The war against cliché
Idon’t like Monday holidays. More precisely, I don’t like what they do to my schedule. One of the first things you learn in this business is that a daily newspaper comes out every day. Which means every day there is work to be done. So people are working every day. Saturdays, Sundays, holidays. Labor Days.
Of course people get time off. We all strive to achieve work-life balance. But newspaper culture encourages an obsession with the job, and a lot of people who are drawn to the trade tend to work long and hard, in part because they don’t want to let any of their colleagues down. And then there are people like me who don’t want to miss a column because we’re afraid of getting Wally Pipp-ed.
If you don’t recognize the name “Wally Pipp,” well that kind of makes my point. Pipp was the first baseman for the New York Yankees 100 years ago. He was a pretty good player on those first really good Yankee teams, and before Babe Ruth came along he was arguably the best power hitter in the major leagues. One day in 1925,
Pipp showed up at the ballpark with a headache. He asked the trainer for a couple of aspirin, and his manager, Miller Huggins, overheard him.
“Hey Wally, why don’t you take the day off?” Huggins allegedly said. “We’ll try the new kid at first base today.”
So Lou Gehrig started for the Yankees that day. And stayed in the lineup for the next 13 years. (If you don’t know Lou Gehrig, I can’t do nothing for you, son.)
The Yankees waived Pipp at the end of the year and he got picked up by Cincinnati and played out his career there. He had a fine 1926 season, hitting 15 triples. No one should cry for Wally Pipp.
A long time ago I decided I was never going to be Wally Pipp-ed. Bench me or cut me — I’m not voluntarily taking myself out of the game. So I have weeks and days like today, when I need to write a few thousand words, to make early deadlines so I can “take the Labor Day holiday off.” Explaining, not complaining.
And actually cheating a bit, committing what is sometimes called in the trade recycling and sometimes self-plagiarism. Most of the rest of this column is based on one from 19 years ago, written in response to something a colleague wrote about how he loved his easy columnist job. He said he could knock out a column before breakfast and have the rest of the day to play. I suspect he often did just that; he was telling his own truth.
What’s undeniable is that column writing is inside work that requires little physical exertion. Other than making one’s self look foolish, there are few hazards associated with it.
Yet, it’s not easy for most. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to write a column. No one is more conscious of how imperfect my work is than I am. I know every clumsy word, every noisome rhythm, every banal expression, every forced unfunny joke. All I can offer in my defense is that I’m doing the best I can. And that I respect my readers.
If I have a theory about newspapers, about the media in general, it is that respect is important. We are not trying to explain the world to stupid people. Those who report and comment on the news ought not assume they are talking to idiots. Newspapers are for people who read, and they generally appreciate a newspaper that gives them something to read rather than colorful, easily digested pictures and hot gobs of gossip.
It’s true that some, maybe most, people care little for serious things; they prefer shouting matches and the cartoon politics of cable shows. Maybe they are looking for someone to tell them what they want to hear, that greed is wholesome and that they deserve more because they are more moral than people with different ideas about how to love or worship. Maybe most people are excited only by the rawest sensation; they think book-learning is for suckers and want nothing more from life than comfortable recliners, big-screen TVs and cheap gasoline for their trucks.
But I don’t think so.
Most of us can reason together. We can admit we don’t know everything. We can hold contradictory ideas in our heads and recognize there are things beyond our understanding. We might admit that our experience is limited and our knowledge incomplete, and that it is hubris to prescribe simple solutions to what are invariably complex problems.
That’s always in my mind when I write columns. There are plenty of people who are smarter than me and who know more about what I’m writing than I do. So I have to be careful.
What these columns are about, as much as providing information and a perspective that may or may not strike a given reader as novel, is a kind of conversation, a thinking through in print. We live in a world that’s rich in strangeness, full of bright and shiny things we might want to examine a little closer, if we have the time.
Newspapers tend to cover things that are coverable, like politics and business and legal matters that can be reduced to dollar signs and agate lines. We need a way to mark our progress through the world, to leave a record for the unborn and unimaginable that will come behind us and eventually bury us in their rush to fade away.
But there is more to life than box scores and filings, red and blue states. All of us know this, but sometimes it’s easier to follow the formula, to assert and rant and color the air with boasts and loud talk. People think it’s funny when you’re arch, when you make fun of TV shows and the celebrities who act so kooky sometimes.
That’s the trap of this job; if you start chasing popularity, you start sounding like everyone else, becoming a part of the chattering class that rules thumbs up or down on everything. You get shrill and snarky and develop an echo chorus or, God forbid, a fan base, and maybe you start repeating yourself and pushing the buttons, and before you know it you’re writing about what you found in your backyard or carrying water for some hack pol who happens to be wearing the right color jersey.
I’ve been writing newspaper columns for nearly 40 years. I know all the tricks, all the ways to take short cuts, all the easy ways out. I know how the game is played, how the cross-pollination thing works, how seductive even the minor celebrity available to someone who regularly has his picture in the newspaper can be.
It’s a job, and as with any job there are days when you just don’t feel like going to work, when it’s a real triumph to produce something that can pass as mediocre, as a honest failure. We all have bad days, we all inflict bad work on our readers.
I don’t think we ought to be cavalier about this. I try not to be offended when someone means no offense, but a person ought to do more than scribble a few lines in the morning. At the very least, we have a duty to join what Martin Amis called “the war against cliche,” to make a craft of putting word next to word, of providing an example of, if not thoughtfulness, at least care.
Anything less is just stealing.