Clevelanders are from Ohio and Our City Politicians are from Mars

Like Calling Peas, Beans

The Ethics of Burglary

AM Conservatives – Not Doing Themselves Any Favors

If You Don't Want Us to Look, Wear a Burka

How Does He Get So Smart?

"Sit Down and SHUT UP While I Tell You What You Need"

Welcome to the White Privilege Club, Root of ALL Evil

Friday 11•25•2005

Clevelanders are from Ohio and Our City Politicians are from Mars

     What is it about Cleveland politicians. It's as if they commute in from Mars, examine the area for personal advancement opportunities and then endorse the most hairbrainedness schemes possible.
     Once Cleveland was the Big Town between eastern giants like New York and Philadelphia and the centerspot of the country, Chicago. We made steel and then bent it into automobiles. We were "The Best Location in the Nation." We had mayors like Tom Johnson and safety directors like Elliott Ness. The Hannas and the Sperrys helped develop a city with broad avenues and a center of the city dedicated to the public.
     But, after enough politicians stole away the industrial capital of the city and used it to line their pockets and temporarily self-aggrandize themselves – name any three city council presidents from the last 40 years – they succeeded in dropping Cleveland from the fifth-largest city in the country to it's poorest large town. And, they're not done.

     Downtown Cleveland is the failing heart of the town. Most retail stores are gone, fled to the suburbs. How you gonna keep 'em down in the town once they have seen Legacy Village? Business offices still keep an anemic thumping of life downtown, but the hand-writing is on the wall there, too. How many new office buildings are going up? How much has business square-footage increased from last year? Why spend millions to upgrade to 21st Century infrastructure when office parks are offering it for free?
     And yet, what do our mayors, council-members, and council presidents do? They foster an environment that fixes nothing and builds their own importance.
     One of the deadest parts of the city is Euclid Avenue. Commercial anchor properties such as Higbee's, Halleys, and The May Company have either gone out of business or fled to suburban malls and shopping nexii. Small commercial shops had collapsed and abandoned their locations. What is left are eat-a-terias that cater to the food needs of the remaining office workers and a few retail stores that sell things people might buy during their lunch hour.
     What's the fix? Hey, kids, let's put on a commuter line! Half of it is "free" federal money and we get to name it after ourselves! Euclid Avenue needs a transportation "corridor" down its center the same way Death Valley needs a 15-story parking lot. Where is this modern method of transportation going to take people?
     Why from Public Square to University Circle, of course. Well, I'm sure that the 58 people who need to make that trip will be eternally grateful for the $3 million spent on each of them, or at least grateful until they get jobs and move out of town.
     Gone will be the wide avenues of the planned city. Instead, Euclid will be bisected by a Rapid Transit line featuring

. . . a diesel-electric bus, similar to ones that currently operate in Europe. The vehicles use a low-sulfur diesel motor to power smaller electrical engines mounted near the wheels of the vehicle.

     Well, why didn't someone say these were European-style buses? Now, I understand. We must keep up with the transit styles of the Bosnian-Hergosovinians. Too bad the folks that write this stuff don't know the difference between an engine and a motor. Ain't no such thing as an electrical engine.
     Since the corridor runs down the median, just how will those 58 lucky riders get on and off the electrically-engined bus? I suppose that you get on at Public Square and ride it to the terminus at the Stokes Rapid Transit Station at Windermere in East Cleveland because everyone wants to visit the home of Emmanuel Onunwor. Gee, I also wonder for whom the Stokes Rapid Transit Station was named? Was it the former mayor of Cleveland who stole dog food or the US representative who was stopped for driving so drunk that he couldn't recite the alphabet? Both maybe.

     Cleveland is kicking in $8 million of the expected $168.4 million price-tag for the project [and I'll eat this website if it comes in on or under budget and on time]. Seems the city could have scrapped this project and the red-light cameras and come away with a $2 million profit. But, fiscal responsibility has never been a priority in this city, or at least not one as high as featherbedding the city payroll with friends, family, and contributors. Right former Mayor White? All it takes is some creative bookkeeping to make things look good.

