Today in 1814, Adolph Sax was born in Belgium. Sax would fashion from brass and a clarinet reed the saxophone, a major part of early rock and jazz.
No comments on Presty the DJ for Nov. 6
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This election was supposed to be too close to call in Republicans’ efforts to retain control of state government in Wisconsin and in states where Republicans were trying to win Senate races to take over the U.S. Senate.
Never mind.
It is hard to see how this election could have gone much better for Republicans. Gov. Scott Walker was reelected. Brad Schimel was elected attorney general. The candidate who pledged to work to eliminate the state treasurer’s office won, replacing the candidate who made the same pledge four years ago and then changed his mind.
Walker won because of a combination of enough voters thinking he’s doing a good job as governor, and enough voters thinking Mary Burke wouldn’t be an improvement. Schimel ran on not being a partisan, which is refreshing in our hyperpartisan days, because (contrary to what Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm thinks) justice shouldn’t have a D or R tag on it.
The Republicans gained a seat in the state Senate, replacing Sen. Dale Schultz, the leader of the Dale Schultz Party, with an actual fiscal conservative (and a CPA), Rep. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green). That was despite Schultz’s efforts to anoint a successor not named Marklein, who committed the unpardonable sin of running against his own party’s incumbent.
Marklein touted himself as being an independent, which seemed a stretch. So did opponent Pat Bomhack, which was a ridiculous assertion given that state Democratic Party leadership (if that’s what you want to call them) recruited Bomhack (getting Bomhack, who had never won an election before, to switch races, in fact) to run against a candidate that wasn’t raising sufficient money and, perhaps, seemed as if he might not do everything Senate Democrats wanted him to do.
The winner list definitely includes U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, who seemed to me too conservative to win in the Sixth Congressional District, which does include some Democratic parts. So does the 17th Senate District, where Marklein won. Since I don’t live in the Sixth anymore, I neglected to find out the last time it sent a Democrat to Congress, but it’s been quite a while. The 17th, meanwhile, has elected exactly two Democrats since statehood. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) is in the majority party in the Senate, and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) is not.
Sometimes, elections aren’t about who wins, but who loses. That certainly includes Burke, whose campaign was summed up in four words: I’m Not Scott Walker. Burke showed nothing, and neither did anyone on her behalf, that demonstrated her ability to be governor. The loser list also includes Democratic attorney general candidate Susan Happ, who showed that she apparently doesn’t run her office very well, and gives plea bargains to people who don’t deserve them.
Who else lost last night? Barack Obama, beyond question. Iowa now has two Republican U.S. senators, with military veteran Joni Ernst replacing pottymouth Tom Harkin. Obama’s home state, Illinois, will have a Republican governor. Union thug Richard Trumka predicted that Burke would defeat Walker. Wrong again.
Schultz lost, though he was not running, because his sort-of-endorsed would-be replacement lost. Schultz hates the tea party (which means he apparently hates a lot of people who voted for him), and yet didn’t present himself as an alternative to too-conservative Republicans and too-liberal Democrats by running for governor as an independent.
Not everything went well, but it never does. U.S. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) was reelected despite his achieving nothing in Congress. Secretary of State Douglas La Follette was reelected despite his doing nothing on taxpayer expense. The latter can be explained by Republican opponent Julian Bradley’s refusal to advocate to eliminate the office, which meant voters had no actual choice. Voters did have an actual choice in the state treasurer race, and look how that worked out.
People who don’t like last night’s results will blame them on big money, or stupid voters. Both are the Lament of the Loser. As for the money complaint, too much money is spent in getting and keeping office because the stakes are too high in elections, both in Wisconsin and nationally. The answer is not campaign finance “reform”; it’s cutting legislative pay and staff and reducing the size and scope of government at every level.
Politics is like sports except that the season never ends, and therefore there is no final winner. Ads for the 2016 presidential race will begin in 5 … 4 … 3 …
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Today in 1956, Nat King Cole became the first black man to host a TV show, on NBC:
The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Elvis Presley performed at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minn. To get the fans to leave after repeated encore requests, announcer Al Dvorin announced, “Elvis has left the building.”
