, the conscience of his party on some of the nastier edges of fighting terrorism — such as torture and general treatment of detainees. So it's not like he's making a deal with the devil even by his own lights. He's looking to someone whose opinions differ from his own, but whom he knows he can respect.

This budding relationship — which the two men made a point of calling attention to, and I'm glad they did — bodes well for the future.

You know, I hardly know what to say about the story in today's paper about the emerging consensus that DHEC should be a Cabinet agency, except maybe, "Duh."

Yes, as we've been saying over and over with great vehemence for a really, really long time, DHEC — and the state DOT, and the state Department of Education, and every other EXECUTIVE agency in state government — should be directly accountable to the person ELECTED to be the chief EXECUTIVE of the state, instead of answering vaguely to an unaccountable board, or a separately elected executive, or whatever.

We've only been pushing hard for this for about 18 years. Before that — before the "Power Failure" project that I led here at the paper that launched this long advocacy — a string of independent studies since 1945 had concluded that yes, the state should indeed make its executive agencies accountable by instituting a Cabinet system. It had not happened because too many elements in our society, from lawmakers jealous of executive power to insiders who knew how to game the byzantine system to their advantage to people who just didn't understand the issues involved, were unwilling to let the change happen. Or lacked the will to push hard enough, even when they were sold on the rather obvious idea.

So while it is but a piece of the puzzle, and it's been far too long coming, I will applaud and cheer loudly for this latest initiative, and hope that this time, the rational thing actually happens.

Just give me a moment. I'll get duly excited about this… I mean, Otis Rawl and Phil Leventis agreeing with John Courson on this is very, very encouraging.

Just now got to a voicemail that was left for me on my office line this morning. It's from Jim Rex, who indicates he was inspired by my Sunday column, "Fuming with impatience." By his account, he's been doing a little fuming himself, and he urges me to keep it up.

To listen to the entire voicemail message, click here
.

Here are excerpts from what he said:

… This is your equally impatient state superintendent of education, calling the impatient editor of The State newspaper, and I just wanted to tell you, my friend, that what you said yesterday in your editorial piece and the way you said it was long overdue; I appreciate you doing it. I think we all need to step up if we care anything about this state… And I hope you'll keep that tenor, that more uncompromising tenor that you displayed yesterday as you challenge readers to do what needs to be done and put pressure on our policy makers to quit trivializing this process that's supposed to be helping our state….

…If they don't redeem themselves this year, we're in big trouble as a state, and they can't redeem themselves doing the same ideological pettiness and partisan squabbles that don't give us any victories or solutions…

… Just wanted to let you know that you struck a chord with me…

Thanks for sharing that, Dr. Rex.

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
OVER THE holidays, my wife and I went to see “Australia.” Since we don’t get out much, the $9 ticket price was a shock. My wife recovered first, and had the presence of mind to ask for the senior discount — the first time either of us had taken advantage of that. It was still high, but $6.50 apiece was less painful to a guy who wasn’t burning to watch Nicole Kidman for almost three hours anyway.
    A couple of days later, playing golf with my dad and one of my daughters, I decided to play from the senior tees, just to keep us from having to tee off from three separate places on each hole. But whatever my excuse, the fact remains that, at 55, I am entitled now to that privilege.
    My point here is that life is finite, and I’ve had numerous reminders of that lately. Consequently, I am less patient than I used to be. In terms of my role as editorial page editor, what this means is that I chafe more readily, and more loudly, at the failure and/or refusal of South Carolina’s political leaders to take even the simplest, most commonsense steps toward moving our state beyond being last where we’d like to be first, and first where we’d like to be last.
    My colleagues on the editorial board are painfully aware of this. They will urge me to go along with praising some “reasonable” political compromise that moves roughly, barely perceptibly, in the right direction, and I will refuse. I will insist that we advocate what should happen, that we articulate clearly why it should happen, and why there is no rational, defensible reason why it should not happen. I insist upon this because all too often if we don’t say it, no one (no one with a pulpit as bully as ours, anyway) will. This can come across as inflexibility. But what it really is is impatience.
    Some of these things that I get tired of advocating for in vain, year after year, are admittedly complicated, which is what makes it so easy for the forces of reaction to prevent progress. Comprehensive tax reform (see the above editorial) is one such issue. But sometimes the need for change is painfully simple and obvious. Take our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax.
    Let’s review some basic facts:

• The state tax on a pack of cigarettes is 7 cents, and it has been since 1977.
• The average state tax nationally is more than a dollar.
• Study after study has demonstrated that the higher the cost of a pack of cigarettes, the fewer teenagers will take up the habit.
• Here in South Carolina, with our current tax, 6,300 kids under 18 take up smoking annually.
• Each year, 5,900 adults — almost all of whom started as teens — die as a result of smoking.
• The annual direct health care cost to South Carolina of smoking (not including the impact of secondhand smoke) is $1.09 billion.
• This adds $574 per household to our tax burden.
• Each dollar that South Carolina contributes to Medicaid is matched by three more federal dollars, quadrupling the effect.

    We’ve heard all the excuses for inaction. They range from the ideological/quasi-religious (the inflexible opposition to any tax increase, no matter how good an idea it may be in a specific case) to the downright moronic. (“If you raise the tax, fewer people will smoke, and your revenues will go down.” Great. Fantastic. That’s just the kind of “problem” we want to have. Duh.)
    You’ve heard all this before, right? So what set me off this time? A small thing.
    House Speaker Bobby Harrell came to see our editorial board last week to talk about his priorities for the 2009 legislative session. I appreciate that he did this; I really do. I’ll even go so far as to say that Bobby Harrell is a better-than-average lawmaker by S.C. standards, and you can see why he rose to be speaker. He is even capable of being semi-visionary, as with his steadfast defense for years of the state’s endowed chairs program.
    His list of priorities was respectable. And he predicted that this year, we will finally raise our cigarette tax — by 50 cents a pack, taking us to roughly half the national average. He wants to spend the money and the Medicaid match on making it easier for small businesses to provide health coverage.
    A 50-cent hike would be progress, I told myself. And whatever it is spent on, it would save a lot of lives in South Carolina. Take what you can get. Be reasonable.
    Two days later, I read a letter from Lisa A. LeGrand of Columbia, which said in part, “It seems downright immoral to me that the state has means of raising revenue that it simply will not utilize, such as… Raising the cigarette tax to the national average…”
    And I had one of my impatience attacks. Yes, Lisa, you’re absolutely right. Your point about raising revenue aside, there is no moral, rational, wise, defensible reason not to raise the cigarette tax immediately to the national average. There is no valid excuse for going halfway.
    The S.C. Tobacco Collaborative projects that a 93-cent increase would prevent 64,100 kids alive today from becoming smokers, help 33,800 adult smokers quit and save 29,400 adults and kids from premature death. In case you’re concerned about the politics, the group has a 2006 poll showing 71 percent of S.C. voters support a 93-cent increase.
    But you know what? That’s not going to happen. The truth is that the best we’re likely to get is what Speaker Harrell and other sensible, pragmatic, realistic, incremental S.C. leaders are willing to make happen.
    This makes me fume with impatience. It should do the same to you.

For more evidence of my growing impatience, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
I REALIZED that the whole thing was getting out of hand when my wife started asking me why I didn’t want to be her “friend.”
   
Not to get into personal matters too deeply, I had always sort of
thought my wife was, is and will be my friend — my best friend, the one
with whom I shared all, ’til death do us part.
    After 34 years of
marriage, five kids and now three grandchildren in common, after all of
which we are still living in the same house and on speaking terms,
you’d think the whole “friendship” thing would have been established to
everyone’s satisfaction long ago.
    But not in the age of Facebook.
   
