Category Archives: Confessional

Laurin and Nancy at the social media symposium

Laurin is presenting, Nancy is going over her notes, and I'm trying to think up some mayhem that will get me sent to the principal's office. Just like school.

Last night, I participated in a symposium on politics and social media at Francis Marion University. Which was great. Trouble is, I was on a panel with Laurin Manning and Nancy Mace. And they were better prepared than I was.

See, I thought it was going to be just a panel discussion, so I had jotted some notes about points I wanted to be sure to hit on, and showed up. Laurin and Nancy had slide shows, and got up and made presentations. So I had to, too. No problem, really, because I can fill any amount of time… I talked about the old blog and why I started it and how it related to my old MSM job, and the new blog and how it’s going, my Twitter feed (dang! I forgot to mention I’m one of the Twitterati!), how I hate Facebook (it’s the AOL of this decade), “Seinfeld,” my Top Five Baseball Movies, and I don’t know what all.

Then at some point, I realized I’d gone on enough, or more than enough, and shut up. Which I think was cool, but it was way less polished than what the other panelists did.

You know how, when you were in school, there were these girls (and sometimes traitor guys) who always showed up with their homework done? And raised their hands and asked for more work, for extra credit? And when the teacher had been out of the room, and came back, they told her what you had been doing while she was gone? It was like that. Laurin and Nancy were good.

But I survived to the actual panel discussion part, and that went well (I think), so all’s well that ends that way. As it happened, I enjoyed it.

I especially enjoyed learning from Laurin and Nancy.

Laurin was sort of a mentor for me when I started blogging in 2005, and she was well established with the legendary Laurinline. She later was part of the unstoppable Obama social media machine of 2008. Recently, she’s blogged at SC Soapbox.

Nancy, the first female to graduate from The Citadel (how’s that for intimidating?), is founder and CEO of The Mace Group, LLC. She’s also partners with Will Folks in FITSNews— she does the technical side, and leaves the content to Will.

I’m not going to share with you all the cool trade secrets they imparted, because knowledge is power, and I want it all to myself. But I will share this anecdote that they told us about:

You know how Will started his blog? By accident. He was actually trying to post a comment on the Laurinline, and got so confused in trying to do so that he inadvertently set up a blog of his own. Really. That’s the way Laurin and Nancy tell it. The site is much more technologically sophisticated now with Nancy involved, and has more than a million page views a month — compared to my measly traffic, which has only broken a quarter of a million a couple of times. (That’s it. That was my display of humility for this month.)

Anyway, that’s why I was in Florence.

Going short at Starbucks (it can be a GOOD thing)

18 Replies

Did you ever wonder why the smallest size advertised at Starbucks is a “Tall?” So did I, but I never wondered enough to ask. I sort of assumed that once there had been smaller sizes, but they had become extinct as America became more gluttonous.

I was right. I think. Because it turns out Starbucks also serves a “Short.” Really. It’s 8 ounces, as opposed to the 12 oz. tall. I’ve taken to ordering them lately, if I’m picking up a coffee in the afternoon. It’s a great way to go when you need something, but it’s just a bit late for that much caffeine.

They’re really not a part of the Starbucks routine. In fact, they don’t have sleeves for them. Instead, you get a double cup when you order one.

You have to know to ask for it.

So there’s another reason I order them, aside from being “sensible.” They make me feel cool, like one of the Starbucks cognoscenti.

As you know, I love Starbucks (a fact I appear to have at least alluded to here 54 times). It’s not just the coffee, which is the best. It’s the smell. It’s the music. It’s the sound of beans being freshly ground. It’s the fact that the women there are more beautiful than anywhere else. OK, maybe that’s the caffeine talking. But then, maybe there’s something about Starbucks that attracts beauty. If I could get a grant, I’d do a study.

So it’s just extra great to casually order something (“a Short Pike”) that none of the unwashed around me — not even the beautiful unwashed women — know about. It adds something to the already pleasant experience of being there. I walk out with a swagger, my confidence in my own hipness fully reinforced.

Can you believe Starbucks doesn’t advertise on this blog? Maybe it’s because I have no clue whom to approach with my pitch. I’m not even getting anything for product placement. Aside from the satisfaction of knowing I’m doing good in this world…

You know what you know, you know?

19 Replies

People who reach conclusions rapidly, intuitively — the way I do — may have confidence in their conclusions. Which I generally do, because when the conclusions are testable, I’m wrong seldom enough that my confidence is preserved. But I know this faculty is (like all decision-making processes) fallible, and there is a certain insecurity caused by the perceptions of others, particularly the concrete thinkers, the materialists, the folks who test as an S on the Myers Briggs scale, as opposed to my extreme N. The people who view holistic, Gestalten perception with utter contempt.

This habit of thought is extremely useful in arriving at opinions on complex, controversial issues in time to write about them on deadline. It’s why I was extremely adept at being an editorial page editor, if at nothing else (something that didn’t matter in the end, since it all came down to money). Not only for the purposes of writing opinions myself, but (much more to the point, since I was the editor) for guiding the board quickly to a conclusion. We’d be arguing, and then I would say something that paid due consideration to everyone’s seemingly disparate views, but which was coherent and followed logically and made all the people who had been arguing nod and say Yes, that’s our position.

It sounds like I’m bragging about how brilliant I am, but not really. (In fact, to doubters I’m confessing what an idiot I am.) Frankly, I suspect most people look at me and wonder whether I’m good at anything. Well, I am, and that’s the thing. The one thing that seems to impress people most when they witness it, and when they are disposed to be impressed. The rest of the time, I think they’re more inclined to wonder who let the incompetent doofus into the room.

Conveniently, it’s a talent that also occasionally comes in handy working as a Mad Man. Much of what we do at ADCO still bewilders me, but when it comes time to sum up a message that the client has been struggling to express, I am able to contribute.

This works great, when people are impressed — such as yesterday, when a client called some modest flicker of insight of mine “brilliant.” (Which it wasn’t — I later looked at it written and there was a glaring grammatical error in what I’d said. But fixable.)

