Paul Greenberg
Stories by Paul
COLUMNISTS: Then . . . nothing happened
posted: 05/23/2012 3:44 a.m. Discuss
Sometimes turning points in presidential campaigns are scarcely noted at the time. Because they’re events that didn’t happen, a low road not taken, a tactic not employed, a decisive mistake not made. Like last week’s nonevent in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
COLUMN ONE: She can’t say that!
posted: 05/20/2012 4:13 a.m. Comments 2
By now the Chronicle of Higher Education should be well-known in Arkansas, and not for good reasons. This is the publication that, with a straight face, repeated the conclusion of a “study” by Project Vote Smart listing this state’s legislature as the poorest educated in the country.
The $2-billion lesson
posted: 05/16/2012 4:27 a.m. Comments 9
Anybody need still another argument for reviving the old Glass-Steagall Act (1933-99 ), with its salutary separation between commercial and investment banking? If so, JPMorgan Chase has just provided one. A big one.
COLUMN ONE: Revolution as fashion
posted: 05/13/2012 3:50 a.m. Comment 1
Congratulations, copy desk.
Live and let live
posted: 05/09/2012 5:07 a.m. Comments 2
In the fall of 1983 in Moscow, we came in from the cold. Ending our tour of what was then the Soviet Union, a group of editorial writers from all across the United States stepped on American soil for the first time in three weeks. Our reception that night was at the U.S. Embassy. We were free. Back home. Oh, Freedom!
COLUMN ONE: It begins
posted: 05/06/2012 3:39 a.m. Comments 2
Every presidential campaign seems more vicious than the last, probably because it’s happening right now, and the public has had four years to forget the slings and arrows of the last one.
Redemption
posted: 05/02/2012 4:39 a.m. Comments 4
Charles Colson died the other day at 80, a respected and even revered evangelist in the mold of Billy Graham. By the time of his death, he may have been the country’s leading prison reformer, too, working to change men rather than just punish them.
COLUMN ONE: The first column
posted: 04/29/2012 3:34 a.m. Comments 6
Today is the 20th anniversary of Paul Greenberg’s arrival at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as editorial page editor in 1992. Today we reprint the first column he wrote for the paper: Wish me luck.
COLUMNISTS: Old man in a bar
posted: 04/25/2012 5:01 a.m. Discuss
The old man in a rumpled linen suit at the end of the bar was as easy to spot as a weed at a garden show. All around him the young couples and swinging singles, so impressionable and so eager to impress, went on laughing and talking about whatever they laugh and talk about. The old man might as well have been another fern. He seemed not so much lost in thought as found in it, nursing the dregs of the tasteless house white.
COLUMN ONE: A night in the Great Hall
posted: 04/22/2012 4:05 a.m. Discuss
It’s a beautiful sunset, as always, when seen from the Great Hall of the Clinton Library with a glass of wine in your hand and the chamber music about to begin. The anticipation is palpable. Good things are imminent. You can feel it.
Dreamwork
posted: 04/18/2012 4:49 a.m. Comment 1
Friday night I dreamed about Ted Stevens. Why would a dead senator from Alaska walk into my dream here in the middle of Arkansas? Maybe he was lost.
COLUMN ONE: The decline of scandal
posted: 04/15/2012 2:51 a.m. Discuss
It’s another sign of the blah times: The sordid details of our public figures’ none too private scandals have grown beyond boring. By now scandals have become as repetitive, predictable and standardized as the apologies for them. Just one more thing to be logged into the system at the end of the of the day’s routine. Like answering your emails.
Pomp and circumstance
posted: 04/11/2012 4:50 a.m. Comments 8
It’ll be quite a ceremony—you could even call it a spectacle—at Fayetteville this Sunday. It seems Bill Clinton is due back at the University of Arkansas, where he once taught law, to deliver the first in a new lecture series named after Dale and Betty Bumpers.
COLUMN ONE: The Obama Manifesto
posted: 04/08/2012 4:20 a.m. Comment 1
Bashing the Supreme Court of the United States is a presidential tradition almost as old as the Supreme Court itself. Thomas Jefferson began it when he railed against John Marshall’s landmark decision in Marbury v. Madison back in 1803. Just as Barack Obama attacked the same, indispensable principle of constitutional law last week. It’s called judicial review, and a country can’t have a meaningful constitution without it, that is, if it doesn’t have a court to ensure that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land—and can’t be overruled by an ordinary act of Congress.
