Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (18 page)

(A friend and mourner recalled that, growing up, she believed cat and dog were the same animal, but that cats were the females and dogs the males. This is entirely credible.)

By human standards, Jason was a great success professionally. He was servile to the point of embarrassment, and was incapable of looking anyone in the eye for more than a few seconds, with the exception of insects. He frequently licked babies, and only an hour before he died he assiduously marked the trunk of a maple tree.

He was well known for his guilty expression, and on those occasions when he had rifled through the garbage it was not uncommon for him to look as though he deserved the death penalty.

His career as a retriever coincided with a period of cataclysmic change. The New York City dog-waste statute, commonly known as the pooper-scooper law, was enacted the year he was born. Late in life the animal rights movement swirled around him, and his master routinely threatened to make him into a coat.

His last illness came on the eve of the recent decision that
stringent regulations governing pit bulls were discriminatory because they were breed-specific, and he seemed pleased when
My Life as a Dog
was critically acclaimed, although it was a little hard to tell since he was exhausted that week from treeing squirrels.

He lived in the city for most of his life, but he never wore a little plaid coat or a leather collar with fake gemstones, and he was never walked by a professional.

Although he began to visit the country only in middle age, he was able to find and flush quail, rabbits, and other small game. Nevertheless, he remained utterly incapable of getting within twenty feet of any of them.

At the time of his death his license was current and he had had all of his shots.

He is survived by two adults, three children, a cat named Daisy who drove him nuts, and his lifelong companion, Pudgy, whose spaying he always regretted, as well as a host of fleas, who have gone elsewhere, probably to Pudgy.

At the combined family Easter Egg Hunt/Memorial Service held in his honor, he was remembered by one of the children as “a really smart dog.”

Unfortunately this was inaccurate.

Burial was behind the barn. A monument made of a piece of slate that had fallen from the roof was erected, bearing his name, a lopsided heart, and the initials of his people.

He will be missed by all, except Daisy.

He never bit anyone, which is more than you can say for most of us.

ON THE NEWS

T
here are three questions people always ask about writing a column:

Q. Where do you get your ideas?

A. The same places that you do.

Q. How long does it take to write a column?

A. As long as I’ve got.

Q. How far ahead do you have columns stockpiled?

A. Say what?

All of those are wiseass responses, and all of them happen to be true. Because while sometimes columns come out of some strange area of expertise or personal exposure, while sometimes they are crafted over days of thinking and rethinking a subject, while sometimes they are written and then
left in computer storage until an opportunity presents itself, most of the time newspaper columnists work exactly the same way they did when they were reporters—on the news, on deadline.

Each of us has subjects that are evergreen, to which we can turn whenever the engine of public discourse seems to have ground to a halt. There are books to be read and commented upon, habitual sources to be called.

William Safire, the conservative columnist who uses the telephone the way Leonard Bernstein once wielded the baton, does some of his most interesting work, as far as I’m concerned, when he simply calls his old boss for a long chat. His old boss happens to be Richard M. Nixon, and no matter what you—and I—may think of Mr. Nixon, there’s no doubt that he is always good for some interesting thoughts on the state of geopolitics. Thus does Mr. Safire fill some of the arid spots magnificently.

But in my first two years of column-writing the dry spots were few, so few that I never once considered that perennial favorite among columnists, the column about the dearth of things to write columns about. The Gulf War was fodder for almost a year, from the time President Bush told Saddam Hussein that the United States could not stand quietly by while Iraq invaded Kuwait to the night when we went to war for the first time since I was still a student, to the aftermath in which many thought we had pulled out too soon, leaving Saddam still in power.

The 1992 presidential campaign was the same sort of cycle. It was not simply that these were obvious things to cover in a column. Sometimes they were the only thing. When the president actually authorized hostilities to begin in the Gulf, or when Gennifer Flowers told the world that Bill Clinton had been her paramour, it would have felt foolish to write about anything else, foolish to me, foolish to the readers.

Sitting in the faint glow of a computer screen, all alone in my narrow office, I flash from time to time on a coffee cup, a kitchen table, and a newspaper folded back to what I have written. The face of the reader is never really clear. Another ubiquitous question
is whom I am writing for, and I often answer that given the size and scope of the
Times
circulation, and given the number of other papers that carry my column, if I tried to imagine the readership in my mind I’d go half mad. The truth is, the reader I write for is myself, which is the act of arrogance that powers the work of most columnists.

