Category: Current Affairs

By way of my brother John: New York magazine has a great conversation between Norman Mailer and his son John Buffalo Mailer (I wonder if my kids would have liked to be called Buffalo?). The main topic is how the expected massive protests at the Republican National Convention will play out now and over the long term. But there’s plenty more about where we’re headed in our history and our world:

“A good many people of the right, not flag conservatives but true conservatives, can feel in accord with men and women on the left concerning one deep feeling. It is that the corporations are stifling our lives. Not only economically, where corporations can claim, arguably, that they bring prosperity (and frankly, I’m certainly not schooled enough in economics to argue that point pro or con), but I can say the corporation is bad for us aesthetically speaking, culturally speaking, spiritually speaking. Just contemplate their massive empty architecture, their massive emphasis on TV commercials, which are a seedbed for interrupting one’s conversation, and their massive complacency about their virtues. They tend to flatten everything. They are the Big Empty.”

The Trib cites “Republican sources” as saying Marylander Alan Keyes has agreed to run for the U.S. Senate in far-off Illinois (state fact for the Keyes campaign: It’s called the “Land of Lincoln” on the license plates, but some people call it “the Prairie State,” too, so remember to sprinkle that into your speeches).

Support from GOP heavyweights has no doubt swayed Keyes to jump into the race. The Trib quotes two enthusiastic backers:

“No comment,” former Gov. Jim Edgar, a moderate, said of the offer to Keyes, a line that may speak volumes considering Edgar’s role as chairman of an already uphill battle to win Illinois for President Bush’s re-election.

Former Gov. James Thompson said he had “no idea” whether he was going to endorse Keyes. “I’ll wait and see what he has to say.”

That’s lusty stuff, right up there with Eisenhower’s 1960 comment on the big contributions Nixon made to his administration: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

So, the Illinois Republicans are so hard up for a candidate in the U.S. Senate race — the GOP’s primary nominee got blown up by a sordid sex bomb that had been hiding in a sealed divorce-case file — that they’re close to naming Alan Keyes of Maryland to run against Democrat Barack Obama. The reasons: He’s black, like Obama; he’s known, like Obama; and unlike Obama, he’s conservative. (And there is another hopeful: Andrea Grubb Barthwell, a doctor who used to be with the Office of National Drug Control Policy. She’s also black, which is suddenly a quality the Republicans seem to value quite highly.)

But back to Keyes: Some of the Party of Lincolners say that the fact he’s a nonresident is a nonissue, pointing to the Bobby Kennedy/Hillary Clinton precedent in New York state. Well, there’s one big difference: Running for the Senate in their newly adopted state was their idea, at least; they didn’t have a lot of desperate party hacks with a ballot vacancy to fill begging them to run, please run.

One fun detail from the Trib’s story on Tuesday’s GOP ballot confab:

Three men who showed up unannounced were allowed to speak to the committee as was a 32-year-old Florida man wearing an 18th Century powdered wig. The only person who said he wanted to speak to the committee but wasn’t allowed to enter was a protester standing on the sidewalk outside the club wearing lederhosen.

Bummer for the lederhosen guy.

And this late update: The candidate-deprived Republicans have asked Keyes to accept the party’s nod — even though I’ll bet he can’t find Kankakee on the map. And Keyes says he’ll think about running and let them know his answer this weekend. The Sun-Times quotes him as saying, “If I do step forward to accept this challenge, I will be laying it all on the line.” Whoa! He’s going to lay it all on the line! Get ready for the fur and family values to start flyin’.

Not that we ever learn anything from history, except how to repeat it, but this week is the largely unremarked 40th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that precipitated the Johnson administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War. NPR had a long audio report from Walter Cronkite on Monday that gave a detailed account of the incident itself and how it played out inside the White House. It’s history, or maybe just journalism, with a real feeling of immediacy and insight. One can’t help but wonder how many years it will take to hear/see something similar on Iraq.

Just saw this on ESPN: Ralph Wiley, an author who worked on the network and for a long time as a feature writer for Sports Illustrated, died. OK: I have not read one of Ralph Wiley’s books, and didn’t follow his magazine career avidly. But I remember him when we were both “copy clerks” (an upgrade from “copyboy”) at the Oakland Tribune in 1977. I was personally in a pretty bad state at the time — was angry with my life and the paper and treated the job like a piece of crap. The Tribune let me go at the end of my three-month probation period. That felt bad, though entirely deserved, and for years I thought I would never work for a paper again. Eventually, I learned something from the episode about not burning bridges.

Ralph learned something else. On the job — at a not-first-rate paper run by a publisher who liked to put on disguises to visit the city room, a paper living under constant threat of going under or getting sold — Ralph made an impression Smart, quick, good-looking, and funny; he seemed like someone who was having fun and was really on his way someplace. He moved up from copy clerk to writing for the sports department, then became a beat writer and columnist, then moved

on to Sports Illustrated. Here’s a decent obit from theWilmington (N.C.) Journal.

Next-morning update: The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice piece on Wiley by columnist Ray Ratto this morning. And the Oakland Tribune remembers him, too.