So It Goes

Kristallnacht: The Other Anniversary

JRW — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:29:36 -0800

HOW INTERESTING THAT TODAY, NOVEMBER 9, is the anniversary of one of the most exhilarating moments of happiness in 20th century history and one of the most terrifying: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Kristallnacht in 1938. One is a celebration of liberation, the other a solemn remembrance of how a people became enemies of their own country overnight. I don't mean to dim the bright light of elation we should all feel about the fall of the Berlin Wall, to make any comparisons or to suggest that one was linked to the other -- though for...

Stop Making Sense, Part II

JRW — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:00:17 -0800

WHENEVER A HORRIFIC INCIDENT visits us, like the mass killing in Fort Hood, Tex., yesterday, our natural impulse is to ask, "Why?" And, to some extent, it's important to get to the facts, if only to see if there are patterns that could warn us before future catastrophes hit. We hear so often (mostly from the blanket media coverage that inevitably follows) that people are "trying to make sense of it all." Even if the shooter recovers and tells his story, we will probably never know the precise reasons for his rage, let alone be able to make sense of...

Do Nothing, Get Nothing

JRW — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:29:38 -0800

EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NEVER (knowingly) pulled a lever in a voting booth for a Republican candidate, I don't want anyone to think I mean to be partisan when I ask: what the hell does the GOP think it's doing? I refer to the Republicans' conscious strategy right now to do nothing, in hopes that it will make Democrats look bad and make people like Republicans more -- or some such tortured logic. Its 'don't-just-do-something, sit-there' approach has been especially apparent for all the months since Congress and the White House have been grappling with health care policy legislation. The...

Sorry

JRW — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:36:56 -0700

THE TWIN JEWISH HIGH HOLIDAYS of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (which begins at sundown tonight) call on each adherent of the faith to engage in a personal reckoning -- with ourselves and with others. It is the beginning of a new year, a time to think back on what we did last year and to start fresh for the next one. In some ways, it is something like an annual staff planning retreat. On Yom Kippur -- or the Day of Atonement -- it is traditional to grapple our transgressions, big and small. (It's sort of like the concept...

U.S.-China Trade Relations on the Eve of the G20

JRW — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:40:44 -0700

Today, "China Daily," the China-based English-language paper, ran this Op-Ed I wrote on U.S.-China trade relations on the eve of tomorrow's Group of 20 Summit in Pittsburgh: Keep an eye on US-Chinese body language in Pittsburgh Like the other two Group of 20 (G20) summits held since the global banking meltdown a year ago, the very picture of cooperation among heads of government will be the main message at the G20 gathering in Pittsburgh on Sept 24-25 - a message these leaders hope will further calm fears enough to bring the international economic crisis to a soft landing, sooner rather...

Health Care Reform: Do We Need a Dictator or a Democrat?

JRW — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:47:43 -0700

ONLY A FEW MONTHS AGO, the political commentators were telling us that if President Obama hoped to pass comprehensive health care reform, he would do well to avoid the sin Bill and Hillary Clinton committed when they tried to do the same in the early '90s. The Clintons' mistake, the Conventional Wisdom goes, was that they tried to bake the entire package on their own before committing it to debate in public and in Congress. Whether or not Obama and his team were consciously avoiding such an approach, I can't know; but theirs was to turn much of the crafting...

From Abstractions to Human Beings

JRW — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:39:03 -0700

I GIVE A LOT OF CREDIT to Professor Henry Louis Gates, police Sgt. James Crowley, and President Barack Obama for making good on their promise to sit in the lawn of the White House and share a few beers. Not that I think it will really overcome the issues of race and intergroup relations in the United States or because I believe the act of throwing back a few beers is really all that therapeutic. (Why do we so often think that beer can settle anything?) Nor was this a truly thorough and candid grappling with this most difficult issue....

