Category Archives: Words

The diminishment of creativity over time

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Lately, in my truck, I’ve been listening to “The Union,” a CD put out by Leon Russell and Elton John. Speaking of gifts, my brother gave it to me last Christmas, but I only broke it out recently.

I’ve enjoyed it. It’s quite good. I’ve kept it in the player for weeks. I’ve even caught some of the tunes going through my head during the day. They worked well together, although their styles remain quite distinct. When you hear the opening piano chords, you know which voice you’re about to hear.

But… there’s this sadness I associate with it. Good as it is, it’s simply nothing like what both of them were producing in 1970 and ’71, and for a short time after that. I really enjoyed John’s work, from “Your Song” through “Tiny Dancer” on “Madman Across the Water.” As for the Master of Space and Time, I doubt that he had any bigger fan than I, back during the “Shelter People” period. “Stranger in a Strange Land,” for instance, remains an all-time favorite. And who else could have pulled off his show-stealing performance at the Concert for Bangladesh?

On that subject, Leon put on the most awesome show I saw live in the early ’70s, if ever. It was in Memphis. The opening: All the Shelter People were on stage, without Leon. There were two grand pianos. At one of them sat a black guy (who really music aficionados can probably name, although I cannot) rocking out in a gospel style (or so it sounded to my untrained ear), and the Shelter People — or whatever they were called at this point, essentially a “hippie commune bonafied” on tour — were energetically jamming along with him. The music built, and built, still without Leon. It had been going on about 10 minutes, it seemed, and everybody was pumped, and then… Leon stolled out on stage. He was wearing a white suit, with a white top hat, and playing a white Stratocaster. He ambled, back and forth, playing lead over the music… then he climbed up onto the second piano, and stood there with the guitar, rocking away. Finally, he climbed down, put down the Strat, and got serious. He sat at the second piano, and he and other pianist duelled away, with the other dozen or so other people on stage rocking along with them…

It was amazing. What a showman.

People get older. Their powers diminish. Certainly, their energies do. One great thing about being a musician, though, is that you generally retain the ability to make something beautiful, even if it lacks the power of what you did that made you a star, if you were a star.

I got to thinking about this yesterday when I saw a Tweet leading me to a thing about Kevin’s Smith’s movies, ranked from Worst to Best. There were 10 of them. Fortunately, it was not called a Top Ten list. You couldn’t even honestly come up with a Top Five from this guy’s work, not if you had taste. Basically, he had a Top One — “Clerks.” Some of you who think me a prig would be surprised that I even liked that, but it was really well done. The pottymouthed script was inventive, clever, as were the acting and the direction. Not even Jay and Silent Bob wore thin, for as long as the film lasted. It made you want to see more from this guy.

And then you did see more, and you wished you hadn’t. It’s probably a good thing he’s decided to desert his oeuvre and turn to more pedestrian, formula comedy (“Cop Out,” which this list placed last, but which was at least mildly amusing).

Kevin Smith is only 41. He was born when Elton John and Leon Russell were at their peak. But he peaked with one film.

That happens, with creativity. It’s a tragedy, when it deserts the young. Look at the Beatles. Of course, the Beatles were so amazingly improbable to begin with. How could anyone, so naturalistically, produce so much material that was that diverse, from year to year, and that appealing? It was inhuman. It was the sort of thing that in a different cultural context gives rise to dark mutterings about clandestine meetings at the Crossroads at midnight.

But it didn’t last. As they broke up, it looked as though it would. Lennon produced “Instant Karma;” McCartney gave us “Maybe I’m Amazed.” George Harrison seemed to explode, having been repressed, with “All Things Must Pass.”

And that was it. They faded. Mozart died, but they lived to see their talents fade. The wonderful thing about Paul McCartney is that he appreciated that his fans loved the old stuff. So did he. (If you’d made John Lennon stand on stage and play Beatles songs, he’d have shot himself before that other guy did.) I saw him at Williams-Brice, and loved it. But, as I noted the other day, it’s sad to see him dyeing his hair, still trying to be the Cute One. That time is past, Paul.

Of course, one looks for such fading in oneself. Fortunately for me, I never hit the heights that these guys did. I was a decent writer by local standards, impressive to some people. Just enough people, in my book. It’s nice to have strangers come up and say kind things occasionally, but it’s also good to be able to walk down the street anonymously 99 percent of the time.

And as we age, things fade. First, one is no longer indefatigable. Gone are the days when, as a reporter, I could work all day, all night, and through the next morning before taking a nap (something I did frequently, back in the day).

But if you don’t rise too far, you don’t have as far to fall. I never wrote the Great American Novel (not yet, anyway), so I didn’t have to publicly struggle to replicate that for the rest of my life, while everyone scoffed. When one muddles along, one can continue more easily.

I look back at stuff I wrote 30 years ago when I find it moldering in a box, and it’s good. It has a spark, one that I lament. But it’s strange how one’s appreciation of one’s own work morphs. At any time in my adult life, I’ve thought the stuff I’d written six months earlier SO much better than what I was writing currently. Then, six months later, I’d think THAT stuff was the best I’d ever written. That has continued through my blogging years. (My old blog was SO much better-written than this one — even though it wasn’t nearly as well-read. And the stuff I wrote on this blog a year ago is amazingly better than this tripe I’m churning out now.)

What I’m writing now is the worst stuff I’ve ever written. (In my opinion, which is what counts, since I’m an introvert.) But it has always been thus. Aside from its lack of creativity, it’s shot through with typos and incomplete thoughts, mangled sentences. Because I don’t read back over it, and don’t have an editor — and everybody needs one. But I look forward, ever hopeful, to enjoying it later.

