Category Archives: Words

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

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Over the weekend, going through some of the stuff my daughter brought when she moved home from Pennsylvania, my wife found a travel case full of CDs I’d about given up on. Some of them were favorites — albums I had bought on vinyl in my youth, such as Steve Miller’s "Your Saving Grace" and The Band’s "The Band."

I put The Band’s master opus into the player in my truck yesterday, and it transported me back. I love those indescribable autumnal tones and word imagery. Over the weekend, we had watched the odd, uneven "I’m Not There," and the scenes with Richard Gere wandering through the faux old-timey (vaguely western, vaguely country) landscape and town were obviously an attempt to evoke that very same feeling, especially the parts around the bandstand. Far less successful, of course.

But you know how it is when you read or see or listen to something from your youth, and you see a flaw you didn’t see back then, and you’re sorry you noticed it? An extreme example of this was the time about 20 years ago when "The Dirty Dozen" came on television, and I said to my in-laws, "Oh, let’s watch this; this is good," and then minute after awful minute dragged by until I felt constrained to apologize for it? When I had seen it at 14, it had been good; I assure you.

This was more subtle. I’m listening to "King Harvest (Will Surely Come)," which makes the October wind blow like no other, and I’m suddenly struck by the incongruity of these two lines:

I will hear ev’ry word the boss may say,
For he’s the one who hands me down my pay.

Which makes perfect sense on one level — the words being spoken by a failed farmer who wants to make a go of his new job. But, with its suggestion that the worker’s position and future are dependent upon doing the will of the boss, it’s wholly inconsistent with the repeated theme that he is now "a union man now, all the way."

This later passage is more consistent with that attitude:

Then there comes a man with a paper and a pen
Tellin’ us our hard times are about to end.
And then, if they don’t give us what we like
He said, "Men, that’s when you gotta go on strike."

But wait — maybe the "boss" is the union boss, not management. That way it works. I feel better now. (Come to think of it, I believe that’s the way I sort of unconsciously understood it years ago.)

In any case, I still love the song, and the whole album. I stopped it in the middle of the second play this morning, and put in the Steve Miller, to keep myself from getting tired of it. (It’s much better than the Steve Miller, but perhaps that’s an unfair comparison — especially since I haven’t heard the much stronger second side yet.)

All you gotta do is rag, Mama, rag, Mama, rag…

Community organizers strike back

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I‘m beginning to suspect that community organizers are organized on a level somewhat larger than the "community."

The first letter on tomorrow’s editorial page sticking up for community organizers as a breed. Last week, within a day after Sarah Palin’s remark about their ilk vis-a-vis being a mayor, I got TWO e-mails sticking up for community organizers. Then, when I got home Friday, there was a panel discussion on PBS, and the person speaking when I walked into the room was defending community organizers.

The two e-mail releases came in within two hours of each other on Thursday. Here’s the first one:

Leading National Organization Responds To Attacks On Community Organizing Statement from the Center for Community Change
Washington, dc- Recently, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and several commentators and surrogates surrounding the presidential contest have attacked and misrepresented community organizing.  The following is a statement from Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, a 40-year-old national organization that builds the field of community organizing with hundreds of local organizations nationwide:

“When Sarah Palin demeaned community organizing, she didn’t attack another candidate.  She attacked an American tradition — one that has helped everyday Americans engage with the political process and make a difference in their lives and the lives of their neighbors. 

"All across the country, in every state and every community, there are community organizers helping people find shared solutions to the shared problems they face.  The candidates for President and Vice President should be working to solve our shared problems, too, rather than attack others who are trying to do the same.

"From winning living wages to expanding affordable housing to improving the quality of public schools to getting health coverage for the poor and elderly, community organizers have made and will continue to make our communities and our country better for all of us.

"The values that community organizers and grassroots leaders represent are not Washington values or Wall Street values but American values–that we care for each other and look out for each other and know we’re all interconnected and have a valuable role to play in making our country work for all of us.  Candidates should be courting these Community Values, not condemning them.”

Since 1968, the Center for Community Change has strengthened the leadership, voice and power of low-income communities nationwide to confront the vital issues of today and build the social movements of tomorrow.  The Center leads the Campaign for Community Values, a national movement of more than 300 grassroots, community-led organizations mobilizing voters in this election and beyond to demand policy changes that reflect our nation’s founding principles of shared responsibility, inclusion and interconnectedness. 
                  ###

Here’s the second one:

America is Built on the Contributions of Community Organizers
Statement of Wade Henderson, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

“The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is a coalition of nearly 200 organizations, much of whose work is done through community organizers. These advocates have provided the leverage for Americans to organize themselves into unions, get the five-day work week, voting rights for every citizen, paid maternity leave and the curb cuts used by people with disabilities and young mothers with strollers.

We’re a nonpartisan coalition but we do take exception when anyone disparages the vast contributions of community organizers to American society.

The United States has had a long and proud history of contributions made by community organizers, from Benjamin Franklin who organized the first volunteer fire department in this country to Clara Barton, who organized assistance for soldiers during the Civil War, to Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped our great nation correct a historic wrong. Over the years, many more community organizers have brought changes to American society that benefit all of us.

Nothing is done in a vacuum.  Someone has to organize it to get it done.  That is the simple and great role of a community organizer.”

               # # #

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) is the nation’s oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human rights coalition. For more information on LCCR and its nearly 200 member organizations, visit www.civilrights.org.

