Category Archives: Working

No more op-ed pages Mondays, Fridays

Well, there’s just no way to sugar-coat this, so I’ll go ahead and tell you what I’ll be telling you on the Friday editorial page:

No separate op-ed page today
Starting today, The State will not have separate op-ed pages on Fridays and Mondays. This is a cost-saving measure, reducing our newsprint expenditure. Instead, we will frequently run a syndicated column on this page on Fridays, and a local guest column on the Monday letters page. We also invite readers to explore our offerings at thestate.com/opinion, and Brad Warthen’s Blog at blogs.thestate.com.

— The Editors

This is a continuation of the painful recent cutbacks we’ve experienced in personnel and operational funds. As I’ve mentioned before, Mike Fitts’ departure brought the editorial staff down to less than half what I had at the start of this decade. Our elimination of Saturday pages earlier this year was a reflection of both the staff cutbacks — so few people can only do so much — and newsprint savings. This one is pretty much all about the newsprint.

You don’t like this? Well, guess what? I’m pretty sure I hate it a lot more than you do. All of us do. There’s nothing we can do about losing these pages, so we struggle constantly to figure out what we CAN do instead to keep serving readers. (What do you think this blog is about, for instance?)

Consider the earlier "cutbacks." When we eliminated staff-written editorials on Mondays, we gave you a full page of letters that otherwise would not have been published, and added the blograil feature. You’d be surprised how much staff time those take.

Then, when we eliminated the Saturday pages, we launched the Saturday Web-only super-op-ed page, with a whole lot more content than we could get into the paper (plus video). Yeah, that’s been an unpopular move with many — but the people who complain about the Saturday feature don’t seem to understand that it’s not a choice between that and having our pages in the Saturday paper, it’s a choice between that and nothing. And believe me, it takes a lot more trouble to produce that Web page than "nothing" would.

Now this, the loss of those half-pages on Monday and Friday. What that means is that on each of those days, we’re losing two columns (one syndicated, one local) and maybe a syndicated cartoon. So far, our best idea for compensating for that is to put a syndicated column on the Friday page whenever we don’t have an overriding staff-written column (and that’s happened about once a week in the past; this just pushes that event to Fridays), and put a local guest column on the Monday letters page. That means in both cases fewer letters.

It probably will NOT mean fewer staff-written columns. Our first and foremost priority is always South Carolina — you can get news and commentary about the rest of the world from a thousand sources, but what Warren and Cindi are able to say about local and state issues is something you can’t get anywhere else. But since we "frequently" have one weekday without a staff column — today’s page was an example of that — we’ll just try to push that vacancy to Fridays, and run a syndicated column there instead of the long letter and the secondary cartoon.

We’re still scrambling to figure out what else we can provide, and I’ve been really pleased at the initiative shown by my colleagues under these circumstances. Warren Bolton, who just became a proud Papa for the second time and took some family leave, surprised me with an editorial (which ended up on the Sunday page) and a column written from home last week. I’m grateful to Cindi for suggesting today (and making it happen, which is more valuable) that we post the Charles Krauthammer column that I almost used on the Friday page (we used Kathleen Parker instead) online. We’re going to have to start doing that more systematically, not just on Saturdays.

Robert Ariail today offered up an extra cartoon for the Monday letters page. Randle Christian, our letters editor, came to me while I was typing this post to suggest a better way to use the Web to provide more letters on the election. More work for each of them, of course.

There aren’t as many of us as there were, but I’m proud and privileged to work with each of the folks I have. They’re all striving harder than ever to fulfill our mission of providing a forum for discussing the issues of greatest importance to our community.

And we welcome your suggestions as to how we can do that better.

Manholes in the Midlands

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Back in the early 90s, I was one of a handful of editors who helped shape a drastic reorganization of The State‘s newsroom, challenging and in some cases throwing out fundamental assumptions about what we covered and how we covered it. (I was also the first one, months later, to say the new system didn’t work, but no one was listening to me at that point.) We came up with some pretty wacky, high-concept beats, but there was one I could never get the others to go for, one that I still think would be a good one — the "driveby beat." Basically, it would involve assigning a reporter to answer the kinds of questions that occur to you driving around the Midlands — What are they building there? How long will I have to take this detour? Whose responsibility is it to fix that pothole? What do all those people waiting for the library to open do the rest of the time? Essentially, just about anything that might occur to you to wonder about when you drive by it, and that normally you would never get an answer to.

For instance, Sunday morning I wanted to know why I couldn’t get anywhere closer than a couple of blocks from the Gervais Starbucks in my truck. It apparently had something to do with people riding around on bicycles in silly outfits, but I had to wait until this morning to get an answer. And I’m still not satisfied, by the way (that is, I’m not satisfied that was worth diverting traffic for, but then I’m a real curmudgeon about these things).

One of the letter writers on our Monday page got me to thinking about another one that I usually forget by the time I get to work. Here’s the letter:

Manholes are hazards around Columbia

Why is it that with the technology to provide a smooth, correctly profiled, beautifully laid asphalt roadway, no one seems able or willing to address the numerous manholes that seem to dot every block of roadway on our main thoroughfares?