It’s more of a problem when people don’t think I’m brilliant — in fact, quite the opposite — and challenge my conclusions. You know, the way Bud and Doug always do. With those guys, I get frustrated because most of my firm assertions cannot be supported by a mathematical proof that will satisfy them, so they conclude that I’m just making it all up or something. And they assert it with sufficient vehemence — being as confident in their conclusions as I am in mine — that sometimes, like a dust mote drifting into a gleaming clean room, a tiny bit of doubt surfaces in my own mind: If I’m so right, why can’t I prove it to everyone’s satisfaction? Which I knew I couldn’t do, even before meeting Bud and Doug. Anyone who thinks his beliefs are self-evident to all (however he arrives at them) will be quickly disabused by even a short stint as editorial page editor. (Yes, Virginia, before blogs and Twitter and email there was the telephone, and snail mail, and running into detractors at social occasions. All designed to take you down a notch.)

So, I find it reassuring to read something like this, in an article in Slate about the uncertainties entertained by identical twins about whether they are identical:

As science looked for more cost-effective ways to divine zygotic history, blood tests and other lab work gave way to surveys that combined objective measurements—height, weight, tone of voice, etc.—with questions about how the pairs were perceived. Were they confused for each other by teachers and friends? Parents? Strangers? But even that proved more in-depth than necessary. In a 1961 study by a Swedish scientist named Rune Cederlof, the whole exam hinged upon a single, probing question: “When growing up, were you and your twin ‘as like as two peas’ or of ordinary family likeness only?”

It turned out that whether twins thought they’d been “as like as two peas” could predict the results of every other available test with surprising accuracy. Cederlof found that the twins’ answers to this one item on the questionnaire matched overwhelmingly with five independent measures of blood type. After nearly 100 years, our finest scientists realized that discerning a man’s zygotic origin was about as easy as discerning whether he was ill by asking if he had a runny nose.

The examination of DNA, then, may be an entirely superfluous reassurance: like searching for witnesses to a murder when the act itself was caught on tape.

Yes! All right! Go, intuitive perception!

By the way, you may enjoy taking the quiz at the bottom of the first installment of that article. It will cause you to be skeptical about your own skepticism. (Oops. Maybe I should have said “spoiler alert” first…)

I continue to believe Twin B and Twin A are identical, despite their pronounced differences. Such as the contrasting ways they habitually pose for pictures (one makes faces; the other instinctively goes for glamour). Don't be fooled by the fact that one has shorter hair.

Well, at least Rusty liked it

8 Replies

I saw Rusty DePass yesterday, and he stopped me to tell me that while my Health and Happiness routine at Rotary on Monday didn’t get what I would call big laughs, he thought it was hilarious.

I appreciated that. I don’t know what was wrong Monday. I mean, I got some laughs, but it was very low-key. The biggest laugh I got was after one of the lines I got from Herb Brasher, I said, “Come on! That was funny!” I said it with such vehemence and frustration, that it really cracked them up.

Maybe it was because a lot of people were missing, this being mid-summer, and we just didn’t have critical mass. I don’t know. I looked in that direction once and saw Kathryn Fenner laughing. At least, she looked like she was laughing, but I couldn’t hear it. It was like a mime laugh.

See, now? THAT was funny… Maybe I should have used it.

Anyway, running into Rusty and getting his kind feedback reminded me that I didn’t thank y’all for your input — particularly that of Herb (and his friend Larry) and Doug Ross, who returned from the wilderness just in time to give me the “Famously Hot” idea. (Which actually got one of my better laughs, although it was slightly delayed. Maybe it would have been bigger if I had paused longer after the punch line.)

Here are my prepared remarks:

Been looking through the news for some humor. It’s tough finding anything funny. I see Michele Bachmann is almost leading the GOP polls for president of the United States. Of course, she’s still a distant second to Mitt Romney. You know, he’s the guy whose most notable accomplishment was starting a health care system in Massachusetts that he can’t talk about in front of Republicans…

See? The topical stuff isn’t funny. So I’m going to intersperse it with some words of wisdom that my friend Herb – Kathryn knows Herb — said he got from HIS friend Larry:

I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on the list.

If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.

Back to the topical…

As you know, I work over at ADCO with Lanier Jones. ADCO is the agency that came up with “Famously Hot.” The last few days, one of the readers on my blog – that’s bradwarthen.com – has suggested that we change that slogan. He just wants to change the first word. It would still start with the same letter.

I see that China, which holds all that U.S. debt, is now watching what’s happening in Washington and thinking WE have a really fouled-up political system. The bad news is, they’re right.

By the way, in case I’m not being clear enough, I refer to those children in Washington, a.k.a. our nation’s leaders, playing games with the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

And no, I wasn’t even trying to be funny about that…

More from Larry:

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says, “In an emergency, notify:” I always put, “DOCTOR.”

Back to the news:

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian – by the way, try fitting “South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian” into a headline sometime, and you’ll see why the press will miss Ken Ard when he’s gone…

Where was I? Oh, yeah… South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian said something that puzzled me the other day. He was criticizing Nikki Haley for saying, when she signed the voter ID bill, that if anyone had trouble getting a photo ID, she would personally drive them to the DMV. I don’t see any problem with that. I mean, it would be nice, right? It’s not like she’s Andre Bauer.

Oh, and for my Republican friends here today:

Look, I wanted to make some jokes about Democrats in office, but hey, gimme a break: This is South Carolina. I couldn’t find any.

OK, some more from Larry:

I didn’t say it was your fault; I said I was blaming you.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won’t expect it back.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

I ad-libbed a few times. Such as, when I saw Boyd Summers laughing about the no-Democrats-in-office gag (although he, too, may have been doing a mime laugh), I said, “See? Boyd Summers gets it. Ladies and gentlemen, Boyd Summers — chairman of the Richland County Democratic Party. Boyd, you need to work a little harder…”

Thanks again for your help, folks! Your material was good. Maybe it was the delivery.