When I don’t do that any more, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Relax, I expect.

What about y’all, in what you do? As critics, do you disappoint yourselves? If so, take heart. Perhaps it will look better later. And even if it doesn’t, the stuff Leon and Elton are putting out is still quite good…

Gov. Perdue did have a point, you know

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Speaking of emails, I just got this one from Joe Wilson:

What is Governor Perdue thinking?

She suggested recently that we shouldn’t hold a Congressional election in 2012 because you might hold your Congressional representatives accountable for the decisions they make.

Isn’t this what our country is all about? Aren’t you supposed to hold your elected officials accountable for the decisions they make?

By holding elections, you have the opportunity to send a message to your leaders, one that can have a very immediate and permanent effect.

This knowledge makes those of us in Congress aware of what our constituents want back home. It keeps us accountable. Without it, we could pass legislation in Washington that only benefited a select few.

That’s not how our country works, no matter how beneficial Gov. Perdue thinks it would be.

Your voice is important, and I consider your will as I cast my vote for any piece of legislation.

Actually, I think the lady had a point. All due respect to the Framers’ wisdom in putting “the people’s House” in perpetual election mode (which sort of got watered down when we started directly electing senators), but I have to wonder… what do we accomplish in these rituals every two years?

You know what will happen in 2012? Joe will raise a whole lot of money through emails such as this one, and the ones in which he exploits his “You Lie!” moment, and he will spend it, and he will be re-elected.

Same thing will happen with Jim Clyburn over in the 6th. I can’t speak to what will happen in the other four SC districts because I don’t observe them as closely, and the incumbents are all so new. So perhaps they are slightly more vulnerable — although probably not Tim Scott.

But Joe’s and Jim’s warchests and the power of incumbency will guarantee that no one credible emerges to run against them, and they will be re-elected.

And yes, I know that Doug and others will say this is why we need term limits. I’m not willing to drop that particular nuclear option on democracy, but we do need something. Because otherwise, these elections pretty much are a waste of time. Except to the political consultants and the media that get the advertising, of course. (See, Wesley, I didn’t just talk about you — I talked about the media, too.)

And if he’d made a different decision, he’d have been a big, fat jerk. With the emphasis on ‘fat’

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Catching up on email, I had to smile at this one from yesterday:

Statement by Gov. Perry Regarding Gov. Christie’s Announcement

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today released the following statement regarding New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s announcement earlier today:

“Chris Christie is a friend, a great governor and rising star in the Republican Party.  I’m sure this was an exciting and stressful process for Chris, Mary Pat and his family, but I know they have a bright, successful future ahead of them. Gov. Christie will be a strong asset for the Republican Party as we work to build a national movement to get America working again, reduce the influence of Washington in our lives, and defeat President Obama next year.”

Somehow, I knew before opening it that it would be laudatory. What made me smile was imagining how it might have read had Christie decided to run.

Of course now, as the AP notes, this puts him in the position to be “a kingmaker.”

So he’s a great guy to know. Really.

Defining deviancy down in our discourse

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Corey Hutchins started this rolling on Twitter this morning, but what shocked me was that Amanda Alpert Loveday reTweeted it:

Best @nikkihaley quote ever! “She’s been busy F-ing the rest of the state. I’m not surprised that she F-ed me.”@HBoydBrown @CoreyHutchins

My shock arises partly from Amanda being the… well, something over at the SC Democratic Party (apparently they’re too democratic at party HQ for titles, but she recently appeared on Pub Politics as the counterpart of Matt Moore, the GOP executive director). I know that her Twitter feed says “My tweets reflect my personal opinions…..,”  but still…

The second is that, well, Amanda just seems like such a sweet “little girl” (to use our governor’s term) to an alter cocker like me. I mean, look at her; I ask you.

Amanda, Amanda, Amanda…

And Corey, and Boyd — what are you boys doing using language like that around Amanda?

Seriously, folks… This is not only grossly inappropriate language to be used when referring to the governor of our state, it’s not an appropriate topic, even if you used euphemisms.

And why am I writing about it? Well, I wouldn’t have if this had come from one of the usual sources for such. But this was said (apparently on the record) by a state representative, repeated by a representative of the Fourth Estate, and picked up by a party official.

And that’s wrong, on all counts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a term for it, or at least one that can be adapted to this purpose: Defining deviancy down.

We don’t need to be on this downward spiral, people.

These SC Democrats are just out of control

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You saw my little expose about Vincent Sheheen. His blatant offense occurred just about an hour after I had banished “The definition of insanity is…” from the realm.

Today, Sen. Sheheen’s good friend and ally Sen. Joel Lourie spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club. He gave a fine speech; maybe I’ll tell you something serious about it later.

But at the very end, in answering the very last question, he not only uttered the forbidden aphorism, but attributed it. I didn’t have my recorder going, and I was too shocked to write it down word-for-word, but more or less, this is what he said:

I think it was Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.

Earlier today, I said things seem to be coming in twos these days. I’m worried that this phenomenon may go beyond that. I fear that next time I run into Rep. James Smith, the first words out of his mouth are going to be, “You know, it’s been said that the definition of insanity is…”

I’ve just drawn the line on the “definition of insanity” thing. Sorry, but you’ll have to come up with something original going forward

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Sorry to get strict with y’all, but I have now read this cliche one too many times:

It has been said that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of insanity…

That was the lede of a press release I got last night from Thad Viers. I think he went on to say something about President Obama’s policies (why, I don’t know, since he is a state rep), but I couldn’t go on after that beginning.