So, however you define "community," one can’t say that these folks aren’t organized.

Peggy gets in some good ones

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First, a confession — I’m backdating this. I meant to post it on Saturday, but ran into technical difficulties, and when I was finally back to where I could do something, the Biden stuff was a higher priority. But I just saw yesterday’s WSJ on the table, and it reminded me that I wanted to call attention to Peggy Noonan’s piece yesterday.

The thrust of it was why McCain had suddenly pulled even with, or ahead of, Obama in polls. She posited that it was because the American people had just started paying attention, and what they saw was:

The Rick Warren debate mattered. Why? It took place at exactly the moment America was starting to pay attention. This is what it looked like by the end of the night: Mr. McCain, normal. Mr. Obama, not normal….

She, like some others, thought Obama really backed himself into a corner on abortion, to wit:

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama’s pay grade, oh, let’s go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it’s meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

Then there was her little shot at W. As a former speechwriter for his Dad, she’s always been sort of amiably disapproving toward the current POTUS:

(The number of men who’ve made it to the top of the GOP who don’t particularly like making speeches, both Bushes and Mr. McCain, is astonishing, and at odds with the presumed requirements of the media age. The first Bush saw speeches as show biz, part of the weary requirement of leadership, and the second’s approach reflects a sense that words, though interesting, were not his friend.)

Her way of doing that provokes a thought: Don’t you think the Bush-haters would get a lot farther if they could tamp down the virulence enough to be able to criticize the kinder, gentler way she does?

But while the piece had some good bits, I had to disagree with her conclusion, which was that McCain should make the one-term pledge:

A move that would help him win doubtful voters, win disaffected Democrats, allow some Republicans to not have to get drunk to vote for him, and that could possibly yield real results for his country. This seems to me such a potentially electrifying idea that he’d likely walk out of his convention as the future president.

In other words, she’s saying, it would be a great gimmick for winning the election. She said his political ambition prevents him from making the pledge. But wouldn’t the ultimate evidence of political ambition, of desire to win this election at all costs, be pulling just such a stunt as she suggests?

Why isn’t it the Peking Olympics?

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Being pretty sure that I’ve had this explained to me before, and I just forgot the explanation, I’ll ask again: How come we say "Beijing" instead of "Peking" now?

Here’s the thing that puzzles me about this: It was supposed to be a phonic representation of the way the Chinese name sounds. So how could the West have been so wildly wrong about the way the name of that place was said for so long? "Peking" doesn’t really sound anything like "Beijing," or at least not enough so that if someone said "Beijing," we would make the mistake of writing it phonetically with a "P" and a "K."

And if his name was Mao Zedong, why did we hear Mao Tse-tung for all those years?

My theory is that one version of Chinese somehow won out politically over another. Like Mandarin over Cantonese or some thousand other variations, because I know there’s a bewildering array of them. Another theory is that the Chinese are just messing with the heads of us foreign devils, and maybe at the height of the Olympics, while they have the attention they’ve been craving, they’ll suddenly announce that the city’s name is pronounced "Vei-ling" or something, just to see if we’ll start calling it that. Then they’ll laugh their heads off.

But I suppose that’s just the paranoia of the Westerner who never truly understands the East, try as he might.

But what do we CALL the building?

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Today’s paper reported that the tallest building in South Carolina — you know, the one across GervaisAtt
Street from the State House — is to have yet another new owner.

Fine. But what I want to know is what to call it, preferably something less cumbersome than "the tallest building in South Carolina — you know, the one across Gervais Street from the State House."

I have in the past called it "the AT&T building," because that’s what it was known as first, near as I can recall. But it hasn’t really been that for a lot of years. Officially, it’s been the "Capitol Center" — but how many people who have occasion to refer to it actually call it that. And it’s so generic-sounding, not many are likely to remember it. The new owner is the Boston-based Intercontinental Real Estate Corp., which doesn’t suggest anything catchy.

Here’s an idea: You remember my column about the political etymology of "good ol’ boy." If you recall, I traced its use in S.C. to the 1986 gubernatorial campaign. Here’s something I wrote then in an addendum to that column about a conversation I had with Bob McAlister, who was in the middle of all that:

In fact, he believes (immodestly) that a TV commercial he produced,
entitled "Good Old Boys," was what won the election for Campbell. The
thrust of it was to drive home the cozy relationship between the
developers of what then was called the AT&T building on the site of
the old Wade Hampton Hotel (neither Bob nor I could remember what it’s
called now; it’s had several aliases). The clincher was a picture he
had taken of a banner in front of the building itself supporting
Democratic nominee Mike Daniel.

So how about, "Good Old Boy Tower?" OK, I just said it was an idea, not that it was a good one.

Can you do better? It’s the tallest building in the state, folks; that makes it a landmark. We ought to have something memorable to call it.

I’m not alone in seeing Bistromathic principles at work in modern finance

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Did you think I was being a tad hyperbolic (just to throw another mathematical concept at you) when I cited Bistromathics in explaining my confusion over the nation’s economic problems?

Well, I had to laugh just now reading tomorrow’s op-ed page, which contains this Paul Krugman column.

Paul Krugman is, according to his billing, an actual economist. Most of his columns might read as though they were written by a summer intern at the National Democratic Party — he is my nominee for Most Partisan Writer Currently Published in Major Newspapers. In fact, I had to double-check to make sure this column was actually written by Paul Krugman, since it did not blame anything whatsoever on George W. Bush. But it actually is a Krugman column. And he actually is an economist.