When you ask a paving contractor about it, he or she sounds like Freddie Prinz of “Chico and The Man” — “It’s not my job!” How about, at least, a composite disc to raise the low ones to the roadway elevation?

With so many diverse utilities — the water and sewer department, SCE&Grab, Bell South/Southern Bell (whatever), etc. — nobody wants to take the time, expense or effort to raise (or lower) these units to the proper elevation before paving, and they are legion. Ride over to Forest Drive and take a look.

There is one in front of the State Museum (outbound lane) that would knock the treads off an Abrams tank if hit at 30 mph.

BEN BOATWRIGHT
Columbia

More specifically, here’s what’s on my mind: I’ve grown accustomed to the periodic indentations along Sunset Blvd. in the left-hand land heading down to the river through West Columbia. It’s been like that for years, and I either stay in the right lane, or dodge the manholes, or put up with my truck being jarred into rattling every few seconds.

But now, on the days I take that route, there’s a new barrier — coming up from the river on Hampton. You know, the part that’s several lanes one-way? It got repaved last month, and apparently it got ground down WAY below the manhole covers before repaving, but was not paved back UP to the manhole covers. The pavers dealt with that by constructing volcano-like slopes around the manholes, creating a sort of slalom situation — particularly right at the top of the hill, at Hampton and Park — if you don’t want to experience the equivalent of multiple speed bumps.

I am as sure as anyone can be of something like this that this situation did not exist BEFORE the repaving. I’m pretty sure I’d remember it if it had been like that.

If I we had created that driveby beat, and if I still worked in the newsroom, and if I were that reporter’s editor, I’d have him or her call around to find out who’s responsible, and whether anyone plans on doing anything about it.

Or if I were an editorial page editor in another state, one where government isn’t impossibly fragmented, I’d just call City Hall and probably get an answer.

But since I’m an editor in South Carolina with half the staff he used to have, I’m going to use the same technique I used to check Nicholas Kristof’s math — post the question on a blog, and see if I get an answer.

Now I’ve got to run; there are proofs on my desk that need reading.

Video: Ed Gomez vs. Nikki Haley

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First, I apologize for the length of this video clip, but I think it gives a pretty fair glimpse of what our interviews were like with the two candidates in S.C. House District 87.

You have newcomer Democrat Edgar Gomez challenging Rep. Nikki Haley. Four years ago, Nikki was the longshot going up against a very Old School incumbent in Larry Koon. If anything, Mr. Gomez is probably a longer shot, if only because Rep. Haley is hardly the symbol of entrenched seniority that Mr. Koon was; hers is still a very fresh face on the S.C. political scene.

On the video, you will see the candidates’ respective remarks about or answers to questions about several issues, starting with an open question about what they consider the top issues to be, then moving on to taxation, school "choice" and payday lending.

And yes, I will still be doing separate posts on these two interviews, just not today. In the meantime, you have the video.

From our political family album

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Searching the AP Archives (a dangerous thing to let me do, given that I’m the World’s Most Easily Distracted Man) for a suitable picture of Fritz Hollings for the Sunday op-ed page (which in the end I didn’t use; Robert volunteered a caricature instead), I ran across the one above, which has the following caption:

State Sen. Edgar Brown, D-Barnwell, left, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C., center, and Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., leave the Darlington Presbyterian Church, Sept. 20, 1972, after paying their final repects to the late state Sen. James P. Mozingo. (AP Photo/Lou Krasky)

Note the hats — evidently, Strom and Sen. Brown had still not received the JFK memo.

Riffing on that as I am wont to do, just out of curiosity to see what an Edgar Brown search would turn up, I found the one below. I like it as a sort of alternative moment from the convention for which Abbie Hoffman and Richard Daley pere are better remembered. The caption:

South Carolina Gov. Robert McNair, right, listens as he and Sen. Edgar Brown, left, and Gov. John West hold a private conference on the fire escape of their Chicago Hotel on Monday, Aug.26,1968 in Chicago. The three men are part of the South Carolina delegation to the Democratic National Convention which gets underway Monday. (AP Photo)

No, this post doesn’t have any point; I’m just sharing…
Brownwestmcnair_chicago68

How Kristof arrived at the $17,000-an-hour figure

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Just to show you I don’t just shovel this stuff into the paper…

You know the Nicholas Kristof column I bragged on, which calculated that Richard Fuld was making $17,000 an hour to run Lehman Brothers into the ground? Something started bugging me about the math when I was reading my proof, so I went to Mr. Kristof’s blog and posted the following:

URGENT QUESTION:

I’m the editorial page editor of The State, the newspaper in Columbia, SC. I’m using your column on tomorrow’s op-ed page.

But I have a problem: How did you arrive at $17,000 an hour from compensation of $45 million? That would work if it were $35 million (assuming a 40-hour week, 52 weeks a year, and how else would you do it?), but at 45, you’d have to assume he was working 51 hours a week, which is an odd assumption to choose.

I need a quick answer. I’ve got to let this page go….