Like Calling Peas, Beans

A Pulitzer Award-winning columnist in town was in high dudgeon the other day about the victims of Hurricane Katrina being called "refugees."
     Hhmm. These were people driven out of their homes by the storm and its aftermath and seeking refuge from the elements. Sounds like refugees was a good word.
     But.
     Refugee carries a stigma with it. Like these were people like, like Bosnians for God's sake. Some kind of third-world rabble washed out of their houses by a tsunami or something. It's okay to call some poor third-word wog a refugee, but these are Americans. In the land of the free and the home of political correctness. It doesn't matter that these people no longer have a pot or a home with a window through which to toss it out. We wouldn't want to hurt their feelings by being so insensitive as to call them refugees. Damn insulting is what it is.
     So, what do we call them? I mean at least a name that the left will consider correct enough. Can't use Evacuees. They didn't evacuate. If they had, they wouldn't have qualified for those $2,000 debit cards now could they?
     Let's go back into the past. How about Reverse Acadians? Anyone remember those? They were French-descent colonists driven out of Canada who came to settle in Louisiana. Nah. Too long and too many people wouldn't get it.
     How about Diasoprians? Surely no one can consider the Diaspora politically incorrect. Then again, I can imagine the local and national news meat-puppets trying to say that. Sure, it's good for a laugh, but what about THE BABIES!?
      It all reminds me of Rodney King. Here's a guy who has no greater claim to fame than he was able to drive a car. Every time his name was brought up by the media, he was labeled Motorist Rodney King. If he'd been a heart-surgeon you could bet that "motorist" wouldn't have been slapped on him as a label. He was a mook whose greatest achievement was driving drunk.
     Seems in that light, being called a refugee isn't that bad.

The Ethics of Burglary

Adrian Lamo was arrested by the FBI. Who? Adrian Lamo – who's last name I've heard pronounced as both laim-oh and lahm-oh, I prefer the former – is a "gray hat" hacker. He hacks into big-business computer systems and then tells the business where their vulnerabilities lie and offers to help fix them for a fee. No, this is nothing like extortion, it's helping companies.
     Lamo got into trouble when he hacked into the New York Times and snarfed up NYT celeb Social Security Numbers and data and added his name to their list of contributors. When he told the Times of his "help," they were less than amused. So unamused that they filed charges with the FBI.
     There is a difference of opinion about Lamo's work and arrest in the technical community. Some of the people on TechTV's "The Screen Savers" are appalled by Lamo's arrest. Others – like co-host Patrick Norton – take no obvious stand but do call him "Laim-oh" rather than "Lahm-oh."
     Lamo's supporters claim he is only offering a service to help business sites become more secure. I'm not buying it. Let's personalize the whole process:
     A "friendly" burglar breaks into your house while you're asleep. He re-arranges your furniture and chalks his name on your wall with a phone number where you can call him so he can tell you how he got in and how to prevent his – or other burglar's – entry in the future.
     No harm done, right? You can put your furniture back the way it was. You can brush his name off of your wall. Hey! He was only doing you a favor.
     Nope, he was creepy and wrong. And, so is Lamo.
     To come into someone's domain uninvited and do damage, no matter how mild is wrong. It doesn't matter if you then contact the people and tell them how to fix things. You've thrown a brick through their front window and even if you offer to tell them how to put in Plexiglas, you've violated them.
     The offer of for-fee advice on how to fix the problem even smacks of extortion.
     Many hackers have given up the black hat for their own computer-security consultation businesses. Lamo could have done the same. He could have even offered the NYT free advice about their vulnerabilities. He crossed the line when he went into their site and damaged and stole data.
      Lamo is a crook, and not just because he's violated some lobbyist-inspired, government-sanctioned laws, he's a crook because he broke into the NYT's house.