Anyway, the part of his column that grabbed me was this part:

    The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief
of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure,
the federal government will come to their rescue.

    This implicit
guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized.
If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits,
but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win,
tails we lose.

    Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad
risks, because the downside is someone else’s problem. The classic
example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the
1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of
federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money.
When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag.
The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Did you get that? "Someone else’s problem…" As you and I and Zaphod and Ford all know, there is a concept involved in the understanding of Bistromathics called "recipriversexclusons," and recipriversexclusons are essential in the generation of an SEP field, or "Somebody Else’s Problem" field. What’s that? Must I explain everything? Oh, all right:

"An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t
let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem…. The
brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it
directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your
only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

So there you have it. And if you can’t see what I’m saying, just blame it on the recipriversexclusons.

‘Basic English’ little help on 2nd Amendment

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On tomorrow’s page we have a letter from someone on one side or the other of the 2nd Amendment debate (which side is irrelevant to my point) who writes "Anyone who has had any basic English course knows…," and then goes on to make some point or other about what he believes the Amendment to mean.

Here’s the problem with that: Basic English (or hyper-advanced English, for that matter) is little help in making clear sense of the 2nd Amendment. Read it — or try to: Those stray commas — you know, the ones after "Militia" and "Arms" — render it into gibberish.

I love commas; I truly do. I think the modern world is sadly lacking in commas. That’s why I loved this column by Robert Samuelson awhile back.

But apparently, they had a surplus of them in the 18th century — a regular plague, as with locusts. And they descended upon the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution, and left devastation in their wake.

‘Member’-ship

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My Sunday column was originally about 11 inches longer than the published form. One of the first things that went in editing it down was my parenthetical digressions, which are sometimes my favorite parts — even though they frequently have NOTHING to do with my point.

An example would be the one in the original second paragraph of the column, to wit:

    You did? Are you sure? I just ask because, as a member of the U.S.
economy (Can you be a “member of the economy?” I don’t see why not,
since everybody these days refers to uniformed military personnel as
“members of the military,” as though the Army were the Kiwanis Club or
something), I’ve got to tell you that I’m feeling a little
understimulated.

It’s a little difficult for me to explain why, but this is a pet peeve of mine. I hate hearing of military personnel referred to as "members of the military." It’s like calling soldier, sailors or marines fingers or toes (or some even less noble appendage), or comparing them to participants in some private club, which to me seems to denigrate their service in some undefinable way.

Those of you old enough to have a sense of perspective will realize that this is a fairly recent construction. I first started hearing it regularly in the 90s, maybe just after the Gulf War. It’s basically yet another awkward attempt to be "gender-inclusive." You tend to hear it as a replacement for the traditional "servicemen." Why we can’t say "servicemen and -women" when we mean to include both, I don’t know.

‘Nuts:’ The cartoon Robert didn’t put in the newspaper

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Aria080712796s0hsvg1cs48kw4w40kcww

As I’ve mentioned before, for a regular guy who makes his living as a satirist, Robert Ariail can sometimes get all sensitive and even shy. He hates criticism, particularly criticism arising from a misunderstanding of his work (if he meant to offend you, he’s OK with that).

And sometimes he decides that his cartoon ideas are inappropriate. Sometimes he’s onto something, or at least it’s debatable. Other times, he may worry a bit too much. You might say that, on the spectrum of cartoon sensibilities, he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from this Dutch guy.

Anyway, his sensitivity on that point was one of the reasons why this cartoon didn’t make it into the paper. He was worried about the salacious nature of "nuts" the way Jesse Jackson had used it. But there were other reasons:

  • The simplest, and most obvious, was that he had an oversupply of cartoons, and we ran out of slots for running them in a timely fashion. There will even be on jammed onto our Monday letters page, which is unusual. If we still had a Saturday page, I probably could have argued him into using it there. But since I was out of space, when he said he’d just put it on his Web page, I left it alone. (In case you haven’t figured it out, we have different standards for what we’ll put on the Web, and what we deem paper-worthy. This is driven by factors ranging from the enduring concept of the "family newspaper" and the fact that on the Web, space is unlimited.)
  • He thought people wouldn’t get it, because it got so little coverage in the MSM, outside of Fox — and most of that coverage tiptoed around what he’d actually said. When he first mentioned this, I said that was an advantage if he was worried about salaciousness, since readers who had missed the reference would just take it on the level of saying Jackson and Wright are "nuts." Sure, that’ll offend some, but the offense is more in the realm of the kind Robert doesn’t mind, since that is exactly what he meant.
  • He lost some enthusiasm for the cartoon when he realized he’d misunderstood what Jackson had said. He initially thought he’d said, "Obama’s cutting off his nuts" by "talking down" to black folks. When he mentioned it to me, it caused me to say something like, "He’s cutting off some nuts, all right, and one of them’s Jesse, and he doesn’t like it." That inspired the above cartoon — Robert’s eyebrows shot up the instant I said it — and this blog post by me. But in the course of researching for a link for the blog post, I discovered Jackson had actually said something different — something more hostile, but something that didn’t quite fit as well the play on words upon which the cartoon is based.
  • He had another cartoon regarding what Jackson had said about Obama, and it was actually a better one, and it didn’t rely upon prior knowledge on the readers’ part. As it happens, we put it on the Sunday page, which is the biggest play we can give anything. You’ll see it tomorrow.

