Try finding a watchdog these days

L.A. Times media writer James Rainey did a simple but heartbreaking story: He wandered over to the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration and ticked off how the number of reporters covering county government had plunged. It’s another measure of where we’re going and why capitalism and journalism don’t seem to be very good for each other.

Punch this into your browser:

Recommended reading

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-onthemedia18-2009jan18,0,2214604.column

When to Use Quotes, and When not to

As you develop your writing talent you develop a technical appreciation of quotes–when they help and when they hinder.

Here, from two stories published today, are a couple lessons.

The first was a feature by the Los Angeles Times’ Peter H. King, who is making his way across the nation, sending back mood pieces tied to the Jan. 20 inauguration of Barack Obama.

Watch how artfully the quotes are presented, set up. This is a good example of a writer with his own distinctive voice stepping out of the way and letting the characters have their say.

Recommended reading

Total length: 1,015 words. Total words in quotations: 297, or 33%.

For contrast, read DeeDee Correll’s sidebar reconstruction of a plane’s crash landing in Denver, published in the Chicago Tribune. The recounting of what happened could not be left to the victims–they knew only the small universe that was their chaotic world; the reporter’s voice needed to be the dominant one, and it was.

Total length: 514 words. Total words in quotations: 35, or 7%

Check’em out.

NO LOVE FOR OBAMA IN THE OIL FIELDS
By PETER H. KING

MIDLAND, TEXAS–Here in the heart of the Texas oil patch, where the presidential voting ran about 4 to 1 for John McCain, where the latest tourist attraction is President Bush’s boyhood home, and where, according to a recent report in the Midland Reporter-Telegram, the election has produced an unparalleled run on assault weapons by gun owners fearing new federal bans, the notion of a Barack Obama honeymoon appears to be a nonstarter.

This was driven home with a visit to the Petroleum Club in downtown Midland, where each day at 9:30 a.m. a handful of Permian Basin heavyweights gather around a poker table for coffee and conversation.

“I’m scared to death,” one of the oilmen offered for openers in what would be a two-hour airing of their brief against the president-elect, which included complaints about liberal policies, inexperience, automaker bailouts, creeping socialism and so on.

“Obviously,” explained equipment supplier Jack Hunnicutt, choosing his words with care, “this part of the country is totally Republican. And we foresee probably some heartache before this is over. More giveaway programs, probably.”

I had described Hunnicutt in print, after a similar visit years ago, as a “balding bear of a man,” and his cronies still tease him about the line. Teasing is very much a part of the daily banter.

“Ronnie, get in here,” Hunnicutt sang out to a latecomer in his slow Texas twang. “We need your ex-per-tise. Whatever that is.”

“You-all don’t realize it,” the man responded, “but I could have been a brain surgeon.”

“And you damn sure could have practiced on this group,” Hunnicutt shot back.

This was not an insignificant bunch. As an oil industry lobbyist explained the first time I stopped by: “These aren’t the guys who get their boots muddy. These are the guys who pay the guys who get their boots muddy.”

Their meeting place, on the ground floor of a sand-toned building on Wall Street, was a windowless cavern done up richly in tan granite, dark woods and deep carpets. At other poker tables in this private sanctuary, an eavesdropper could hear deals being arranged, drilling strategies mapped.

There wasn’t much in the room to suggest hard times, and in fact until recently Midland — called the Tall City for its 20-odd-story office towers that rise out of the West Texas plain — had bucked many of the economic trends gripping the nation. Skyrocketing oil prices will do that in a city built on the stuff.

Six years had passed since my last visit. On that tour, I had been sent across the country to report on what Americans were saying about the prospect of a war with Iraq. The Petroleum Club of Midland, where Bush himself had spent time in his oil-patch days, had seemed to offer a certain bastion of support.

I received a surprise.

While the president had their general backing, some of these oilmen harbored serious doubts, citing a lack of a clear endgame and questioning the wisdom of injecting American troops into a region where internecine hostilities had flared for centuries.

“It’s kind of like stirring up those damn fire ants,” Hunnicutt had said. “They go underground for a while and then they come back and eat you up.”

Of all the people I talked to in that pre-invasion period — including noted historians and spring-training peanut vendors — the old boys of the Petroleum Club had seemed the most prescient.