Onion: “God Urges Rick Perry Not To Run”

21 Replies

Speaking of Rick Perry, which we were doing in passing back here…

I don’t go in for blasphemy, which means I don’t like it when politicians (usually conservatives) claim to be tighter with God than other people, or when critics (usually liberals) make fun of them for it. I especially, speaking from my own brand of conservatism, don’t like it when people presume to put words in God’s mouth.

But I must confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I did find the point brought up by The Onion here at least worth discussing:

July 21, 2011 | ISSUE 47•29

AUSTIN, TX—Describing Texas Gov. Rick Perry as grossly unqualified for the position, God, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, urged Perry not to run for president of the United States Wednesday. “I prayed last night and asked the Lord to support my candidacy, and He said no,” Perry told reporters outside the Texas Capitol, explaining that God had cited the governor’s rejection of federal stimulus funds to expand state jobless benefits, his irresponsible speculation about Texas seceding from the union, and his overall lack of concrete solutions to nation’s problems as reasons why He could not endorse a Perry presidential bid. “I believe God made some valid points about my lack of credentials, and He’s absolutely right. My extreme beliefs when it comes to social issues and states’ rights are not only disturbingly narrow-minded, but would also make me a horrible president.” When reached for comment, God said He would not be present at Perry’s much-talked-about Christian day of prayer on Aug. 6, calling the governor’s use of his public office to endorse a religion both “irresponsible” and a violation of the Constitution.

OK, it’s not as funny or creative as some Onion stuff. I’ll confess that, too. I think they sort of called this one in. They thought, “Somebody needs to make this point, and it might as well be us.” What keeps it from being brilliant is that the writer couldn’t resist making serious points, and even doing it in a sort of preachy manner.

But hey, I thought that referring you to it would be one way of bringing up the topic of Perry suggesting that he is on a mission from God. So we could discuss it.

Personally, I don’t think God wants to get involved in the Perry candidacy one way or the other. I am, of course, not positive about that. I could ask Him, in order to make sure, but I really don’t like to bother Him with stuff like that.

Bad video of the Benjamin-Runyan thing

1 Reply

I’ve had about enough of outdoor political events.

First, this time of year, it’s too hot. Then, it’s also too noisy.

But those are not the things that make this bad video. The main thing is that I couldn’t edit it. I shot it on my iPhone, which shoots awesome, HD (I think) video.

Trouble is, I can’t edit it. I can call it up in the PC editing software, just as I do with videos from my Canon. But there’s no sound. I tried ignoring that, and cutting it anyway down to the bits that looked and sounded best in Windows Media Player (which plays the format just fine), but the format that it saves to also lacks sound. So, pretty useless.

I have iMovie on the Mac laptop at work, which I think is supposed to edit video, but can’t figure out how to get the files from the phone to that application. Probably something really simple for people who think Mac, but hard for me.

So I just uploaded the whole thing. I said I would use the video to sub for one of the photos back on the previous post, but why take down a perfectly good jpg for a bad video? Make what you will of this.

Bow before me: I’m one of the Twitterati!

3 Replies

A couple of years back… actually, to be precise, it ran on the very day before I got laid off from the paper (which really made the part where I reflected on a politician declaring the death of news media, um, interesting)… I wrote a column in which I blasted the very idea of Twitter:

… But so far I haven’t figured out what Twitter adds to modern life that we didn’t already have with e-mail and blogs and text-messaging and, well, the 24/7 TV “news.” Remember how I complained in a recent column about how disorienting and unhelpful I find Facebook to be? Well, this was worse. I felt like I was trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack topped with Pop Rocks, stirred with a Slim Jim…

Then, a few months later, Tim Kelly persuaded me that I could promote my blog using Twitter. So I tried it. And I got hooked on the form, sort of a cross between headline writing and haiku. And Tim was prophetic. My blog gets 3 or 4 times the traffic that my old blog did when I was at the paper — something close to 200,000 page views a month, and sometimes well over that.

And now, I’m one of the top Tweeters in Columbia, one of the “Twitterati,” according to the Free Times:

The former editorial page editor of The State tweets a lot and has 1,200 followers. He’s often re-tweeted, tweeted at, and he becomes involved in Twitter debates. Sometimes he’ll even play mediator in said debates.

In any case, it’s obvious that while Warthen has been out of the newspaper game for a few years now he still has some pull at the paper. On May 31, he tweeted, “What in the world are these UFO-looking things all along I-26?” Days later, The State ran a story answering this life-altering question under this headline: “What Are Those Green Things?” — Corey Hutchins

So, you just never know what’s going to happen, do you?

Looks like I can now make fun of MySpace again

1 Reply

Several years ago, I sort of embarrassed myself by making fun of Andre Bauer for having a MySpace page. (Actually, no one mocked me for it at the time, but looked at a year or too later, it made me look pretty hopeless…)

Back then — we’re talking 2006 — nobody at the State House did social media; not yet. Or not so I had noticed. There were a couple of bloggers, but MySpace? Facebook? Those were for kids, for college kids trying to hook up or whatever. And it was an indication of a lack of seriousness for a constitutional officer of the state to engage in such activities. Or of a constitutional officer trying to, you know, hook up. Ahem.

Then, everybody started doing it. Which sort of made Andre look like a trailblazer. Way before Obama.

But then… MySpace got really uncool. If we want to be taken seriously, we are still not allowed to make fun of Facebook — yet. And in fact, it seems to be going from triumph to triumph. To hear some talk, it will soon take over the world. Well, that’s another topic for another day.

My purpose in addressing you at the moment is to declare that it’s officially OK to make fun of MySpace again. It’s sort of been OK for a couple of years now, but this makes it official:

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has finally found a buyer for MySpace, but the $35 million sale price is only a fraction of how much the company had been asking for.

Advertising network operator Specific Media and News Corp. finalized the deal Wednesday, allowing Murdoch’s company to move the once-mighty social networking site off its books before its fiscal quarter ends Thursday.

News Corp. had reportedly been hoping to sell the company for at least $100 million.

The $35 million price tag is either laughably high or embarrassingly low, depending on where you’re sitting. It is $545 million less than Murdoch paid for the site only six years ago. But that was when MySpace was the new Friendster, back when such a comparison was a flattering one. (Yes, we know we’ve used that joke before.)