Seems like there were a couple of things that ran through my head in the couple of seconds after Robert told me he’d decide to use this on the Web only (and send it to his syndicate), but I’m forgetting them now.

(Trying to reconstruct one of those internal monologues this way is actually one of the fun things about blogging. Dostoevsky did this — far better, of course, but it appeals to me for the same reason. I pretty much fell in love with Crime and Punishment for good at about the point when Andrey Semyenovich Lebezyatnikov goes on and on about what ran through his head in a couple of seconds. I thought that was cool.)

Yessirree bobtail!

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Cindi’s got another column on tomorrow’s page that involves the S.C. legislative practice of "bobtailing." As usual, she uses the term as though it makes perfect sense, although it doesn’t.

Cindi defends the word as one that has meaning within the context of the State House, and she has enough of a point that I leave the term in when she uses it (Hey — you try to argue her out of it). Cindi uses the term because, as she put it, That’s what they call it, so that’s what it is. I’m grateful that in one recent column, she at least put the term, as used by S.C. lawmakers, in quotation marks.

Yes, if we’re going to describe what these folks do we need to use the lingo, but this is just an example of our lawmakers abusing language. They use the term to refer to ADDING something, or somethings, to a bill — something that doesn’t belong there. In the English language, the term "bobtail" indicates that something has been TAKEN AWAY — or mostly taken away.

To "bob" a tail is to cut most of it off. It applies to things other than hair, of course (I refer you to Fitzgerald’s "Bernice Bobs Her Hair.") A Bobtail Cat is so called because he has a mere stump of a tail.

Far more accurately descriptive is the "Christmas Tree" metaphor, of hanging amendments on a bill in the manner of ornaments. Unfortunately, in South Carolina, "bobtailing" is what they call it. I just thought I’d point out that they are WRONG to call it that.

The real Room 101

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HOrwellgeorgeaving made a reference to "Room 101" in Orwell’s 1984, I went to find an explanatory link. (On some
level or other, the very existence of hypertext is one of my biggest motivations for blogging. Even though most of y’all may not — and probably don’t — follow the links, just finding them and setting them up releases endorphins in my brain. I dig making the connections; my favorite literary device is allusion.)

In this case, I was more than usually rewarded.

Like Winston Smith, you probably know already what Room 101 is. As O’Brien explains it to the prisoner,

    You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the
answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the
worst thing in the world…
    The worst thing in the world… varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.

In my case, it was having blood drawn, which is why it took me almost 49 years to work up the nerve to start making donations at the Red Cross.

But the really cool thing, the point of this post, is to share with you what I learned by reading the Wikipedia link:

Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House where he used to sit through tedious meetings.

Boy, can I identify with that! I certainly hope Wikipedia was right on that one, because it really brings Orwell down to where I can relate.

Here’s a creepier fact I ran across, about the days when the Stasi terrorized East Germany:

The people of the GDR lived through their own private Nineteen Eighty-Four every single day. Funder describes Orwell’s book as "like a manual for the GDR, right down to the most incredible detail". The party, if not the proles, knew that very well. She remembers that the much-dreaded Stasi chief Erich Mielke even managed to renumber the offices in the secret-service headquarters. "His office was on the second floor, so all the office numbers started with ‘2’. Orwell was banned in the GDR, but he would have had access to it. Because he so wanted the room number to be 101, he had the entire first floor renamed the mezzanine, and so his office was Room 101."

More about the ‘good old boy’ system

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My column today may appear to be about our endorsement of a candidate for the state Senate. But that was just an excuse for writing about something I’d been thinking about for 20 years — the meaning of the phrase "good old boy," as used in S.C. politics.

This post is to include some additional stuff that I didn’t have room for in the column, in addition to what I already wrote about the movie I referred to.

First, there was my reference to Billy Carter. Remember that he was the one who tried to define the difference between a "good old boy" and a "redneck." He said a good old boy drives down the road in his pickup truck drinking beer and throwing the empty cans back into the bed of the truck (or into a recycling bag, in another version). A "redneck" throws them out onto the road.

In any case, his point was to make a "good old boy" out to be something not so bad. And indeed, through the 70s and into the 80s, while a Northerner or even a snobbish Southerner might look down on a "good old boy," it wasn’t necessarily a pejorative. It was an OK thing to be.

As I said in the column, my first memory of hearing the phrase used politically by a Southerner as a bad thing was after I returned home to South Carolina in 1987. I kept hearing of the way that Carroll Campbell had used it in the 1986 campaign.

As I noted also in the column, when used as Campbell used it ("good old boy system), the phrase seemed a bastardized hybrid of two very different concepts — an uncultured, generally rural, working-class white Southern male on the one hand, and a member of the very upper crust (Old Boy Network) in Britain or the American Northeast, referring to alumni of the poshest schools.

A footnote: Not until after I had written the column, and was looking for links for the blog version, did I learn that someone else had drawn the same contrast, in a letter to the editor in The New York Times in 1991. That writer, a William M. Ringle of McLean, Va., also used Billy Carter in defining one of the phrases, by the way. Finding that made me feel slightly less original, but then also slightly less crazy. The main point is that Mr. Ringle saw the two phrases as just as jarringly incompatible as I did:

According to your report that Yale University’s Skull and Bones club has voted to accept women into its ranks (news article, Oct. 26), the secret society "can no longer rightly be considered just a ‘good old boy,’ network." You make the common mistake of splicing "good ol’ boy" onto "old boy."