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The election is today, which means we need only hang on until 8 p.m., after which the damnable political ads on radio and TV and in your mailbox will end.
(Before I go on: Read the Obligatory Disclaimer on this page, so you know that these are my opinions and my opinions alone.)
Republicans replaced Democrats left and, well, left in the elections four years ago. Having endured an illegitimate recall, Gov. Scott Walker is now running for his second term, amid questions about whether he’s going to run for president soon after this election.
Every election is a referendum on the incumbent, or at least the incumbent party. The incumbent party in Wisconsin is quite obviously the Republican Party, to which voters entrusted state government four years ago.
Walker cleaned up the fiscal mess left by the James Doyle administration to the point where the state budget is running a surplus, and the rainy-day fund ignored by Doyle has actual money in it. Only reflexive Walker-haters (which include those legislative Democrats who suddenly discover interest in fiscal responsibility — this means you, Kathleen Vinehout!) can claim state finances aren’t in better shape than they were four years ago.
School districts, municipalities and counties complain about not getting enough money from state government. I don’t mean to be cynical (for once), but school districts, municipalities and counties have claimed they aren’t getting enough money from state government during my entire lifetime regardless of whether the governor is a Democrat or Republican, or which party controls the two houses of the Legislature.
One good thing about the Republican Party (which is not perfect, and, as I have said before, does not include me among its membership) is that it has fiscal conservatives who put their work where their mouths are. This includes Rep. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green), running to replace Sen. Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center). Marklein is who you can thank for the UW System tuition freeze, which will certainly go away without Marklein in the Senate and Walker back as governor.
There are people running for office — for instance, Rep. Janis Ringhand (D-Evansville), running for the 15th Senate District — who claim that (insert function of government here) needs more “revenue.” Ringhand brought that up herself about local (that is, non-state) roads. Ringhand may be right. But when I asked her what in government should be cut so that local roads got more money, she didn’t have an answer for that; only that more revenue was needed.
That is why if you didn’t vote for a single Democrat Tuesday, you would be making the right choice. Democrats are fiscally irresponsible and fiscally unconservative. Fiscal conservatives do not raise taxes, and they certainly do not raise taxes as a first choice. Until the time when — or, more likely, if — Democrats let back into their party such actual fiscal conservatives as former Democratic Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer, Democrats cannot be trusted with your tax dollars. Based on some comments Democrats have made, the state Democratic Party will not be happy until we are number one in the nation in state and local taxes.
Walker also cut taxes. He didn’t cut them enough, as far as I’m concerned, but Doyle raised taxes $2.2 billion in a state that has taxes that are already too high. Mary Burke hasn’t said she’ll cut taxes, and she didn’t oppose Doyle’s tax increases before she started running for governor.
Walker has been criticized for being divisive. Complaints of divisiveness are always from the losing side, or the side that thinks it’s losing. Besides that, if you believe divisiveness is the number one political sin, then Abraham Lincoln shouldn’t have fought the Civil War to end slavery, and non-whites should have shut up about their civil rights, because the civil rights movement was divisive. So was the anti-Vietnam War movement. If you complain about divisiveness, then you’re complaining about people exercising their First Amendment rights.
The Act 10 public employee collective bargaining reforms didn’t go far enough, because people paid by our tax dollars should not be allowed to be in unions. What Act 10 did, however, is to put the correct people in charge — people we elect to run municipalities and school districts — in such issues as pay and benefits. That means that, for instance, bad teachers, while not being able to be fired immediately, now can be put on a path of improve-or-leave. The unions should never, ever, ever, ever have their hands on tax dollars, and that is what they were able to control in the bad old days.
The election therefore is not about being divisive; it is about what the incumbents did, and what they promise to do. It is also about whether the alternative is better, instead of being merely, in Burke’s case, Not Scott Walker.