I wondered if they would surprise me again with their thoughts about Obama and what his election might mean for America. They surprised me, all right, but only with the degree of their dissatisfaction.

“This country is not made up of a lot of happy campers right now,” said drilling consultant Johnny Mulloy. “Some of his ideas are so foreign to the way we think. Everything owned by the government. It doesn’t work. The government is going to own all the banks. Medicare is going to be screwed up like it is in Canada.”

Much of their ire this morning was directed at recipients of federal bailouts. After a few robust years, the Permian Basin oil region was again in retrenchment as oil prices fell back to earth.

“There are probably 100 less rigs running today than there were two months ago,” Hunnicutt said. “That is at least 15 to 20 people per rig who are suddenly out of work.

“You don’t see them marching in Washington saying, ‘Hey, where is our damn bailout?’ Not one driller have you seen up there, begging like these car people and these banking people.”

That the bailouts — and, for that matter, the universal fiscal crisis Obama must confront — had occurred on Bush’s watch did not seem to count for much.

“It’s only going to get worse,” Mulloy grumbled.

“You are going to have some old boy over here who is making $22 an hour as a roughneck,” said one participant, who like many did not want his name published. “And some guy is going to be reading his paper and having a sweet roll at $80 an hour in Detroit. “That is the perfect storm for someone to start a revolt.”

They wanted to make clear that their objections to Obama had nothing to do with race, only with politics and what they saw as a lack of experience. Most of all, in their view, the president-elect had simply made too many promises to too many people.

“He is going to be a whole lot less popular with some of the disenfranchised and downtrodden,” one said, “because he is not going to be able to deliver all that he has promised.”

And what of the Americans who voted for Obama, who saw him as an agent of hope with the potential to lead the nation to a new epoch of less-fractured us-against-them politics?

Mulloy, the drilling consultant, fell into oil-speak to answer that one.

“There is,” he said, “a term in the oil field about having your suction in the wrong pit. I’ll leave it at that and let you figure it out.”

ABOARD PLANE, ‘WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD
Passengers, firefighters recall scene in Denver
By DeeDee Correll

DENVER–Gabriel Trejos wasn’t a nervous sort of passenger. He enjoyed flying. So when he and his wife, Maria, settled Saturday into their seats on Continental Flight 1404, heading to Houston to spend Christmas with his father, he felt relaxed. He hoisted his 13-month-old son, Elijah, onto his lap to point out the lights on the runway.

Minutes later, the plane gathered speed for takeoff. Then it hurtled off the runway, sliding down a gully. Maria, pregnant, gripped her seat.

“It was the worst feeling in the world,” said Trejos, one of 115 on the Boeing 737 at Denver International Airport.

As it slid downhill, Trejos saw flames in the engine outside his window. Finally the plane stopped. The air grew smoky. “Get out of the plane,” passengers began to yell.

The firefighters of Station 31 were just sitting down to dinner when the red alarm connecting them to Denver International Airport’s control tower began flashing.

That means a plane in trouble and it goes off frequently enough that no one was nervous. Real trouble is rare. But this time, at 6:18 p.m. Saturday, a voice from the tower announced a crash. “Did he just say what I thought he said?” asked firefighter Jason Cole.

From the four city fire stations spread around the 53-square-mile airport, firefighters stopped what they were doing.

At Concourse A, Cole and Capt. Mike Benton had been awaiting a passenger arriving with a medical problem. They took off running.

Inside the cabin, passengers rushed for the exits, and to Trejos’ disbelief, several first tried to retrieve luggage. Trejos, with Elijah in his arms, climbed onto the icy wing of the plane resting on its belly and dropped to the ground. His wife followed.

As the firefighters arrived, they saw passengers hiking toward them, some weeping, others eerily calm. Most shivered in their shirt sleeves in the single-digit temperatures. Those who had jackets offered them to Trejos to keep Elijah warm. One flight attendant had a sprained ankle and several people had head injuries, said Capt. Tom Gliver. In all, 38 were injured, with The New York Times reporting that five remained hospitalized on Sunday.

Cole, 37, clambered up the slide, which was already slick with foam that other firefighters had sprayed on the plane, and braced himself.

“I was expecting the worst,” he said.

So was Benton, 55, who entered after Cole.