An old boy is an alumnus, originally of a British public school, which is of course a private school. Such old grads have been credited with creating the kind of network that Skull and Bones supposedly fosters. Old school ties maintain the bond.

Good ol’ boys, however, are Southern Americans not known for a burning desire to go to Yale. Even if they got there, they wouldn’t be tapped for Skull and Bones. Gregarious, charming and politically wise though they can be, they can’t be imagined swapping stories, between bites of Moon Pie and gulps of R. C. Cola, with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. or President Bush. Billy Carter might epitomize the good ol’ boy.

Despite strained similarities, old boys are old boys, and good ol’ boys are good ol’ boys, and never the twain shall meet.

Anyway, back to Carroll Campbell, who had hit upon this odd usage. It was really rather brilliant for a man who would be the first Republican governor since Reconstruction who was not elected by a fluke (the Establishment’s — or shall we say "Old Boy Network’s" successful scuttling of the Pug Ravenel candidacy). Since everyone in power in the state was a Democrat, it was appropriate to evoke the concept of the Old Boy Network in opposing that entrenched power. And "good old boy" was a familiar Southern term by then, giving the concept a particularly South Carolina flavor — one that conveniently evoked the notion that by voting Republican for a change, you would be raising yourself above those rednecks who are running things. This played subtly to the traditional notion that Republicans were in a higher social class than Democrats.

The brilliance of this combination of ideas was that it gave voters an opportunity both to identify subliminally with a higher social class (if you voted for Campbell, you were not a "good old boy"), while at the same time satisfying a populist urge to strike a blow at the Establishment (the "Old Boy Network"). One could hardly find a better psychological formula for encouraging people who weren’t used to doing so to vote Republican.

The phrase worked so well that over the years, people across the political spectrum took it up. You found women and blacks — generally Democratic constituencies — using it to describe the white men who kept them from power. The meaning in those contexts was simpler, because it directly replaced "Old Boy Network."

Cindi Scoppe, in editing my column, said I was full of it. She said there was nothing new or original about Campbell’s use of the phrase "good old boy system." But I believe she thinks that because she doesn’t remember the time before that. Cindi came to work at The State in 1986, fresh out of college (UNC). She didn’t start covering state politics until I recruited her from the metro staff in 1987 or 1988. I, on the other hand, had dealt with politics professionally since 1975, mostly in Tennessee (as likely a place to find good old boys as anywhere).

Nevertheless, she did plant a small seed of doubt. Fortunately, Bob McAlister was able to clear it up for me. I called Bob late Friday just to give him a heads-up that indeed I was about to use the quotes I had dragged out of him a couple of weeks earlier. And Bob insisted that the "good old boy system" WAS original to the 1986 Campbell campaign.

In fact, he believes (immodestly) that a TV commercial he produced, entitled "Good Old Boys," was what won the election for Campbell. The thrust of it was to drive home the cozy relationship between the developers of what then was called the AT&T building on the site of the old Wade Hampton Hotel (neither Bob nor I could remember what it’s called now; it’s had several aliases). The clincher was a picture he had taken of a banner in front of the building itself supporting Democratic nominee Mike Daniel.

But while Bob took credit for the spot, and therefore for the victory, when I asked whether the "good old boy" rhetorical strategy was his, he said no: Carroll Campbell had been using it in the campaign all along, and it was original to him.

The tension between "good old boy" and "Old Boy Network" inherent in "good old boy system" had never consciously occurred to Bob, he said.

