Month: July 2005

Riposte

—– Original Message —–
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 5:24 PM
Subject: [Chicago Newspapers] 7/20/2005 05:22:22 PM
In response to your attack on me [June 17, “Seminary selectivity”], Cardinal George delivered those remarks during a press conference on the first day of the bishop’s meeting. He was on a panel with two other bishops’ responding to questions from reporters around the country. The comments were also reported by NPR religion reporter Jason De Rose. I beg to differ with your opinion that this does not justify a lead paragraph, since it was a turnaround from statements he has made in the past on homosexuals in the seminary.

As to your characterization of my analysis being like a cartoon, i can only say that I was given 800 words to write on this complex issue AND the day’s events at the bishop’s meeting. This is a daily newspapers, not The New Yorker.  If you are indeed a former reporter, you should understand the nature of this business and fitting complex issues into small space. If you are not a former reporter, you have not right to criticize.
—
Posted by Margaret Ramirez to Chicago Newspapers at 7/20/2005 05:22:22 PM

=============================

She has a point: I came on too hard and apologize.  Must remember there’s a human being behind that story I do not like.  It’s good she responded because (a) the critic deserves a sharp reponse now and then and (b) I am moved further to correct errors I have seen:

* She says George spoke in a press conference.  It would have been good to tell us that; it was therefore a public statement, not given in interview, or something said in floor debate during the meeting. 

* The no-gays statement, run also by NPR, she says deserved to be her lead and the story’s headline.  But George spoke of being “part of a gay subculture,” not of being homosexual.  There’s a difference.  If Ramirez doesn’t think so, she should know that George does.  It’s all part of the church’s hate-sin-love-sinner approach, not to mention the fair presumption that tendencies do not always lead to activity.  If George mentions the gay-culture habituee in one breath with one “who has lived promiscuously as a heterosexual,” moreover, we may be doubly convinced.

This is what was wrong with Ramirez’s lead and the copy editor’s headline.  Neither seems to have caught George’s meaning.  Furthermore, does she think George had earlier said gay-subculture participants should be admitted?  I hope not.  His statement in any case represented no change.  It’s too bad Ramirez and her editors, such as they are, thought it did.

I likened her analysis to a cartoon, citing her use of unsupported generalities, one after another.  She responds citing deadline pressures, which are as real as the day is long, to be sure.  It takes practice to do it right, something you’d think she had enough of to be writing for a 600,000-plus-circulation newspaper with national-coverage intentions.  But (again) does she have editors working her copy over?  Is there a city desk at Chi Trib, copy deskers who walk over to her desk or into her cubicle and ask what she has in mind by such and such?  One wonders.

As for my being a former reporter, yes, Margaret, there was a Bowman byline, with subtitle Daily News Religion Writer, or Editor if the story was big enough and they wanted to doll me up a bit more than usual.  And there were bishops’ press conferences and deadlines and calling stories in or faxing them with a suitcase-size new-fangled machine into which you fitted a hotel-room telephone which magically reproduced copy in a wire room sometimes hundreds of miles away!  Amazing!

Boy’s response to a man’s world’s problem

This is the best one of our wise men can come up with on a moment’s notice.  It tells us a lot about vacuity and the shallow mind of a newspaper columnist:

=================================== 
Eric Zorn’s Notebook

July 07, 2005
TERROR IN LONDON – THERE’S NO GOOD REASON IT WON’T HAPPEN HERE

After nearly every tragedy or disaster, it’s human nature for those of us not directly involved to tick off the reasons why we weren’t hit, why we couldn’t have been hit.

I don’t work in an internationally significant skyscraper. I don’t vacation in Thailand. I don’t often fly transcontinentally. I don’t live on a coast routinely smashed by hurrircanes or in a small town in the tornado belt. I don’t serve in the armed forces. I would never find myself in that kind of neighborhood or be out at that hour.

And, today, I don’t live in London.

It’s mostly nonsense to calm the soul, but it preserves the important illusion that we can be safe, and that horrible things only happen to other people.