It was black within. Cole, breathing through an oxygen tank, started down the aisle on his knees, groping with gloved hands for anything that felt human. Outside, firefighters aimed foam at the plane, and the spray blasted through the skin of the aircraft, dousing Cole in the face. An obstacle blocked the aisle, so he started climbing over the seats, running his hands over cushions, patting luggage.

Benton followed holding a thermal imager, a device that looks like a camcorder and detects body heat. He pointed it down each row of seats. Nothing.

“I was overjoyed,” he said later. “Not a soul was on that plane.”

By Sunday, the National Transportation Safety Board had begun an investigation.

The disease that haunts our lives

A portrait of a struggling newspaper—are there any other kind?—by New York Times’ Dan Barry.

Go to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/us/15land.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=bristol&st=cse

Recommended reading

Another take on life without newspapers by T.J. Sullivan. Go to:

http://www.laobserved.com/intell/

A perfect game and an imperfect relationship

Dear readers of Newsthinking,

I thought I’d use the site to recommend good stuff, stuff that print journalism has to do more of if it expects people to continue subscribing. We’ve got to recognize that this is becoming an artistic performance test: Can print offer enough surprises, enough goodies that lead a reader to say: Hey, I never thought about that? With that, two recommendations today:

Poignant New York Times story on bowler who dies immediately after throwing his first perfect 300 game. Watch how judicious the writer is about not larding the story up with quotes. He used his own voice. And wrote a great small-town-America piece. Paste address into your browser:

Recommended reading

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/sports/othersports/08bowler.html?scp=1&sq=300%20bowling&st=cse

Three-parter in Los Angeles Times about a weird romantic relationship between Aryan Brotherhood prison inmate and his sister-in-law/lawyer. Very long but worth getting lost in it.

Part 1

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-pam30-2008nov30,0,2664112.story

Part 2

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-pam2-2008dec02,0,4270960.story

Part 3

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-pam4-2008dec04,0,5843828.story

. . .interesting things happen. In this case, powerful details blossomed

Nobody says a word in the following story, published in today’s Los Angeles Times. Nobody has to. The writer sensed that the absence of public comment when the body of another dead soldier arrived at the hometown airport was the key to making you feel you were there.

Writing without quotes forced the writer to concentrate on observational detail. Watch how the absence of quotes makes the 534-word story more emotionally powerful.

Once you begin killing quotes. . .

A SOLDIER’S FINAL HOMECOMING
By Paloma Esquive

They stood on a small landing strip for private aircraft at Long Beach Airport. A mother and father, a wife, family and friends. They gathered for the arrival of the body of Army Sgt. David J. Hart, who was killed in combat in Iraq.

There were no speeches, no eulogy. Those will come later. On Tuesday afternoon, there was only the quiet, methodical ceremony of a soldier’s final homecoming.

Framed by a clear blue sky, eight members of a military honor guard stood at attention, waiting for a small charter airplane. The group’s leaders walked down the line, adjusting hats to sit just so, wiping away the faintest smudge. To their right, police officers and sheriff’s deputies stood, hands behind their backs, waiting to lead Hart’s casket in a procession from the airport to a Boyle Heights crematory.

Just before the aircraft made its final stop, 47 members of the veterans group Patriot Guard Riders filed out of a terminal reception room and fanned out, forming a long line with fluttering American flags.

Across the way, a group of airport workers in faded gray uniforms left their jobs when they saw what was happening and stood quietly observing, at attention in their own way. Even air traffic seemed to abate as everyone waited in silence.

Hart, of Lake View Terrace, died in Balad of wounds suffered in a firefight with insurgents Jan. 8 in Samarra, north of Baghdad. He was 22.

Two other soldiers also were killed: Pfc. Ivan E. Merlo, 19, of San Marcos, Calif., and Pfc. Phillip J. Pannier, 20, of Washburn, Ill.

They were all assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) at Ft. Campbell, Ky.

Hart’s family and friends waited just outside the terminal door. His mother, Sheri, stood with her arms wrapped around his widow, Nicole, quietly whispering words of consolation. They watched as the plane pulled up and its door opened.

Army Spc. Richard Gilbert, who served with Hart in Iraq and who escorted his body home, walked out of the plane and stood at attention nearby.