What’s a ‘Good Old Boy’ to you?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MORE THAN THREE decades ago, I saw a “B” movie that was a sort of poor cousin to “In the Heat of the Night.” It was about a newly elected black sheriff in a racially divided Southern town, and the white former sheriff, played by George Kennedy, who reluctantly helps him.
    At a climactic moment when the two men seem to stand alone, a group of white toughs who had earlier given the sheriff a hard time show up to help. Their leader gruffly says that they’re doing it for the sake of the old white sheriff, explaining that, “You always was a good old boy.”
    Or something like that. Anyway, I recall it as the first time I heard the term “good old boy.”
    It got a good workout later, with the election of Billy Carter’s brother to the White House. But the first time I recall hearing it used prominently as a pejorative by a Southerner was when Carroll Campbell ran against the “good old boy system” in the 1980s.
    The usage was odd, a fusion of the amiable “good old boy” in the George Kennedy/Billy Carter sense on the one hand, and “Old Boy Network” on the other. The former suggests an uncultured, blue-collar, white Southerner, and the latter describes moneyed elites from Britain or the Northeast, alumni of such posh schools as Cambridge or Harvard. Despite that vagueness, or perhaps because of it, the term remains popular in S.C. politics.
    Which brings us to Jake Knotts, who represents District 23 in the S.C. Senate.
    Jake — pronounced “Jakie” by familiars — could have been the prototype for that George Kennedy character, had Hollywood been ready for something with a harder edge. He is a former Columbia city cop who by his own account sometimes got “rough.” He offers no details, but a glance at his hamlike hands provides sufficient grist for the imagination. According to a story said to be apocryphal, he once beat up Dick Harpootlian for mouthing off to him. (The mouthing-off part gives the tale credibility, and longevity.)
    After Jake was elected to public office, he further burnished his “rough” reputation with a legislating style seen as bullying by detractors, and tenacious by allies.
    This newspaper’s editorial board has always been a detractor. You see, we are high-minded adherents of the finest good-government ideals. Jake’s a populist, and populism is common, to use a Southern expression from way back. In our movie, we’re Atticus Finch to his Willie Stark. (See To Kill A Mockingbird and All the King’s Men.)
    We were against video poker; Jake was for it. We were against the state lottery; Jake was for it. We were for taking the Confederate flag off the State House dome; Jake was against it.
    We were for giving the governor more power over the executive branch; Jake was against it.
    In 2002, we endorsed a candidate for governor who agreed with us on restructuring, and didn’t seem like anybody’s notion of a good old boy. He styles himself as the antithesis of back-slapping, go-along-to-get-along pols, to the extent that he doesn’t go along or get along with anybody.
    That’s fine by the governor, because his style is to set forth an ideological principle, see it utterly rejected by his own party, and then run for re-election as the guy who took on the good old boys.
    Jake’s notion of the proper role of a lawmaker isn’t even legislative; it’s helping — he might say “hepping” — constituents on a personal level. This can range from the unsavory, such as helping out a voter charged with a crime, to the noble, such as paying out of his pocket for an annual skating party for kids who’ve gotten good grades.
    Jake’s slogan is “for the people,” as simple an evocation of populism as you will find. To him, theJake_sign
proper role of the elected representative is to make sure government “heps” regular folks rather than working against them.
    That means he will take a bull-headed stand against the concerted effort to undermine the one aspect of government that does the most to help regular folks — public schools.
    This brings us to what caused us to do something we thought we’d never do — endorse Jake Knotts, the sentinel of the common man who doesn’t give two figs for what we think the proper structure of government should be.
    We’re endorsing him because he stands against the Old Boy Network (see how different these terms are?) of wealthy out-of-state dilettantes who don’t believe in government hepping folks at all, and want to make our state a lab rabbit for their abstract ideology.
    We are not comfortable with this. We’ve had some terrific arguments about it on our editorial board. It was not one of your quick decisions, shall we say.
    Occasionally, when we have a really tough endorsement in front of us, I quietly call a knowledgeable source or two outside the board, people whose judgment I trust, to hear their arguments.
    On this one, I talked to three very different sources (one Democrat, two Republicans) who shared values that had in the past caused us to oppose Jake. All three said he had won their respect over time. All said he was a man you were glad to have on your side, and sorry to go up against. All three said that between Jake and his opponent who is backed by the governor and the Club for Growth and the rest of that crowd, they’d go with Jake.
    Not that they were proud of it. All three spoke off the record — one got me to say “off the record” three times. I complained about this with the last one, saying it was all very well for him to urge us off-the-record to endorse somebody on-the-record, and he said all right, he’d go public.
    It was Bob McAlister, Carroll Campbell’s chief of staff back in the late governor’s glory days of fighting “good old boys.”
    “I don’t agree with Jake on a lot of issues,” Mr. McAlister said, but “at least you don’t have to wonder where he stands on anything, because he’ll tell you.” In the end, “There’s a place in politics for his kind of independent thought…. I think Jake Knotts has served his constituents well.”
    In his own staid, doctrinaire-Republican kind of way, I think Bob was saying he thinks Jake is a good old boy.

Knottsjake_001

What is ‘our community?’

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From time to time, a comment by one of y’all causes me to comment at some length, and I decide to make it a separate post. This is one of those times.

A modest Everyman who calls himself "john" had this to say back on this post:

Well bud, I think the votes are in.  Like I keep telling you, your views do not fit in our community…

First, let me clarify that I think he meant me, not bud. I’m less clear on what he meant by "our community." I think it’s an interesting question to pose to all: What, in the context of these discussions, does "our community" mean?

It’s like with editorials: WE can mean a number of things when we say
WE — it can be the editorial board, or rather the consensus thereof.
It can mean WE South Carolinians, or WE Americans, or WE who hold a
certain truth to be self-evident. When the meaning seems vague, I work with the writer to try to sharpen up what WE mean by the word.

So what does "our community" mean? South Carolinians? Americans? People
living in Zip Code 29201? Is it "our thing" in the Sicilian sense? Are you presuming to speak for the readers of
MY blog? If so, you have to deal with the fact that the READERS of the
blog and the people who regularly comment — perhaps I should have
emphasized REGULARLY there — are almost certainly different groups, in
terms of prevailing views on this and other issues. Of course, there’s no way to
establish whether that’s the case or not (beyond the anecdotal evidence
of all the nice people who say they read my blog but don’t want to
comment because they don’t want to mix it up with you ruffians — the
wimps); it’s just that my experience causes me to doubt that those who push themselves to the fore are representative.

To give you a stark example… back in the fall of 2001, when the
consensus in this country was strongly in favor of toppling the
Taliban, a majority (or a very large percentage, anyway; we didn’t keep
count) of the letters we received for awhile there were AGAINST
military action in Afghanistan. People who were FOR the action — the
overwhelming majority — saw no need to write letters, because there
was no argument to be made. That is, until they saw some of the
anti-war letters we were running. Then they weighed in in response.

Never for one moment was I fooled into thinking the antiwar letters represented a majority of Americans, or South Carolinians, or readers of The State.

A blog, which its more or less instantaneous interactivity and
reinforcement (positive and negative), has a tendency to run off in one
direction or another very quickly, with moderate views quickly
intimidated into silence (people of moderate temperament generally have
better things to do with their time, or so they quickly decide — again, the wimps). There are a few brave moderates who hang in there with us, until they
can’t stand it, and go away for awhile. Certain other types are with us
always.