The Long Path to Independence

JRW — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:36:18 -0700

WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST Michael Gerson published a piece in today's paper on the mixed feelings he has when his kids go off to summer overnight camp. I swear he took the ideas and the sentiments right out of my head. Alas, it is the action, not the thought, that really counts. Plus, he got to it first -- and wrote it better than I could have. "The ultimate goal of camp," Gerson writes, "is the cultivation of independence -- for a child to be away from home and face problems without the assistance of parents. Children stand on the edge...

Life Well Lived: Rebecca Lipkin

JRW — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:15:33 -0700

TODAY, I ATTENDED memorial service for a friend, Rebecca Lipkin, who died a week ago today from inflammatory breast cancer at the age of 48. Too young, you may think, and she was. But in such a short lifespan, she accomplished so much, as this obituary details. When she died, she was Director of Programming at Al-Jazeera English, which she had helped found only a few years ago. Before that, she was a longtime producer for ABC News, where she was responsible for major pieces for "World News Tonight" and "Nightline." She not only saw the world -- particularly spots...

In Defense of (a Few) Typos, Part II

JRW — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 09:17:04 -0700

THOUGH I HAD FIGURED I'd left the subject for good after my last post, So It Goes readers might want to know about a New York Times editorial today that admonishes those who would reject others simply because of a small typo. The editorial, with the headline, "For a Typo?", recounts a case in which an otherwise qualified candidate for public office is disqualified because "a cover page on his packet of signatures said that there were 131 folders when there were actually 132." To be fair, the editorial is really about how difficult it is for new, underfunded candidates...

In Defense of (A Few) Typos

JRW — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:12:27 -0700

ACCORDING TO A REPORT I heard on the radio this morning, the business world has a low threshold of tolerance for typos. That's according to a survey conducted by the staffing agency Accountemps, which found that "three out of four (76 percent) executives interviewed said just one or two typos in a resume would remove applicants from consideration for a job; 40 percent said it takes only one typo to rule candidates out." My own feeling about this is that it's much too strict a standard -- that is, to disqualify someone for an errant punctuation mark or a dropped...

Some Good News

JRW — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:26:22 -0700

FIRST THE BAD NEWS: they're still out there, those crazy-ass guys who believe the Holocaust never happened, that Jews control the world, non-whites are genetically deficient, homosexuals are emissaries of the devil, all Muslims are terrorists, etcetera, etcetera. According to the watchdog group Southern Poverty Law Center, the numbers of hate groups are growing, up by 54 percent between 2000 and 2008. More bad news: they will probably always be out there. Much as I hate to believe it, history has shown the staying power of hatred is remarkable, more resilient than cockroaches. As the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa...

Can Science and Religion Coexist?

JRW — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:38:03 -0700

TODAY'S NEW YORK TIMES reported that President Obama has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. It caught my eye not only because this is a remarkably important position but also because of this passage: [One of the objections some have made about the selection of Collins] is his very public embrace of religion. He wrote a book called “The Language of God,” and he has given many talks and interviews in which he described his conversion to Christianity as a 27-year-old medical student. Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught...

Michael Jackson: Why Should We Care?

JRW — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:35:34 -0700

ONE THING I'VE LEARNED from my many years of pitching story ideas to journalists (which is a big part of what I do professionally) is that I have to answer the question that every reporter, editor or producer has to answer on behalf of his or her audiences: why should we care? What is it about this story that will enlighten or enrich at least a segment of the readers, listeners or viewers? Why should anyone beyond a small circle of interested parties care about this story, and, if it's a specific anecdote, what lessons does it offer that are...

Settlements: Only a Side Show

JRW — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:11:59 -0700

THERE'S A LOT OF CHATTER RIGHT NOW ABOUT A COLLISION between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about their disparate views on settlements of Israelis in the West Bank. True, they disagree (at least according to their public statements), and true, that has put some pressure on Netanyahu. Israeli politics make it difficult for him to freeze expansion of settlements, let alone cut back on existing ones -- even if the Prime Minister does, in his heart, agree with Obama's position; and those same domestic pressures insist that every Israeli leader keep the American President on his...