Burke is the most unqualified major-party candidate for governor in my lifetime in this state. I wouldn’t vote for Tom Barrett, and before him Doyle, for dog-catcher, but one couldn’t really argue they weren’t qualified to be governor; they were just wrong on the issues. Burke is not only wrong on the issues, but she has proved at no point that she can even make decisions, let alone the right decisions. If you want a puppet of the public employee unions, Burke is your choice.
Walker didn’t meet his jobs pledge. And yet the state created more jobs in his four years in office, no thanks to Barack Obama, than the Doyle administration lost in its eight years in office. (Which, by the way, includes years of economic expansion nationally.) The state unemployment rate is lower than two-thirds of states and the national average. And for the first time in more than three decades, personal income growth now exceeds the national average. So to say that the state’s economy is in bad shape compared to other states is a lie. (This means you, Ruth Conniff!)
Voters for Burke and other Democrats should also remember this: Even if Burke wins, and even if Democrats take the Senate, Republicans will remain in charge in the Assembly. This means that Act 10 is not going away. This means that concealed-carry is not going away. This means that the state minimum wage is not going up.
The bad guys in government are (among others) the public employee unions. Walker and Republicans stood up to the unions. That should be enough reason right there to vote for Walker and other Republicans.
“Other Republicans” include someone who had nothing to do with Act 10, Waukesha County district attorney Brad Schimel, now running for attorney general. In addition to the well publicized cases where Jefferson County D.A. Susan Happ made the wrong decisions in prosecution (including, worst of all, someone who shot to death two people and gets to get out of prison in five years instead of dying in prison), Happ has already said she won’t defend laws she disagrees with. We have had quite enough politics in law enforcement as it is. Schimel says he will defend and enforce laws regardless of which party enacted them.
State treasurer Matt Adamczyk also deserves your vote because he wants to get rid of his office, as his predecessor Kurt Schuller said he would advocate, but now refuses. Secretary of state candidate Julian Bradley should get points for not being Doug La Follette, but Bradley does not want to get rid of the useless secretary of state office.
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Today in 1963, John Lennon showed his ability to generate publicity at the Beatles’ performance at the Royal Variety Show at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were in attendance, so perhaps they were the target of Lennon’s comment, “In the cheaper seats you clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewelry.”
The number one single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1972:
Today in 1990, Melissa Ethridge and her “life partner” Julie Cypher appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine for its cover story on gay parenting.
I bring this up only to point out that Etheridge and Cypher no longer are life partners, Cypher (the ex-wife of actor Lou Diamond Phillips) is now married to another man, and Etheridge became engaged to another woman, but they split before their planned California wedding. And, by the way, Cypher had two children from the “contribution” of David Crosby, and Etheridge’s second woman had children from another man. Draw your own conclusions.
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The Wisconsin State Journal endorsed Mary Burke for governor.
That says three things. Anyone who claims the State Journal takes conservative editorial stands cannot read. The State Journal made that decision because it was concerned about losing subscribers among Madison’s too numerous government employees. The previous sentence says everything you need to know about Madison — too much government, and intolerant of any non-liberal point of view.
Who has the correct view? The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:
The most important single election next Tuesday is for governor of Wisconsin. The incumbent, Scott Walker, was elected in the Republican wave of 2010 and embarked in 2011 on a serious, substantive program of reform. He succeeded in his effort to eliminate “collective bargaining” for most government employees, a boon to the state fisc and a blow to politicians, mostly Democrats, who benefit from public-sector electioneering at taxpayer expense.
Because of the latter effect, the Walker reforms provoked furious outrage and extreme tactics. Democratic state legislators fled the state and hid out in Illinois to deny majority Republicans a quorum and forestall passage of the bill. Opponents tried to unseat a state Supreme Court justice and mounted a recall drive against the governor. Both efforts failed; in the 2012 recall—a rematch with 2010 opponent Tom Barrett—Walker expanded his margin of victory. Watching MSNBC that night was awesome.