Anyway, I’m getting far afield: Within the context of these discussions, what does "our community" mean?

Modest hoopla

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This is a subtle thing, but I’ll share it anyway.

I couldn’t help noticing something that this release from Buddy Witherspoon…

Buddy Witherspoon for U.S. Senate
www.BuddyWitherspoon.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  –  June 9th, 2008

The Buddy Witherspoon for U.S. Senate campaign will be hosting an Election Night gathering on June 10th at 7pm.  The event will be held at Sticky Fingers, which is located at 380 Columbiana Blvd., (near Columbiana Mall) Columbia, SC.  Buddy’s supporters and the media are welcome to attend.
            ###

… and this one from Rob Miller…

June 9, 2008
Media Advisory

Rob Miller to Address Supporters Tuesday Night
Rob Miller, Democratic candidate for Congress in the Second Congressional District of South Carolina, will address supporters Tuesday night in Columbia at his campaign’s Primary night celebration.

Miller for Congress Primary Night Celebration
June 10, 2008 – 7:00 PM
The Inn at USC – 1619 Pendleton Street, Columbia (Palmetto Room)
            ###

… had in common. Namely, neither is claiming that this will be a victory celebration, as so many campaigns tend to do.

In Mr. Witherspoon’s case, the lack of hubris is well advised. In the other case, I’ve had the impression that Rob Miller had a pretty good shot at his party’s nomination in the 2nd congressional district. His opponent might have rank on him, but I don’t think that gives him the advantage. We’ll see, though.

Spelling, parts of speech, and other hard stuff

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Rob Godfrey over at the S.C. GOP sent out a note to make sure we all knew that, in endorsing Barack Obama, Rep. John Spratt misspelled the Illinois senator’s name — not once, but five times.

Rob calls our attention to this item on the subject on The Politico. Actually, it was really short, so I’ll just reproduce the whole thing here:

It’s the little things

Memo to South Carolina Rep. John Spratt: If you’re going to go to all of the trouble of putting out a statement in which you endorse Barack Obama, it might be a good idea to spell his name correctly.

Spratt’s statement — in which he says Obama’s "eloquence" sets him apart — misspells the candidate’s name as "Barak" not once but five times.

By Tim Grieve 03:02 PM

Mr. Spratt, who has been described as one of the smarter people in the House, should be ashamed, and I’m sure he’s embarrassed.

I should mention however, that Rob has his own problems — a chronic inability to distinguish a noun from an adjective, on display once again in a release I got from him yesterday. Ironically, it was also on the subject of "Barak" Obama:

COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson today released the following statement on the Democrat Party’s presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama:
    “After the most divisive presidential primary in history, Democrats appear to have settled for the most inexperienced presidential candidate in history.  But don’t take my word for it.  Members of Barack Obama’s own party have criticized him for lacking the experience to lead on issues that matter most to Americans.
     “If Barack Obama can’t unite his own party, we certainly can’t trust him to unite our country.”

If you’re going to keep disagreeing with it, at least learn its proper name…

Radical Chic, and Mau-Mauing the Superdelegates

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Four quick things:

  1. First, don’t try to figure out the headline on this post. It doesn’t exactly make sense; I just liked it.
  2. Second, The Washington Post has a piece today suggesting that if Hillary Clinton is going to point to Barack Obama’s associations with ’60s-era radicals, she’ll need to answer for her own experience "in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law
    firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers."
  3. Third, when folks do give Obama a hard time about the Weather Underground, why do they talk about Bill Ayres, when the guy’s name rings no bells for me? Why don’t they speak instead of Ayres’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who is way more famous and way, way more memorable? She and Obama worked in the same law firm once, and when an Obama fund-raiser was held at Ayres’ home when he was running for state Senate, it was her home, too? This seems to me a slight to female radicals everywhere, and they are not a category of woman one usuals wants to cross…
  4. Finally, which do you prefer, Weather Underground, or the much-cooler, Dylan-inspired "Weatherman?" Not that I’m trying to influence your decisions…

HERE’s that Wolfe quote

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Back on this last post, I made reference to something Tom Wolfe had written, and I just had to run it down, and it turns out to have been from The Right Stuff, and most delightfully of all, it was making fun of my least favorite sector of the MSM:

In the picture on the screen all you could see was the one TV woman, with the microphone in her hand, standing all by herself in front of Annie’s house. The curtains were pulled, somewhat unaccountably, inasmuch as it was nine o’clock in the morning, but it all looked very cozy. In point of fact, the lawn, or what was left of it, looked like Nut City. There were three or four mobile units from the television networks with cables running through the grass. It looked as if Arlington had been invaded by giant toasters. The television people, with all their gaffers and go-fers and groupies and cameramen and couriers and technicians and electricians, were blazing with 200-watt eyeballs and ricocheting off each other and the assembled rabble of reporters, radio stringers, tourists, lollygaggers, policemen, and freelance gawkers. They were all craning and writhing and rolling their eyes and gesturing and jabbering away with the excitement of the event. A public execution wouldn’t have drawn a crazier mob. It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity…

Mind you, this was long before the 24/7 cable "news" channels took this sort of foolishness to exponentially greater lengths…

Must intellectuals use the language properly?