A Question About Guantanamo

JRW — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 05:24:04 -0700

CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME why Guantanamo, the place, had to be abandoned in order for the United States to regain its moral standing as a humane place? Again, the place, not the practices that took place there, which I found grossly unacceptable: the "enhanced interrogation techniques," the absence of any sort of due process that enlightened people are supposed to follow. (How could we allow people to sit there, for long stretches in solitary confinement, without even being read charges or having access to an outside counsel?) I also detested the previous administration's tortured (sorry for the pun) legal...

Jargon: Enemy of Good Communication

JRW — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:14:37 -0700

A WRITING TEACHER I HAD IN COLLEGE once told our class that if readers don't understand what we write, chances are it's our fault, not our readers'. It's our job, he said, to be understandable more than it is the readers' job to understand. That advice has stuck with me since, and it applies not only with writing but with every form of communication. That's why one of my pet peeves is jargon. Jargon is the enemy of good communication. It immediately throws up a wall between the communicator and his audience, one that the communicator can quite easily eliminate....

Customer Service -- What a Concept!

JRW — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 08:23:31 -0700

MARC GUNTHER, one of the leading observers these days of corporate social responsibility, talks in a recent blog post about companies' "ethic of service—to their employees, their customers and their shareholders" and how that translates into loyalty from those same critical groups of stakeholders. "I’m willing to bet that Southwest [Airlines] customers are less grumpy about flight delays than those on United or Delta because they have a sense that the company wants to treat them right," writes Gunther, who profiled Southwest's "ethic of service" in his 2004 book, Faith and Fortune: How Compassionate Capitalism is Transforming American Business. Funny...

Well-Meaning Homeowner Surrenders to Convenience, Vanity; Fate of World Hangs in the Balance

JRW — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:39:55 -0700

ON SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2009, Jeff Weintraub of Silver Spring, Md., finished cutting his grass with a gasoline-powered lawn mower after he lost faith in his non-motorized push mower's ability to do the job. Nearly two years ago, the starting cord on the power mower broke, and, rather than replace it, Weintraub decided to buy a manual rotary mower. "With such a small patch of grass to cut," he thought at the time, "there's no reason to continue to pollute the air, deplete the ozone layer and pierce the calm of my pastoral neighborhood with a roaring power mower." Along...

Manny's Folly: Do We Really Care?

JRW — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:54:36 -0700

ANDY BOROWITZ has a funny piece today under the headline, "Angry Cleveland Indians Fans Demand Team Take Steroids." "The national pastime suffered another black eye last night," Borowitz 'reports' in a spoof article, "when a mob of irate Cleveland Indians fans poured onto the diamond at Progressive Field to demand that their team take steroids. "Displeasure with the championship-starved squad reached a boiling point with the news that slugger Manny Ramirez took performance-enhancing drugs -- but only after leaving the Indians." Of course, Borowitz is playing off of the news that Ramirez, the L.A. Dodgers star outfielder, got hit with...

Three Things

JRW — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:13:19 -0700

OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS, I've entered a season of life that most of us encounter at roughly this time, I assume. I've gone to more funerals and memorial services than I ever had before, including for some for people close to me -- or, at the very least offered condolences of one form or another. It's not a lot, and nor do I bring this up to be overly melancholy, morose or precious -- though I'm sure that's not what you're thinking right now. It just occurred to me recently that this tide has come in without my...

The Obama Doctrine: We Could Use a Little Love

JRW — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:15:28 -0700

"IT IS BETTER TO BE FEARED THAN LOVED, if you cannot be both." So said the 16th century political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (looking otherwise lovable at right), known for his full-throated support for the exercise of raw political power. With the Obama Administration, we're seeing a test of whether Machiavelli was right. Obama has pretty noticeably departed from Machiavelli's doctrine -- and from his predecessor's -- with one all his own. In a few words, we might call it a doctrine of humility, introspection and self-effacement. Indeed, when asked at a news conference in Trinidad and Tobago last month after...