And that’s it. I hereby banish it from the realm…

Here’s another that’s skating close to the edge:

As Pogo said (sometimes it is rendered as “as someone said,” but I’m using the proper construction here), “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

I allowed that one once on the blog yesterday — I won’t name any names — but I’m reaching saturation point.

Maybe I’m the only person here bothered by these constructions, perhaps the result of 35 years of editing mountains of copy about politics. I’m oversensitized. In any case, enough is enough.

To explain, these don’t work because they no longer surprise, and their value depended upon your not knowing what came after the opening words. They were awesome when they first appeared. They were less awesome the second time. Their awesomeness is now into the negative numbers.

Perhaps they could get Byron as a marriage counselor

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Bryan Caskey brings our attention to this line in a Costa Pleicones dissent:

In my opinion, public policy does not require parties live in separate residences in order to bring a separate maintenance and support suit. Instead, I would allow such a suit where the parties no longer have a ‘romantic’ relationship.

Bryan doesn’t like it — he prefers a “bright line” — but I do. I appreciate thoughtfulness and creativity in a judge, up to a point. And as you know, I don’t think everything in the world can be quantified; sometimes we actually have to use judgment. (Also, I’ve never had much trouble with the “I know it when I see it” ruled for obscenity.)

Of course, it could get me in trouble at home. I feel like J and I have more of a Mark Twain kind of marriage than the James Fenimore Cooper kind.

Oh, but wait: I am into tales of chivalry and seafaring, so I guess that’s how I do my part to keep things going. I’m sure she appreciates it.

The first words I wrote after the planes hit

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I think I’ve told this story before, but to recap…

In 2001, the senior staff of The State — the heads of all the newspaper’s divisions (including news, advertising, circulation, HR, finance, production, marketing and of course, editorial) — met with the publisher ever Tuesday morning at 9. On Sept. 11, 2001, we had just sat down when someone from the newsroom came to the door seeking John Drescher, who was then our managing editor. John told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, then left the room.

We had it in our minds that it was a big story, and certainly John needed to get started on it, but we were picturing (at least I was) another confused amateur pilot in a Beechcraft or something. The WTC bombing of several years earlier crossed my mind, but I didn’t take it seriously yet.

It seemed we had just resumed the meeting when Drescher burst back in and told Executive Editor Mark Lett (News and editorial each had two editors who were on Senior Staff. The newsroom was represented by Lett and Drescher, while Associate Editor Warren Bolton joined me in representing editorial) that a second plane had hit the other tower.

Now we knew it was a coordinated attack  on the United States.

That was it. Meeting over. Everybody jumped up. A few of us huddled over by the window and discussed putting out an “Extra,” before moving on to putting together the regular paper for the next day. I asked whether they’d like a column from editorial, just to inject a bit of opinion into the special edition. They said “yes,” and I went to get to work.

The first job was to get some sort of sense of what was happened — I mean the total picture, not just the Twin Towers (which probably had not yet collapsed as I began). That wasn’t easy. A  lot was happening at once — the Pentagon getting hit, the Capitol evacuated, the president up in the air, somewhere. And then there were some the unconfirmed reports that later proved to be untrue — I don’t even remember the details of them now, some sorts of smaller incidents going on in the streets of Washington. Once they were discounted, I forgot them so my brain could process all the other stuff going on.

Once I turned to my keyboard, it took me about 20 minutes to write the following. That didn’t keep Drescher from sending up messages from the second floor: Where’s the copy? We’ve gotta go. Of course, all news really had to do is grab the stuff coming in and put it on a page. I had to think about what it meant, on the basis of alarmingly incomplete information, and write it.

So you might say this was written in even more of a hurry than a similar number of words on the blog, and amid great confusion and a certain amount of duress. You can read that in these words. There’s some emotion, and some thoughts, there that wouldn’t have been there a day later, or even a few hours later. Very stream-of-consciousness. I wince at some of it now. But it’s a real-time artifact, at least of what was going through my head that morning. See what you think:

AMERICA WILL FIND A WAY TO PREVAIL AGAINST COWARDLY ENEMY

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor
Sometime within the next 24 hours, no doubt, some television talking head somewhere will say, “This doesn’t happen here.”
Yes, it does. It has.
It’s happened before, in fact. It just wasn’t this close to home.
We remember Pearl Harbor. We’ll remember this, too.
The question is, what will we do about it?
Two nights ago, the nation delved back into its history with a celebrated media event, the premiere of the television version of Stephen Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers.”
We marvel at how a previous generation responded to an unprecedented crisis – a sudden attack by a ruthless, remorseless enemy. We think of those people as the “greatest generation,” and they deserve that appellation because of the way they came together to settle their own crisis and secure our future.
And we all wondered: Are we like them? Do we have it in us?
We’re about to find out.
We’re about to find out if we can snap out of shock, pull ourselves off the ground, set our petty differences aside, and come together as a nation to deal with our enemies.
For now, there is no question that we have enemies. And these enemies are in many ways different from Imperial Japan. In some ways, they are worse.
Pearl Harbor was an attack upon a distant outpost of American military power. The attack, as sudden and dishonest and vicious as it was, was at least an attack that made strategic sense in traditional military logic. And while there were civilian casualties, the obvious primary target was our fighting men and their machines of war.
This time, there is no pretense of such rudimentary “decency,” if you want to stretch so far as to call it that.
This time, civilians were the target every bit as much – if not more so – as our men and women in uniform.
This was a strike – and a temporarily successful one – at the chief power centers that have given this nation the strength to stand astride the world as its only superpower.
We are the world’s largest economy, so they struck, with devastating effect, at the very symbolic heart of that strength.
We are the undisputed military champion of the world, guarantor of security not only for this nation but for the rest of the globe. And this time they struck not just battleships and sailors, but the nerve center of our military colossus.
The greatest gift this nation has given the world is our form of democracy. And they have shut down and evacuated our Capitol and the White House. The home of the most powerful man in the world stands empty, surrounded by nervous men with automatic weapons and itchy trigger fingers.
The nation that gave the world flight is frozen, earthbound, at a standstill.
We are stunned. This attack has been devastatingly successful. We don’t know who did it, and we don’t know how much there is to come.
Our response will have to be different from the response after Pearl Harbor. This appears to be a different kind of enemy – the worst kind of coward. An enemy who strikes, and ducks and runs and hides.
How to prevail against such an enemy and restore peace and prosperity to the land is not immediately apparent.
But we will find a way. This is the same nation that was laid low 60 years ago, by an enemy who thought we lacked the will or the know-how to stop them. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.
We may not be the greatest generation, but we are their grandchildren. We are Americans. We are shocked, and we will mourn.
But then we’ll dust ourselves off, and find a way.

Later, I briefly attended a newsroom meeting in which they were talking about the next days paper (the only time I remember doing that during my years in editorial), and then turned to directing my own staff and writing stuff for the next day. I’ll show you that tomorrow.

Here’s how our governor apologizes: It’s HER fault!

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Earlier today, I passed on a headline on the WIS site that said, “SC Gov Haley says she regrets ‘little girl’ remark.”

WIS later took down that headline because they realized what I did when I read their story. There was nothing supporting the implication of the headline, which was that the governor had apologized.

Later in the day, Gina Smith over at The State explained what had actually happened. Here’s the operative paragraph:

“The story painted a grossly inaccurate picture and was unprofessionally done,” Haley said in a statement. “But my ‘little girl’ comment was inappropriate and I regret that. Everyone can have a bad day. I’ll forgive her bad story, if she’ll forgive my poor choice of words.”

Yep. In her expression of “regret,” she went further in trying to insult the reporter.

That’s our governor. If she does something she shouldn’t obviously it’s someone else’s fault.

Why do some languages sound so fast?

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Stan Dubinsky brought this interesting piece to my attention:

It’s an almost universal truth that any language you don’t understand sounds like it’s being spoken at 200 miles per hour — a storm of alien syllables almost impossible to tease apart. That, we tell ourselves, is simply because the words make no sense to us. Surely our spoken English sounds just as fast to a native speaker of Urdu. And yet it’s equally true that some languages seem to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese leaves German in the dust — or at least that’s how they sound…

But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to Spanish doesn’t whiz by in half the original time…

To investigate this puzzle, researchers from the Universite de Lyon recruited 59 male and female volunteers who were native speakers of one of seven common languages — English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish — and one not so common one: Vietnamese….

The investigators next counted all of the syllables in each of the recordings, and further analyzed how much meaning was packed into each of those syllables. A single syllable word like “bliss,” for example, is rich with meaning — signifying not ordinary happiness but a particularly serene and rapturous kind. The single syllable word “to” is less information-dense. And a single syllabile like the short i sound, as in the word “jubilee,” has no independent meaning at all.

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: The average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information….

So basically, with some languages it takes more syllables to say the same thing. So you have to say them faster to arrive at the same destination in the same amount of time. Weird that people around the world would be synchronizing their clocks that way.

Now you know.

Once, we had a “young lady” reporter at the paper, and a governor wanted to SPANK her. No, really.

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Nowadays, we have our young lady governor calling a reporter a “little girl.” In the olden days, when men were men and so were governors,  they were somewhat more polite toward the youthful and female. But if they weren’t careful, they also came across as a bit kinky. I refer you to this column I wrote in 1994:

CARROLL CAMPBELL MUST LEARN HOW TO TAKE THE HEAT

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, April 10, 1994

Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Writer

If Carroll Campbell really wants to run for President of the United States, he will have to grow a much tougher hide.

The Governor is regularly mentioned as a top contender by some of the most respected political writers in America, including The Washington Post’s David Broder. But Broder and company are missing something. To use a baseball analogy, the top sportswriters have taken only a cursory look at this rookie. They’ve seen him field, throw and bunt. They’ve yet to determine if he can hit a curve ball. Or as Harry Truman might have asked, can he take the heat?

Mr. Campbell is an extraordinarily thin-skinned man for a politician. The general public doesn’t know this because Campbell manages his public exposure with an artful care reminiscent of the way Richard Nixon was handled in 1968. He stays above the fray.

But when he can’t do that — say, when someone surprises him with a tough question, off-camera — the image can fall apart. Experienced reporters have seen that carefully groomed mask shift, with remarkable speed, into a visage of suspicion and hostility. His eyes flash, and his answers, if he responds, are highly defensive. The motives of questioners are questioned.

This flaw isn’t fatal. People can change and, in fact, over the last couple of years, Mr. Campbell has mellowed. He’s become more statesmanlike and less confrontational. In seven years as governor, he has polished some of his rough edges.

At a luncheon briefing for editorial writers at the Governor’s Mansion in January, I saw the Carroll Campbell that Dave Broder sees. He was open, talkative and articulate, exhibiting an easy command of any topic that came up. In the next day’s editorial on his State of the State speech, I wrote about the “New Carroll Campbell .”