AM Conservatives – Not Doing Themselves Any Favors

It's pledge-drive time for the National Public Radio stations around here. WCPN in Cleveland and WKSU in Kent.. WKSU transmits about 3.5 watts and I can only pick it up on a cheesy little Walkman digital radio and in my car. Most times the Cleveland and Kent campaigns don't coincide, but I guess their menstrual cycles have synced.
     "Won't you give to support Public Radio?" Seems I already have. It's called taxes and Public Radio and all of the rest of the federal, state, and local "services" suck off 30 percent of what I work for already. If NPR wants more money, why don't they aim their begging at Congress rather than double-dip out of my pocket.
     But, this isn't about NPR. I listen to NPR each morning while I get ready to go to work so that I can pay taxes that I thought already supported public radio. The alternatives to NPR for me are the pop-country station [owned by Clear Channel], the local "morning zoo" oldies type station [owned by Clear Channel] that is mostly commercials and DJ plugs for restaurants and car dealers that give them comps, or the commercial classic station that can't produce enough wattage to get west of the Cuyahoga River on a windy day.
     So I listen to NPR and grit my teeth when Daniel Schorr and his Lefties profess their contrarianism about what the government is doing. Well, at least the Republican-lead government.
     During a ride home last Friday I thought I'd try scanning the AM band to see what it had to offer. I sometimes listen to the Big Band station when I've had my fill with stories about US abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan that the NPR stations use to fill up their airtime. Using the "scan" button on AM, I hit a talk show. Just as FM is the domain of the Left, AM is the kingdom of the Right.
     Michael Medved – whom I'd last heard was a movie reviewer who doesn't like sex or violence, or bad language, or naughty thoughts, or whatever tweaks his libido in films – was on. I stuck with it for a few minutes. Seems earlier in the week some magazine – which probably has a paid subscription of about 13 – cited Bush, Schwarzenegger, and some other Republican politico as trying to establish a Fourth Reich in California. The cover of the magazine showed Bush the Younger riding in a motorcade with Adolph Hitler behind him. A pretty nasty brush with which to tar people. Medved had offered the authors time on his show to "discuss" the piece. On the day I was listening, one of them phoned in.
     Make no mistake, I am truly and deeply suspicious of Bush the Younger and everyone in his administration with the exceptions of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. When one of BtY's first official actions as president was to try to funnel money to religious organizations I thought that this man had no business being president. To call him a Nazi, however, was going overboard. Maybe Ashcroft deserves the Brown Shirt Award, but BtY's just a dopey rich kid who had his life handed to him by Daddy and Granddad.
     Medved wasn't interested in conversing or even debating with this weaselly writer. Instead, he ran roughshod over him: demanding answers to leading questions, interrupting any explanations, shouting him down.
     The writer, on the other hand, was a crazy as an outhouse rat. Having stated in his article that BtY's grandfather with funding Nazism during the 1930s and Arnold's father as being an Nazi [true], this POS writer refused to stand behind his painting of BtY and Schwarzenegger as Nazis. Instead, as with many of the true far Left, he began justifying his article by trying to explain how Big Power Business was the root of all evil and was behind the scenes fomenting the fall of the One, True California government so the Dark Lords of the Sith could take it over for their own nefarious goals.
     I guess conspiracy theorists are at both extreme ends of the political spectrum.
     Listening to these two go at it was like watching a political debate between Rock'em Sock'em Robots with Medved working both controls. This whole episode made the Weeping Lefties on NPR seem like the reasoned voices of equality.
     I stuck with the Medved show long enough to be sure he wasn't just going off on a rant for that portion. He wasn't. The bellicosity of the Right media undercuts any merit some of their ideas may have. Instead of civil adversarianism between themselves and their political opponents, they come out swinging well-ground axes.
     Perhaps other Rightie radio hosts are more reasoning with their guests, but 90 minutes of AM conservatism more than makes up for my six months of NPR.
     Now if they would just remove that halo they installed over Daniel Schorr's head, I'd be much happier.

