Posted by
DaveMatheny on Thursday, August 10, 2006 5:40:08 PM
I had this exchange recently with a newspaper friend from long ago. Thumbnail background: He and I were pretty dang close back in the 1970s. I was an illustrator for the old Minneapolis Star (now the Star Tribune), he was a reporter. He left the paper in 1982. He went – well, way out west, to another paper. We have talked on the phone a few times over the years but otherwise we haven’t been in touch, really.
Recently, Googling around, I found that he was not only still at his out-west newspaper, but had managed to get into trouble by writing a piece on the eve of the 2000 elections saying, basically "I don’t know any Republicans. Why would anybody be stupid enough to be a Republican?" The piece had to be hand-pulled from 350,000 papers at a cost that can only be guessed at. The reason being, I suppose, so the paper would not appear to be, you know, Lefty or anything. Which of course it is, but it just can’t say so.
Since I am a what's called a conservative today but was once called a liberal, I couldn’t resist doing a little needling, saying, in effect, Of course you know Republicans, you dope. You know me. By the way, it’s germane to the story that he is black. Here’s what I sent. (I’ve changed his name here to David Clark, and the paper to Bugle News.)
=======
. . . then would you be the same David Clark who caused a flap some time ago with a story about how you don’t even kniow any Republicans? Or is it just some guy going around saying dumb---ed stuff in your name?
After all, if that IS you, then you do know me, and I'm a conservative. A many-gun-owning, Israel-loving, Michael-Moore-despising, Bush-voting, abortion-hating, Iraq-war-supporting, reparations-loathing conservative.
Whoever wrote that story ventured into Pauline Kael territory ("How can Nixon get elected? I don't know anybody who voted for him.") Since Google doesn't provide the full text of the story itself, it's impossible to say if you -- or he -- went on to even greater silliness, but I would guess that with a start like that, he --or you -- couldn't very well go back and head in some much more sensible direction.
I left the Star Tribune in 2001 -- retired, technically, so I could scoop up all those benefits -- and now my wife of 18 years, Jean, and I are supremely happy, living in a split-level. I write and illustrate a monthly feature for [an aviation magazine]. I fly as often as I can. Jean's an artist, too. She it was who led me back to my original Catholicism, too. (Better add that to the list of my awfulness.) I'm also trying to produce a couple of heavily-illustrated children's books. We go to work every day by going downstairs. Is that great or what?
Okay, David, to be completely clear about my political views: I was always an old-fashioned liberal. I did NOT vote for Nixon -- and like Kael I didn't know anybody who did -- but I had too many disagreements with the positions my supposed party, the Democrats, had been taking over the years. It was getting worse and worse. They had been moving further and further Left, and at some point I just could not stomach it any more. Abortion was huge, and so was gun control. I also think quotas are a dreadful idea, as you know from discussions we’ve had.
After years of voting against the people I agreed with (including Reagan in 1980), and voting for people I disagreed with, I finally came to my senses (and voted for Reagan in 1984), completing my apostasy.
I've given this a lot of thought and it comes down to an insight that I can't prove with facts or numbers, but that I am absolutely sure of: Most newsroom liberals – and I was one of them -- agree with most conservative positions on most individual issues, abortion being a great example, quotas being another, environmental wacko-ism being another.
But they console themselves with the thought that they could never, ever agree with, say, a William F. Buckley or a Dubya or a Rush Limbaugh because. . . because, well, because, somewhere down deep, your Buckleys and Dubyas, your Charlton Hestons and Rush Limbaughs, way, way, way down deep, are secretly Nazis. Which lets the otherwise-sensible newsroom liberals off the hook.
But of course they aren't Nazis. But if you even BEGIN to question that assumption, the whole thing crumbles. At least that's the way it was for me.
Here's a great example of what I'm getting at. Mark Steyn, in the Telegraph, writes that ". . .As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters, the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape."
Okay, can you find the fascists in that news item? To remain a card-carrying Democrat, I would have had to say that it was this Ripke guy.
And then, of course, September 11, 2001, came along, and the mask fell off the face of the Left, who had been saying for 60 years that the people who hate America are the good guys and the people who love America are the bad guys, and lo, they were embarrassedeth beyond measure and revealedeth to look like nitwits.
So anyway [some personal stuff here]. . . .What are you doing these days, apart from causing great distress to your editors? (That WAS you, wasn't it.)
--Dave
The reply:
YIKES...so much scary stuff below I have to figure you've been writing for days. I can't believe you just dashed all that terrifying stuff off the top of your head in the last few minutes. Did you?
Uhhh, no. In fact, I had written most of it yesterday and set it aside to think about it. Your note today made me add some more incendiary right-wing material, is all. Ha!
Unfortunately, I recall the Davis Flood newsroom liberal. That's the part of you I'd never believe would change. If you are in fact a new-fangled conservative, your compadres would smack you about the head and face for even exchanging e-mails with one of "The Dark People," as Republicans refer to people of color behind closed doors.
And you know this -- how? See, David, that is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about when I wrote that in order to remain a liberal you have to assume that onservatives are secretly Nazis. They just are not and I just am not. As you know.
David, I have hardly changed at all. Trust me on this: Conservatives are not secretly racist. They do despise Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, not because of the color of their skin, but because of the content of their character -- to paraphrase one black guy that conservatives do admire, along with people like J.C. Watts and Condoleezza Rice, whatever that tedious old phony Harry Belafonte may say.
But I do see how assuming that conservatives are secretly racist can be very comforting for any liberal. Kind of makes that whole liberalism thing work, dunnit?