Go ahead. Let’s hear your sarcastic remarks. It’s OK. (Ha-ha-ha — Friendster. The Aztecs had Friendster…)

Coming soon: The Alvin Green graphic novel

6 Replies

OK, now I’m feeling bad about an idea I let slide awhile back.

Corey Hutchins of the Free Times brings this to my attention:

Current and former Columbia Free Timeswriters are teaming up to produce a black-and-white graphic novel on the bizarre rise and fall of South Carolina’s Alvin Greene.

Last year the unemployed Greene unexpectedly won the South Carolina Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate, giving him the chance to face off against — and eventually lose to — incumbent Tea Partier Jim DeMint. Greene’s primary victory came despite the fact that he didn’t campaign, didn’t have a website, and was virtually unknown to the voting public.

“What happened in the summer of 2010 was the strangest American political story in modern times,” says Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins, who gained national attention by exposing Greene. “It’s no wonder that it came out of South Carolina, the state that James Petigru famously called ‘too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum’ more than 100 years ago.”

Hutchins is teaming up with former Free Times staff writer David Axe and artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner to serialize the comic online beginning in early 2012, following with a print edition in the spring.

In order to secure funding for the project, they’re using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to attract backers. As of this writing, the team is halfway towards reaching their goal of $1,000.

That’s pretty cool. Cool enough that it make me feel bad I never followed through on my own idea.

You know, I wanted to do a graphic novel about Mark Sanford back in 2009. I even had a couple of exchanges with someone with publishing contacts in New York. But when I didn’t find an artist who was interested right away (I felt like it had to be done immediately for readers to be interested), I dropped it. I was really busy job-hunting and stuff at the time. The images were key, and while I could have written the whole thing without them, I think it would have been an inspiration to see some sketches as I went along.

I had this one really vivid image in my mind as I tried to picture the visual style of the book. It was NOT of Mark Sanford, actually. It was black-and-white. It would have been an extreme closeup, taking about half a page, of Jake Knotts as he began the process of spreading the report that Sanford was missing, in his big bid to bring down his nemesis…

The image was inspired by images of The Kingpin in Spiderman (see this or this or this or this) … Only darker…

Anyway… I actually wrote a sort of treatment for my New York contact. I was really riffing on it at the time. I wanted it all to be told by a seedy, self-hating ex-journalist narrator, sort of based on Jack Burden from All the King’s Men. The narrator would be all conflicted and guilt-ridden, because he felt responsible for having created the central character. This would give his narration a certain bitterly ironic tone. (This character would of course in no way be based on any living former editors who maybe sorta kinda endorsed Mark Sanford in 2002.)

It had levels. It had edge. It had irony. Sort of Gatsby meets Robert Penn Warren meets “Citizen Kane” meets, I don’t know, “Fight Club.”

But now I can’t even find the blasted treatment. I think I lost it in that major Outlook meltdown of my e-mail.

But it would have been good.

The Perpetual Adoration of the Dysfunctional

15 Replies

I’m at Barnes & Noble, engaged in my favorite leisure activity of getting a cup of coffee and wandering among the books and maybe blogging a bit. And moments ago I got a text from my wife. She is out of town, has been for several days. She’s somewhere in the Ozarks having a reunion with her high school friends from St. Agnes Academy in Memphis (37 in the graduating class, all girls). Here’s what she texted:

Who directed & starred in easy rider & supported andy warhol?

This is my function in the world. Perhaps it is why she married me. Anyway, I quickly responded, “Dennis Hopper. Why?” That was an easy one. We just saw him in that Warhol thing last week.

It was at Spoleto. There was this show that was very, um, Warhol. It was called, “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.” We went with my artist daughter and a friend of hers. It was enjoyable, even artistically impressive. But if you thought about it too much, it was disturbing. And I tend to do that. That’s the other thing I do. I keep trivia in my head, and I think about stuff until I ruin it.

Warhol did these things he called “screen tests” in which he had various people in his orbit sit in front of a camera loaded with a short piece of film — I want to say about 100 feet; in any case, it would last exactly four minutes. In this way, the artist fulfilled his own prophecy to a certain extent — immortalizing these people for at least four minutes of their allotted 15. He shot people he thought were beautiful in one way or another. Some were quite conventionally beautiful the way I would use the word, such as this one (who bizarrely kept her eyes open the whole time, causing tears to flow). But all were interesting.

You had Dennis Hopper doing his thing. Jane Holzer brushing her teeth. Lou Reed drinking a Coke. Edie Sedgwick being big-eyed and lovely. The live, original music performed on the stage below the screen was very engaging. The hall was pretty full, and the crowd seemed engrossed. On the row in front of me I thought I recognized Allison Skipper from the Ports Authority. And sure enough, after we exchanged Tweets about it, she was to share this account with me:

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL…SONGS FOR ANDY WARHOL’S SCREEN TESTS

Call Andy Warhol what you will – genius, whack job, or some combination of the two – the man certainly had an eye for pretty people.

In 13 Most Beautiful, indie rock/pop musicians Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips pair hypnotic musical compositions against a backdrop of black and white projections of some of Warhol’s famous (or infamous) screen subjects. The footage itself is grainy and subjects range from the familiar (Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Nico) to the obscure. You can imagine Warhol himself off-screen, directing the subject to spontaneously cry, drink a Coca-Cola, look melancholy, or choreographing a slow curl of cigarette smoke or light reflected from the lens of sunglasses. Wareham and Phillips give an understated performance, demonstrating a conscious effort to take a backseat to the screen stars. The music serves to connect the audience with the subjects, in doing so achieving what they wanted all along. We love them, we adore them, we are fascinated by them. They are all famous, for at least 13 songs.

Our arty barometer says: It’s Warhol. It’s weird. Embrace it – with or without some mind-altering substance.

While the screen is dark for the show’s run at Spoleto, a recorded version is available to Watch Instantly on Netflix. Happy viewing.

