Columnist.
How appropriate. The exhibit at the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock is called Forgotten Places, and it's been mounted not in one of the main galleries but in a forgettable part of the museum. The exhibit consists largely of black-and-white photographs of old, abandoned houses out in the country. The kind of photographs developed in a darkroom, the almost forgotten way. The pictures are scattered along an upstairs hallway, in nooks, on a landing at the top of stairs, out of the way, or maybe on the way to somewhere else. Perhaps to one of the spacious, brightly lit displays for children. You might pass the pictures right by, just as you would a dilapidated old house by the side of a country road.
Barack Obama put it so persuasively in his address the other night that I had to restrain myself from rushing out to apply for still another credit card. Or just accepting the next one to arrive in the mail, as they do with remarkable frequency. It was one heckuva sales job the president did, and as a political appeal, it wasn't bad, either. At least not for one based on the solid theory, oft attributed to that well-known political scientist P.T. Barnum, that there's one born every minute. As our president explained in terms any fool can understand, if only fools, this whole tangle in Washington over raising the debt limit hasn't really been about whether to curb the federal government's high-spending ways. Not at all, not at all.
The robotic voice, recorded on an endless loop, droned on in the C Level cafetorium, explaining the dangers represented by that dangerous artifact of an earlier civilization, the book. The bored work crews filed in and out of the bare hall for their prefabricated rations, pausing now and then to use their OCDs, or Online Communications Devices. Each of the small accessories, just the right size to fit into a pocket of their government-issue coveralls, was licensed, limited, and certified to have no more links than necessary to barracks, work station, National Public Agitprop, and the current Top Ten beatmusiks.
Walking by the bank of television sets out in the old-fashioned, wide-open, sunlit newsroom here in Little Rock, I just had to stop for a minute to see what the panel of distinguished commentators were saying about the latest capital-C Crisis. That's how it is in Teeveeland. No broadcast out of Washington or anywhere else is complete without a Crisis of the day, maybe hour. The talking heads were wearing expressions even more solemn than usual. When I turned up the sound, it took only a ponderous phrase or two to realize they weren't being authoritative in the old Walter Cronkite, Brinkley-Huntley style at all. They were in their Sincerely Mystified mode.
Looking for a clear, concise, simple explanation of why it's important -- indeed, vital -- to hold the line against raising the federal debt limit unless federal spending is cut at least as much? Then check this out: "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. ... Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better."
Our species has a number of formal names in the scientific-sounding Latin. Perhaps the most ironic is Homo sapiens, man the thinker. Especially when you keep coming across thoughtless statements in the news. But man does use thought -- to rationalize his actions, however dubious. Some of those rationales are ingenious indeed. Even when admitting past wrongs, it is an almost irresistible temptation to add, "but...." As in "I'm sorry, but...." Which is what makes someone who simply confesses and stops there so rare -- and admirable.
Greece isn't the only country to try spending its way to prosperity -- only to find a sure way to poverty. The same delusion has tempted other European governments. Portugal comes readily to mind, and Italy may be next to discover that what looked like the road to Easy Street leads instead to Skid Row. The temptation to spend more than a government's got can be intoxicating. (See Washington, D.C.) But it's beginning to lose its lure. On both sides of the pond.
Consider this an obituary for a newspaper. The suddenly late News of the World succumbed at 168 this month to a fatal case of shame aggravated by financial calculation. Its chronic hubris became acute under its latest owner, who has not been free of that malady himself. The end came as a shock. Who knew The News of the World was even capable of shame? And now it's died of it. Its insatiable appetite for scandal finally did it in. For once its zeal got in the way of its owner's ambitions instead of furthering them. And it had to be put it out of its misery. Its last great scandal, as it turned out, was its own.
Dear Professor, It was wholly a pleasure to get your email seconding the motion that we permit the study of the Bible in the public schools. It gives me an opportunity to write a few words in defense of what used to be called First Things. But we will always have with us those who argue that teaching the Word, right out in public and all, as in public schools, would violate the separation of church and state. I'm rather attached to that wall myself. As a Jewish kid, I grew up under its protection.
I went to the Arkansas Writers Conference the other day to talk about writing. Talk about writing? Rather defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Like driving somewhere to walk. Or attending a conference to learn how to pray in solitude. But I accepted the invitation anyway. I had a few things I wanted to say about the current tendency to teach writing as a process. Much like churning out pre-cast concrete, no doubt. Or producing a political speech that, you can tell, has been written by asking all the politician's advisers for their, to use another unfortunate term, Input. Because that's the accepted Process. As in processed cheese.
