Malaise is back: Remember the Carter Years, much as it hurts to? Malaise was a common way to describe the mood after that president gave a speech diagnosing the American mood as a crisis of public confidence. And now the same, telling word has popped up in a description of how Americans are reacting to Hillary Clinton's dragging presidential campaign: "There's a malaise inside the race right now with Clinton," says Tony Bisagnano, a state senator in Iowa who supported Joe Biden for president back in 2008. "People I know who are supporting her are not necessarily withdrawing, but are unenthusiastic." In short, they're coming down with a bad case of Malaise.
There goes print: Retiring as chancellor of UALR, Joel Anderson says he plans to spend his mornings with coffee in hand, leisurely reading the newspaper. Not enough people do to please this old newspaperman. The signs are everywhere. For example, New Orleans' famous old newspaper stand, Lakeside News, is shutting down after moving out of the French Quarter to suburban Metairie, which was Binx Bolling's stomping grounds in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.
In its heyday, the newsstand next to Morning Call, the still famous coffeehouse, offered everything from racing forms to literary reviews, along with a wide selection of the foreign press. Adding to its mystique, New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello ran the place for years. And now, like so much of New Orleans before the Deluge that was Katrina, it's gone, too.
There's more than one way for a city, and civilization, to disappear. Some by water, others by fire, and in this case, by going out of print.
A different point of view: Harris Faulkner, who's a television anchorwoman for Fox News, is suing Hasbro, the toymaker, for $5 million after Hasbro named its toy hamster Harris Faulkner, claiming Hasbro damaged her professional credibility as a journalist. On the other hand, being named for a TV anchor in an era when talking heads don't rate high in public esteem may have hurt the hamster's credibility at least as much as it did Ms. Faulkner's.
Murder by guitar: According to an item in the indispensable In the News column on the front page every day, one David Darrell Thomas, 60, has been indicted on first-degree murder charges in North Carolina, where police say he killed Ruby Duncan Johnson, his 72-year-old caregiver, with a guitar. We've heard some bad geetar-playin' in our unfortunate time, but this is going too far. ("Strumming my pain with his fingers/ Singing my life with his words/ Killing me softly with his song . . .") Better to settle for just a boo or two.
The news from Lake Wobegon: After four decades of being the founder, inspiration and guiding spirit of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor has announced that the show's next season will be his last as host. It's not easy to describe the rambling, old-time radio program he put together that has attracted millions of listeners over the years. Call it an upper-middle-class version of the old Hee Haw TV variety show, or a Grand Ole Opry for urbanites of the Minnesotan persuasion. But the show is definitely an American institution. And those addicted to it wouldn't miss it.
Whenever its host described his mythic town of Lake Wobegon as a place where all the kids are above average, it brought to mind the skewed results of test scores that had not been tested themselves. The best way to test those test scores is by comparing them to those racked up by students in other states.
But if a state like Arkansas conducts its own student tests without comparing the results to those in, say, Iowa or Louisiana, there's no basis for comparison. And the test scores are rendered meaningless. Let's not let that happen here. Lake Wobegon needs to stay fictional.
What's the difference between aid and help? Aid is a word derived from the Latin, while help is Germanic in origin, like most of the common, everyday words we use in English. In short, aid is what executives in suits negotiate around conference tables, while help is what a good old boy offers when he stops on a dark and rainy night to change your flat tire on a winding country road somewhere east of Ash Flat.
The Triumph of the Vulgar: Public life has always had its share of vulgarity; it comes with the territory. But it seems to get particularly thick as an election year approaches. Leading the list of people in the "news" that I'd really rather not read about is Josh Duggar, though there are some close contenders for that dubious honor. Consider, if you can bear to, the one and only, thank goodness, Donald Trump, who has few peers in the vulgarity department. I'd print some of the responses to my column critical of The Donald if only they were printable.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:
pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 09/27/2015