— Brad Warthen, Columbia, SC

That was at 4:34 p.m. At 5:12, I got this reply:

brad, thanks for your note, which was forwarded to me.
I used 50 hours a week and then rounded. Failing to round seemed to me to suggest a false precision when the whole effort is so rough….
allbest, nick

So he was being generous and assuming Mr. Fuld was working better-than-banker’s hours (which is a pretty safe assumption, whatever else you say about the overpaid so-and-so). Ol’ Dick’s got no room to complain, then…

Makes sense to me. I pass this on in case you read the piece and wondered the same thing.

Double dose of Krauthammer

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Robert was poking around nosily on my desk earlier and, seeing the op-ed page proof, expressed his pleasure that I was going to be running Charles Krauthammer for a second day in a row.

Dang. And I’d hoped nobody would notice.

The problem started when I saved Mr. Krauthammer’s column that had been written for Friday publication for our Monday page (it was better than any other leftovers I had at the time I had to choose, which was Friday).

This morning, as I looked over the 11 new columns I had from writers to whom we subscribe, one of them was an EXTRA one that Mr. Krauthammer had offered over the weekend (he normally only writes once a week). Like most such spontaneously offered material — stuff the writer just felt compelled to write — it was a strong one. But I had just run a Krauthammer.

What I WANTED to run on Tuesday was a "liberal" columnist, even though I normally don’t think about such things. Why? Because a colleague suggested the other day that I’ve been running more "conservative" syndicated op-ed columnists than "liberals" lately. She may have been right; I had not been keeping score. In the daily scramble to put out pages since we lost Mike Fitts (who used to choose op-ed copy), I have done each day’s selection in a vacuum, with no thought to what I ran the day before or will run the day after.

And each day, I have simply chosen what seemed to be the best-written column. You see, I only have room for one. I can’t pick what I regard as the best column, and then another for "balance." But since this perceived imbalance was pointed out to me, I’ve been making an extra effort to see the "liberals" as "best" on some days. But they haven’t been helping much. Especially today.

Oh, I thought I was in good shape on my goal, because I first picked a Paul Krugman piece that I thought was particularly timely. It was about the mounting crisis in the U.S. financial sector. Good topic, one I certainly could stand to know a lot more about. I had it picked, and edited, and was in the process of choosing some AP art to go with it, when I made the fatal mistake of READING the captions on the photos of anxious traders I was looking at. They mentioned that Lehman had filed for bankruptcy today. Mr. Krugman’s piece didn’t reflect that. Nor did it reflect that Bank of America was buying Merrill (he had been writing over the weekend, for Monday publication). Dang.

At this point, already late for my Rotary meeting, I turned back to my options, and noticed that while some of the folks on the left had written about the Sarah Palin interview with Charles Gibson …

Bob Herbert: While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson on Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail…. "Do you believe in the Bush doctrine?” Gibson asked during the interview. Palin looked like an unprepared student who wanted nothing so much as to escape this encounter with the school principal. Clueless, she asked, "In what respect, Charlie?”
Maureen Dowd: Being a next-door neighbor is not quite enough, though. If Sarah had been reading about the world she feels so confident about leading rather than just parroting by rote what Randy Scheunemann and the neocons around McCain drilled into her last week — Drill, baby, drill! — she might have realized that as heinous as Russia’s behavior toward Georgia was, it was not completely unprovoked. The State Department has let it be known that it warned McCain’s friend, Misha, the hotheaded president of Georgia, not to send troops in to crush the rebellion in two breakaway states. And she might not have had to clench her jaw and play for time when Gibson raised the Bush doctrine, the wacko pre-emption philosophy that so utterly changed the world.

None were as good as the Krauthammer piece. Those columnists went no deeper into the "Bush doctrine" thing than Tina Fey had on SNL.

Momentarily, I considered a column from Mary Newsom at The Charlotte Observer (a paper with a new EPE, by the way), which struck me as interesting because it was written by someone who disagrees strongly with Ms. Palin, but considers much of the criticism of her as "creepily misogynistic." I like columns like that — you know, the "against type" columns, like the one in which Kathleen Parker broke with other "conservatives" and expressed her displeasure with the Rick Warren event — but I was struck by how much this passage was like Herbert and Dowd: "Further, I am horrified at her inexperience in foreign affairs. Did you see her micro-expression of fear Thursday when ABC’s Charles Gibson asked her about the “Bush doctrine” (that pre-emptive strikes are OK) and Palin obviously was lost?"

Meanwhile, Krauthammer not only raised the question that popped into MY head when I heard it — WHICH Bush doctrine? (If you had forced me to guess, I would have guessed he meant "pre-emption," but I would have asked him to define his term first, too) — but also made the point that while Sarah Palin obviously didn’t know what it was, neither did Mr. Gibson. Nor, presumably (if Mr. Krauthammer, who claims to be the author of the phrase, knows what HE’s about), do Mr. Herbert or Ms. Dowd.

An arguable point to be sure, but one that struck me as more interesting, and adding more to the conversation, than any column that merely elaborated on the Tina Fey point of ridiculing Ms. Palin. (And if you haven’t watched that yet, you must; it was truly hilarious.)

