The Right Words To The Uncommon Voters

Over the past two years, America has taken on the disquieting, if not outright alarming, aspect of a tumbling gyroscope, a whirling top that has begun to slow down and wobble—careening across the national landscape, its stability deteriorating, its ultimate topple frightening.

With the mid-term elections just six months away, it is so important to hold fast to our sanity, comity, and the beauty and power of our language in order to shift the center of political discourse’s gravity back to some angle of normalcy. The only thing that can restore our nation’s once-famed gyroscopic stability—the hallmark strength of United States for 242 years—is to spin it back up to speed and right the top. That won’t happen with hate, or with fear, or with anger. But it can happen if we apply common sense, confidence, cooperation, and trust in the truth. We have been in worse straits, and we’ve gotten out of tougher spots.

Over the next six months, those of us who seek change at the top, and for quite some distance down the ballot, may take some sense of direction from the prescient words of the late novelist Eugene Burdick, who wrote in the preface to his 1963 book, The 480:

“[T]here are plenty of common men about and all the candidates know them well. They will vote out of habit for the party they voted for at the last election and the one before. The ‘uncommon man’ is the person the candidates are trying to find, identify, analyze and appeal to. The victorious Presidential candidate is the one who is most successful in appealing to the uncommon voter.

“The uncommon voter, is not, alas, always a superior person. His ‘uncommonness’ sometimes consists of being bloody minded, hostile, ignorant, frightened and prejudiced.”

When Burdick wrote that 55 years ago, he was reflecting on the upcoming election of 1964, and he not only got the image of the ugly “uncommon man” right then, it would seem he got it right about the ugly uncommon man and woman—the Trumpians—of 2016.

When I read social media posts from outraged writers of any political persuasion huffing out blow darts of poison-tipped words like fascism, socialism, denier, Nazi, Hitlerian, gestapo, redneck, commie, snowflake, etc., I invariably stop reading, dismiss the writer and any argument or position he or she may be positing, block or unfriend them, and move on. This is a conscious decision on my part to filter out the spew of those who refuse to employ a broader, richer, and far more effective vocabulary available to anyone who wishes to make a salient statement about the disquieting world in which we live.

It is no secret that I don’t care much for the current president, and I have a hard time understanding his base’s predilection to remain loyal to a man I believe is unsuited for elective office at any level. But when people opposed to him and his administration, or when people opposed to Democrats or Independents or any other faction, resort to words and images unbecoming the society we like to think we are, I sigh at their lack of imagination and their reluctance, intransigence, or flat-out refusal to express themselves in something better than all caps, insults, snark, and scatology.

There is a school of thought that teaches the necessity of fighting fire with fire, that the only way to grapple with someone hobbled by a limited vocabulary, a weak grasp of history, the rust of corruption, and Munchausen-symptom-by-proxy is to fling excrement-loaded speech and brown-shirt insults at him and his followers. And to that school’s students I ask, “How’s that working out for you?” If putting lipstick on a pig is a useless effort, covering the pig in its own slop is not only less effective, it does actually make the pig happy.

It is not ironic that in the previous paragraph I used derogatory phrases to describe the president. I’m not saying it’s improper to criticize, I’m saying it’s ineffective didactically to step over the line separating critically-descriptive speech and ugly-profane speech. If all you want to do is be funny in your criticism and toss in a few “Whoopsie Doodle Shitsky Mixes”—last year’s Chelsea Handler’s Fourth of July video is a cute example—go for it. If you want to repost that ridiculous “I am a great writer” tweet Trump posted a couple of days ago—and pore over its first draft (pour made it to pore after someone at the White House couldn’t stand it any longer)—and still make fun of the rest of the post’s grammatical awkwardness, I say go for it. And if you want to go after Trump, McConnel, Ryan and their slavering acolytes with razor-sharp wit and slice them up with microtomes of facts and bury them in Pinocchio noses, I say go for it with gusto…but leave the caustic and crude flamethrowers at home, please.

It will do us no good to try to appeal to Trump’s voters, the ugliest uncommon men and women; they are set in their ways and they will forever be unresponsive to truth, logic, or screaming. The uncommon voters we need to make peace with are those who will respond to us if we appeal to their better natures, who will listen—even if with some skepticism—to our fact-based, and reasonable positions, offered, honestly, respectfully and with dignified language.

Your Capital Was, By Any Other Name, Our Capital

The news of the shooting deaths of five staff at the Capital in Annapolis on Thursday, June 28, in all likelihood brought back many memories to a dwindling number of active and retired journalists (of which I’m one) whose careers began in just such a small town daily or weekly newspaper. 

If you were lucky enough to be a small- to medium-market newspaper reporter, editor, photographer, an ad salesperson, or classifieds coordinator, or a back-of-the-building pressroom staffer—working with actual hot type, huge rolls of newsprint, and gallons of ink—you were part of a close-knit community not just within the walls of your offices, but within the boundaries of your publication’s distribution.

This was not only true of the full-time staff, but it was true of the crews who bundled the newspaper and heaved the bundles from the loading dock onto ancient, gear-grinding trucks that trundled around the town before dawn or before dinner, dropping off string-tied bales on the driveways of paperboys who then biked or walked their assigned routes, flinging the papers onto the lawns and porches (and roofs) of subscribers. From the receptionist at the front end, to the paper carrier across town, everyone who touched that journal before it was read over a morning cup of coffee or in an easy chair before dinner, was intimately involved with the heartbeat of their town. I know.

I was an eleven-year-old paper boy in Wilmington, Ohio, in 1960, and then a teen-aged “cub” reporter with the Northern Virginia Sun in ‘67-’68, moving away to college where I worked as a reporter and photographer for the Longmont Daily Times-Call, northeast of Boulder, Colorado, from 1968 to 1971. I remember my assigned beats for the Times-Call: the sugar beet crop and the Great Western Sugar processing plant; a huge turkey farm; the tiny towns of Frederick, Dacono, and Firestone with their quirky water-filtration systems and limited- or no ambulance services.

Breaking news stories were few and far between, but there was always something to keep our newsroom busy, and while we were small potatoes as far as the big-city papers down in Denver or back East were concerned, our readers depended on us to be a reflection of their daily lives in Small Town America. We were the chroniclers of their births, their struggles, their harvest successes, their courtroom dramas, their victories on the local football fields, their garden clubs, their Rotary meetings, their holidays, their 50th wedding anniversaries, and their departures noted in our obituaries.

We knocked out our stories on mechanical typewriters (imagine), using reams of cheap paper, and changing ribbons at least once a week. We huddled with the city editor and the managing editor who helped us shape our stories and cut them to fit whatever column inches were available, and we sighed whenever a story met an editor’s spike. Red pencils, blue pencils, layout sheets and waxed headlines, datelines and headlines, the rumble of the presses, the newsprint on our fingertips…the tactile, auditory, and olfactory memories of those days all flowed back to me as I watched the tragedy of Annapolis unfold. And I know with certainty that thousands of other journalists who grew up in the newsrooms scattered across the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s all felt the same pangs and sorrow and loss as the names of the five colleagues of the Capital cycled across our televisions, phones, and laptops.

Gerald Fischman, 61. Rob Hiaasen, 59. John McNamara, 56. Rebecca Smith, 34. Wendi Winters, 65.

I never had the pleasure to meet any of them; most journalists across the country did not know them. But we all do know what they did and why they did it. We know the kind of community they served, the world they knew and the work they lived and breathed. We know their labors of truth-telling, of their love for the basic Constitutional freedom they exemplified with each and every edition of the Capital. Your Capital was, by any other name, our Capital