Category: Current Affairs

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News Tales: ‘You’re Still a Kid’

Sometime back in the rich Early Middle Era of my news career — 1987, I’ll call it, at The San Francisco Examiner — something awful happened at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. A wire-service bulletin said an airliner had gone down somewhere down the coast. I was new on the city desk, and had just started my shift. I had been part of many newsroom scrambles for big stories on deadline, but I was never really in charge of the response. I wasn’t, really, on this night, either. I remember that the senior city editor grabbed a reporter who was just about to leave for the evening and told him he needed to fly down to the crash site. Done. I think my fellow editor collared two or three other reporters who thought they were going home and told them to stand by.

Just recounting the incident revives its horror for me, though I don’t think of it often. What made a more conscious impression, one that still rises to the surface whenever I’m in a newsroom–every working day, now–was the way the editors and reporters reacted to the simple suggestion that a story was happening, that game was afoot.

I’m thinking about that now because my current newsroom, at KQED Public Radio, is in the midst of trying to respond to this week’s problems on the Bay Bridge. Circumstances are a little different now. Much smaller newsroom–which means much smaller staff. No one to stop at the door on the way out and say, “Hey — wait a minute. Big problem on the bridge.” In fact, when the incident occurred the other night, I was winding down from our evening newscasts and getting ready to edit a feature story, a guy wandered over from an adjacent (non-news) department and asked if we knew what was happening on the bridge. When it came down to it on night one, it was me, the local traffic reporting service, and our evening announcer who held the fort. (One of the bosses said to me, “These all-hands-on-deck situations are fun.” I didn’t reflect until later that at first, mine were the only hands on deck.) I had started work before noon and sent my last new email of the night after 1 a.m. I complained mildly on Facebook that it’s harder for me to do those long news days and come back the next day to do it again. The very same editor I was so impressed with that evening back in ’87 responded to that note: “And yet … you’re still a kid.”

Not so sure about that. But some old news reflex is still there.

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Guest Observation: Howard Nemerov

Kate’s a teacher. We talk a lot about school around here, and everything that happens there, and all that should or might and doesn’t. We brought out this poem this evening and read it aloud: “A school is where they grind the grain of thought,/And grind the children who must mind the thought.” Wow–what a description of the institution. (And who was Howard Nemerov? Here’s a good writeup from the American Academy of Poets.)

September, the First Day of School

I
My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible
Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.
II
A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,
The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form
Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

(Used without permission, but in a noncommercial spirit.)

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You’ve Been Warned

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This was posted adjacent to the campus of Santa Clara University. We spotted it Saturday night when we were down there to watch soccer with Eamon and Sakura.

Let’s not even talk about what the reaction a poster like this is trying to elicit. Let’s focus on the wording. If prompted, my slogan might be, “Vaccines save lives.” Clearly this local leafleteer is of another mind. Fine–let’s resolve this disagreement in the marketplace of ideas. But here, the pitch isn’t “vaccines may be dangerous” or “Vaccines: use at your own risk”–statements that would probably be attention-getting and may not stray across factual lines. That’s not enough for this broadside, which says flatly “vaccines are poison.” In a world where apparently no one can be trusted to think–hey, which vaccines are we talking about here?–nothing but the most alarmist message will do.

[Update: NPR’s “Morning Edition” did a segment this morning addressing questions about the safety of the new swine flu vaccine. ]

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‘Fight the Anti-Worker Capitalist Agenda’

socialism1.jpgsocialism2.jpg A couple of days ago, a young woman came down the aisle of my car on BART as we neared the Civic Center station. She was dropping postcards on empty seats. Strangely, she wasn’t handing them to any passengers. Maybe this is why: One of my fellow passengers picked up one of the cards, scanned it, and started to laugh. His companion said, “What’s so funny?” “Nothing,” he said. “Crap.” Then he tore up the card and discarded the scraps on the floor. Even here, the region some people would unhesitatingly dub the furthest left in all America, it’s hard to win people over to the fight against the anti-worker capitalist agenda.

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John Muir: ‘I Asked the Boulders Where They Had Been’

We’ve watched most of the first two installments of the new Ken Burns public TV extravaganza, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” The beauty of the show is exhilarating and the history is fascinating (Theodore Roosevelt–what a guy).