The honor guard’s leader whispered instructions to other members, who quietly made their way, marching in lock-step to the plane, where they lowered the flag-draped casket onto a stand.

Arm-in-arm, Hart’s widow and mother made their way up. They hesitated for a minute, and then Nicole draped herself over the wooden casket. Her mother-in-law held her.

Soon, they were joined by the rest of the family — Hart’s father, Jack; brother, Daniel; sister, Sarah; and his in-laws, Ruth and Ramiro Gonzalez, and their son, Ramiro Jr. Each of them laid a hand on the casket, every once in a while whispering words to each other. They did not let go until the driver of the hearse gently said it was time to go.

The honor guard, whose members had been waiting quietly at attention, made its way again to the casket and carried it to the hearse.

The last soldier in line closed the door softly. She saluted and whispered final instructions to her group before it marched away. The click-clack of dress shoes on the pavement was the only sound.

1954 is happening all over again

People trying to analyze Barak Obama’s electrifying effect on audiences often suggest he has found a way to graft the yearning of Martin Luther King onto the challenging charm of John F. Kennedy.

But they’re looking at the wrong models. To appreciate Obama, don’t go back to a presidential election year. Go back to the early 1950s, when a Memphis record company owner named Sam Phillips would wistfully imagine a style of music unimaginable in segregated America.

Phillips, whose Sun Records specialized in recording black artists, would tell friends that he could make it big if he could just find a white singer who could perform with the Negro “feel”—the less inhibited, more spontaneous and, to much of society, more dangerous style called rhythm & blues..

Obama’s secret weapon

Which is why the best way to appreciate Obama’s unexpected surge in popularity is to listen to some 1954 Elvis Presley recordings, as the 19-year-old truck driver’s pure, high wail is filtered through a minimal, gut-bucket arrangement that, in one beautiful moment, has the singer declares incongruously: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.” The tension between soaring voice and subject matter seizes you by the throat. It commands you to listen.

Similarly, listen to Obama’s concession speech after losing to Hillary Clinton Tuesday. Obama filters his political ideals through an oratory style that to the ear is more Midwest suburban than stereotypical African American preacher. (See: the ’88 presidential campaigns of Revs. Jesse Jackson Al Sharpton.) Obama’s stump style often creates an Elvis-like type of dramatic tension between what the audience hears and sees.

Obama has become skilled at ratcheting this tension further by selectively reaching back to the parallel construction and repetition techniques of the black church and throwing small shards to the crowd.

“There is something happening in America,” he said at one point Tuesday, and started the next several sentences that way: “There is something happening when….” He borrowed the civil rights concept of being “ready” for equality: “We’ve been told we’re not ready, that we shouldn’t try…” That allowed him to bring forth a declaration: “Yes we can,” which he said three times before the crowd took over the chant.

If Elvis is best appreciated as a white man comfortable with a black feel, Obama is a black man comfortable with a white feel. Both men generated excitement by crossing back and forth over a seldom-trod barrier.

When Elvis first met Sam Phillips, Phillips asked him who he sounded like. “I don’t sound like nobody,” Presley said. Similarly, without having to boast, Obama is saying the same thing. Maybe King and Kennedy aren’t the only ghosts who seem to be campaigning with Obama. Need proof? Tuesday night, when Obama delivered his brilliant concession speech, would have been Elvis’ 73rd birthday.

A therapist’s guide to using the best part of yourself

If you’re the type of person who is making New Year’s resolutions, or who is given to the questions “Who am I?” or “What Have I Become?” I offer this essay by Southern California marriage and family therapist Dr. Ronald Soderquist, to be published in the January issue of Mind & Spirit.

‘It is your business. . . to keep the channel open’

Who Are You? Defining Yourself Within

It was a lovely blue sky afternoon at the annual women’s tennis tournament in Manhattan Beach. We had bleacher seats near the top, which was alright because it was an unusually small stadium for a competition that attracted eight of the top 10 women’s tennis players in the world. As we relaxed during a break between games, I noticed two women sitting further down and to the left waving at us. When one caught my eye she called out, “I have been looking at you. Are you someone special?” That immediately activated my funny bone and I replied, “Well, I am very special to my family and friends.” She continued, “I mean, are you in the movies or on television?” I couldn’t resist, “Well, my agent has asked me to come incognito today.” A silly question deserves a silly answer. But I am grateful to that stranger for her question, “Are you someone special?” As we look at that fascinating question, let’s start with the women and their struggle to find identity in a “man’s world.”