Walker Percy called it a Repetition., a re-enactment of a past event in the same setting so it can be savored for its own sake, without all that has transpired in the intervening years getting in the way. All those things that, as he put it, clog time like peanuts in peanut brittle. The hero -- well, the protagonist -- of his novel "The Moviegoer" would go back to see the same movie from time to time. The movie was the same; he wasn't. Seeing it again gave him a gauge by which to judge how much he'd changed since he first saw it.
There is a dusty corner of a graveyard in oft-besieged Tripoli that is American soil, made so only the way the dead do. Eight American sailors lie there. Five others are buried in the little, white-walled Protestant cemetery a mile away. All were members of a daring raid during the First Barbary War against the pirate realm of a pasha long accustomed to collecting ransom from British and French ships who dared sail within his reach. But the still young American republic would prove different. As the pasha's extortionate demands increased, so did American resistance. These 13 sailors were among the early casualties of the war that would result; they were all part of a raiding party launched against the pasha's stronghold. Our contemporary SEALs are not the first Navy outfit determined to avenge American honor.
Remember the Misery Index? It tends to reappear whenever the economy exhibits a couple of unwelcome trends in unusual tandem: not just a high unemployment rate but more inflation, too. Talk about a double whammy. Add those two figures together and you get the Misery Index. So if you combine the current 9.1 unemployment rate with the 3.6 inflation rate, the rate of misery in the American economy is 12.7. The country hasn't seen that kind of number in almost 30 years.
Higher education keeps getting lower. And not just in this state, where the core curriculum at the University of Arkansas' campus at Fayetteville is being hollowed out. It's happening all over. In Britain, the study of the humanities is being diluted, too. Happily, this sad trend has inspired a familiar reaction. Over here, as state universities cut back on required courses that once were considered necessary for a well-rounded education, small liberal arts colleges have taken up the slack. Now comes word from England that A.C. Grayling, the renowned philosopher, has joined with other free-spirited academics to start a new, private College of the Humanities.
He rose to speak in the midst of a colonial war that would prove more than a colonial war but a whole Novus Ordo Seclorum, as it still says on the dollar bill, or A New Order for the Ages. Eloquent rhetorician, thoughtful student of history and insightful analyst of events in his own time, Edmund Burke had decided ideas about what made nations great and what undermined them. The member of parliament for Bristol understood very well what was at stake in the coming conflict over the nature of the British empire: the empire itself.
War is the health of euphemism. As was demonstrated once again when Robert Gates, who now has served as secretary of defense under two successive presidents, appeared on Fox News the other day. Mr. Gates is (a) a dedicated public servant whose competence the country has relied on for years, and (b) an honest man obliged to explain his boss' disingenuousness. It ain't easy, but he gives the assignment his unconvincing best. For example: Asked whether the country is engaged in hostilities in Libya, a legal point of some interest in the debate over the War Powers Act, our game secretary of defense said that, at the Pentagon, they prefer to say "we're involved in a limited kinetic operation."
Thomas Friedman was right. The world is flat, or at least it seemed so last week when the news came that Peter Falk, aka Columbo, had died at 83. For 30 of those years, he had regularly delighted television audiences as a not-as-dumb-as-he-looks detective. Every third week, he invariably caught the killer, who of course was depicted as the very soul of sophistication, and at the end of the show wound up as surprised as viewers weren't to find that this cop wid a working-class accent had outwitted him.
It's definitely that time of the year again. The summer heat is starting to cover the country like a horse blanket. It's time to update my annual list of heat-beaters. Feel free to clip and save, mix and match, and add your own: 1. Delete all unwanted emails without opening them. Especially if they're from types who are always a little hot under the collar anyway. If you must open any, under no circumstances reply. Soon you'll be on their heated level.
Forget the dollar. This time of year, a different currency holds sway here in Arkansas. It circulates widely. It's carefully assayed and weighed out by judicious appraisers. It's traded freely with satisfaction guaranteed and good will all around. In other parts of the country, dinner guests may arrive with flowers in hand or carrying dessert. But in this bountiful season here in this, the Natural State, as it says on the license plates, folks will come through the door carrying a plain brown paper sack, and inside will be nestled treasure -- red, pink, green, gold or a mixed palette of all.