7•7•2003

If You Don't Want Us to Look, Wear a Burka

OK, we've just passed the Fourth of July, the top of the bell-curve of Summer. What's that remind me of? Being nearly naked.
     Here's the long way around: I was watching "The Best Years of Our Lives," the other day on Turner Classic Movies. TCM is what American Movie Classics used to be before they went upscale by adding commercials and subtracting hosts. Ted's doing it right. TBYOOL is about the disaffection felt by returning WWII vets. One vet is a guy who lost both hands, played by a guy who lost both hands. In a touching scene, he shows the girl he left behind what it would be like if they got married as they had planned. He's getting ready for bed and he has to shed his prosthetics. Having seen the flick a half-dozen times I was looking at what he was wearing instead of what was going on.
     The correct ensemble for getting some shut-eye included a pair of boxer shorts [I'm guessing on this], a T-shirt, and a pair of pajamas. This guy was wearing one more layer of clothing to get into bed than I'd been wearing that afternoon to do yard work. Now, I usually don't got commando when I go outdoors, but it's summer, I'm in the backyard, and it's hot enough to roast a monkey.
     But, that's really no excuse. We just don't wear as many clothes as we did 60 years ago. When's the last time you saw a woman in her 30s wearing a hat and gloves in July? If you go to the 'burbs, you're more likely to see women in the same demographic sporting sweatpants and a warmup jacket. That has about the same class as wearing pajamas to church.
     In the younger age brackets, this is the weather that brings out skin by the acre. Women from their teens to their 40s take warm weather as a license to wear less clothing in public than the underwear Mae West wore when she was considered a racy woman. In most cases, these women shouldn't be exposing that much avoirdupois. In much too rare cases, a woman who is actually flattered by a skimpy outfit will be wearing just enough clothing to be street-legal. But, if you're a man, don't look too long, you perv.
     Most women will tolerate an ogle with stiff resolve and distain. However, there are some that fancy themselves such icons of beauty as to assume that any man who lays eye-tracks upon them should be put in their place with a firm word. Much the same way you'd discipline a dog who was licking his 'nads in front of company. Having lunch with a bad driver got a car full of us put in our place by a 20-something who flattered herself as being the object of our affection.
     Back in the days when I worked in the 'burbs, we'd normally haul ourselves to any of a number of feed joints in the area. Larry Allen always drove because he was easily put-upon, he had a large vehicle [what would be called an SUV in later years], and we'd chip in for his lunch on occasion because he usually only had four dollars on him after his wife and kids had picked his pocket, and he had to get enough gas to make it home that evening. In fact, we nicknamed him Fo-$.
     The only drawback was that Fo-$ was a notoriously bad driver. Fo-$ loved to talk and debate. He was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal of the LJB Great Society stripe. A government led by a benign philosopher king who doled out with a free hand all of the necessities of life to everyone was his ideal form of government. Fo-$ would swivel his head around to address his opponents – everyone else in the car. Fo-$ would crash red lights, miss turns, and change lanes into oncoming traffic.
     For the sake of our skins, the other three people in the car would co-pilot: "Larry, turn here!" "Larry, stop!" "Larry, go!"
     We'd just finished lunch at the Chinese restaurant called "China," but we called "Chinese Gary's" [that's another story] in a little sunken shopping plaza. To get back to work, Fo-$ had to make a left turn across two lanes of traffic on a busy street. Fo-$ had stopped his white rhino at the top of the drive and all four pairs of eyes were focused on the oncoming traffic since Fo-$ had the street navigation skills of a squirrel and none of us wished to be transformed into spots of road jelly.
     Just as we were ready to goad Fo-$ into jumping into traffic, a comely young miss walking toward us on the sidewalk with her equally comely friend, neither of them wearing more than 4 oz. of clothing combined, called out to us: "Why don't you take a picture, it'll last longer!"
     Fo-$ pulled into the flow of cars narrowly avoiding death before any of us recovered enough for a repartee. I honestly hadn't even seen the girl until she berated us. What a monumental ego. Especially considering that one of the guys in the car later transgendered himself.
     But it brought up the bigger question we pondered on the way back to work: Why would a girl who knows she's attractive, wear clothing that shows how attractive she is, berate people who appreciated how she looked?
     Maybe she only wanted to show off for the lumpy women in sweatsuits. See, my ass is half the size of yours. Look upon it and despair.
     Maybe she only wanted "cute" guys to notice her and we didn't fit the picture since we ranged in age from 32 to 52 and none of us would qualify for a reality show contestant.
     Maybe she was just hot and didn't want to wear lots of clothes.
     Or maybe she was just so stuck on herself that she assumed that any man looking in her direction for more than 18 seconds was soaking up the lush pulchritude she knew she exuded with ever step.
     To tell you the truth, she was pleasant looking, but I wouldn't have taken my eyes off of traffic for her.

6•7•2003

How Does He Get So Smart?