For much of human history, half the population has responded to our important question, “How can I be special? I’m just a girl.” It’s true, you won’t get by with that kind of stereotypical-talk with my granddaughter, Emily, a Cal Poly honors graduate, who will soon be in law school. But you don’t need to be a history buff to know that male babies have been treated as more special than female babies all over the world. We remember how Henry VIII sent his wife, Anne Boleyn, to the guillotine because she produced Elizabeth instead of a boy. By the way, don’t you just love the irony of how despised Elizabeth became a great leader of her nation?!

Even in today’s modern society, we still encounter a multitude of “I’m just a girl” examples. Over and over, we see evidence right here at home of young women hesitating to use their full ability because they fear men will resent them. For instance, recently at a small Midwest college, a reporter was shocked to find women students apprehensive of being too forward in classroom discussions.

So, how do we discover we are someone special? For some it comes bubbling up from mysterious genetic sources. The noted psychologist, Abraham Maslow, writes: “A musician must make music, an artist must paint and a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.” We remember how little Mozart, by age five, was already composing minuets. Later he could hear entire symphonies in his head. And he was lucky to have a father who taught and encouraged him.

However, not all fathers are pleased with an offspring’s choice of identity. Eduard Manet’s father was a French judge and, naturally, wanted his son to pursue a career in law. There must have been some pretty heated arguments in that home. But, when I wander through art galleries I am always thankful Eduard embraced his true identity.

That still leaves us with the question of how the rest of us discover who we are since most of us are not born with genius talents in music or art. Therefore, parental and cultural messages shape our identity. For example, in my wife, Elda’s family, her mother’s message was: “You can do anything you want to do. You are capable and smart. Go for it!” On that Minnesota farm Elda got a different message from her father: “As the eldest daughter you have an obligation to stay home to help your mother with the younger children.” So we listen to the messages and we make choices. Elda chose to listen to her mother’s message.

However, the female identity is growing stronger not just in the U.S., but throughout the world. According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, young women in India are choosing between two very different messages about their identity. Until the last few years, if you were a young woman in India, no one cared about your unique talents. No one asked about your dreams. There was no point in imagining a career because there was only one path for you: your family selected a husband and after the wedding, you moved into his parental home. Now, for the first time in India’s long history, some women are boldly breaking custom by leaving home after college to explore their talents as fashion designers, aerobic instructors, software engineers or radio DJ’s. In the Indian culture, these are daring and sometimes even dangerous choices.

The Times article also described how one young woman, Ms. Mandala, after college, wanted to savor her independence. As she explored her freedom she said: “What is ‘me’? What is ‘myself?’” We are reminded of Henrik Ibsen’s character Nora in his play, A Doll’s House and Nora’s standing against the culture of her day. Nora’s husband, Helmer says, “Before everything else you’re a wife and a mother.” Nora says, “I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that before everything else I am a human being just as much as you are. At any rate I shall try to become one.” Women, and all people, for that matter, must be able to identify themselves within before they can act as a mother, father, sister, brother, etc. to anyone else.

As I prepared this article, I also pestered friends and relatives with the question, “who are you?” So when we visited Elda’s 88 year-old Aunt Marcella, I said: “Marcella, I’m going to ask you a question. Please just give your spontaneous answer. Who are you?” Her response was dramatic. She quickly straightened up in her chair, raised her arms as though holding a bat and said: “I’m a catcher on a champion softball team!” Marcella’s favorite memory of her identity went back 70 years. She added: “When I graduated from high school there were just four choices for me as a woman: getting married, nursing, teaching or a working as a secretary.” Like women in India, her identity was limited by what society expected of her. Therefore her favorite identity was a time when she felt free to express her natural identity. Now, all over the world, the limitations are collapsing for women. While perhaps not as dramatic, many of us men are also claiming our humanity and saying, like Nora, “before everything else I am a human being.” We are claiming the right to feel, the right to be both fierce and tender.