A month later, the Old Carroll Campbell was back.

It started with the effort by former state Rep. Luther Taylor to get his Lost Trust conviction thrown out. One of the tactics his lawyer used was to say the federal investigators had backed off investigating charges that could have implicated Mr. Campbell .

A little background: In 1990, when I was The State’s governmental affairs editor, we looked into these same charges and found an interesting story about how the Legislature gave 21 people an $8.6 million tax break. But we never found any evidence that Mr. Campbell was involved. And neither did the feds, with their far superior investigative powers.

Taylor alleged that the federal agents hadn’t gone far enough. The new U.S. attorney, a Democrat, agreed to investigate. The State’s federal court reporter,Twila Decker , concluded that the only way to check the course of the previous investigation was to gain access to Mr. Campbell ‘s FBI files, and she needed his permission. So she asked.

The Governor went ballistic. He requested a meeting with The State’s publisher and senior editors. This led to an extraordinary session on Feb. 17. Assembled in a conference room at The State were the various members of the editorial board and three people from the newsroom: Managing Editor Paula Ellis, chief political writer Lee Bandy and Ms. Decker . Mr. Campbell had a small entourage. Most of us wondered what the Governor wanted.

Over the next hour or so, we found out — sort of. Mr. Campbell had brought files with him, and between denunciations of those raising these charges anew, he read sporadically from the files. Each time Ms. Decker tried to ask a question, he cut her off, usually with a dismissive “young lady.”

Throughout the session, rhetorical chips fell from his shoulder: “This young lady had given me a deadline. . . . You’re smarter than the court. . . . I will not even be baited. . . . May I finish. . . . Now wait a minute, young lady; you’re mixing apples and oranges. . . . I really don’t care what you have, young lady. . . . You seem to be obsessed with ‘lists.’. . .”

No one in the room thought Mr. Campbell had done anything wrong, and everyone wanted him to have the chance to clear the air. But we were all riveted by his agitation, particularly as it was directed at the reporter. At one point, Editorial Page Editor Tom McLean felt compelled to explain to the Governor that Ms. Decker wasn’t imputing wrongdoing on his part by simply asking questions. It did little good.

At the end, the Governor stormed out, without the usual handshakes around the table — without even eye contact.

Later that afternoon, Consulting Editor Bill Rone, who had missed the meeting, stuck his head into my office to ask what had happened with Mr.Campbell . Bill said he had run into the Governor in the parking lot, and that he had been upset about Twila Decker . He told Bill he had been so mad he had wanted to “spank” her.

Repeatedly during the interview, Mr. Campbell had expressed indignation that he was being questioned by someone who wasn’t “here at the time.” Is that what he will say when the national press corps starts taking him really seriously, and somewhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Georgia someone in the pack asks him about that capital gains thing in South Carolina? Or the 1978 congressional campaign against Max Heller? Or fighting busing in 1970? Or the Confederate flag?

Mr. Campbell has gotten altogether too accustomed to the relative politeness of the South Carolina press corps. Our group was throwing him softballs — real melons — and he went down swinging. What will he do when he faces major league pitching?

Of course, the late Gov.  Campbell didn’t mean anything kinky about it. He just wanted to punish her somehow. Putting Twila in the pillory would probably have satisfied him.

I remember one of the newsroom editors — someone who has not worked there for a long time — saying after he read my column, “Hey, I’d like to spank her, too.” He meant it the other way.

Perry damns himself with faint praise

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Just got this release from Rick Perry:

Rick Perry: They called Reagan dumb, too
CBS News
Bonney Kapp
August 30, 2011

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20099519-503544.html

Texas governor Rick Perry called into the Sean Hannity radio program Tuesday afternoon, where he responded to questions about his intelligence first raised in a Politico article with the blunt headline: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?”

Perry, who has surged in the polls since he announced his candidacy just over two weeks ago, shrugged off the speculation that has become fodder for cable news.

“It’s kind of the same old attacks that they made on President Reagan,” he said. “The better we do down here in Texas, my bet is the more they’re going to attack us and that’s fine. I think my record is going to stand the scrutiny of time across the country.”

Perry, who made many C’s and D’s as a student at Texas A&M, turned the attack on the Harvard-educated Barack Obama — whose transcripts have not been released to the public.

“What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers – over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster back in the ’30s and try them again in the 2000s — that’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb,” he charged.

And he didn’t stop there.

Perry stoked the ‘book smarts v. street smarts’ flames by chiding President Obama for surrounding himself with academics instead of people who’ve had “real life experience.”

“They are intellectually very, very smart, but he does not have wise men and women around him. And I think that’s what his real problem is. He has listened to the academics,” he said….

Ummm… Y’all know what I think: I think Perry is going to win the nomination — unless Republicans start thinking strategically and look harder at a guy like Huntsman.

But gee, fella. Oh, yeah? Welll… they said that other guy was dumb, too! Kind of a weak defense. I think if people were saying I was dumb, I’d have come back with something sharper.

Of course, I don’t think like a partisan, and I guess among Republicans, “they said Reagan was dumb, too” is a heckuva powerful argument.

As for the “We’ve tried smart people and it didn’t work…” I’m not sure that’s a strong refutation, either…

Can you tell the sex of the writer?

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I’ve given you nothing so far today, so perhaps even this, insubstantial as it is, will seem like something.