The Science Fiction genre is a ghetto.
     Authors who write as if Calliope were marionetting their fingers get buried in the "Sci Fi" section while Brazilian tree-fellers are clear-cutting the Amazon to provide paper for Danielle Steele's tripe.
     Harlan Ellison, who made his Name in SF, refuses to be branded with the Science Fiction label. Yeah, and he's such a household name outside of SF.
     Michael Crichton, on the other hand, has written almost nothing but Science Fiction and has never been ghettoized. Timeline, one of his more-recent works was about time travel using quantum foam, for Chris' sake. But it ain't SF.
     Go figure.
     I just finished his latest novel, Prey. It's a page-turner for gear-heads. Okay, I'm a gearhead. But that doesn't mean I'll swallow his stuff whole without regurgitating a few complaints.
     Like most of Crichton's works, it's a cautionary tale about the misuse of technology. Everybody's been writing these things since Ugh the Cro-Magnon figured out that the wheel shouldn't have any corners. Frankenstein is the prototype of this kind of novel. These books can all be boiled down to that famous Saturday-afternoon horror movie motto: There are some things man is not meant to know.
     Blarney. If that were the case we'd still be sitting in caves flinging pooh at each other and eating our close relatives.
     In Prey, a greedy tech company – is there any other kind? – lets loose a plague of nanobots at a research and manufacturing facility in Nevada. Our hero, an out-of-work code monkey – who is getting offers of $250K jobs at IBM in New York state, but won't move out of California – has to save the day after his wife screws the pooch by intentionally letting the nanites loose.
     The motivations for all for all of this are too convoluted to address here because I'm too lazy and they are not nearly funny enough to recount. Suffice to say that the programmer saves the day mostly by himself when anyone else would have been screaming for the Air Force to napalm the place down to bedrock.
     Characters have all of the emotional depth of the gang on Friends and aren't nearly as appealing.
     Our Hero's wife, friend, and close co-workers all get snuffed and he's less emotionally distraught than someone who just dropped a cup of coffee: inconvenient, but plenty more where they came from.
     And yet, I kept reading.
     Crichton would stop the narrative flow for big dollops of "Tell Me Professor." You know, the ploy from '30s science fiction where one character would ask the Professor / Scientist / Genius to explain something.
     Screeech!
     The story train comes to a dead stop while someone expounds.
     In Prey, the protagonist usually does the Q&A himself. There are several big hunks of text that go into the details such as predator / prey behavior in Army Ants. Interesting and necessary for the story, but included most inelegantly.
     And yet, I kept reading.
     As if these weren't enough to offput all but the most geeky reader [I wasn't too put off], Crichton starts the book with a forward nearly as technical as a Scientific American treatise. Throughout the novel he sites studies, scientists, and researchers as if they were household names like Einstein and . . . well, I don't think there are any other household-named scientist; you get the idea.
     And yet, I kept reading.
     After the end of the novel, where the genie is stuffed back in the bottle – or not, ,just like Jurassic Park – there is a bibliography with what looks to be 40 or more citations from obscure research publications and books. My questions are not only where does to get the time to read these things, but what brought him to read Dynamics in Human Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes?
     Michael Crichton is one smart guy with lots of time on his hands. He writes on par with the pulp SF writers prior to when John W. Campbell revolutionized the field, but he's had the good fortune not to be slapped in the SF ghetto. Some of the best writers there might not have him.

5•22•2003

"Sit Down and SHUT UP While I Tell You What You Need"

Freedom of speech only works in the first person for some people.
     New York Times columnist Chris Hedges was booed from the stage during his Rockford College commencement address  a few days ago. Students booed, shouted, and finally after pulling the microphone plug on Hedges, cut his speech short. They'll be taken to task for stopping someone from speaking his mind. Except for yanking the mike cord, I congratulate the graduating class of Rockford College.
     It's not that I'm some jingoistic silverback who can't stand any criticism of the US. Nope, I'm just applying the Principle of Reversed Situations.
     If Charlton Heston were standing before the graduates of that liberal arts college and berating them for not owning firearms and he was booed off stage, the left and right coasts and all of the mainstream media would be congratulating the students for their bravery moral stance. Garrison Keillor would write a song about them and sing it in that hushed honky self-congratulatory voice of his.
     This time it happened to a pundit who cares more about cosseting his personal agenda at the expense of the country that not only allows him the right to say whatever he wants, but get paid a grand sum for saying it. I have a hunch that if I were to offer Hedges a cocktail weenie, I'd pull back a stump.
     What did the students do? Did they sit there like sheep while Hedges blamed the US for every evil in the Middle East? Nope. They reared back on their hind legs and told Hedges that they didn't like what he was saying.
     Isn't that impinging on his right to free speech?
     Not the way I see it. Free speech works both ways. If someone is saying something I don't like, I have the same free-speech right to protest. What I don't have is the right to shut him up. That's were I have to disagree with the students who pulled Hedges mike cord. It was the metaphysical equivalent of gagging him.
     What gives the left end of the political spectrum the right to think they can spew their ideas and we should all sit down, shut up, and listen to what's good for us? Besides, of course, the whole concept of Nanny America.
      The media would be cheering the students on if they'd booed-down the hate speech of a Ku Klux Klan member who was onstage. Everyone has the right to freedom of speech, but there's no law that says we have to listen and agree.
     I'm not one of those "all media is controlled by the liberal [fill in the blank] interests" wall-climbers. I've been in my friend Stuart Goldlust's basement and there's no console where he controls all world media. I have, however, been in enough newsrooms and hung with enough "journalists" to know that liberalism and the urge to move to Nanny Amerika is as rife there as conservatism is in the NRA.
     Should commencement speeches only consist of information with which the students' agree? No. But if you present ideas in such a self-serving manner and are so beyond the edges of reality that a majority of Midwestern college students rise up in protest, you're not conveying your thoughts, you're ranting. If you want to do that, find a job on the New York Times or get a web site.
     "But Hedges has a Pulitzer, he's a New York Times columnist!"
     Seems that both cachets aren't as worthy as they seem.
     Is that the same New York Times where Jayson Blair was coddled even after he'd proven himself a liar and cheat [see below]?
     Is that the same Pulitzer organization that awarded a 1931 prize to New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty for writing pieces admiring Stalin's 5-year plan while he privately admitted that "it is quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."
     Hey, a double-play, skewering both the Times and the Pulitzer.
     Organizations give prizes based on how they want to be perceived. How else do you explain "Gandhi" winning the 1982 Academy Award for best picture in 1982?