In my office I frequently hear something similar from women in their fifties: “I am at a new stage of life when I have time to focus on me. I actually have time to think about what I enjoy doing. I am still trying to find myself. Now I can make choices. Do I want to go back to school? Start a business? The children are launched. I’m ready to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.” She is “recasting herself” and like women in India she is asking: “Who is ‘me?’” I ask her: “What do you love to do so much you would be willing to pay to do it?” Then we explore her deepest values. Ultimately, by cultivating our natural talents and deepest values we can find a way to live with meaning, with love and with hope.

Dancer Martha Graham said it best: “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open

23 tips to cut fat from your story

My biggest complaint with the Times is having to pour through redundant type, book-length articles that need a Rider’s Digest condensation job . . . Starting a news item like some melodrama has me rolling my eyes. I usually move on to less complicated stories.

–A subscriber in Upland, California, in an-email to a Los Angeles Times Metro reporter on Dec. 6, 2007

Presciently, an hour after that e-mail was sent, small groups of L.A. Times reporters and editors participated in sessions designed to offer tips on cutting fat from their copy. Here is a summary of the participants’ suggestions. Read this if you’re interested in streamlining–or simply evading the wrath of that reader in Upland and countless others like her.

Does your copy have that bloated feeling?

1. Test your quotes. If you can do a better job communicating in your own syntax, do it. We must fight against obligatory-sounding quotes.
2. Squeeze each sentence.
3. Read your story aloud-and, if you have true courage, have someone read it aloud to you
4. Write a “theme statement” at the top of your screen and don’t allow yourself to use any language that doesn’t advance the theme.
5. Check your sentences that precede a quote. You can often find redundancy. Kill these “echoes.”
6. Try to avoid passive voice
7. Edit on a print-out, not the screen.
8. Read your print-out with the margin tightened to resemble the published column-width version.
9. Put a non-deadline story down for a day.
10. Pretend you are a subscriber
11. For editors: Ask your reporters if they’d be willing to read the story with your editing marks suppressed
12. Use shorter words
13. Take out “boring” words
14. Try to avoid parenthetical sentences
15. “Of” is a sentence-stretcher you can often lose
16. Value periods over commas, which can create extraneous phrases
17. Squeeze the “background” elements of your story
18. Can you read your first paragraph with one breath?
19. After you decide you like your story, give it one more read
20. Kill jargon
21. Trim widows
22. Too much of the word “that” can slow down the story.
23. “Stage” your story to keep it in focus.

Most of these tips are obvious, but what’s also obvious is that we don’t pay enough attention to them. Make this pledge: Try one of these techniques on your next story. It shouldn’t mean more than a 15-minute effort against the hated foe: fat.

Good luck!

What 4 op-ed pieces in 11 days can tell us about ‘truth’

“There is no truth. There is only perception.”

–Gustave Flaubert

Truth is wet sand at the beach; you can mold it into endless combinations and you can shatter it at will. It’s always important to remember the fragility of your subjects’ certainties–how fragile their perceptions are, and how quickly they can be disproven. Nowhere recently has this been more clear than on the New York Times’ op-ed page, where in the past 11 days four columnists have offered different interpretations of the significance of a Ronald Reagan presidential campaign stop in 1980, the year Reagan unseated President Carter.

It’s always more complicated than you think

When the most recent retrospective on Reagan’s visit to Neshaoba County ran in the NYT today, I almost screamed: “Enough.” But I read it, and I commend the four pieces to you as examples of all the untidy nuanaces that wrapped inside the “facts” you think you have solidly nailed. You can find many Ronald Regans inside these commentaries: Prejudiced, unprejudiced, canny, clueless, misunderstood, nailed to a cross.

The parade began Nov. 9 when NYT columnist David Brooks took his crack at what he felt was a shard of unsupportable history:

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.

But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988). Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: ”The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

The Reaganites then had an internal debate over whether to do the Urban League speech and then go to the fair, or to do the fair first. They decided to do the fair first, believing it would send the wrong message to go straight from the Urban League to Philadelphia, Miss.

Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: www.onlinemadison.com/ftp/reagan/reaganneshoba.mp3 . He told several jokes, and remarked: ”I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: ”Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase ”states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether Reagan’s outreach to black voters would work.

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase ”states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of ”Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

Brooks’ column prompted his liberal fellow NYT columnist Bob Herbert to take a swing four days later:

Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.

Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.

They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to register and vote.

