Here is a miscellany of characters and subjects I hereby resolve never to mention again in any column of mine, though I know I will. It may be unavoidable. It's the nature of the beast, namely the news. The same themes keep repeating themselves, and so I keep repeating my response to them. It's a bad habit. So I've made a little list of people and subjects to avoid:
1.Corrupt politicians who everybody knows are corrupt. Why go into detail, repeating the same old outraged rants?
2.Dennis Milligan, our not so esteemed state treasurer who succeeded the even less esteemed Martha Shoffner; there's no need to mention her again. She's better left to the court filings. But you know Dennis Milligan will continue to make news. Scandalous news. And there'll be no way to avoid mentioning him.
3.Jason Rapert, the state senator and crashing bore from Conway who's got to be the most tiresome politician in the state of Arkansas and maybe several surrounding ones. Especially when he delivers one of those stemwinders he considers eloquence incarnate. He's the Joe Btfsplk of Arkansas politics--Al Capp's hapless jinx who never hurts anybody himself but leaves everything and everybody he touches, or just walks past, a smoking ruin. For boredom can devastate, too--by killing all interest in a subject. And after Jason Rapert has delivered himself of another of his unending diatribes against, say, homosexual marriage, you won't ever want to hear another word about the subject. You'll be sick of it--and of Senator Rapert, too.
4.Legislators who object to joint public-private projects on the grounds that ours is a strictly free-market, free-enterprise system. Which would rule out a state bond issue to finance that new Lockheed-Martin defense plant at Camden, just as an earlier bond issue financed a new steel mill at Osceola, both of which promise to pay long-term dividends for the whole state, its economy and taxpayers. But they're both out of bounds for the kind of legislators--and ideologues--who would prefer their economic theories to real-world experience.
Historical note: Ours has been a mixed economy at least since Alexander Hamilton gave the new United States a national bank, national tariff, and a modern economy in general. All such projects may be dismissed by their critics as "corporate welfare" when in practice they serve the general welfare that the Constitution mentions from its first words:
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
5.Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Martin and Charlie Sheen . . . and any other Hollywood celebrities who believe that delivering clever lines written by others makes them political philosophers instead of just over-publicized blowhards.
6.Any character who could be played by Matt Damon as a natural genius frustrated by a system that just doesn't understand him. He was perfect only for the role of The Talented Mr. Ripley--a natural fake.
7.Scornful descriptions of the American landscape that was once a natural paradise but has been ruined by interstates, capitalism, investment, commercial development, and all those other plagues that transformed the American West into a land that even now beckons to new immigrants. Not to mention old wildcatters who have transformed America's energy crisis into an energy surplus that promises to fuel the rest of the world. Fracking is their latest contribution to the economic revolution America continues to lead. Sure, the practice needs to be strictly regulated, but not outlawed. It's proven its value. Just ask the rest of the world.
8.The disabled of all varieties who are supposed to be celebrated for being disabled and nothing else, regardless of their merits, achievements, personal character, or anything besides being disabled.
9.Anything that could have been written by Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni or some other party-liner at the New York Times.
10.Or anything that could have been written by Ayn Rand, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Barack Obama, Glenn Beck, Mitch Albom, Sam Harris . . . name your own favorite bore. On the right or left. The merchandiser of cheap religion or of cheaper atheism. The glib, the too-sure, or the too tentative who are scared to express a direct thought.
The late great John Cheever once drew up a similar list ("A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear") but one that, needless to say, was much better written than any column of mine. Which was the inspiration for this poor imitation of it. But we can't all be Cheevers; it's challenge enough to be ourselves. My apologies to John Cheever's memory and to any readers who lost interest in this list some time ago. As I now have done.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat- Gazette.
Editorial on 06/17/2015