Mark Brown Shocks the Faithful
A young liberal journalist told me he could admire Brown’s intellectual honesty in the abstract but believed the price was too high to pay. Brown had given aid and comfort to the enemy. Brown himself wrote a day later, “The reaction certainly has made for a most unusual day, the strangest part coming when I hear from family and friends that Rush Limbaugh was quoting from the column and remarking favorably about it . . .
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Brown read me the e-mail sent by one troubled reader. “Having once or even twice pledged to you my eternal gratitude and devotion for your consistent and articulate opposition to our war on Iraq,” it began, “I am a bit constrained in my response to your recent columns. Still, I have to express my disagreement and dismay.” Her letter went on to remind Brown that “the war was wrong from the start.”
As a media critic, I attempt from time to time to slash holes in the arguments pundits make in their columns and editorials. It’s what my readers expect of me. But a while back one of those pundits, Brown’s Sun-Times colleague Neil Steinberg, got a little tired of this treatment and reminded me tartly that columns and editorials aren’t, strictly speaking, arguments at all. They’re pronouncements. “I don’t believe in persuading people. It isn’t possible,” he wrote me. “Their minds aren’t open enough, and they have too much pride to admit they’re wrong. The best you can do is comfort those who agree, and irk those who don’t.”
“His reaction to the second Daley was completely based upon the second Daley,” says Royko’s son David. “He didn’t have a knee-jerk judgment of somebody based on who their father was.”
The Surprise Ending Is Neither Surprising nor the Ending
Fooled? Million Dollar Baby doesn’t fool anybody. But certain that it does, Keller assures us that even when a movie doesn’t work because we’re all just waiting for the big surprise, that’s OK. “The final, stomach-flipping dip could be worth whatever you miss along the way while waiting for the payoff.”