–Allison Skipper

I pretty much agree with that. But at first, I didn’t think I would be able to sit through it. The very first “test” consisted of the totally impassive, androgynous Richard Rheem doing nothing but staring at the camera for the full four minutes. The band had not yet come out, so I didn’t have them to watch (of course, when they did come out, the stage was dark enough that all you could see really clearly was the whiteness of Britta Phillips’ shapely legs below her very short black dress as she played guitar and sang, but that was quite enough to make up for anything lacking on the screen), and this period was extremely tedious.

But it got better. Lots better. We weren’t bored again. And the experience was greatly enhanced by Dean Wareham’s narration, telling us a bit about the subject we were to see or had just seen.

And we watched, and were fascinated, as master showman Warhol had intended us to be.

But as for the disturbing part… well, look no further than “Ingrid Superstar’s” obsessive fingering of her face (and giving us the finger, but we don’t mind, the poor girl) throughout the four minutes, in which we see her with her hair cut to look like Edie Sedgwick. Right after we were told she was a junkie. And a sometime prostitute and temp (I liked the way he added “temp” anticlimactically). She was to go out for cigarettes years later and not come back — presumed dead, but her body never found. Her dysfunction is on display on the screen, we stare at it almost as unblinking as Ann Sheridan. Her being so obviously f___ed up is a source of entertainment for us, or of aesthetic edification if we choose to dignify it that way.

Then there was the guy who that same summer, deep in his own problems, was taking a bath at a friend’s house when he heard his favorite piece of music playing in the next room, upon which he leapt from the bath, ran into the room and danced about naked to the music, then jumped out a window to his death.

And here we were, staring at him making self-conscious faces for the camera. And I thought about this. Eventually, I was struck that what we were doing, sitting there so patiently, was a form of worship. Modern-day secular worship of celebrity, of hipness, of the various forms physical beauty can take, and of tragedy and dysfunction. I got to thinking of the Catholic practice of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This is a practice I’ve never been able to get into — not that I’ve ever tried. As a post Vatican II convert, it is alien to me, and smacks of idolatry. I recently heard that Pope Benedict wants it to make a comeback, which does not surprise me. But hey, I didn’t vote for him.

But while Perpetual Adoration to me seems strange and even vaguely wrong, here we were staring, for a period lasting longer than a Mass, at all these seriously messed up, self-involved people. And I found it fascinating, even enjoyable. What does that say about me, about us? I decry Reality TV, but I got into this.

It suggests that my priorities are seriously out of whack.

But at least it helps me keep the part of my brain devoted to cultural trivia sharp and active. My wife relies on me for that.

Regarding the end of film

Quick survey: Do you like clowns? Did you EVER?

14 Replies

We all have our prejudices. Me, I don’t like clowns. Never did. I was afraid of them when I was a kid. You know the axiom about how bigots tend to dehumanize members of the groups they don’t like? Well, that’s what I did. Sort of. Actually, it was the other way around. It’s not that I didn’t like them, therefore I thought of them as not being human. It’s that I really didn’t get that they were humans, and I didn’t like them.

In fact — and I was right on this point — they didn’t seem like anything natural. They weren’t dogs, or cats, or horses, or cows, or any other species that I found totally nonthreatening. They were like something from another world, and a pretty freaky, inexplicable one, too. (Later, I was to see “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” — or some of it, anyway — and it made a lot of sense to me.)

Funny thing is, I don’t remember being afraid of much as a kid. At least, not of real things. I never had the fear of nuclear war that so many who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis shared. I do recall having an unreasoning fear of that Snidely Whiplash guy who was on the kiddie show on WIS… when we lived in Shandon back around 1957, I was convinced that that guy lived in the bushes behind the duplex we lived in. Not the one on Heyward Street, the other one we lived in… But I wasn’t afraid of much else. Except clowns.

I have this early memory — this was probably the mid-50s, ’57 at the latest — of being in the Colonial store in Bennettsville (remember Colonial stores, you oldsters?) and there was some sort of promotion going on, and there was a clown giving out popcorn. I remember wanting to check out the popcorn, but not wanting it badly enough to go anywhere near that clown. I did my best to keep at least an aisle between him and me. Or rather, between it and me. This seemed to me a completely rational response. Still does, looked at from a little kid’s perspective.

I don’t know when it was, but I remember that eventually I did finally realize that they were people, only with makeup. I think it took awhile because the premise seemed unlikely. Why would people want to make themselves look so FREAKY?

Anyway, I got to thinking about that again when I read that Ronald McDonald is in trouble:

The 48-year-old, red-haired mascot has come under fire from health-care professionals and consumer groups who, in recent days, have asked the fast-food chain to retire Ronald McDonald. But McDonald’s Chief Executive Officer Jim Skinner staunchly defended the clown at the company’s annual meeting on Thursday, saying, “Ronald McDonald is going nowhere.”

He kept his job, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that. I hate for anybody to lose their job in this economy, but… well, you know… he’s a clown…

Anyway, somewhat more seriously… I’ve always sort of wondered about this concept that clowns are a great way to appeal to kids. Because they certainly weren’t in my case. So I put it to you: Do you like clowns? And more to the point, did you ever like clowns?

Oh, I guess we really CAN do stuff like that

2 Replies

Channel-surfing over the weekend, I noticed that Wolfgang Petersen’s “Air Force One” was showing. I didn’t stop to watch it. I own it on Blu-Ray — so I can actually hear Gary Oldman saying “smart bomb” in his extreme Russian accent any time.

But it reminded me of something.

Back in the late ’90s, I mentioned that movie in a conversation with then Secretary of Defense William Cohen. I was in Washington on one of those things where senior government officials invite journalists from the boonies to interviews as a way of trying to bypass the Washington press corps and speak straight to the people — or relatively so. The idea being that we’re less cynical, or more gullible, or something.

Anyway, at one point I suppose I confirmed Cohen’s faith in my lack of sophistication — thanks to my own odd sense of humor. There were several of us at the table speaking with the secretary, and someone was talking about some intractable international situation — Saddam Hussein, perhaps, or maybe Moamar Qaddafi — and expressing the American people’s supposed frustration. There was an implication in what this guy was saying that there was some simple solution that the Clinton Administration was simply failing to employ. I couldn’t resist facetiously saying, “Yeah, after all, everyone who has seen the opening of ‘Air Force One’ knows we can just send in a SEAL team and snatch a troublesome foreign leader neatly and cleanly and with no U.S. casualties, right out of his own house, any time we want to.” (To see what I’m talking about, start at about 2:50 on this clip.)