It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. ”I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, ”to tell him not to go.”

After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.

Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: ”We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, ”I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about ”states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.

To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like ”states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.

This prompted Reagan biographer Lou Cannon to offer his analysis on Sunday:

SUMMERLAND, Calif.– Political mythologies endure. One myth that is enjoying a revival in a year when Republican presidential candidates are comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan, their iconic hero, is the notion that Mr. Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters.

The core of this myth is the claim that Mr. Reagan scored a political masterstroke when he spoke on Aug. 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. At the fair, Mr. Reagan told a cheering and mostly white audience, ”I believe in states’ rights” and that as president he would do all he could to ”restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”

He had been talking this way for two decades as part of his pitch that the federal government had become too powerful. What was different this day was not Mr. Reagan’s words but where he said them: Nearby Philadelphia, Miss., was notorious for the murders in 1964 of three civil-rights workers, killed in cold blood with police complicity.

In the wake of Neshoba, Mr. Reagan’s critics pounced. President Carter’s campaign operatives portrayed Mr. Reagan as a divisive racist. At a money-raising event in Chicago, Mr. Carter told his audience: ”You’ll determine whether this America will be unified, or, if I lose this election, Americans might be separated black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.”

The mythology of Neshoba is wrong in two distinct ways. First, Ronald Reagan was not a racist. Second, his Neshoba speech was not an effective symbolic appeal to white voters. Instead, it was a political misstep that cost him support.

Any fair-minded look at Mr. Reagan’s biography and record demonstrates that he was not a bigot. In 1931, when Mr. Reagan was on the Eureka College football team, two black players were refused admission to a hotel in Elmhurst, Ill., where the team was playing. Mr. Reagan took them with him to Dixon, Ill., to spend the night at his parents’ home. He and one of the players, William Franklin Burghardt, remained friends and correspondents until Mr. Burghardt died in 1981.

As a sports announcer in Iowa in the 1930s, Mr. Reagan opposed the segregation of Major League Baseball. As an actor in Hollywood he quit a Los Angeles country club because it did not admit Jews. In 1978, when preparing to run for president, Mr. Reagan opposed a California ballot initiative that would have barred homosexuals from teaching in the state’s public schools. He was widely credited for its defeat. (Mr. Reagan was understandably anathema in the black community not because of his personal views but because of his consistent opposition to federal civil rights legislation, most notably the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

Far from being a masterstroke, the Neshoba speech was a mistake made by a candidate who had not yet become the skilled operator the nation would see as president. Surveys by Richard Wirthlin, his pollster, showed that Mr. Reagan had little hope of winning black support but was competitive among moderate white voters who wanted a president who would be sensitive to minority issues. The Neshoba appearance hurt Mr. Reagan with these voters in the target states of Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania without bolstering his standing among conservative Southern whites.

Knowing that it would be damaging, Mr. Wirthlin urged Mr. Reagan to cancel the Neshoba speech. Mr. Reagan wouldn’t do it. He had a showman’s superstition that it was bad luck to cancel an engagement once it was booked.

It was one of many blunders Mr. Reagan made in August 1980 when he was an undisciplined candidate who lacked an effective campaign manager. He sent his running mate, George H. W. Bush, on a mission of reassurance to China, then undermined Mr. Bush by praising Taiwan. He provoked an uproar at a veterans’ convention by calling the Vietnam War a ”noble cause.” He gave a rambling answer to a reporter’s question that seemed to endorse creationism.

Mr. Reagan was rescued by his secret weapon: his wife, Nancy Reagan. She brought in his onetime California political manager, Stuart Spencer, who helped focus both the candidate and the campaign. Once Mr. Spencer arrived, Mr. Reagan talked no more of Taiwan, creationism or states’ rights. Instead, he focused on the failed leadership of Mr. Carter and his unpopular economic policies, borrowing from Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask Americans if they were better off than they had been four years ago.

In November, Mr. Reagan won the presidency in an electoral landslide. Neshoba had nothing to do with it.

Which led leftist NYT columnist Paul Krugman a take his cut this morning:

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement.

The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement.

The centrality of race — and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans — is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as ”humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.

The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. ”Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.

And Ronald Reagan was among the ”some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.

True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, ”Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” ”Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race — a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”

Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.