Among many things I did today instead of blogging was try to continue cleaning out my inbox, which a day or two ago was up to about 500. That happens because there are things that I don’t have time to deal with at a given moment, but that I want to do something with, so I leave them where I found them rather than filing them away, where I’ll never see them. And of course the next day another hundred and something come in, and I try to winnow those, but there are always a few more that end up staying there for the same reasons, and so on. Then, there are days I don’t really have time to cull at all, and things just get deeper and deeper.

No, it’s not a good system, but it is mine.

Anyway, I managed to dig today all the way down (I only have 211 left, mostly old stuff) to something I saved on June 3. It was this Tweet, which I had emailed to myself hoping to blog about:

Slate @Slate
Can you tell if this paragraph was written by a man or a woman? V.S. Naipaul says he can: http://slate.me/lWMWfg

Yes, I took the test provided by The Guardian — the one designed to determine whether I could do what Naipaul claimed HE could do, which was quickly tell whether something was written by a man or a woman.

And of course, I failed — I got 4 out of 10 right. Which is what the person who devised the test had intended. It’s easy enough to pick passages by men that sound like they are in the voice of a woman, and vice versa. To make it hard (or, in this case, to prove Naipaul is a sexist pig, which seemed to be the point — which he deserved, since he was being ungentlemanly).

Often, when I start out thinking, for whatever reason (say, an ambiguous byline such as “Pat,” or “Leslie”) that I’m reading something by a man or a woman and I’m wrong, at some point in the reading I go, “Wait a minute…” because something doesn’t seem right. And then I realize — the man is a woman, or vice-versa. Since, as an editor, I’ve had to critically read thousands of pieces from strangers, this has happened enough for me to note a trend.

Sometimes I’m wrong about my realization, though. I suspect, based on observations over the past thirty or forty years, that men and women (especially younger ones) are writing more and more like each other. Just as in other areas the genders are crossing paths. For instance… I’ve been driving for more than 40 years. For the last 25-30 years, I’ve noticed that young women are driving a lot more like young men than they did the first 10-15 — more aggressive, more likely to cut you off, more stupid in general, just like young guys.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed a number of trends among young guys that combine to make it harder to determine the presence of a Y chromosome in superficial behavior. OK, guys still do more stupid stuff than women do, since testosterone still exists in them, but it seems that some of them try harder and harder, and often succeed, to express themselves like women. I won’t go into detail because one of them might punch me. Not very hard, of course, the wussies, but I still would find it inconvenient.

Anyway, take the test if you like. I’ll bet you flunk it. I certainly did. I knew I would, so I played along. When I thought the deviser of the test was trying to lead me to answer a certain way, I did.

I think I could probably devise a test you could pass along these lines. (The way to do it would be to choose paragraphs that are characteristically masculine or feminine in tone. In other words, stack the deck toward being easy rather than hard. If you chose paragraphs at random, everyone would flunk that, too. Most paragraphs provide few clues.) But you know what? I think my not having time to do that is why this post idea has sat here for almost three months…

The nod and the wink? Deconstructing Perry’s comments about Bernanke

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I didn’t really notice Phil Noble’s release earlier about Rick Perry and Ben Bernanke (I’m drowning in email), until it was also forwarded to me by Samuel Tenenbaum today. Here’s the full release, and here’s an excerpt:

Noble Calls on Perry to Apologize for ‘Unacceptable’ Attack on South Carolina Native Son Bernanke

Gov. Rick PerryIn response to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s continuing suggestions that South Carolina born-and-bred Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke is not acting with America’s best interests at heart, SC New Democrats president Phil Noble is calling on the GOP front-runner to apologize.

“In the last few days,” Noble said, “Rick Perry has called our native son Ben Bernanke ‘treacherous’ and ‘treasonous’ and has questioned what his ‘true goal is for the United States.’ Somebody needs to tell Mr. Perry that we don’t talk that way about central bankers here in the South Carolina, and we certainly don’t talk that way about central bankers who happen to be Jewish.”

Noble continued, “The stereotype of the ‘treacherous” or ‘treasonous’ Jewish banker is one of the most poisonous slurs in all of recent Western history. And whether Rick Perry is exploiting this anti-Semitic stereotype today out of true malice or simple ignorance of that long and tragic history doesn’t really matter. Either way, it’s completely unacceptable, and he needs to apologize to Mr. Bernanke and all the people of our state for this grossly inappropriate attack on one of our most distinguished native sons before his Texas boot heel touches South Carolina soil again.

“Or, to put this in terms that even the Governor should understand: Gov. Perry, don’t mess with South Carolina.”

Samuel offered his own observation, which I’ve heard him make before in different contexts:

Remember Campbell and his political anti-Semitism [a reference to the campaign against Max Heller]? It is the old nod and wink game here. Call it the “nink.” Those who have the correct receptors get his message and those who do not, never would associate anti-Semitism with his statement.

True, as a goy, I did not at first associate what Perry said with Bernanke’s Jewishness. But then, I had not initially heard that one bit of comment from Perry, “… I think there will continue to be questions about their activity and what their true goal is for the United States.” To a Catholic, that sounds familiar. But still…

Samuel and I have a lot of discussions about stuff like this. We went to see “The Passion of Jesus Christ” together, along with Moss Blachman, on Saturday in 2004, and then we all went to lunch and debated it. We did not see it the same. But we agreed about one thing: We didn’t like the movie.

Bottom line, I don’t think Perry is going after Bernanke because he’s Jewish any more than because he’s from South Carolina. I think Perry is going after him because a section of the electorate he’s trying to woo deeply dislikes the Federal Reserve, and Bernanke just happens to be its current chairman. The Fed chair could have been a gentile from Oregon, and for that matter could be pursuing policies completely different from Bernanke’s, and Perry would still be on his case.