I expected Cohen to get that I was kidding, that I was making fun of Hollywood and the way it can unrealistically shape public expectations, and give me an ironic smile before patiently explaining reality to the other guy. Instead, he looked at me and explained very patiently and without a crack of a smile that it wasn’t that easy in real life.

I was so embarrassed that he thought I was that unsophisticated that I didn’t realize how difficult and rare, even impossible, such a coup de main operation can be. I think I muttered something about, “I was kidding…,” but I don’t think it did any good.

But here’s the wild and ironic thing: Cohen and I were both wrong. The bin Laden raid proved that — conditions being right — we CAN do stuff like that. This thought has occurred to me a number of times since May 1, and I was reminded of it again over the weekend.

Tell you what, though — I still don’t think a man swinging back and forth as he dangles from a parachute can shoot a guard on a roof in the back of the head with one shot, from hundreds of yards away — laser sight or no laser sight…

‘Hypocrite’ isn’t the right word for Sanford

30 Replies

There’s a discussion about character going on right now on “Talk of the Nation:”

We’re often taken aback when a respected governor or political candidate, or our own husband or wife, cheats. But psychologist David DeSteno argues that a growing body of evidence shows that everyone — even the most respected among us — has the capacity to act out of character.

… and I was struck by the fact that the segment started off with Mark Sanford as exhibit A.

Inevitably, talk turned to his “hypocrisy.”

I don’t see him as a “hypocrite.” But then, I didn’t see him as a guy who would so brazenly and spectacularly cheat on his wife (or do so on Father’s Day weekend), so what do I know?

But I still don’t see him as a “hypocrite.”

That’s a word that gets bandied about a good deal in our politics, particularly by social liberals talking about social conservatives who turn out to be human (and, as I said, sometimes spectacularly). It tends to reflect a couple of mutually-reinforcing elements of a world view: People who espouse traditional moral values are not only wrong, but they don’t even mean it! I mean, how could they, really? So it’s relevant to discuss.

Andy Griffith’s character on “A Face In the Crowd” was a hypocrite — a super-folksy alleged populist with a deep contempt for the masses. But Sanford — I think he always believed what he espoused, including “family values.” And still does, in his own weird way.

However, there were OTHER things they were saying on the show that were dead on, with regard to Sanford and the rest of us. Yep, he is a towering monument to rationalization. And yep, human character does tend to be “dynamic.” In spite of the root of the word, character is not stamped on us as indelibly as the image on a coin. It’s something you have to work at every day. And just because you act inconsistently with what you say on Wednesday doesn’t mean you didn’t believe it on Tuesday. Or on Thursday.

What Sanford revealed in my own far-from-omniscient opinion was a startling lack of depth, mixed with narcissism.

The narcissism shouldn’t have been a surprise, given his profoundly Randian (as in Ayn Rand, author of “The Virtue of Selfishness”) political views. Actually, it WAS a surprise, but it shouldn’t have been.

As for the lack of depth — the guy’s analysis of himself and what he openly acknowledged as his sin didn’t even go skin deep. He went around apologizing to everybody, but with an unrepentant blandness that seemed to take it as a matter of course that we were obligated to forgive him, while he blithely went about continuing to consort with this mistress. Because, you know, that’s what he wanted to do.

But “hypocrisy”? That both oversimplifies, and misses the mark…

I just can’t get THAT much into political trivia

8 Replies

Twitter alerted me to this item on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:

Iowa Straw Poll Rises in Importance

“With the Iowa straw poll a mere 90 days away, the absence of an obvious leader in the GOP race for the presidency, or even an obvious lineup, has left Republicans in a state of unease — but the uncertainty has also heightened anticipation,” the Des Moines Register reports.

First, I don’t care all that much about the Iowa caucuses themselves. That is to say, I don’t believe they should have the impact they have had for the last few decades. I wrote about that in a column several years ago.

Second, I can’t think of when I was ever impressed by a “straw poll” — anytime, anywhere. If I did, it was a moment of weakness in which my sense of perspective was badly diminished, perhaps by a nutritional deficiency of some sort.

But the idea of anybody being so a-quiver about such things as to write the phrase, “With the Iowa straw poll a mere 90 days away…” causes me to think that somebody needs to get a life…

OK, I feel much better now

4 Replies

This morning, Phillip was kind enough to console me for having typed “Obama” when I meant “Osama” by sending me a link about someone else who had done the same.

Later today, I saw the video above.

I feel SO much better.

Changing my mind — maybe we DID get Osama because of Obama

42 Replies

This is one of the problems with new media. Sometimes you spout off before you have taken in enough information and processed it. After the Obama administration analyzed intel for eight months, and STILL only had a little better than a 50-50 supposition that bin Laden was in the house, maybe I should have taken a little more time to pass judgment. After all, my original training was in a medium when I could take all day, or — in the case of my columns — all week to make up my mind. Consequently, I can only think of one or two columns ever that I later regretted writing.

Blogging is different. I try to make sure I really mean what I say here, too, but sometimes my interlocutors get my dander right up, as Professor Elemental would say, and I give ill-considered answers.

Such is the case with my reaction to a comment by our old friend Bud the other night. Here I was very pleased with President Obama’s performance in the bin Laden case, and saying so, when I read this by Bud:

Let’s not forget the tireless work the president did as commander in chief to bring this operation to a successful conclusion. It really does matter who our leader is. Thankfully we have someone competent in charge.

… it tapped me on a sore spot. The comment itself was pretty innocuous by Bud standards, but in it I read the ghosts of so many other comments by Bud along the lines of EVERYTHING George W. Bush ever did was wrong, especially invading Iraq, and so I responded:

Bud, we should all give President Obama full credit for playing his leadership role well. But don’t make the political mistake of thinking this happened because he is president. This is more about stellar work by nameless, ground-level people in our military and our much-maligned intelligence services.