5•21•2003

Welcome to the White Privilege Club,
Root of ALL Evil

Leave it to an NPR opinion piece to open up a slow-healing wound, reach in, and twist some nerves.
     This morning a non-white guest commentator, judging from his apocope, took to task White Amerika for the failings of Jayson Blair. Jayson Who?
     Blair was a 27-year-old reporter – a journalism graduate from the University of Maryland and former reporter for The Boston Globe – who recently resigned in disgrace from his job [well, as much disgrace as is possible from resigning and then getting a seven-figure book deal out of the affair] as a national news reporter for The New York Times because he fabricated news stories and plagiarized other reports. But, don't worry about Jayson having to find dinner in the dumpster behind Kentucky Fried, word is that he's going to pen a contract for a tell-all book worth seven figures. I wonder where he'll get his material. Ooh, I'm just sooo bitchy.
     Twenty-seven years old and working as a national news desk reporter for the pinnacle organization in newspaper journalism. He'd been there for four years.
     Let's see, graduate from college at 21 or 22, four years at the Times. That means he spent about a year or two at the Globe. "Wow," says I, "he must have been some kind of Sierra-Hotel newshawk."
     Yeah, the kind of reporter who had questions raised about 36 of his 73 stories since October 2002.*
     The kind of reporter who got promoted despite Times Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landman's e-mail comment in April, 2002, that "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."*
     How could a reporter who wrote questionable stories nearly 50 percent of the time get on such a fast track? Talent? Diligence? Dogged determination to unearth the truth?
     Maybe is was white guilt and a quest for "diversity" at the Times.
     Yes, yes, I know. I'm a racist bastard for broaching that subject. I'll tell you what, though, I've been on the receiving end of this stick. Sherman, crank the Wayback Machine to 1978, Kent State University.
     KSU and Ohio University were the only two colleges in Ohio at that time that had accredited journalism programs. Thinking about it, who accredits such things? The National Journalism School Accreditation Police? That's neither here nor there. I went to KSU because I wanted to be a JOURNALIST. What's important is that getting a J-school degree from KSU required an internship at a newspaper.
     The Cleveland Plain Dealer would stop by once a year and select the supposed crème de la crème from journalism students and offer them a summer internship. It was better than the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, and a Target credit card all rolled into one. Get a PD internship and you were made. Besides, they paid Newspaper Guild [read Union] scale.
     A jowly guy in a cheap suit interviewed all comers, including myself. I wore my best, and only, suit. Polyester of course. Hey, back in '78, polyester was hot stuff. Literally.
     I was a sophomore with some experience working the college copy-editor desk. No, not as copy editor, as one of the people working the "rim" writing headlines to fit the column-widths assigned to the stories.
     I knew I had about as much chance of getting the internship as I had of jumping over the Moon carrying a gross of bowling balls, but I at least I thought the spot would be filled on the basis of merit. Not bloody likely.
     Elaine Rivera was chosen from the hundred or so candidates.
     Elaine Rivera?
     She wrote for the entertainment section, for Dog's sake: concert reviews, musician interviews. Those of us who thought of ourselves as carrying The Flaming Sword of Truth used to make fun of the entertainment writers. We called her Sleepy Rivera because she'd nod off in the newsroom. How did she get a PD internship?
     Most newspaper staff falls into the left side of the political spectrum. Agenda's abound. Don't believe it? When's the last time you read a series taking welfare cheaters to task or uncovering corruption and waste at a social-services organization? Wait, wait, I forgot that I'm a racist.