But whether I’m picturing myself hoisting that coffee cup, or seeing some faceless Everyreader instead, it is clear that there are days when there is only one story in the world, one thing that everyone is talking about, one topic that must be covered, about which readers, turning to the Op-Ed page, are saying, “Let’s see what they think about that.”

Perhaps no story in my first years as an Op-Ed columnist so clearly demanded that kind of attention as the one that emerged when Anita Hill, a professor at the University of Oklahoma Law School, temporarily derailed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court—and turned the national agenda on its axis—by saying the nominee had sexually harassed her when she worked as his assistant. It is the only subject about which I have written four columns in a row without ever thinking I might be boring the reader. Whether you believed Professor Hill’s story or not—and I did—and whether Clarence Thomas was confirmed or not—and, of course, he was—in the short but seemingly endless span of two weeks during which the story broke, the hearings were scheduled, the testimony from both sides was given, and the vote taken, there was simply no other story to be told.

When the details of Ms. Hill’s allegations first began to emerge, I was not in my office, with easy access to wire stories and files, but in Albany on a reporting trip, with a full schedule of appointments and a column idea all ready for Wednesday. But I went to a dinner, and everyone said, “What are you going to write about Anita Hill?” Not: Are you? Not: Will you? To them, it was a done deal, the only thing on their minds. And that meant it must be the thing on my mind, too. That’s how you know, whether you
hear it from people at dinner, hear it discussed on the street, or hear it in your mind’s ear.

Sometimes we do write columns that keep, but inevitably events like these intrude. Or the column begins to feel a little canned. Sometimes there are columns that can be cosseted into shape over days. But events like these unfold quickly, and luckily deadline work is second nature to most of us, even when we are analyzing the news instead of covering it.

(I cling to the rigors of deadline work when I look up and see one of my columns on the Gulf War tacked to my bulletin board. It was written just as the conflict drew to its triumphant close, and predicts confidently that George Bush will be reelected in 1992. It hangs there to remind me of the sin of hubris.)

And columns that must be written quickly as events unfold are often the easiest to produce. The Anita Hill columns were so deeply felt that by the time I actually sat down at the computer they were half written in my head. When I am deeply aggrieved I can never type fast enough.

How do I come up with column ideas? The same way you do, really, except that it is my job to do something with them. When you notice more people sleeping in the subways, you may shake your head and get on the train; I may do the same and then write about the worsening economy, or a street sweep in the bus stations, or the American anomie about pain and suffering. When your children learn to read, you may write it down in a baby book or file it away in your memory bank; I may do the same and then write a paean to Maurice Sendak, or a memoir about growing up a bookworm.

When Anita Hill spoke, all of us listened. And then some of us wrote. It really is as simple as that. Twice a week, week after week. Thank God for the news. I’ve felt that way my whole life, ever since I threw in my lot with the newspaper business. But never with more gratitude than now.

JUSTICE FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
September 11, 1991

Picture a columnist appearing before an audience of readers. Someone asks a question about an issue—capital punishment, say, or abortion, or busing. And the columnist replies, “It would be improper for me to discuss that because I plan to write about it in the future.”

Now, there’s a considerable difference between columnists and justices of the Supreme Court, the greatest being that the latter are infinitely more important, despite what the former sometimes seem to believe.

The similarity is that the trade-secret response for either is insulting to the audience. Yesterday Senator Joseph Biden noted that Clarence Thomas would, if confirmed, serve on the Court well into the twenty-first century, and so it seems a good time to establish a twenty-first-century agenda for confirmation hearings. And that is what the American people should know and the Judiciary Committee should try to uncover: how a nominee thinks, how his mind works.

Clarence Thomas’s biography has become the linchpin of his appointment to the Court—his impoverished childhood, his rise from humble beginnings. We know the color of his skin; now it is time for the content of his character and the caliber of his mind. We need to know not necessarily his intellectual and judicial destinations but the roads he will travel to arrive at them.

More than his personal opinion on abortion, I want to know what he thinks of the reasoning of
Roe
v.
Wade
. I hope the committee will continue to ask about that decision, about what he sees as its shortcomings and its strengths. I would like to know his thinking on privacy rights and the right to reproductive freedom.

I hope there will be many questions about
Brown
v.
Board of Education
, the landmark school desegregation decision that Judge Thomas has criticized in the past. I hope there will be many questions about his philosophy regarding sex and age discrimination, about affirmative action and the rights of the accused.

I hope he will be urged to speak publicly about the Constitution, about whether it should be interpreted narrowly or broadly, about how he would assess the work of Thurgood Marshall, about his judicial role models.