Anyway, that’s why you’ll be seeing Charles Krauthammer two days in a row.

Just in case you think all the shouting happens here in the Blogosphere…

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My colleague who processes incoming letters regularly forwards copies of those that are specifically responding to a personal column. I’ve been copied several of those today from my Sunday column. Here are my two favorites so far. They illustrate the point that those of us who edit editorial pages had been dealing with the "blogosphere" for years before the word was coined.

By the way, I have no idea whether either of these will be among the few chosen to be published. I’m satisfied to see them (or not) when they show up (or don’t) on the page.

Anyway, first I get BAM from the left:

In "Worrying about what happens if Obama loses" (Sunday September 14), if Brad Warthen doesn’t consider Barack Obama to be a black man, then what does he consider him to be? Nevermind the angst over a polarized country, Mr. Warthen has more important worries such as how he can educate himself on issues of racism. Surely, anyone who has spent five minutes seriously considering racism on a real level would instantly know that the Rev. Joe Darby is dead on with his assessment of white middle America. Not so? Try imagining Sarah Palin’s life superimposed on the Obama family and see if the same sympathy and understanding resonates.
It would seem that Mr. Warthen doesn’t consider Obama black because he obviously doesn’t see black: par for the course in South Carolina. And like so many typical South Carolinians, if you don’t see race, then you certainly don’t have to deal with the issue in any meaningful way.

Then I get BAM-BAM from the right:

Mr. Darby is about as racial as you can get. I have read his diatribes promoted as Guest Columns. In many ways he reminds me of Mr. Limbaugh, except at the opposite viewpoint. Unfortunately to the Liberal Media, such as NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and "The State", a comment can only be considered racial if the person making it is not of the Black Community.
In my letter to the Editor of August 28, 2008, which was censured and intentionally not put into print, I had predicted that the Liberal Media and the Black Community want to get Mr. Obama elected, not because he is qualified but to make history as the first Black to win the Presidency. I had also forecasted that the race card would be played by them to make people of all other races and creeds guilty if they did not vote him in. Mr. Darby considers the Presidency for Mr. Obama, as an Entitlement.
I also find it mind boggling that Mr. Warthen wears blinders when he harps about Ms. Palin’s lack of experience. While I agree that Ms. Palin does not have enough experience, she at least has 1 1/2 years of it as the Governor of Alaska and she is running for Vice President. Mr. Obama is running for the Office of the President and he has zilch "NADA" experience of any kind.
It has not dawned on Mr. Warthen that a larger majority of the people in this State are either Independent or Conservative in their views and The State’s Editorial Group is out of place. Maybe this is why The State continues to and will lose readership. I predict that "The State" will pick Mr. Obama as their choice in November.

I’m always intrigued by the letter writers who see a huge, PERSONAL slight in their letters not being among the ones chosen for the paper, as though we run ALL of them, except the few that we choose not to run, just to be mean. For the record — I just went and asked — we run about half of the letters submitted.

I also enjoyed that one because of the endorsement prediction. So THERE, those of you who accuse us of having decided already for McCain…. Also, when did I "harp on" Sarah Palin’s lack of experience?

The first letter I liked because this reader just can’t wait for that promised column about how I don’t consider Obama to be a black man. Those of you who read the blog of course have read about this upcoming column before, back on this post:

Talk about what the election of Barack Obama as a black man means misses the point, since — as a lot of black folks asserted last year leading up to the primaries — Obama simply is not a "black man" in the sense that the phrase has meaning in American history, sociology and politics. I’ve got a column I’m planning on writing about that, after I read his autobiography on the subject. It will be headlined "Barack Like Me," and it will be rooted in the experiences he and I share spending part of our formative years in Hawaii (where race simply did not mean what it means here) and outside the United States — both in the Third World, in fact. None of these experiences are common to the sort of guy we describe when we say "black American." I hope to write that one before the summer is over.

Obviously, I didn’t get it done before the summer is over. There have been two holdups:

I haven’t had time to read that book yet, and I expect reading it will make the column better.
I have thought about the blasted column so much, and have so many points I want to make in it, that I dread the hard work of having to cram it all into 25 inches. That happens some times with columns that I keep MEANING to write — they get delayed further by my having thought too much about them. (Although the two columns are not at all alike, I had the same problem with the John Edwards column that caused such a stir — I had promised it for months, and just kept putting it off.)

Maybe I should just skip reading the book (which may complicate the writing further) and write it this week or next.

Oh, one other thing about that first letter: Someone else — I think it was in another letter we ran, or maybe somebody else — raised that "imagine if Sarah Palin were black" thing, with the assumption that she’d be perceived differently. (At least, I THINK that’s what was meant by "superimposed on the Obama family;" maybe it meant something else.) I thought the same thing then that I think reading this now: How do you figure?