     Since most people involved in journalism are of the liberal persuasion, they want to change the world according to their concepts because They Know Best and it's their duty to be sure that Nanny Amerika takes care of us all. Where better to start than in-house? Too many white men in the newsroom, they need "diversity."
     What's better diversity than a two-fer? Hispanic and female. A double-header.
     So much for merit.
     The next year my internship was on a weekly newspaper with a circulation of about 16 and run by the publisher from her beer and wine shop across the street. By the end of my run, I was finding stories, writing them, typesetting them, pasting them up, and shepherding the pages through the printer with whom we contracted. Don't get me wrong, I learned more that summer than in all of the academic courses I'd had prior to that stint at minimum wage. But, it sure wasn't the biggest newspaper in Ohio. Not even in the podunk town in which it was based. I had a sneaking hunch that most of the papers taken by our "distribution manager" – a fat guy with a station wagon – ended up in storm sewers around the city.
     Quick story about the cosmopolitan nature of the paper. Our "Advertising Manger" was a guy who liked fortified Muscatel wine . . .  a lot. He had the complexion of an albino vampire who'd suffered from acute acne as a teen. One day he rolled into the "newsroom." The newsroom was the hallway of a  tiny former bank branch The Times now occupied. It held two desks.
     He was wearing a suit from 1963 with lapels as narrow as a DAR's view of sexual positions, and wrap-around sunglasses. He looked like a hitman wannabe. He was smoking a cigarette underhand, the way I imaged Bulgarians did.
     "I've got New York on the line," he announced.
     "Wow, New York?" I imagined some huge corporation from Gotham pouring in thousands of dollars of advertising revenue.
     "Yeah, the New York Deli might take out an eighth page."
     The New York Deli was a sandwich place two blocks away that had just opened in a failed Dari-DeeLite shop.
     We never saw him again.
     Set the dial for three years later, if you will Sherman.
     I'm a city beat reporter for a small morning daily in a tiny 'burb south of Cleveland, making $10k per year and thinking I'm in high cotton. As with most small-town, hell, even big-town, city politics there's a lot of infighting. This week's brannigan is between the carpetbagger mayor and the old fossils on city council. It raised enough ire to get noticed by the Plain Dealer.
     I'm sitting at the official "press" folding-table in the city hall rotunda where the council meetings are held when the PD reporter rolls in [five ruffles and flourishes and a 12-gun salute]. Any guesses about the reporter's identity? Bing! Bing! Bing! Give that man a BRAND NEW CAR for guessing Elaine Rivera!
     Halfway through the meeting I notice that Elaine's nodded off. Probably tired from all that work on her Pulitzer efforts.
     After the meeting, she's interviewing me about what went on.
     Half-sarcastically I say that she must be ready for bigger things than the PD.
     "Yes, I am," says she, "I think I might take a job being offered by The Washington Post."
     That "CLANG!" is my jaw hitting the floor.
     I guess the Post must have needed to better their diversity numbers.
     So we're back to Jayson Blair, who may be getting a million or more bucks for his "tell-all" story about being a lazy liar while the rest of us mokes who thought being a reporter meant telling the truth are accused of having been the beneficiaries of White Privilege according to the NPR commentator. I guess we White Privilegites didn't hear about the perq of lying for millions or else we would have snatched it away from the Deserving Minority Fellows.
     And boy-howdy have I been benefiting from my membership in the White Privilege Club. That membership has meant 22 years of busting my hump to show that talent and experience are better than the luck of the racial draw.
     Eventually I left newspapering for opportunities in magazines, technical writing, and "information development" where you were rewarded for what you did rather than who your ancestors were.
     So where do I get in line for a million-dollar book deal telling that story?

* CNS online report, May 15, 2003