The essence of terror, though, is that it shatters that illusion and mocks the notion that any of us can guarantee our safety if we just install enough checkpoints, confiscate enough nail clippers from enough little old ladies and build enough barriers around us.

That essence is what we forget when we think of “terror” as an organized, opposing army that our military can fight and perhaps defeat, and when we put “terror” only in the context of spectacular acts of mass murder such as those of 9/11/2001.

“Terror” is a near-paralyzing fear of the random, the sudden, the unpredictable. It’s the absence of sanctuary. It’s the corrosive, destructive sense that no place is safe and none of the old rules of engagement apply.

With every car bombing and suicide slaughter in Iraq in recent months and with today’s deadly series of rush-hour explosions in London, the same thought hits me: There’s no good reason we haven’t seen such small-scale attacks here –- bombs hidden in vans, suitcases, sewers, tunnels, mall trash receptacles -– and no reason to assume we won’t.

One reason you don’t read this thought very often is that there’s no ringing follow-up to it; no “…and yet we will meet this challenge with…” to calm the heart. And so most of us superstitiously avoid mentioning it in hopes that somehow the vicious, disaffected zealots in America will always be different from those overseas.

My son was on the subway this morning at the very moment I heard the news from London. I knew he was safe — in fact he called when he emerged from the below-ground station in the Loop to get directions to the bus stop — and I didn’t feel terror.

But I did feel again the nagging tug of terror’s point man: Dread.

Posted by ezorn at July 7, 2005 09:49 AM

Boy’s response to a man’s world’s problem

This is the best one of our wise men can come up with on a moment’s notice.  It tells us a lot about vacuity and the shallow mind of a newspaper columnist:

=================================== 
Eric Zorn’s Notebook

July 07, 2005
TERROR IN LONDON – THERE’S NO GOOD REASON IT WON’T HAPPEN HERE

After nearly every tragedy or disaster, it’s human nature for those of us not directly involved to tick off the reasons why we weren’t hit, why we couldn’t have been hit.

I don’t work in an internationally significant skyscraper. I don’t vacation in Thailand. I don’t often fly transcontinentally. I don’t live on a coast routinely smashed by hurrircanes or in a small town in the tornado belt. I don’t serve in the armed forces. I would never find myself in that kind of neighborhood or be out at that hour.

And, today, I don’t live in London.

It’s mostly nonsense to calm the soul, but it preserves the important illusion that we can be safe, and that horrible things only happen to other people.

The essence of terror, though, is that it shatters that illusion and mocks the notion that any of us can guarantee our safety if we just install enough checkpoints, confiscate enough nail clippers from enough little old ladies and build enough barriers around us.

That essence is what we forget when we think of “terror” as an organized, opposing army that our military can fight and perhaps defeat, and when we put “terror” only in the context of spectacular acts of mass murder such as those of 9/11/2001.

“Terror” is a near-paralyzing fear of the random, the sudden, the unpredictable. It’s the absence of sanctuary. It’s the corrosive, destructive sense that no place is safe and none of the old rules of engagement apply.

With every car bombing and suicide slaughter in Iraq in recent months and with today’s deadly series of rush-hour explosions in London, the same thought hits me: There’s no good reason we haven’t seen such small-scale attacks here –- bombs hidden in vans, suitcases, sewers, tunnels, mall trash receptacles -– and no reason to assume we won’t.

One reason you don’t read this thought very often is that there’s no ringing follow-up to it; no “…and yet we will meet this challenge with…” to calm the heart. And so most of us superstitiously avoid mentioning it in hopes that somehow the vicious, disaffected zealots in America will always be different from those overseas.

My son was on the subway this morning at the very moment I heard the news from London. I knew he was safe — in fact he called when he emerged from the below-ground station in the Loop to get directions to the bus stop — and I didn’t feel terror.

But I did feel again the nagging tug of terror’s point man: Dread.

Posted by ezorn at July 7, 2005 09:49 AM