(The recallers did succeed in capturing a state Senate majority for the Democrats, but the victory was Pyrrhic. The decisive recall came after the end of the 2011-12 legislative session, and the GOP retook the majority in November 2012.) …
With so much at stake, the campaign has been high-minded and substantive. Haha, just kidding. As we noted last month, Walker’s opponent, Mary Burke, put forward boilerplate policy proposals—literally copied from proposals used by earlier Democratic candidates in other states. In the tradition of Vietnam veteran John Kerry and businessman Mitt Romney, she is running what is known as a “biographical campaign,” one focused less on what she’d do if elected than on what she did before going into politics. Like Romney, her experience is in business. She was an executive at Trek Bicycle Corp., a privately held company founded by her father.
As Kerry or Romney could tell you, a danger of a biographical campaign is that it opens you up to criticism—fair or not—from people who had experience with you then. That’s what’s now happening to Burke. It began with a Tuesday piece from the Wisconsin Reporter, a nonprofit investigative-journalism website:
In attempting to explain her two-year work hiatus in the early to mid-1990s, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke has said she was just burned out after an intense period of leading European operations for Trek Bicycle Corp., her family’s Waterloo-based global manufacturer.
In fact, Burke apparently was fired by her own family following steep overseas financial losses and plummeting morale among Burke’s European sales staff, multiple former Trek executives and employees told Wisconsin Reporter.
The sales team threatened to quit if Burke was not removed from her position as director of European Operations, according to Gary Ellerman, who served as Trek’s human resources director for 12 years. His account was confirmed by three other former employees.
“She was not performing. She was (in) so far over her head. She didn’t understand the bike business,” said Ellerman, who started with Trek in 1992, at the tail end of Burke’s first stint as a manager at Trek.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel credited the Wisconsin Reporter for the scoop and advanced the story with its own reporting:
Two former high-level executives of Trek Bicycle claim that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke was forced out as head of European operations for her family’s business 21 years ago—an allegation that Burke and the company denied, labeling it a last-minute smear campaign.
“I’m not saying she was incompetent,” said Tom Albers, former Trek chief operating officer who left the company in 1997. “Maybe this job was too big for her.”
As in Kerry’s case, there are Trek veterans who see matters differently. Also as in Kerry’s case, Burke’s supporters are attempting to discredit her critics with a series of ad hominem attacks. A Journal Sentinel editorial makes that clear right up top in the headline: “Attack on Mary Burke: Consider the Source.”
The bulk of the editorial consists of six paragraphs, each of which begins “Fact” and all but one of which end “consider the source.” (The other ends “Indeed.”) Here are the first and third:
Fact: The initial report surfaced in The Wisconsin Reporter, a pseudo-journalistic publication bankrolled by conservative foundations. The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation gave the Reporter $190,000 in 2012 to help underwrite the website. The Bradley Foundation’s top executive is Michael W. Grebe, who also chairs Walker’s campaign committee. Consider the source. . . .
Fact: A second source, dug up by Journal Sentinel reporters, says it’s his understanding that Burke was “fired” from her job directing Trek’s European operations 21 years ago. . . . Albers left the company in 1997 and considers himself a conservative. He became the top executive at a Trek competitor, Specialized Bicycles. Consider the source.
That’s a bit awkward, isn’t it? The Journal Sentinel tells us we can’t trust what we read in the Wisconsin Reporter, then tells us we can’t trust what we read in . . . the Journal Sentinel. It’s the liar’s paradox! Though it’s easily resolved when you consider that in most major newspapers, the newsroom and editorial pages are separate operations. We leave it to the reader to decide which, in the Journal Sentinel’s case, is more trustworthy.
The editorial’s attack on the Wisconsin Reporter is entirely ad hominem; there is no criticism of the actual quality of the site’s journalism. If the editorial didn’t have such a transparent political agenda, one might suspect sour grapes over getting scooped. In the second paragraph, the “source” we are supposed to “consider” is not the Journal Sentinel, but the Journal Sentinel’s source, who turns out to be rather partisan (which we should note the news story made clear).