The first two episodes are closely entwined with the story of John Muir, and part two focuses first on his fight to complete the preservation of Yosemite and then on his unsuccessful battle to stop San Francisco from flooding Hetch Hetchy valley. Muir’s voiceovers are done in a soft Scots burr. Occasionally, you hear about Muir from Lee Stetson, who has portrayed him for decades and who has even adopted the Muir look. But when Stetson appears on camera, he speaks in a plain old General American accent. At the very end of the second episode, though, he briefly introduces a Muir quote, then instantly transitions to the gentle and compelling Muir voice, then appears on camera to finish the quote. It’s a moving performance. Here’s what he recites:

“Muir said, ‘As long as I live I’ll hear the birds and the winds and the waterfalls sing. I’ll interpret the rocks and learn the language of flood and storm and avalanche. I’ll make the acquaintance of the wild gardens and the glaciers and get as near to the heart of this world as I could. And so I did. I sauntered about from rock to rock, from grove to grove, from stream to stream, and whenever I met a new plant I would sit down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance, hear what it had to tell. I asked the boulders where they had been and whither they were going, and when night found me, there I camped. I took no more heed to save time or to make haste than did the trees or the stars. This is true freedom, a good, practical sort of immortality.”

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Blood Sport, and a Second Coming

A friend writes: “… The public personalities who get the most attention now are the raging, fulminating blowhards who seem to be non-differentially angry at everything. It’s become a blood sport. But it’s nonetheless disturbing when you think that the population is so much in the grip of its shadow that it needs to find a victim to feed to the lions. At times I really do wonder if Obama will end up a single term president because he could not answer that savage impetus in the country. …”

Which put me in mind of this poem from William Butler Yeats:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Safire’s Rules for Writers

From Robert D. McFadden’s obituary on William Safire, the Nixon-Agnew speechwriter, conservative columnist, and usage maven:

“… And there were Safire ‘rules for writers’: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid cliches like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!”

Did I like the guy’s politics? No–not that it matters. But you have to love a guy so precisely but unfussily focused on the language and how we use it.

[Update: In his “On Language” column for October 7, 1979, Safire included a query to his readers:

“I am compiling “Ten Perverse Rules of English Grammar.” Thanks to Philip Henderson of Lawrence, Kan., I have three. They are: (1) Remember to never split an infinitive. (2) A preposition is something never to end a sentence with. (3) The passive voice should never be used.

“Any others along these lines?”

Four weeks later, Safire published, “The Fumblerules of Grammar,” which contained the first three dicta and 33 more (ending with “last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; seek viable alternatives.”) Here’s the complete set of 36 rules (along with some research disclosing that another writer published a similar list earlier in 1979). In 1990, Safire reprinted the list (and added 18 more “rules”) in “Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage.”]

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A Brief History of Congressional Decorum, II

1880: The Weaver-Sparks Affray

During deliberations on December 21, the House took up a funding bill–“a measure from the consideration of which no one would suspect a disgraceful riot could possibly arise,” The New York Times noted. But debate over the bill, or rather a debate over how the bill should be debated, quickly deteriorated into accusations of party disloyalty and political skulduggery. Soon, the quarreling centered on two members: James Baird Weaver, a member of the Greenback Party from Iowa, and William Andrew Jackson Sparks, Democrat of Illinois.

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While Weaver (left) inveighed against Democratic monetary policy, Sparks (right) and several others tried to shout him down, and someone was heard to call Weaver a liar. Sparks apologized for getting exercised but said he wasn’t the one who called Weaver a liar. Weaver accepted the apology, then issued a warning. Here’s how The Times described the scene in its December 22 editions:

” ‘I would not harm a hair of your head [Weaver said]; but don’t make any mistake about me. My fighting weight is 185 pounds, and my address is Bloomfield, Iowa.’

“This increased the general merriment and increased Mr. Sparks’s anger. Shaking his fist at Mr. Weaver, he shouted: ‘I have a contempt for that man’s arm. It can’t be used to hurt me. The manner in which he received my explanation shows that he is not a gentleman, a fact of which his conduct in the Presidential campaign has given abundant proof.’

“At this point, for the first time during the long controversy, Mr. Weaver lost his temper, and replied to Mr. Sparks by saying: ‘In the presence of the House of Representatives I denounce you as a liar.’

” ‘… And I denounce you as an unmitigated scoundrel,’ rejoined the irate Sparks.”

Weaver and Sparks rushed at each other but were restrained from fisticuffs as dozens of members rushed toward the Speaker’s desk. The Times again:

“At this time, the commotion on the floor of the House had the appearance of a mob fight, and from the galleries it looked as though such a termination was inevitable. At least three members were struggling to encounter each other in combat, and at least 60 others were wrestling and shouting to prevent the threatened conflict. … In the midst of the uproar some wag from the rear of the hall shouted: ‘Trot out the American eagle,’ referring to the silver mace surmounted by that bird, which is the emblem of the authority of the House when borne by the Sergeant-at-Arms. Finally, Sergeant-at-Arms Thompson made his appearance, bearing the silver mace, and parading with it among the members forced them to be seated, thus quelling the disorder.”