There is one sense in which Obama was a critical factor, though. It’s complicated. I think I’ll do a separate post about it…

That separate post was the one in which I argued that it was Obama’s laudably bellicose attitude toward going after our enemies hiding in Pakistan that made a positive difference here….

And as I was writing that, my sense that Obama being president WAS critical to the way this happened started to take hold. Not that Bud was right or anything; I still object to the way he characterized it, especially later when he said, “I find it so refreshing to have a competent, bright, hard-working leader in charge. He’s not rashly going in to places like Iran and Libya. Not sure why we still have troops in Iraq but otherwise Obama is doing an outstanding job keeping our foreign involvements to a minimum.”

But that’s quibbling over personal quirks.

Bottom line is, the more I’ve thought about it the last couple of days, then more I have decided that on the MAIN, unadorned point, Bud’s right: There are elements to what happened that are uniquely Obama. Not that it wouldn’t have happened under other presidents — JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. — but maybe not exactly this way, or this successfully.

I was thinking that this morning when reading The Wall Street Journal’s detailed story on how the raid unfolded, “U.S. Rolled Dice in bin Laden Raid:”

An early favorite: a bombing raid. That approach would minimize risk to American troops and maximize the likelihood of killing the residents of the compound. But it might also have destroyed any proof bin Laden was there.

A helicopter raid would be more complex, but more likely to deliver confirmation. Some officials were wary of repeating a fiasco like “Black Hawk Down” in Somalia, when U.S. forces were killed after a botched raid on a warlord… [By the way, one quibble on this story: That last sentence was inaccurate. The raid was NOT on the warlord, but to grab some of his lieutenants, and it was successful, not “botched.” The lieutenants were neatly grabbed and the operation was essentially over when the militia managed to hit two helicopters with RPGs.]

On April 19, Mr. Panetta told the president the CIA believed bin Laden was there. Other advisers briefed Mr. Obama on preparations for an assault, including the outcomes of the dress rehearsals. Mr. Obama told them to “assume it’s a go for planning purposes and that we had to be ready,” an administration official said.

That same day, Mr. Obama gave provisional approval for the commando-style helicopter assault—which was launched from Jalalabad, Afghanistan—despite the added risk. Senior U.S. officials said the need to get a positive identification on bin Laden became the deciding factor.

You’ll notice that Bill Clinton wasn’t on my list above. That’s because I’m practically certain that he would have opted for the bombing. And the more I think about it, the less I’m positive about the other presidents.

Whereas Obama made exactly the right call. The Seal raid was the way to go. And the president was completely right not to tell the Pakistanis — another point where I have my doubts about some of those earlier presidents (for instance, Bush pere was all about some multilateralism). There is a certain confidence — something important in a leader — in Obama’s choosing the riskier option in the absence of certainty, and then, once HE was satisfied that this was bin Laden who was killed, having the body buried at sea. The president was saying, LET the conspiracy theorists claim it wasn’t him — I know it was, and I’ve eliminated his body or his grave becoming an object for our enemies to rally around.

The president may be a lousy bowler, but he makes good calls in a tough situation. That is my considered opinion — now that I’ve taken time to consider.

By the way, I might not have decided to write about this change of mind — it happened sort of organically the more I read, rather than in a “Eureka” moment — if I hadn’t read two other items in the WSJ this morning. As it happens, they were opinion pieces by people who are as firmly entrenched on the right as Bud is on the left. But whereas Bud’s reflexive anti-Bush rhetoric put me off from being convinced of his point (that, and the fact that I just didn’t have enough info yet to reach that conclusion), their unadulterated praise of someone they usually criticize really drove the point home in a way that not even I could miss it.

Bret Stephens’ piece was headlined, “Obama’s Finest Hour:”

Thane’s point isn’t that vengeance is better than justice. It’s that there can be no true justice without vengeance. Oddly enough, this is something Barack Obama, Chicago liberal, seems to better grasp than George W. Bush, Texas cowboy.

The former president was fond of dilating on the point, as he put it just after 9/11, that “ours is a nation that does not seek revenge, but we do seek justice.” What on Earth did that mean? Of course we sought revenge. “Ridding the world of evil,” Mr. Bush’s other oft-stated ambition, was nonsense if we didn’t make a credible go of ridding the world of the very specific evil named Osama bin Laden.

For all of Mr. Bush’s successes—and yes, there were a few, including the vengeance served that other specific evil known as Saddam Hussein and those Gitmo interrogations that yielded bin Laden’s location—you can trace the decline of his presidency from the moment he said, in March 2002, that “I really don’t care [where bin Laden is]. It’s not that important.”…

Good points, although I may not be totally with him on the virtue of “vengeance” alone. Note that he makes a point similar to one I made yesterday, as my mind was starting to change (sometimes, and this may be hard to understand, I change my mind as I’m writing something — on the blog, you can sometimes see it happen, as I argue with myself) — that when it comes to Pakistan, Obama is more of a go-it-alone cowboy than Bush. Which to me is a good thing.

Then there was William McGurn’s column, which was about how Republican candidates (obsessed as they are with fiscal matters) have a long way to go to catch up with Obama on foreign policy:

It’s not just that Barack Obama is looking strong. For the moment, at least, he is strong. In the nearly 10 years since our troops set foot in Afghanistan, a clear outcome remains far from sight, and many Americans have wearied of the effort. As President Obama reminded us Sunday night, getting bin Laden doesn’t mean our work there is done—but his success in bringing the world’s most hunted man to justice does reinvigorate that work.

It does so, moreover, in a way that few of Mr. Obama’s recent Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office have matched. The killing of bin Laden was no one-shot missile strike on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory suspected of making chemical weapons, as ordered by Bill Clinton. Nor was it a failed hostage rescue in Iran à la Jimmy Carter. Instead, it was a potent combination of American force and presidential decisiveness.

First, Mr. Obama authorized a ground operation with Navy Seals far inside Pakistani territory. Second, he did not inform the Pakistanis.