Philly columnist sees same problem I do

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Well, this is eerie. I’m going through the lastest columns to move on the wire, looking for something acceptable for the Tuesday op-ed page, and I run across this one from Kevin Ferris of The Philadelphia Inquirer, headlined "Don’t cry racism if Obama loses," which is weirdly like my Sunday column. An excerpt:

Last month, one of our two major political parties nominated an African American as its candidate for president of the United States.

Historic progress to be celebrated?

Apparently not. A few weeks and polls later, and some are already bemoaning the rampant racism that might keep a black man from ascending to the presidency.

Hey, Barack Obama could not have clinched the nomination without votes from white Americans. The other party isn’t supposed to just concede the election based on skin color. Voters shouldn’t have to choose based on race when they disagree on issues or believe a candidate isn’t up to the job.

But expect to see the bemoaners looking to the heavens and saying, "We’re not ready."

Baloney. Maybe it’s Obama who’s not ready and the people who recognize that – men and women, whites and blacks, Hispanics and Asians – are just fine.

So maybe I’m not totally crazy, huh? Or maybe this Ferris guy is.

In any case, I have never met or previously worked with Mr. Ferris, near as I can recall.

David Herndon, S.C. House District 79

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Sept. 11, 1 p.m. — OK, I’m really going to try to keep these endorsement interview posts shorter so that I can get them done and not fall behind the way I did in the last couple of election cycles (resorting to such cheap tricks as running nothing but pictures when I ran out of time).

David Herndon should be a good one for me to practice this new resolution on, since he didn’t have that much to say different from what he said in our primary interview. (And that’s not a bad thing at all, since we ended up endorsing him then.)

An overview of what we talked about:

He said he was better qualified for the House because of his experience in business and in life.
He said opponent Anton Gunn — a "super nice guy" is less qualified because he’s spent his work life out of the private sector, in politics and the community organizer field.
He feels very comfortable with his district. He said that (like Caesar’s Gaul), there are three distinct communities within the Kershaw-Richland district, and at various times he’s lived in all of them.
He thinks the governor’s trying to get the Legislature to come back to prioritize budget cuts is political posturing.
On education, he agrees with most of Jim Rex’s proposals. He sees himself as having a broad perspective on the issue, with one child in military school, another home-schooled, and one in public elementary school.
He sees his job as maintaining his district’s attraction for economic development and as an attractive place to live.

I’m going to force myself to stop right there.

The cognitive divide between black and white, 2008 election edition

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For me, reading the piece by my old friend Joe Darby on today’s op-ed page was another excruciating instance of the apparently unbridgeable cognitive divide between black and white Americans. I always find it very troubling — in fact, I lack words for just how much it troubles me.

Somehow, Joe looked at the fact that Republicans LIKE an inexperienced conservative Republican, but DON’T like an inexperienced liberal Democrat, and saw it as racism. I realize that after my more than half a century of living in this country, I should not be shocked at such things, but I was. Shocked, and very worried.

Remember this post about Bill Moyers’ hyperbole about the stakes in this election. Something one of y’all said caused me to express my worry about what will happen if Barack Obama loses this election: Democrats, who have been VERY charged up about their expectation of winning, and whose hatred of Republicans has reached new depths in the past eight years, will be so bitter that — and I hate even to think this thought aloud — the political polarization will be even WORSE in this country. MoveOn.org, to name but one segment of that alliance, will probably implode to the point of nuclear fusion.

(Republicans, by contrast, have been expecting to lose all year. As recently as last week, when I wrote that earlier post, I would have expected the GOP to accept defeat in November relatively fatalistically. Of course, that was before Sarah Palin got them excited. Now, if they lose, I expect the usual level of bitterness, just not as severe as what I think we’re in store for if Democrats lose.)

And that was without considering race. If you add in the expectations of so many black voters this year, the potential for bitter disappointment is incalculable. This year I’ve noted a potent paradox in the attitude of many black voters: A disbelief that a black man (if you consider Obama to be a black man, which I don’t — another subject for another day) has won a major party nomination, combined incongruously with the notion that if he doesn’t also win the general election, it’s because of racism.

Even though I was aware of that, Joe’s piece was a shock, because it wasn’t just generalized excitement about Obama combined with being prepared to resent it if he loses. It was the logic, or lack thereof, that Joe employed in seeing racism specifically in the fact that Republicans like Sarah Palin and not Barack Obama.

No sooner had I read that on proofs yesterday and taken my worrying to a new level than The Wall Street Journal reported this morning:

An anxious murmur is rising among black voters as the presidential race tightens: What if Barack Obama loses?
Black talk-show hosts and black-themed Web sites are being flooded with callers and bloggers reflecting a nervousness — and anger — over the campaign. Bev Smith, a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, devoted her entire three-hour show Monday night to the question: "If Obama doesn’t win, what will you think?"…
If Sen. Obama loses, "African-Americans could be disappointed to the point of not engaging in the process anymore," or consider forming a third political party, said Richard McIntire, communications director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This is not a good place to be.

I first met Joe Darby about 15 years ago. The newspaper sponsored a black-white dialogue group that was coordinated by a reporter I supervised. Joe was one of the panelists, and I was struck by his patience and mildness of manner in explaining his perspective to whites flustered over black citizens’ sense of aggrievement.