To be sure, the criticism of Burke is also ad hominem. But ad hominem arguments are not necessarily fallacious. Information that contradicts a candidate’s claims about her own qualifications surely is relevant to the question of how to vote. The motives of those making such counterclaims are also relevant, as the Wisconsin Reporter acknowledged in its original story: “Full disclosure: Ellerman is chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party.”
The Journal Sentinel news story added that Ellerman “ran as a sham Democratic candidate” in one of the state Senate recalls, and Daniel Bice, a columnist at the paper, reported that Ellerman’s Facebook page included truculent postings about President Obama.
It’s reasonable to argue that Ellerman’s claims deserve to be heavily discounted because of his strong partisanship. Perhaps Albers even gets a slight discount because he “considers himself a conservative.” (That he works for a Trek competitor would be relevant only if there were some reason to think that Burke, if elected, would use her office to benefit her family’s company.)
Further, as noted above, Burke has defenders among her former colleagues. One is former CEO John Burke, who said: “Mary is a good person. Mary spent 55 years building up her reputation. All of a sudden, you get this character assassination.” Another is Steve Lindenau, who was managing director of the Germany office. From the editorial:
“I think given her work intensity, she would put in super long hours,” said Lindenau, who is now chief executive of Easy Motion Electric Bikes-BH Bicycles. “She was on a very aggressive growth pattern for Europe. It’s a family-run business. Maybe she just got burned out and needed a break.”
So what are Lindenau’s politics? The Journal Sentinel doesn’t say. What about John Burke’s politics? In terms of party and ideology, again we have no clue. But it seems a safe bet that in this election, he’s not supporting Gov. Walker, whose opponent is Burke’s sister.
The problem with the Journal Sentinel’s defense of Mary Burke is not that it is ad hominem but that it is one-sidedly so. And on that score the newsroom is as guilty as the editorial page. Guiltier, in fact, since editorialists are under no ethical obligation to be balanced.
The editorial bemoans the criticism of Burke as “a classic political trick, an October surprise of innuendo and half-truths” and avers that “no voter should base his or her decision on 20-year-old twaddle.” But such are the hazards of a biographical campaign.
Which raises the question: Why isn’t Burke running a substantive campaign? As Collin Roth of RightWisconsin.com observed in February: “Mary Burke has been largely incoherent on Act 10,” the collective-bargaining reform law. “Sometimes she opposes, sometimes she likes the healthcare and pension provisions, sometimes she wants to reinstate collective bargaining rights, and sometimes she simply didn’t like that the law was divisive.”
One possible answer is that she doesn’t think a full-throated campaign of opposition would win the election. Established Democratic politicians in the state seem to have agreed when they begged off on challenging Walker, leaving the field open for Burke.
Yet even if Walker’s reforms are secure, a loss for him next Tuesday would be a huge victory for Big Labor—a show of union power that would discourage other governors from undertaking similar reforms by sending the message that success is politically fatal. That’s why the race is so important even though the campaign isn’t especially edifying.
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The number one single today in 1956:
Britain’s number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1962:
Today in 1964, a fan at a Rolling Stones concert in Cleveland fell out of the balcony. That prompted Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locker to ban pop music concerts in the city, saying, “Such groups do not add to the community’s culture or entertainment.” Kind of ironic that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ended up in Cleveland.
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Wisconsinites know that the first radio station was what now is WHA in Madison. Today in 1920, the nation’s first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air.
The number one British single today in 1956 is the only number one song cowritten by a vice president, Charles Dawes:
The number one song today in 1974:
The number one British album today in 1985 was Simple Minds’ “Once Upon a Time” …
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We begin with a non-music anniversary: Today in 1870, the U.S. Weather Bureau was created, later to become the National Weather Service.
Tomorrow in 1870, the first complaints were made about the Weather Bureau’s being wrong about its forecast.