Keep Calm and Carry On

JRW — Sun, 03 May 2009 08:44:17 -0700

THE BUZZ THESE DAYS is all about flu -- most importantly, how each of us avoids it. So it shouldn't have surprised any of us at my synagogue yesterday when it became the subject of our rabbi's d'var torah, or explication of the current Torah (bible) portion. Coincidentally -- or, better put, conveniently, if your purpose is to address the current public health crisis -- yesterday's Torah portion (starting with Leviticus 16: 23). The prescriptions were, at least in the context of religious ritual, meant to purify the souls of the priests, but one cannot escape the sense that it...

Poetry Belongs to God

JRW — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:11:17 -0700

RELIGION HAS ALWAYS BEEN – and still is – largely about giving human beings a way to understand those things that we cannot fully understand. Certainly in ancient times, religion was a primary way to explain the inscrutable and often frightening acts of nature. Even now, religious thought still plays a role in helping us better comprehend what even modern scientific tools cannot yet fathom. The Psalmist speaks in several places, perhaps most famously in Psalm 27, of “seeking God’s face.” I would interpret that phrase not as pulling back a curtain and seeing the Wizard who has His hands...

Polish Rescuers of Jews and "The Habit of Breathing"

JRW — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 10:40:51 -0700

WHENEVER I HAVE READ ABOUT or been in the presence of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews from the Nazi extermination machine, I can't help but ask myself a question: what would I have done if I had been in their place? And when we think through all the pressures that many of them faced in that circumstance -- not the ordinary, workaday stresses we prattle on about in our lives today -- we have to wonder if we would have been so courageous. It's not only the threat of torture and death that hung oppressively and in some cases for years...

Immigration Reform: If Not Now, When?

JRW — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:35:18 -0700

I HAVE TO CONFESS that when The White House announced a few weeks ago that it intends to pursue a (long overdue) comprehensive reform of our nation’s immigration policy, I was a bit skeptical. Hadn’t we just gone through a bruising and ultimately counterproductive exercise to pass an immigration reform bill a couple of years ago? And aren’t there enough tough issues on the President’s agenda right, which will tap more than enough of his energy and political capital? Don’t get me wrong, I hope President Obama succeeds, that we can fix what everyone, from one end of the political...

The Drama of Durban II

JRW — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:13:10 -0700

THERE WAS SOME EXTRAORDINARY and, for me, heartening drama today at the U.N. Durban Review Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, the follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. That last confab, which took place in Durban, South Africa, was so shot through with anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that the U.S. and Israeli delegations ceremoniously and under a barrage of intense criticism walked out. It was one of the very few actions by the George W. Bush Administration that I thoroughly applauded. But much of the attention that should have been directed at this surreal event...

Becoming Americans

JRW — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:40:12 -0700

EVERY AMERICAN -- native born or naturalized -- should have the experience of watching a naturalization ceremony, as my family and I did yesterday. This one, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was a little bit more majestic than most. And it came following a 70-anniversary commemoration of the famous concert singer Marian Anderson gave on the same spot after she was denied a chance to sing at the Daughters of the American Revolution building because she was black. The event featured outstanding performances from Sweet Honey in the Rock, The President's Own U.S. Marine Band, the Chicago...

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

JRW — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:21:17 -0700

ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF AGO, I was listening to a podcast of "The Writer's Alamanac," a five-minute radio literary salon hosted by Garrison Keillor. At the end of each of these daily dispatches, Keillor finishes with a poem, and this day he read "The God Who Loves You" by Carl Dennis. The poem struck me so profoundly that I had to go back and read it for myself and listen to it several times again to make sure I was not merely swept away by Keillor's sonorous recitation. (His voice could probably make a bad poem sing.) When...

"Michelle Obama Fashion Watch"

JRW — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:55:57 -0700

THE WORLD IS IN TURMOIL. Leaders from some of the biggest economies on the planet met in London to hammer out some new global financial remedies, and still others, members of the largest military coalition in the world, convened in Strasbourg, France, to ponder how they will maintain peace and security. Our President, Barack Obama, is engaging in a critical effort to win the hearts of Europeans and, in Turkey, the Muslim world. And what's on the front page of the today's New York Times? Three side-by-side photos of Michelle Obama with a headline/caption: "First Lady, Two Countries, Three Outfits"....