I’m sure Joe would have been just as patient with the middle-aged white acquaintance — someone I’ve known for many years, and who I am quite sure is not a racist — who came up to me this morning and said, based on the op-ed piece, "That Joe Darby is a racist." I insisted that I knew Joe Darby well, and he was not, but this was exactly the reaction I had predicted to a colleague when I saw the proof the day before. I had said that what Joe had written was precisely the kind of thing that caused white conservatives to be profoundly alienated by the way many blacks express themselves politically.

Fifteen years after that black-white dialogue experience — and many, many less formal such dialogues later — I find myself close to despair that mutual understanding can be achieved.

Particularly if Barack Obama loses the election.

Loving me some planet

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Ya gotta love this: So I’m going through my snail mail IN tray, something I do every month or so whether I need it or not (please, please don’t send me anything urgent or important via snail mail), and I run across this tabloid-sized publication called Environment & Climate News, and of course my usual move with anything unsolicited that is printed on something like newsprint is to toss it in the newsprint recycling bin.

But I can’t, because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC.

So who in the world who’s so interested in the environment be so utterly clueless as to send something so grotesquely incongruous to a crack, trained observer such as myself?

Well, once you know the answer you say "of course:" It’s our old friends Joseph L. Bast and his Heartland Institute, which is an organization that, like our governor, would never ever want gummint to do anything about climate change or anything like that.

Oh, and you say the picture above is hard to read on account of the glare? Well, that’s because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC!

But before you walk away chuckling, I should point out something that probably would never have struck me if not for my habit of saving up the mail to go through all at once: A few minutes before, I had dispensed with (by which I mean I had passed it on to Cindi because I noticed there was an item related to S.C. state policy) a publication called Health Care News, which as it happens is also put out by The Heartland Institute. Three guesses as to what the Institute wants us to do about health care. You got it: Nothing. (Mainly because the concept of "us" is anathema to such groups.)

This organization now has my attention. Ubiquity will do that. This group may be better funded, and operating on more fronts, than its spiritual brother Howard Rich.

Amazing the amount of money people will spend rather than pay taxes, isn’t it?

Pooge

Editing cartoons

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You might wonder what my role is in Robert Ariail’s cartooning process. Well, I’m his editor, so my function is much the same as when editing text, only it’s pictures.

For instance, Robert had done a cartoon for tomorrow that — way back in a corner of the background — had a fire hydrant. But there was no dog in the cartoon. He had drawn a cartoon fire hydrant without a cartoon dog! Obviously, he had slipped a bit from being on vacation last week.

As soon as I pointed out the omission, he immediately went and fixed it. We must preserve the unities, you know.

And to think — there are people in this world who don’t think editors serve a useful purpose…

9/11 plus seven years

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The way we split up duties on the editorial board, Cindi Scoppe handles scheduling. For instance, she maintains "the budget," which has nothing to do with money — it’s newspaperese for a written summary of what you plan to publish in upcoming editions.

A couple of weeks back, Cindi put a bold notice on the budget to this effect: 9/11 ???? Beyond that, she’s mentioned it a couple of times. Each time I’ve sort of grunted. The most recent time was Monday, and I felt compelled to be somewhat more articulate. I explained that I hate marking anniversaries. Such pieces are so artificial. The points one might make 365 days after an event should not differ from what you would say the day before, or the day after — if you’re saying the right things.

Nevertheless, I’m kicking around a column idea, one that I’m not sure will work. If I can pull it together between now and Wednesday morning, we can run it Thursday.

Actually, it’s a couple of column ideas. One would simply be a bullet list of things to think about: the movement of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be one bullet, another would be Osama bin Laden, another would be the state of the NATO alliance — or something like that. Something acknowledging that it’s tough to isolate One Thing to say on a topic so complex.

The other would be to hark back to the editorial I wrote for the Sunday after 9/11 — 9/16/01. In it, I set out a vision of how the U.S. needed to engage the world going forward. A key passage:

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

There’s nothing profound about it — it seems as obvious to me as the need to breathe. But America is a long way from embracing the concept holistically. We seem to lack the vocabulary for it, or something.

A couple of months ago, former State staffer Dave Moniz — who is now a civilian employee of the Air Force with the civilian rank of a brigadier general, operating out of Washington — brought a couple of Air Force guys to talk broadly about that service and how it’s doing these days. In passing, one of them mentioned the concept of DIME (which refers to "Diplomatic," "Information," "Military" and "Economic" as the four main elements of national power), which apparently is widely understood among military officers these days, even though it doesn’t enter much into civilian discussions.

We’ve wasted much of the last seven years arguing about the legitimacy of the exercise of military power, to the exclusion of the other parts. It’s sucked up all the oxygen. Occasionally we talk about "soft power," but as some sort of alternative, not as a necessary complement. And as long as our discussions are thus hobbled, it’s tough for us ever to get to the point of accomplishing the overall goals of making the world safer for liberal democracies:

But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

With rescue workers still seeking survivors in the smoking rubble of the twin towers, it didn’t occur to me that the military part would be such a political barrier. I couldn’t see then how quickly political partisanship would reassert itself, or how quickly we would split into a nation of Iraq hawks and the antiwar movement.