Today in 1946, two New York radio stations changed call letters. WABC, owned by CBS, became (natch) WCBS, paving the way for WJZ, owned by ABC, to become (natch) WABC seven years later. WEAF changed its call letters to WNBC.
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Saturday begins National Novel Writing Month, along with National Blog Writing Month (motto: “No plot? No problem!”).
I’ve been doing the blog thing for nearly seven years between this and the predecessor blog, so I don’t have to enter the latter.
As for the former, that “no plot” thing, as you know, has been my downfall. The standard advice is to write what you know, which precludes me from what I’d rather write, detective fiction. My eyesight deteriorated below police levels somewhere in middle school (thus leading to poor hand–eye coordination and bad aim), so other than having covered crime of various sorts, and investigated none of said crimes, I have no ability to write detective fiction. If this were National Book Writing Month (“NaBoWriMo”?), I could just take a month of this blog, and presto! Instant book!
Since you’re probably wondering after three paragraphs: What prompted me to write this was news that author Ron Franscell’s book about a newspaper publisher/editor, Deadline, is being rereleased in early November by WildBlue Press:
A dying convict’s last request thrusts Jefferson Morgan, a small-town newspaperman into a deadly maelstrom as he explores a fifty-year-old case of child murder – a wound this town still isn’t ready to re-open. Amid threats from unexpected foes and under the most important deadline of his life, Morgan struggles with his own conscience to dig deep into the town’s past, tell the truth no matter the consequences, and unveil a killer who managed to remain unmasked for almost 50 years.
(Are not all maelstroms deadly?)
You may remember that I reviewed Deadline, and generally liked it (as did other reviewers), though I found a flaw with a subplot. One of the hero’s antagonists is the banker who is financing the newspaper’s purchase. The banker has to be there as a plot point (apparently because the bank isn’t a big enough advertiser; that should be enough of a conflict right there) when most purchasers of newspapers not by corporations are by seller financing. Had I written it, I would have made the banker a big advertiser who threatens to pull his advertising, but that’s just me. I have not read Franscell’s sequel, Obituary, but I will have to.
As you know, I’ve been underwhelmed for years with fictional depictions of journalists as heroes. (Perhaps journalists are not heroes.) One of the Deadline reviewers called it “newspaper noir.” I’m a fan of film noir and detective fiction, but I had never heard of newspaper noir. If you’re familiar with film noir, newspaper noir fits this description, though Deadline does not:
Perhaps the darkest of these is Ace in the Hole, a 1951 indictment of mass storytelling starring Kirk Douglas, who plays Chuck Tatum, an unforgivably dishonest newspaperman who knows what the people want. The people, mindless cattle that they are portrayed as in this film, do not necessarily want journalists to “tell the truth,” as the quaint needlepoints hanging in Tatum’s Albuquerque newspaper office instruct. They want, above all, a classic tale—preferably unspooled over many days, with heroes and villains and dramatic suspense and a thrilling ending. If that requires Tatum to keep a man trapped inside a mine shaft for six days so that he can spin a serial, proto–Baby Jessica yarn about a mountain that is cursed by ancient Indian spirits, a devoted wife who is praying for the man’s rescue, and a desperate multiday bid to drill a hole through the top of this cursed mountain (Tatum’s idea, the trapped man could have been pulled out in a day if other methods were used)—if that’s what is required to hook the people, boost subscriptions, and revive Tatum’s career, then so be it.
This being noir, everything ends badly for everyone involved, including the mindless cattle-people who, having read Tatum’s dispatches in papers all over the country, descend upon the dusty plain in front of the cursed mountain and while away their days of suspense with the help of speedily arrived circus entertainers and carnival rides. In one of the final scenes, Tatum stands on the mountaintop—a disheveled, alcoholic anti-Moses—and speaks his commandments to the people through a microphone. It will not spoil anything to say that these commandments are simple, grim, and ultimately not very likely to drive up newspaper circulation. There is no mass story, this film teaches, and therefore no credible mass media—only human frailty and mass manipulation.
