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Brooks Peterson
Monday, July 16, 2001
Let us now praise scribes of yesteryear
Do you want to know how you really, really figure out that you have, beyond the most ephemeral shadow of a doubt, become a dinosaur? Maybe not, but I'm going to tell you anyway.
This is how: You find yourself waxing nostalgic about bygone newspaper columnists. Comic strips, too, come to think of it, but that's another column for another day.
Mr. Givens, the Viewpoints Editor, and I were discussing the relative merits of the journalists who occupy the op-ed page these days vis-à-vis those who came before them. I gotta tell ya, I'm worried. Not Viewing With Alarm, not yet, but I will tell you this: The Situation Will Bear Watching.
Of all those who have opted out of the game (happily, most are still on this funny old orb with us), the one I miss most is the inimitable, irreplaceable James Kilpatrick. This guy was, and remains, the Total Package, if I may resort to the kind of neologism he would deplore. He wrote - in fact, still does write (in a weekly column on the courts and legal issues) - with power, wit and impact. When it suits him, he addresses the same issues the other pundits do, but usually more perceptively and almost always more entertainingly.
The view from Scrabble, Va.
Then there are (OK: were) the columns he wrote about the beauties of life and the neighboring life forms in his beloved Scrabble, Va., retreat. His recollections of Christmases and Thanksgivings there spring directly from an American experience that most of us idealize but may not have experienced first-hand.
One of his greatest strengths, though, is the way he will surprise you. Kilpatrick is a conservative's conservative, no question, but he's no doctrinaire, club-you-over-the-head dogmatic blowhard. If memory serves correctly, once he even had something favorable to say about legalized prostitution.
Among the others whose departure I mourn is a fellow whose politics are 180 degrees removed from Kilpatrick's: Donald Kaul, the Detroit-born scribe who learned all he ever needed to know about politics and the world at his father's knee: "They're all in it together."
More than anyone save perhaps Molly Ivins, Kaul had the power to elevate the blood pressure of local and area right-wingers. He was the quintessential happy warrior, relishing the sting of battle while at the same time reveling in the absurdity of the spectacle.
I think his best years came during the Reagan and Bush administrations, when he hilariously did battle with the reigning orthodoxy. You could almost see him rubbing his hands together gleefully over the word processor.
But Kaul retired a year or two back, I know not why. I hope it wasn't health problems. Myself, I suspect he came down with a case of the blues on confronting the Clinton administration. Sharing Clinton's politics to a considerable extent, Kaul was too intellectually honest to disregard his glaring, gaudy failings.
Wherever he is, I suspect Kaul is still tending the fire. Long may he prosper.
Where's C.W. Gusewelle?
There are plenty of others: the urbane but earthy Russell Baker, most of whose work was beyond reproach, but who would every now and then toss off a column that left you wondering who'd slipped the locoweed into his feedbag; Joe Murray, the sage of the Piney Woods, who had what may have been the best job in journalism, traveling all the heck over the place for Cox News Services; and, by no means least, Kansas City's C.W. Gusewelle, whose beautifully evocative columns about the outdoors and the sportsman's life could make this unregenerate city dweller yearn to be crashing through the underbrush with a shotgun in his hand and a pack of dogs in front of him.
This is not to say the current crop of scribblers is devoid of merit. But Kilpatrick, Kaul, et al, embody, for me, a bygone but somehow more rewarding sort of journalism.
That, of course, is just one dinosaur's opinion.
Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com
Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com
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