I’m encouraged that the surge in Iraq has been successful enough — Gen. Petraeus was thinking in DIME terms as he suppressed the insurgencies — that we are prepared to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (Which reminds me of something I often thought over the last few years when antiwar types would talk about "bringing our troops home." I didn’t see how anyone would think we could do that, with the battles still to be fought against the Taliban. The most compelling argument those opposed to our involvement in Iraq had was that it consumed resources that should be devoted to Afghanistan. Obviously, as we turn from one we turn more to the other — not because we want to exhaust our all-volunteer military with multiple deployments, but because until we have a larger military, we have no choice — no credible person has asserted that Afghanistan is a "war of choice.")

You know what — I’m just going to copy that whole Sept. 16, 2001, editorial here. Maybe it will inspire y’all to say something that will help me write a meaningful column. Maybe not. But I share it anyway… wait, first I’ll make one more point: What the editorial set out was not all that different from the concept of "Forward Engagement" that Al Gore had set out in the 2000 campaign to describe his foreign policy vision — although after he unveiled it, he hardly mentioned it. Too bad that between his own party’s post-Vietnam isolationism and the GOP’s aversion to "nation-building," we’ve had trouble coalescing around anything like this.

Anyway, here’s the editorial:

THE STATE
IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD
Published on: 09/16/2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A8

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words "missile defense shield" to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.
That’s about the only way it might have helped.
Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.
We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.
Essentially, we have wasted a decade.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.
We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was "It’s the economy, stupid." Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s "policeman."
Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.
Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.
Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.
In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, "When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.
At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.
Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.
We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call "humint" – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.
But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.
This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.
We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

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…

Welcome back, Robert!

1 Reply

We’re all very happy around here to have Robert Ariail back today after a week off. Apparently, some of his fans have missed him, according to one of my colleagues at thestate.com, who e-mailed me today to say:

Has Robert posted any cartoons in a while, or is he on vacation? I looked in p-edit and didn’t see anything beyond 8-31. The natives on his web site are getting restless!

I don’t know whether it will settle them down, but Robert is back from vacation today, and his next cartoon is already on tomorrow’s page.

So take it easy, folks … step away from the keyboard…

If his fans thought last week was tough, they should have tried being ME without Robert. It was very tough putting out pages without him here, because the pickings were slim between the two syndicated columnists we still have, Toles and Payne.

So join me in welcoming Robert back. No one appreciates his presence more than I.

The NYT’s very, very cool video/text software

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Have you had occasion to check out the way The New York Times has been posting the major speeches from the conventions? It’s about the coolest — and to me, most useful — software I’ve ever seen. Certainly the coolest since Google Maps came up with the "street level" view, and without the Big Brother overtones.

Here’s what it does: First, there’s a high-quality video window. Then, there’s a transcript of the speech posted next to the video, but that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that if you click on the paragraph you want, the video jumps to the beginning of that paragraph. Then, on top of that, there’s a topical outline to the right of the transcript. Click on the subject you want, and it jumps to that part of the transcript and video. It’s amazing.

Not only that, but the paper’s site search engine — which unfortunately often frustrates me; it doesn’t read my mind as well as, say, Google does — will take you straight to these miraculous pages with the simplest, most intuitive input, such as "Barack Obama’s speech."

Since I subscribe to the NYT, I don’t know whether these are accessible just to subscribers, or to everyone. But in the hope that you can go check them out and groove on them, here are a few of the top speeches from the two conventions:

Did it work for you? I hope so. This is too cool not to be able to share.

Aw, I already DID a column on the tie thing

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In what I can only characterize as a desperate attempt to get me to produce something for the actual newspaper, my colleague Cindi Scoppe has actually suggested that I turn my post about the leading candidates for the highest offices in the land not wearing ties into a column.

Really — Cindi "Gravitas" Scoppe, who normally only has scorn for anything that doesn’t bear on some topic as serious and gray as, say, state budget provisos.

So I gave it some thought, and I haven’t completely dismissed the idea. But I will note that I’ve already written ONE column on the subject. Sure, it was in 1998, and I have the new angle on Obama and the rest, but just how often must this subject be addressed? Here, by the way, is that column from pre-blog days:

THE STATE
‘CASUAL FRIDAY’ IS ONE THING, BUT THIS WAS ON A MONDAY
Published on: 06/26/1998
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A10
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
Column: BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

We had come to ask Hootie a favor. The Blowfish, too.

Jim Nichols, Cary Smith and I were at Fishco headquarters on Devine Street to meet with Rusty Harmon, Hootie’s manager. Jim was then the executive director of Central South Carolina Habitat for Humanity. Cary was a past president of Habitat’s board, and I was a board member.

We were there to ask Hootie to help us build a house. As it happened, they did, so the meeting was a success. But what sticks in my mind was something that happened before that point.