As for my infamous piece. It was in 350,000 newspapers and ready to go.
Then, on that Friday before the Sunday paper came out, it was hand-pulled from all the editions. The top editors here retreated into that anti-1st amendment, right-wing, crush our civil rights, be-afraid kind of mindset that conservatives love so much. It would have run the Sunday before the election and papers claim not to write anything political that close to E-Day.
Sounds like they were trying to save their butts from being called a lopsidedly liberal paper. Sounds like scuttling the First Amendment had nothing to do with it. In any case, why would conservatives object to First Amendment stuff? Matter of fact, they are more in need of it than anybody on the Left has been for about 50 years. Do you have any idea what happens to an openly conservative person who works for, oh, I dunno, just to pick an example at random, say, the Star Tribune? It's ugly.
Not that anybody would actually come up to you and spit on you, nothing like hat, but the mood was there. By actual count, when I retired, the staff nmbered 412, and there were at most eight people who voted for Bush in 2000. I bet it's about the same at your paper. Which, as I recall, was the paper that published the great CIA-crack cocaine story.
Remember when Tim Robbins was going around before the Iraq war, saying he couldn't get his ideas heard anywhere? The story was carried on NBC, CBS, CNN, Time, Newsweek, Fox, NYTimes, WashPost that he couldn't be heard. Nope, not anywhere. Could. Not. Be. Heard. He told the National Press Club about the way he was being silenced. They carried it on NPR. For about a week, on the radio, TV, in the papers and magazines, I heard about poor Tim and the way he was being stifled. It was just terrible.
David, it's time for the Left to stop pretending it's being hushed up. Your side hasn't experienced censorship since the 1950s. Stick a fork in it and take it out, it's done.
((In fact, Condi Rice was being vetted for national security possiblilities and mentioned that she had done extensive interviews with a reporter doing a piece asking WHY WOULD ANYBODY BE A REPUBLICAN? The powerstructure was so afraid that calls were made and made and made until Tony Ridder made one to my editor and THATZ why it was pulled.
It was a chickenshit piece of cowardice by this paper. And, the piece -- a magazine essay which gave me the right to be a "diehard Democrat" in print -- was called by the Hoover Institute (right wing all the way) at Stanford, "one of the the fairest stories about Republicanism we've ever seen."
Your point being? Anyway, I would have printed it, and all of the conservatives I know would have. . . and not just to show how loony-left the paper was. However, I would have balanced it with something from the other side. Problem is, your paper probably doesn't have anybody from the other side to write a "Who would be a Democrat?'' story.
However. All that is behind me. The ignorant and the fear-mongering and the American Taliban Right have gathered together and scared out a BUSH> VICTORY. It's over. We are under the control of a man with the IQ of a hockey puck and of an equally simple-minded electorate.
Ah yes, the old Bush-is-dumb salient. Okay, here ya go, pal: Measured IQ of about 130, according to his entrance tests in the Air Guard. Had better college grades than Al Gore. Learned to fly a supersonic jet fighter (and believe me, his daddy could not fit into the cockpit to give him tips. Also, those things require more than stick-and-rudder skills. About 8 out of 10 flight students wash out). And, of course, he got elected governor once and president twice. That's how stupid he is. Man, is he ever dumb!
I will give you this, though. He is not widely read, and he would not fare well in a group of people at a cocktail party discussing amusing New Yorker cartoons. And he does not look good in a press conference -- that deer-in-the-headlights look. I think he gets self-conscious and forgets what he was going to say. But what I value in a president is clarity and constancy of purpose, and honesty. I think he is all of those things. I
don't want Noel Coward in the Oval Office. He does not have (or want) the kind of quick, literary wittiness that you and I have, but that is not the measure I'm interested in.
"Taliban right." Oh, lovely. And what the Right has in common with the Taliban is. . .? Well, nothing that I can see. (Oh, wait, I know! The old secret-swastika-flag-in-the-closet again.)
I dunno if you caught it on the news, but the real Taliban was wiped out a couple of years ago by a bunch of Americans headed by Republicans, and Afghanistan had a big election in which women voted for the first time ever. Meantime, over in Iraq, we're trying to establish a democratic government, and being opposed by d---heads who cut people's heads off while screaming "God is great!" You know, the people that Michael Moore -- Jimmy Carter's favorite living filmmaker -- calls the Minutemen of
their country.
Conservatism is easy because it requires no growth, no change, no
>intellect.
It ain't easy. But let's see: Between the two of us, which one is
demonstrating "growth," or if you have a problem with that, certainly
change, at least? And which one is using a connected series of arguments to
make his point, while the other is reciting bumper-sticker slogans?
>With Bush and Rove in power, that will probably not change for a while.
I pray that it will not. Literally. If we succeed, and Iraq winds up a democracy, then the world willbe a much better place, and maybe Islamofascism will be on its way out. And
your objection to that outcome would be?
>
> I'm fine. My family is fine, as long as we stay in a BLUE state where we
> won't get hung for, ya know, being racially integrated and uppitty.
Actually, I live in a blue state, too. But have you looked at the red-blue
county map? The only blue parts are along the coasts and around the cities.
If you want to console yourself with the thought that Bush was re-elected by
knuckledraggers, go ahead. But you know it's not true.
Yep, I'm THAT [David Clark].
Yep. Thought so. I'd know that spark anywhere. Seriously, David, why not
reconsider conservative ideas? The downside would be the end of your
career at any newspaper, and being stoned out of town by the villagers, but
you're a gutsy guy. You would have nothing to lose but some slogans.
--Dave
Sadly, I have not heard from him since. I expected better.