These are the kinds of hard decisions that presidents have to make, where the outcome is likely to be either spectacular success or equally spectacular failure. For taking the risks that would paralyze others, and for succeeding where others have failed, the president and his team have earned the credit they are now getting.

Also good points. And hearing such good points made by people who don’t like the president nearly as much as I do made a big impression on me.

So in the end, I find myself agreeing with those guys, and with Bud, on this point: Having Obama as president made a big difference in this case.

Scooped by The State on my own danged story

12 Replies

Our late, lamented AC units, right after the deed was done.

Some of y’all were disparaging The State on a previous post. Well, I’ll say this for them: They just scooped me on my own blasted story.

Of course, I let them. Remember that list of posts I’ve been MEANING to get to, which I wrote about back here? Well, one of them was about copper theft:

Metal fabricator Stanley Bradham delivered two 300-pound concrete slabs to a Pickens Street business Tuesday, then lowered a couple of 2- to 3-ton heating and air-conditioning units on top.

But it is what Bradham did next that theft-weary business and church leaders are hoping will finally slow the alarming rate of vandalism aimed at removing copper wiring – a trend that not only inconveniences victims, but also drives up their insurance rates.

Bradham bolted a lockable, customized, 350-gauge unibody steel cage over each of the units and welded the cages to the cement pads, which are secured by 12-inch anchors in the ground.

“It stops your access to the top of the unit, so you can’t get in,” said Bradham, of the newly formed Carolina Copper Protection company in Hopkins. “For the cost factor, it’s a very visual deterrence.”

That Pickens Street business was ADCO.

This is a story that goes under the heading of the Jerry Ratts dictum, “News is whatever happens to, or interests, an editor.” Or former editor, in this case. Jerry was a bit of a cynic, but he had a point. I mean, you know, this copper theft was a serious problem and all, but it only became dire quite recently, and suddenly…

Several weeks back, copper thieves destroyed both of our AC units to get a few coils of copper. We’re talking $8,000-$10,000 worth of damage for maybe, maybe $400 worth of metal.

Actually, that’s the high estimate. Back right after this happened, when I was in full fury over it, I interviewed Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott about it, and he said it was probably more like between $30 and $100. Which is… mind-boggling to me. I mean, it seems way easier to actually to out and work for that amount of money. I mean, mow a lawn or something — way less risk.

But apparently, it’s not as much trouble as I thought to tear up an AC unit that way. Chief Scott says they’re in and out in 3-5 minutes. Otherwise, he’d catch more of them.

It started with empty or abandoned commercial buildings. Now, he says, they’re hitting everything — churches, law offices, even private homes. Having your unit on a roof is no defense. Thieves destroyed 17 units from the top of the Dream Center at Bible Way Church on Atlas Road. Then, after the units were replaced, they hit again.

In fact, as Roddie Burriss reports:

In 2009, Southern Mutual wrote checks for $365,000 worth of losses due to copper thefts, according to Robert Bates, executive vice president.

In 2010, the company paid $1.2 million in copper theft losses to 174 member churches. Because most of the churches it covers are located in the Palmetto State, 109 of the 174 copper theft claims were in South Carolina, accounting for losses totaling $839,000, Bates said.

Through March 2011, Bates said the company already had paid churches $552,000 in copper loss claims, putting it well on the way to a $2 million payout for the year in these thefts…

I ran into Roddie and photographer Tim Dominick in the alley outside our building yesterday — and realizing they were doing MY story, I lapsed back into editor mode. Let the reporters and photographers do the work, then comment it. It feels natural.

So here’s the commentary part… Obviously, Something Must Be Done about this problem. Back when we were without AC, I had a suggestion, which I posted on Twitter. It was on a particularly warm day last month (I told you I’d been sitting on this for awhile):

Can’t breathe. No air-conditioning all week. Thieves stole copper. We need to bring back flogging. Or keelhauling. Something painful…

Sonny Corleone would say it’s just business, but I was taking it very, very personally. Chief Scott has a more constructive, and constitutional idea than my sweaty rantings: Make it harder to fence the stuff.

He’s backing, and testified in favor of, legislation sponsored by Rep. Todd Rutherford that would stiffen penalties (although, I’m sorry to say, no flogging), and make the businesses that buy scrap metal get legitimate ID from the people who sell them copper. Which would seem sort of like a no-brainer. As the chief said, “When you ride up on a bicycle, and you have two air-conditioning coils, you’re probably not a legitimate air-conditioning repair man.”

Chief Scott, and other law enforcement professionals, have enough problems, what with people coming at them with AK-47s. And yet they are spending more and more of their time fighting this rising tide of copper theft, and it’s pretty overwhelming — and not only to the angry, sweaty victims.

During our interview (which, like so many of my interviews, took place at the Capital City Club), the Chief looked out over the city and said, wondering, “Just LOOK at all those air-conditioners…”

Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott: "Just LOOK at all those air-conditioners..."

OK, so NONE of us knows what we’re talking about (the collards controversy continues to rage)

8 Replies

Remember how yesterday we were sorta kinda making fun of Greg Ryberg for not knowing (although I assumed he was being facetious) that the collards vote was for SC “official leafy vegetable,” not “official vegetable?”

Turns out that Ryberg had it right, and Larry Martin, and The Associated Press, and bradwarthen.com, all had it wrong. AP moved this correction last evening:

SC legislators make collards state vegetable

Corrects that the designation is for “official vegetable” instead of “official leafy vegetable.”

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – South Carolina senators have named collard greens the state’s official vegetable.

The Senate on Tuesday approved recognizing collard greens with a 30-12 vote. The proposal needs to get routine final approval Wednesday before being sent to the House.

State Sen. Greg Ryberg of Aiken wondered why collards were getting singled out for recognition and not something like green beans.

State Sen. Larry Martin of Pickens said the designation was for a leafy vegetable and green beans weren’t leafy vegetables.

But the legislation doesn’t limit the designation to a leafy vegetable.

That means collard greens can stand tall over everything from everything from arugula to zucchini.

I don’t know about the AP, but I suddenly feel the need for a leafy vegetable with which to cover my nakedness…