Just as depressing, but far more entertaining, is The Big Clock, which features a rotund, time-obsessed media mogul named Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), who presides with ruthless efficiency over a Hearst-like media empire. His building’s lobby boasts—in addition to the big clock itself—many smaller clocks telling the time in Janoth’s 43 foreign bureaus (bureaus that stretch “from Reykjavik to Cairo, Moscow to Buenos Aires”) as well as a statue of Atlas, weight of the world on his shoulders, muscles straining at the difficult task of carrying around reality as humans know it. But, oh, what a profitable task this carrying of reality to its proper destination can be! Style Ways, News Ways, Crime Ways—these and other popular titles have brought Mr. Janoth a considerable fortune, although a new “recession” in circulation is worrying him. “Dynamic angles!” he barks during a meeting early on in the film. “We live in a dynamic age, gentlemen, with dynamic competitors—radio, newspapers, newsreels. We must anticipate trends before they are trends. We are, in effect, clairvoyants.”
Murder and mystery ensue, and both are well worth the time it takes to resolve, but the most delightful part of the movie has already passed. It is, quite simply, the sad absurdity of the proposition that any lumbering, giant, Hearst-like institution, then or now, could ever be dynamic enough for a truly dynamic age.
I had a detectivish piece started for a previous NaNoWriMo, also called Deadline (an Amazon.com search of books with the word “deadline” in the title returned 2,851 matches), about a small-town newspaper reporter who finds out something nefarious. It is on a non-functioning laptop (when I started writing it Google Drive didn’t exist), but it wasn’t good enough to be upset about that. The premise of NaNoWriMo is that if you write around 1,700 words a day for a month, you will get a 50,000-word novel at the end of the month. Writing that much in a day isn’t difficult for me (what you’ve read so far is about 950 words), but doing that every day around the rest of your life is not easy, even if you’re not working. And if you miss a day, or if your day’s output doesn’t hit the daily word count, you have to make that up the next day.
I subscribe to The Rap Sheet blog, which covers detectives famous and obscure in print and in movies and TV. It’s a worthwhile read (as are The Thrilling Detective and Criminal Element), covering such subjects as writers of yore whose output would shame Stephen King and James Patterson, as well as creators of the lurid yet attention-getting covers of said detective novels. The Rap Sheet author throws out a few liberal snippets, which he’s entitled to do, but it’s a bit annoying for those expecting to read about detectives instead of slams upon non-liberals.
Which brings to mind this aside: The Rap Sheet’s author writes approvingly of detective-fiction writers who insert a liberal point of view into their work. There is, for instance, Stephen Greenleaf, whose lawyer/private detective John Marshall Tanner thinks ill of the Ronald Reagan 1980s. More recently, he wrote approvingly of a British author whose hero, an in- and out-of-work British reporter, investigates the disappearance of the daughter of a high Church of England official. (Hint: The father comes across very badly.) The theme of more novels than I can count features someone downtrodden by a rich and powerful antagonist, which seems a fundamentally liberal point of view. I’m not suggesting that every mystery should be as right-wing as Mickey Spillane’s work. It does make me wonder, though, if those writers are writing for their audience, or if they’re indulging their inner political/cultural commentator.
Back to the actual point of this piece: Irrespective of the fact that no journalist I know or have ever met is tough enough to be believable as a detective, private or otherwise, the fact is that watching journalism take place is as interesting as watching cars rust. Consider the job functions of someone working at a weekly newspaper:
- Talk to people, either in person or on the phone.
- Sit at government meetings while other people drone on.
- Take photos.
- Use a computer (email, looking for something on the Internet, writing, page layout).
- Think.
Of those five, only the first might be interesting to watch. So since the journalism process is visually dull, you have to substitute plot, and not only do I have a problem creating an A-to-Z plot, creating an A-to-Z plot with a journalist with detective skills as a believable hero is beyond my limited creative abilities. Remember, unlike real life, fiction has to make sense.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 