There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a ”strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.

Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over ”George Wallace inclined voters.”

Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.

Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong.

The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time. The ”macaca” incident, in which Senator George Allen’s use of a racial insult led to his election defeat, epitomized the way in which America has changed for the better.

And because conservative ascendancy has depended so crucially on the racial backlash — a close look at voting data shows that religion and ”values” issues have been far less important — I believe that the declining power of that backlash changes everything.

Can anti-immigrant rhetoric replace old-fashioned racial politics? No, because it mobilizes the same shrinking pool of whites — and alienates the growing number of Latino voters.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn’t avert our gaze because we’re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan’s image.

One life told in 408 words

Most of us would say the same whiny thing if asked to do a profile in 400 words: “Whhhhaaaaaaa! I can’t capture a life in 400 words!”

But suppose you took it upon yourself to see if your writing tools included harsh self-discipline–suppose you tried to write a 400-word profile every once in a while. Think of it as an exercise that will develop the self-editing skills that are even more in need when you’re writing long.

Squeeeeeez it!

I thought of this while reading a 408-word profile by Gregor McGavin in the Riverside, CA, Press-Enterprise. Gregor is drawn to features about marginalized yet sometimes hopeful people, and this is what he wrote last week on the 30th anniversary of Elvis’ death. Much of what I liked about the story came from what the writer didn’t do–beat me over the head about the adversity of the protagonist. As you read, think about what you might have done differently, for better or worse.

ONCE A MONTH, ELVIS LIVES
By Gregor McGavin

The transformation takes place in an office at the end of the makeshift ballroom, where a Saturday night dance is just getting started.

Off comes the navy blue blazer, then the collar and tie.

Even the Superman T-shirt has to go.

On comes a cream-colored bodysuit with a six-inch collar and a V-neck down to his belly.

On go the gold-framed shades.

He cinches a broad gold belt around his waist, picks three favorite compact discs from his bag and strides to the door.

“Here comes Elvis,” Tim Page says with a grin.

Life has often been more cruel than tender to Page, a mildly retarded Riverside man of 49.

He and his brother Joel, who is also retarded, live with their older brother Rick, a truck driver. Tim needs a caseworker to help him with day-to-day living.

He works as a janitor in Colton. Pushing a broom and a mop pays $2.28 an hour, on top of his monthly disability check.

But one night a month — this night — Tim Page gets to be the King.

The monthly dances hosted by Riverside nonprofit group Ability Counts are a huge hit with the developmentally disabled people they serve.

And Page is perhaps the highlight of it all.

Tonight, the hall is dressed up in red crepe-paper.

The deejay spins songs from the ’80s — Michael Jackson, Madonna, the Romantics.

“It’s not my kind of music, but it’s OK,” says Page, his thin frame and sharp features set him apart from the older Elvis, though his hair is dyed black for performances.

Slowly the dance floor starts to fill.

Couples sway.

A big guy in a sports coat struts.

A fellow in a Stetson shakes strangers’ hands and another guy walks in circles.

Page paces as he waits for his cue, but says he’s not nervous.

Finally, the moment arrives.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the deejay says, “put your hands together for Elvis!”

Page steps on stage to a driving beat.

He swivels his hips as the horn section starts.

His hair flies and his right arm works like a piston.

He points and poses and the crowd cheers.

Page works his way through “C.C. Rider,” then straight into “Burning Love,” and “Suspicious Minds.”

The voice falters now and then, but the moves are pure Presley.

When the music ends, Page lifts his mic one last time.

“Thank you,” he says in a low drawl. “Thank you very much.”

Thirty-four separate, short sentences, averaging 11.9 words per sentence. The words themselves were short–4.3 charactes per word. In keeping with the virtue of brevity, I asked Gregor to write a short self-analysis. He said:

“This story was so loaded with poignancy, I wanted to be sure to not overwrite. So I tried to use mostly short, simple sentences and avoid any over-the-top adverbs.

“I thought that leading the reader from Tim’s preparations through his performance was a good way to work in his personal story without beating the reader over the head with it. Then, I just tried to capture the excitement of the dance and the joy that Tim and others take from it.

“I had to write very economically, because what I was really trying to do was to capture a moment that meant a lot to these folks. I think I picked my spot well, and from there, the story almost told itself.”