That’s what I think.

Esoteric word of the day: “quotidian”

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I’ve always enjoyed odd coincidences, such as this one today in the WSJ.

How often do you see “quotidian” in a newspaper? Not, um, every day, I would think.

But today, it was in two pieces, right next to each other, on the same page of The Wall Street Journal. This piece, and this one.

If I were the main character in “Rubicon,” or John Nash, the schizophrenic genius that “A Beautiful Mind” was about, I’d attach significance to this double occurrence.

But instead, I just enjoyed it.

You can still find good stuff in the NYT

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After a bunch of y’all piled on with me as I criticized The New York Times for that Haley piece, I felt a little bad for the Gray Lady. Especially since I know they do have good writing in the paper still. Or at least in the magazine. I enjoyed this passage from a piece by Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard:

Gingrich’s inattention to detail is one reason his speakership was so chaotic, as readers of a certain age will recall, and the primary reason he was shunned by his own party after four years with the gavel. “Lessons Learned the Hard Way,” released months before his defenestration, is a more conventional memoir than anything else Gingrich has written, and it was supposed to serve as a mea culpa for his mistakes as Speaker, as well as a bid to regain the loyalty of members who had grown tired of his boyish exuberance. It didn’t work.

Admitting mistakes comes easily to no public man — as memoirs from figures like Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld demonstrate — but in “Lessons Learned,” Gingrich gave it the old West Georgia College try. This didn’t work, either. There’s lots of mea in “Lessons Learned,” but the culpa is all on the other side.

Early in the book, he offers an account of the drafting of the Interstate Transportation Bill of 1997. Most readers, he admits, might think such a story uninteresting. “But in this case most readers would be wrong.” In fact, in this case most readers would be right. The point of the story, though, is that Gingrich handled the transportation bill pretty damn well. Indeed, he handled nearly all his duties pretty well — except for when he worked too hard or cared too deeply or thought too much or trusted too many of the wrong people.

I only shared that for the play on mea and culpa. Good stroke, that.

I also appreciated the next paragraph:

Democrats, for instance. One lesson Gingrich claimed to learn the hard way was, as a chapter title has it, “Don’t Underestimate the Liberals.” As speaker, Gingrich discovered that Republicans are too good for their own — um, good. “The difference between the well-thought-out, unending and no-holds-barred hostility of the left,” he wrote, “and the acquiescent, friendship-seeking nature of many of my Republican colleagues never ceases to amaze me.” Democrats flatter themselves with the mirror image of this fantasy, of course, pretending to be envious of the robotic efficiency of Republicans and the freedom of action allowed them by their utter lack of conscience or shame. Self-awareness is not listed in the catalog of traits required for faithful partisanship. About the true nature of their enemies, however, if about nothing else, professional Republicans and Democrats are both exactly right.

I like it when partisans are described just as they are.

Can’t Is Not a Contraction (and other options)

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Some of y’all, being a hard-to-please bunch, were apparently less than impressed by the planned title of our governor’s long awaited memoir, “Can’t is Not An Option.” As Tim said:

“Can’t is Not An Option”. I guess her editor and publisher don’t not believe in double negatives. Essentially the title means “Can is an Option.” More Sarah Palindromisms, inventing the language as you speak…

OK, so let’s see if we can do better. Here are some, for want of a better word, options:

  • Failure Is Not An Option — The original, as spoken by Ed Harris as Gene Kranz in “Apollo 13,” works a lot better. More compelling. Better use of the English language. Of course, it doesn’t work for Nikki Haley. In fact, it’s about as wildly inappropriate as you can get. The phrase epitomizes the can-do spirit of a man leading a bunch of government employees determined to work together to accomplish something remarkable. No way Nikki would want any part of that. In Kranz’ place, she would have insisted that NASA was the problem, not the solution, and would be going on about how the space agency needed to be run like a business as the spacecraft ran out of oxygen.
  • Can’t Is Not a Doctrine — I like it, but I think she would disagree.
  • Can’t Do Cooperation
  • Can’t is Not a Contraction
  • Can I Have a Conniption?
  • Canned Heat, Fried Hockey Boogie
  • Can It, Knothead Unction

OK, so I’m running out of actual ideas here, although I don’t see that necessarily as a disqualification.

What do y’all have?

I’m just trying to pass the time here. It’s SO hard waiting until January, when the book comes out.

Corey quotes me well in The Nation

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Several weeks back, Corey Hutchins of The Free Times called to say he was working on a profile of Nikki Haley for The Nation magazine. He wanted to talk with me about it, and asked if I’d meet him for a beer at Yesterday’s. He didn’t have to twist my arm. (Note the ad — be sure to check out Yesterday’s. Good food, good beer, good company, reasonable prices.)

So we met, and I said a bunch of stuff, and later I got a call from a fact-checker at The Nation, so I knew that the piece was coming out soon. (Yeah, just like in “Almost Famous.” To a newspaperman, the whole “fact-checker” thing is weird. If you’re going to have a staffer check all the facts, why not just send them to do the story to start with? But when you’re using freelance, which magazines do, I guess this is something you have to do to protect yourself. When a reporter works for you, it’s different. You can fire his butt if he tries to put one over on you, and he knows it.)