Rusty presented something of a paradox behind the desk, surrounded by books, papers, a PC and a laptop both running screen savers – all the usual trappings of the white-collar life. But he looked the way I did in college – hair running toward shoulder length, T-shirt and shorts.

But when he got up and walked by Cary on his way to fetch an associate, his flip-flops slapping against the floor, the contrast was dialed up several notches.

Cary was looking every bit the ex-IBM executive that he was, in a light gray suit. His leather shoes were polished, his hair trimmed close to the scalp, his shirt and tie everything that Big Blue would expect. He was sitting carefully, politely, quietly on the edge of a sofa, every inch of him projecting "trustworthy supplicant."

As soon as Rusty was out of earshot, Cary leaned slightly forward and said, very softly:

"So that’s what success looks like."

His voice contained no irony or disapproval. It was filled with guileless, almost childlike wonder.

Spin forward three years, to last week. Cary is now president of United Way of the Midlands, and he has come to talk to the editorial board about recent changes in the way the community chest collects and distributes money. We meet in what I term "the fancy meetin’ room." It’s the newspaper’s formal board room, with the long, polished table, the leather chairs, the paneling and the portraits of a century of past publishers keeping watch to make sure we don’t do anything they wouldn’t do.

The portraits kept their counsel, but I suspect they were taken aback by the picture Cary Smith presented, in open-necked, short-sleeved madras sport shirt and khaki pants. "You going ‘cazh’ today, Cary?" I asked, expecting him to say he was on his way to an outdoor event. But what he said was, "Oh, we’ve gone casual at United Way." He said it as matter-of-factly as you or I might say, "The dinosaurs are all gone."

Well, this was more than I was prepared to take in. Not that there’s anything wrong with the way he was dressed. After all, this is the way South Carolina’s bourgeoisie has long dressed for upscale barbecues, right down to his loafers without socks. No self-respecting Southern frat boy would ever let hosiery get between him and his Bass Weejuns.

But. But. But it wasn’t even Friday. I was aware that lots of people in lots of offices were dressing down at the end of the week, but this was Monday.

I have to say, with no offense meant to my friend Cary, that I don’t hold with it.

The point of clothing, in my own stuffy view, is to avoid distracting or giving offense, either through nakedness or an excess of individuality. I want people to interact with me and what I have to say, not my clothes. Give me blue and gray and white and khaki (but only with a blazer), and certainly give me blue or black socks – not because they look spiffy, but because they blend into the background.

I have enough things to think about in the morning without having to consider attire. Cary Smith has to remember now to wear a coat and tie on the days he meets with big donors.

Of course, I have little choice. I meet with all sorts of people in the course of a day who would think I wasn’t giving them proper respect if I didn’t wear the tie. They’re in suits – or the bewildering array of outfits that women wear that supposedly equate to suits – and therefore so should the newspaper guy. It’s a tradeoff: You go through life with a silk noose around your neck, but at least it makes things simple.

That’s the way it’s always been. Unfortunately, things are changing.

I still remember the first candidate who came in for an endorsement interview wearing shorts. It was in 1996. I assumed that since he was a Libertarian, he was just asserting his "right" to dress any way he pleased. We asserted our right not to endorse him, for reasons that extended beyond costume.

He was a harbinger. It’s becoming less and less remarkable for folks to come in wearing jeans and even T-shirts. Sometimes they apologize. Others comment upon our ties as though we were the ones breaching decorum.

I still wear the coat and tie, and will until it just becomes so distracting to others that I can’t do my job. That time may come sooner rather than later. I noticed at Rotary on Monday that more and more people were dressing like Cary, who happened to be seated at my table. I mentioned that to him, and he had this advice:

"Get used to it."

Today’s mystery photo

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WARTHEN: "Sir, I’ll have you know that in South Carolina, we dress for dinner!"

QUAYLE: "All I want is a potatoe."

Did that mob look familiar?

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Students of Robert Ariail’s work may note that there’s something really familiar looking about that cartoon criticized on a local feminist blog.

Take a look at the cover of his last book, Ariail! There’s at least one particular character who appears in both. Of course, she appears in a lot of Robert’s cartoons, such as this one and this one and this one. He even has a name for her: He calls her "Auntie Bellum." She was to be a character in a comic strip that Robert and I kicked around a lot back in the 1990s, but never got around to developing (I haven’t given up hope of getting back to it, though).

Here’s how that cover developed: One day in 2001, Robert had another group of women angry at him — Muslim women who maintained that a gag he did about dress codes for pages at the State House (he’d drawn them in burqas) was anti-Islam. I said something like, "You’ve just got everybody on your case lately, don’t you — flag supporters, the governor, Democrats, Republicans, traditional Muslim women…." The drawing arose from that, and then Robert got to thinking that would be a good cover for a book….

You will note that women are not the only people who get really, really mad at Robert.

How SC gummint looks from the outside

bradwarthen.com

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Category Archives: Working

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9/11 plus seven years

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

Welcome back, Robert!

The NYT’s very, very cool video/text software

Aw, I already DID a column on the tie thing

Today’s mystery photo

Did that mob look familiar?

How SC gummint looks from the outside