The House adjourned. When it met again the next day, Reps. Sparks and Weaver were taken to task for what other members termed a “pot-house brawl” and “gambling-house quarrel.” Members debated whether the would-be combatants should be censured or simply required to apologize. Rep. Selwyn Zadock Bowman, Republican of Massachusetts, thought a mere apology wasn’t sufficient for the “gross outrage” committed against the House. “The two gentlemen … had bandied between themselves the vilest and the most opprobrious epithets that could pass from one man to another. They had boasted of their fighting weight [here the House reportedly erupted in laughter]; they had treated it as a joke; they had … endeavored to strip off their coats, and had only been separated by force.”

“The vilest and most opprobrious epithets”? How times have changed. Notwithstanding Bowman’s plea to preserve the dignity of the House–“a sacred tribunal,” he called it–Sparks and Weaver were allowed to end the affair with apologies to the chamber.

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A Brief History of Congressional Decorum

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1856: Sumner and Brooks

The House of Representatives has rebuked South Carolinian Joe Wilson for his “You lie!” outburst during President Obama’s speech last week. Wilson’s behavior is an outgrowth of something ugly that’s stirring among us. I don’t know how to summarize what that something is, but its hallmark is an intolerance that skips over debate and argument and rushes straight into hate-mongering and an insistence that those who dare disagree be denounced and silenced. I’m mindful I’m writing in a town, Berkeley, that has its own history of trying to shout down voices it doesn’t want to hear. There’s always a good reason to muzzle your foes and to caricature them as the spawn of the devil or worse.

I look across this bleak landscape and I find some ironic solace in the fact we’ve been here before. When I was a kid, I liked to read about the Civil War. A pictorial history we had included a chapter or two on the prelude to the war. One of the episodes that made an impression was the brutal beating of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina. The attack took place May 22, 1856, on the Senate floor after Sumner, an abolitonist, denounced pro-slavery forces in Kansas and their allies in Congress. Here’s a description of the incident by James M. McPherson in “Battle Cry of Freedom“:

“All spring, Charles Sumner had been storing up wrath toward what he considered ‘The Crime Against Kansas’–the title of a two-day address he delivered to the crowded Senate galleries May 19-20. ‘I shall make the most thorough and complete speech of my life,’ Sumner informed Salmon P. Chase a few days before the address. ‘My soul is wrung by the outrage and I shall pour it forth.’ So he did, with more passion than good taste. ‘Murderous robbers from Missouri,’ Sumner declared ‘hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization’ had committed a ‘rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.’ Sumner singled out members of the F Street Mess [a group of southern senators instrumental in writing the Kansas-Nebraska Act] for specific attack, including South Carolina’s Andrew P. Butler, who had ‘discharged the loose expectoration of his speech’ in demanding the disarming of free-state men in Kansas. Butler’s home state with ‘its shameful imbecility from Slavery’ had sent to the Senate in his person a ‘Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress to who me has made his vows, and who … though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight–I mean the harlot, Slavery.’

“Sumner’s speech produced an uproar–in the Senate, where several Democrats rebuked him, and in the press, where even Republican praise was tempered by reservations about the rhetoric. The only thing that prevented some southerner from challenging Sumner to a duel was the knowledge that he would refuse. Besides, dueling was for social equals; someone as low as this Yankee blackguard deserved a horsewhipping–or a caning. So felt Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Andrew Butler. Two days after the speech Brooks walked into the nearly empty Senate chamber after adjournment and approached the desk where Sumner was writing letters. Your speech, he told the senator, ‘is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.’ As Sumner started to rise, the frenzied Brooks beat him over the head thirty times or more with a gold-headed cane as Sumner, his legs trapped under the bolted-down desk, finally wrenched it loose from the floor and collapsed with his head covered with blood.”

The House voted 112-95 to throw Brooks out–but the motion failed because southern members voted against it and deprived it of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. The reaction at home? As McPherson notes, “From all over the South, Brooks received dozens of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as ‘Hit Him Again’ and ‘Use Knock-Down Arguments.’ “

I note that in looking up “Joe Wilson” on The New York Times site today, at the top of the page was an automatically generated ad: Support Joe Wilson Today: Stand for Joe. Stand for truth. Make a contribution today.” By some accounts, he’s raised millions since he screamed at the president.

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‘Inside of a Dog’

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My friend Pete pointed me to the New York Times review of “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” It’s a nicely written piece, and a lot of it resonates with what we’ve seen in the nearly three and a half years since we became unintentional dog “owners.” I like this bit from the review, for instance:

“The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, ‘is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers — of our reactions.’

“In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. ‘Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.’ They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts. It seems only right that we try a little harder to reciprocate, and Horowitz’s book is a good step in that direction. “

Kate points out there’s a comic reference in the title, an old Grouch Marx line: “Outside of a dog, a book’s a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Bravo, Kate!