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First, I realize to what extent I’m opening myself to criticism, but then, when did I ever call myself an intellectual, other than ironically? So have at me, for whatever sins against the language you can find on this blog. I know they are many; one thing I had to do in resolving to maintain a blog to begin with was accept the fact that I would have to write and publish more quickly than I could do so without error. So go for it.

On to my subject: I don’t know whether you clicked through this post on Foreign Policy‘s "Public Intellectuals" reader-participation feature. If you did, you might have found the accompanying article by Christopher Hitchens, "The Plight of the Public Intellectual." Do so now, if it’s not too much trouble. It won’t take long. I’m just asking you to take a quick glance at the first paragraph, which goes (for those of you too lazy to click) like this:

Has anyone ever described themselves as an “intellectual,” or given it as the answer to the frequently asked question, “And what do you do?” The very term “public intellectual” sometimes affects me rather like the expression “organic food.” After all, there can’t be any inorganic nourishment, and it’s difficult to conceive of an intellectual, at least since Immanuel Kant, whose specialization was privacy. However, we probably do need a term that expresses a difference between true intellectuals and the rival callings of “opinion maker” or “pundit,” especially as the last two are intimately bound up with the world of television. (I recently rewatched the historic 40-year-old ABC News confrontation between Gore Vidal and the late William F. Buckley at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The astonishing thing was that the network gave these two intellects a full 22 minutes to discuss matters after the news. How far we have fallen from that standard of commentary.)

Actually, you only have to read the first five words:

Has anyone ever described themselves…

… to which I respond, No, I don’t believe anyone ever has.

Do you not find this painfully jarring? You don’t see it? It’s the number disagreement, dammit! It jumps right out and smacks me in the face. I could not make a mistake like that. There are all sorts of mistakes I can make, and not bat an eye or any other part of my anatomy, or yours either. But this one is a mistake that I find it hard to imagine myself making.

Of course, Mr. Hitchens being an intellectual and all, I find myself doubting that it’s a mistake. There is a school of thought out there — one of the more twisted branches of feminism — that hold that it’s better to refer to a person of nonspecific gender as plural rather than commit the unpardonable sin of using the traditional English standard of the inclusive "he" — or rather, in this case, "himself."

So it seems that one of three things seem likely:

  1. It was an honest slip, on Mr. Hitchens’ part as well as at least one (and probably more) editors’. (The fact is that even if one agrees that we should no longer assume the masculine form is inclusive, one can write around the problem without committing the sin of number disagreement.)
  2. It was a positive assertion of a sociopolitical point, and one that I would have thought far too trite for Mr. Hitchens, who — while I may disagree with him on the existence-of-God thing, is a man of discerning and courageous intellect, one who doesn’t tiptoe around words to avoid offending. Doubt me? Read this piece about Iraq, "A War To Be Proud Of."
  3. This disturbing usage has become so ubiquitous that even top intellectuals — and their editors — think nothing of employing it.

Whichever explanation applies, I was surprised to see such an article begin that way.

An intriguing way out for Hillary

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With John McCain beating either Democrat in polls, and the prospect of months of exhausting Democratic Party infighting ahead, an intriguing idea was offered on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal today. It was proposed as a way for Hillary Clinton to save face, and for the party to regain ground lost to the bitter primary campaign. And the power to act lies entirely in the hands of Harry Reid:

    The solution that is within his power is simpler, yet more profound than any of the extraordinary political events America has witnessed this election year. It requires only the rarest of things: an individual willing to set aside his own power and ambition for the good of his party and his country. It is this: Mr. Reid could step aside as leader of the Senate and hand the post to Mrs. Clinton. Only the proffer of this consolation prize would likely persuade Mrs. Clinton to drop her divisive, and now futile, quest for her party’s nomination.

Neither Sen. Reid nor Sen. Clinton is likely to actually listen to this advice, for a simple reason: The author of the piece is Richard N. Bond. Since he is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, he is persona non grata to Democrats.

He would be persona non grata to me, too, as founder of the UnParty. But over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that former party chairs can be decents sorts. Look at Henry McMaster and Joe Erwin (and don’t look at Dick "Bad Boy" Harpootlian; that would spoil the picture). And besides, it’s an important UnParty tenet to be open to good ideas wherever they may come from.

Is this a good idea? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. Read the whole piece, if the link allows you to, and let me know what you think.

An amusing aside (amusing to me, anyway, as a word guy). Mr. Bond is addressing himself to Democrats — sort of — yet he can’t help engaging in a linguistic tic that labels him immediately as a partisan Republican: He refers to "Democrat primaries," and "Democrat presidential hopefuls." What makes this stand out particularly is that he was actually trying to write in a neutral fashion, acknowledging the difference between a noun and an adjective. Elsewhere, he refers correctly to "a smashing Democratic win," "Democratic gains," "a dream Democratic year," and even, if you can believe it, "the Democratic Party!"

So he tried hard, but couldn’t quite carry it off. He reminds me of Gordon Jackson as Flight Lt. Sandy McDonald, "Big S" in "The Great Escape." Remember how he drilled prospective escapees in their German, and would trip them up by suddenly speaking English, causing them to speak English, and he’d lecture them on not falling for such a cheap trick? Then he fell for it himself during the actual escape. (I couldn’t find video of that scene, but as a consolation prize, here’s a clip of Steve McQueen’s legendary motorcycle chase scene.)

Habitual use or abuse of language carves deep ruts in the brain, and it’s hard to keep your tongue out of them, however hard you try.