Spanked
“Mr. Steinberg, you are a complete ass,” said Martin by way of introduction. “When you have a white columnist working for a white newspaper who has the audacity to suggest that a black politician checked in to the hospital for campaign purposes when in fact he is actually sick . . . this to me shows the kind of ignorance that is pervasive. And when you purchase the Sun-Times this is the kind of individual whose salary you are supporting.” He read the part where Steinberg mocked the idea of a sympathy vote, then went on to wonder about the people who depend on the “garbage-filled parks, [the] overcrowded, understaffed jail, [the] overwhelmed hospital? Who pities them?”
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“You know who I pity?” Martin said. “I pity Neil Steinberg’s wife. I pity his wife for having to live with a fool who’s willing to slap her around. Oh yeah, I went there. Because if you’re going to sit here and make light of the board presi-dent’s actual illness, then I’m going to speak to why did you slap your wife, Neil Steinberg? . . . If you want to get personal, let’s get personal.”
Steinberg: “OK. He is sick.”
“That sounds like a ridiculous thing for a journalist to do,” said Martin. “Why didn’t you go back and change the column?”
I was reminded of Tessio in The Godfather trying to get off the hook by explaining to Tom Hagen that he always liked Michael Corleone and betraying him was only business. It didn’t work for Tessio either.
The Friday Sun-Times carried an apology on its editorial page and another at the top of a column Steinberg wrote even though it was his day off. Steinberg’s regrets showed him at his best. “It was a mistake to focus purely on the political, and ignore the personal, the reality of a sick man going to the hospital. I’m sorry for that,” he wrote. “I was bragging the other day that one of the benefits of being called awful names a dozen times a day is that it has made me less sen-sitive to hurt. I thought that was a good thing, but it’s not.” This felt genuine enough, or at least true to the persona Steinberg’s created for himself as a columnist–more clever than warm. Later in the column he commented on this persona. Questioning the sincerity of President Bush as a man of prayer, Steinberg called himself a “cynical sort” and wryly added, “Myself, I never like mouthing the expected pieties. Though they do have protective value.”
