High on the list of reasons to read a newspaper the old-fashioned way is the opportunity to wrap highfalutin editorial comment around soggy coffee grounds and drop the mess in a can. Such is the punishment we readers, who live, of course, in the real world, mete out to pundits (who of course don’t). I recall my mother’s scorn for the op-eds favoring sanctions against South Africa that she kept spotting in her local liberal rag. It was all empty posturing, she declared, by nattering theoreticians who didn’t begin to understand South Africa the way she did. Her relationship was real and personal. It was based on the stories her own mother used to tell about the dashing Boer lieutenant who’d swept her off her feet at the 1904 World’s Fair.
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The United States made its separate peace with North Vietnam in early 1973, which is when our POWs came home. The bitter end for our Vietnamese friends came two years later. And in those chaotic final days, when I was writing stories from Saigon and watching the country collapse, the Americans ran an airlift day and night from Tan Son Nhut airport. When the airport was bombed, the evacuation continued by helicopter from the embassy grounds, and ultimately from the embassy roof. After the last helicopter left the embassy the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon. Does Byrne think we should still be fighting in Vietnam? Does he think this should have been a very special war in which the winners didn’t conquer the losers? Perhaps he believes we should have asked the North Vietnamese to wait at the city gates another couple of years while we evacuated everyone they were fighting against.
Jonah Goldberg is another Tribune columnist who could use a summer camp in the real world. On November 16, Goldberg, who’s a National Review editor, took on “diversity” in academia. “It’s time to admit that ‘diversity’ is code for racism,” he began. “If it makes you feel better, we can call it ‘nice’ racism or ‘well-intentioned’ racism or ‘racism that’s good for you.’” The best universities have quotas, he argued, and even though they’re supposedly in place to make sure minority students can get in, they have the effect of keeping some minority students out–namely Asian students, who, like the Jewish students of another era, would give universities another “feel” if they were admitted solely on their merits.
Like Byrne, the Tribune is troubled by the idea of abandonment. But if there’s a lesson in Hungary–which today is as free as it wanted to be 50 years ago–that’s applicable to Iraq, the Tribune doesn’t know what it is. It wants there to be one, and it has the idea that there’s probably one somewhere, but it can’t put its finger on it. It asks the question, “Should America have backed Hungary’s freedom fighters in 1956?” But even though half a century has gone by, at the end of a long editorial it doesn’t have an answer.
I’ve never been able to get angry at Mariotti. He is what he is. Sometimes he’s even right. In a November 24 column in the Sun-Times he allowed that in the sportswriting game the “possibilities for impropriety are endless” and proposed getting rid of “one glaring problem area.” Sportswriters should get out of the business of creating sports news by deciding who wins awards, such as most valuable player, or who gets into a hall of fame. “Just because we cover sports doesn’t mean we should be part of their electoral mechanisms,” he wrote. “We should be detached from the big machine.”
aThe Sun-Times was modest to a fault last Monday when it carried the story the Associated Press finally got around to doing on the November 3 self-immolation of Malachi Ritscher. The AP story–which also ran in the New York Times and sparked a fresh burst of international interest in Ritscher’s act–reported that the suicide “went largely unnoticed” at first but that word began to spread after the Reader “pieced the facts together.” That’s true. But the Sun-Times did have a brief item the day after Ritscher died and later two Richard Roeper columns. It was entitled to edit the AP story in a way that gave itself a little credit. Uncharacter-istically, it didn’t. Meanwhile, the Tribune ignored Ritscher’s death until a solid story by Tonya Maxwell appeared November 29–a good two weeks after it should have.