Call me a mossback, but I admit it: I don’t get Facebook. It’s not that
I ain’t hep! Blogging is second nature to me. Almost everything else
about the Internet, from Google to e-commerce, I do as though I’ve
always done them. I’ve essentially been instant-messaging since the
early ’80s.
    But Facebook foxes me. It doesn’t make sense. I
don’t understand why information flows the way it does on that site or
is structured the way it is; I have trouble obtaining the simplest
information from it. I can’t get a footing in all those little snatches
of messages in various type sizes with little pictures and all; as soon
as I step into my Home page, I slip and fall as though I’d stepped into
a roomful of marbles, and my attention slides right off the screen. I
need gray, continuous type, one clearly expressed thought following
logically upon another, to hold my consciousness — which is why the two
papers I’m most likely to read other than my own are The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
   
But most of all, I don’t get the whole “friends” concept. Mind you, I’m
not the world’s most sociable guy. There’s family. There’s co-workers.
There’s sources. There are nice people I see at church or at Rotary.
But friends? Not so much. We’re not encouraged to have “friends” in my
business. I’ve been the recipient of disapproving remarks from
colleagues on the rare occasions I’ve called someone a “friend” in a
column. It’s considered unprofessional.
    But ever since I set up
a Facebook account (I did it when my youngest daughter’s boyfriend died
last year, and I’d heard his sister had set up a page where a lot of
people had said nice things about him), I’ve had this steady trickle of
e-mails saying:

   
Sometimes these are people I know, usually professionally. I started
out confirming them, just to keep open the lines of communication — but
I’ve started to hold back. Some are people whose names are only vaguely
familiar, although I generally recognize them when I go to their pages.
Then I have a dilemma — should I snub this person who has asked me to
be his or her “friend,” or potentially compromise myself by declaring
to the world that this person is a “friend”? (This category includes a
lot of people, usually younger ones, who work in politics
professionally.)
    Yeah, I get it that the site is using the word
“friend” to describe a range of relationships much broader than the
original meaning, but I’m still not sure what to do, because I still
place value upon the word.
    Finally, some are members of my
immediate family. First, there were my own children. I approve those,
of course, although “friend” seems an absurdly inadequate way to define
the relationship. Then my wife signed up. A few days later, she said
our youngest had expressed dismay that her mother had not yet named her
as a “friend”! Well, we smiled over this. How silly. She knows how much
we love her.
    Next thing I knew, my wife was asking how much longer I was going to go without confirming that she
was my friend. OK, OK, I took care of that. I now see that all but one
of my children are my friends on “Facebook,” but I am not going to bug
the one holdout about it, because that’s his business. (To the extent
that anyone has personal business in a Facebook world. I don’t want to
give away one of the reasons why I think my wife likes the site, but
kids will post stuff on their Facebook site they would never tell their
parents directly, which to me remains inexplicable.)
    It’s
probably good to have my wife on there, though, on account of the total
strangers asking me to be their “friends.” The very first person who
asked to be my “friend” was an attractive lady (which I knew from the
glamour shot) who lives in Germany and is married. I “confirmed” the
friendship just so I could send her a message asking, as delicately as
I could, whether we were acquainted. She said we were not. OK. Whatever.
   
That was over a year ago, and I still don’t understand what’s going on.
But I am feeling the pull of this complicated web of relationships, and
it is not always pleasant. At first, it’s nice to make contact with a
friend — a friend in the old sense — you haven’t seen in 20 years, and
that leads to “friend” requests from people who were close to both of
you back then, and on and on. But as the thing spreads in a viral
manner — which seems to be the point — it all becomes rather cumbersome.
   
So I don’t get Facebook. I’m told that Barack Obama does, though, which
is good to know. I read a piece in Foreign Affairs last week (see how
hopeless I am?) that in this century, the world’s most dominant power
will be the one with the most “connectedness,” and “the United States
has a clear and sustainable edge” in that department.
    So I’m glad to know that somebody gets it. But I don’t.

For a site that makes sense to me, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.