Anyway, Corey did a pretty good job. Personally, I don’t normally enjoy reading The Nation, but this was good. And he did an excellent job of extracting something intelligent-sounding from my ramblings:

Still, like so many Palmetto State chief executives before her, Haley seems to be angling for a spot on a national ticket. She is already penning her memoir. “Every governor we’ve had since Carroll Campbell has had national aspirations, but with her it’s more naked and obvious,” says Brad Warthen, a Columbia advertising man who until 2009 was the longtime editorial page editor of the State. Warthen endorsed Haley in two legislative elections and chronicled her rise beginning about seven years ago. In that time, he says, she has morphed from a naïve newcomer, to a politician he thought could become a good force in the legislature, to something approaching megalomania.

“I think she’s had her head turned by discovering where demagoguery will get you,” Warthen told me. “I don’t think that’s totally who she was before. I think she has developed in this direction. It’s a B.F. Skinner behavioral reinforcement thing; she has been rewarded and rewarded and rewarded. This has worked for her. And she continues to charm the national media. Because you know what? They don’t care. It’s just a story.”…

You see what just happened? Yep. For the first time ever, after a 35-year career in newspapers, I was just identified in a national magazine as an “advertising man.” Move over, Don Draper. You’re about to be replaced in the national imagination.

There were other good bits. Such as this, the result of an interview with John Rainey:

But Haley has been navigating a series of land mines—IRS disputes, questionable business deals and appointments, multiple adultery allegations—any one of which threatens to blow up her political career. “I believe she is the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction,” declared John Rainey, a longtime Republican fundraiser and power broker who chaired the state’s Board of Economic Advisers for eight years. A 69-year-old attorney, Rainey is an aristocratic iconoclast who never bought the Haley myth. “I do not know of any person who ran for governor in my lifetime with as many charges against him or her as she has had that went unanswered,” he told me on a recent afternoon at his sprawling horse farm outside the small town of Camden. “The Democrats got Alvin Greene; we got Nikki Haley. Because nobody bothered to check these guys out.”

OK, so John was way more provocative than I was. But I think I sounded more erudite.

It’s worth a read.

Coming soon: The Alvin Green graphic novel

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OK, now I’m feeling bad about an idea I let slide awhile back.

Corey Hutchins of the Free Times brings this to my attention:

Current and former Columbia Free Timeswriters are teaming up to produce a black-and-white graphic novel on the bizarre rise and fall of South Carolina’s Alvin Greene.

Last year the unemployed Greene unexpectedly won the South Carolina Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate, giving him the chance to face off against — and eventually lose to — incumbent Tea Partier Jim DeMint. Greene’s primary victory came despite the fact that he didn’t campaign, didn’t have a website, and was virtually unknown to the voting public.

“What happened in the summer of 2010 was the strangest American political story in modern times,” says Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins, who gained national attention by exposing Greene. “It’s no wonder that it came out of South Carolina, the state that James Petigru famously called ‘too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum’ more than 100 years ago.”

Hutchins is teaming up with former Free Times staff writer David Axe and artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner to serialize the comic online beginning in early 2012, following with a print edition in the spring.

In order to secure funding for the project, they’re using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to attract backers. As of this writing, the team is halfway towards reaching their goal of $1,000.

That’s pretty cool. Cool enough that it make me feel bad I never followed through on my own idea.

You know, I wanted to do a graphic novel about Mark Sanford back in 2009. I even had a couple of exchanges with someone with publishing contacts in New York. But when I didn’t find an artist who was interested right away (I felt like it had to be done immediately for readers to be interested), I dropped it. I was really busy job-hunting and stuff at the time. The images were key, and while I could have written the whole thing without them, I think it would have been an inspiration to see some sketches as I went along.

I had this one really vivid image in my mind as I tried to picture the visual style of the book. It was NOT of Mark Sanford, actually. It was black-and-white. It would have been an extreme closeup, taking about half a page, of Jake Knotts as he began the process of spreading the report that Sanford was missing, in his big bid to bring down his nemesis…

The image was inspired by images of The Kingpin in Spiderman (see this or this or this or this) … Only darker…

Anyway… I actually wrote a sort of treatment for my New York contact. I was really riffing on it at the time. I wanted it all to be told by a seedy, self-hating ex-journalist narrator, sort of based on Jack Burden from All the King’s Men. The narrator would be all conflicted and guilt-ridden, because he felt responsible for having created the central character. This would give his narration a certain bitterly ironic tone. (This character would of course in no way be based on any living former editors who maybe sorta kinda endorsed Mark Sanford in 2002.)

It had levels. It had edge. It had irony. Sort of Gatsby meets Robert Penn Warren meets “Citizen Kane” meets, I don’t know, “Fight Club.”

But now I can’t even find the blasted treatment. I think I lost it in that major Outlook meltdown of my e-mail.

But it would have been good.

Yep, they pinned the tail right back on ’er

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Here’s the typo of the day…

Personally, I have not followed the Sarah Palin emails nonstory, but my attention was grabbed when I saw the blurb under the headline on this Slate story:

Pro-Palin Vandals Hack Twitter in Revenge for Email Release

Crivella West faces retailation for uploading Palin’s emails electronically.

By Josh Voorhees | Posted Monday, Jun. 13, 2011, at 12:01 PM EDT

Yep, that’s what they did to ol’ Crivella West — they “retailated” her… pinned the tail right back on her.

Oh, wait… Crivella West is not a person. I had thought that maybe it was Cruella De Vil’s cousin, but turns out it’s an it, not a she. Apparently, it’s the “company that helped upload thousands of Sarah Palin’s emails to the Internet.” In case you care.

OK, so it’s not as funny that way. But I still smiled at it.