Hilton Kramer vs. artspeak
posted: 04/04/2012 4:16 a.m. Discuss
It seems like cheating, writing an obituary for Hilton Kramer, art critic extraordinaire. For his best obituary is his own body of work. It reflects the man himself: educated, independent, clear-eyed. Opinionated in the best sense of the term. That is, someone who has earned the right to an opinion and isn’t just throwing one off to meet a deadline.
COLUMN ONE: Ethics vs. ethicists
posted: 04/01/2012 3:05 a.m. Discuss
Something happens to ethics when it becomes a specialty.
COLUMNISTS: A little perspective, please
posted: 03/28/2012 3:36 a.m. Comments 2
To read this week’s press coverage, you’d think not just a landmark Supreme Court case was upon us, but a jurisprudential Armageddon. The moment of truth has arrived, the die is about to be cast, the Rubicon crossed. . . pick your own favorite cliché. There are so many out there.
COLUMN ONE: Mail call
posted: 03/25/2012 4:57 a.m. Discuss
Dear Curious, In response to your question—who’s going to win this year’s presidential election—allow me to borrow Mark Twain’s response on a similar occasion: Ma’am, I am gratified to answer your question. I don’t know.
Instant Responses
posted: 03/21/2012 4:09 a.m. Comments 2
A small but select group of dignitaries was assembled for a panel discussion last Wednesday at the Clinton Library here in Little Rock. The topic: how to clean up political campaigns in Arkansas, specifically the campaigns for judicial office.
COLUMN ONE: The War goes on
posted: 03/18/2012 3:21 a.m. Comment 1
Dear Disputatious, It was wholly a pleasure, kind of, to hear from a reader plumping for the Confederate names of battles rather than the Union ones. You demand to know why a news story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette would refer to the Battle of Pea Ridge here in Arkansas rather than to Elkhorn Tavern, the name for the battle in Southern accounts.
Son of Climategate
posted: 03/14/2012 3:51 a.m. Comments 15
It’s the latest chapter in a continuing saga: Still another climateer has been caught monkeying with the evidence. All to prove that man-made Global Warming/Climate Change isn’t just a debatable theory but an established fact. Any doubters must be gagged, or at least discredited.
COLUMN ONE: In search of celebrity
posted: 03/11/2012 3:55 a.m. Discuss
It happens every few years or whenever John Hinckley makes the news again. You may remember the name, unfortunately. He’s the wanna-be Lee Harvey Oswald who almost killed a president of the United States. A great president of the United States. If he’d succeeded, he might have changed the course of 20th Century history, whether we’re talking about the end of the Cold War (and the Soviet Union with it) or the revival of the American economy and American pride with it.
Keep the flag flying
posted: 03/07/2012 4:22 a.m. Discuss
That’s what makes horse races—and different reactions to the same painting. Call it a difference of esthetic opinion. One of Little Rock’s city directors, Lance Hines of Ward 5, says his constituents’ sensibilities are offended by the sight of Occupy Little Rock’s tents on the old parking lot at Capitol and Ferry near the Interstate 30 overpass.
COLUMN ONE: Program Notes
posted: 03/04/2012 3:20 a.m. Discuss
(In Four Movements) First comes the talk. It can’t be helped, much like the local DJs’ chatter on KLRE, the classical music station here in the middle of Arkansas. It’s a small station but there are those who love it. Putting up with the announcers’ chitchat is the tax you pay for getting to hear the music that’s the station’s reason for being. Think of it as verbal static. It may be annoying between compositions, but the wait is worth it.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
posted: 02/29/2012 5:30 a.m. Comments 6
Have you got health insurance? I do. Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody did? Just think: No more worries about losing your health care if you lose your job, or just get a different one. Ah, peace of mind at last.
COLUMN ONE: Clichés by Pierre
posted: 02/26/2012 3:06 a.m. Discuss
It’s like a plumber’s showing up for work without a full set of wrenches. Here we are well into a new year and I had neglected the basics of the columnist’s trade: a supply of the latest, up-to-date, guaranteed-to-say-nothing-while sounding-profound clichés.
COLUMN ONE: ‘Thy life’s a miracle !’
posted: 02/19/2012 3:44 a.m. Comments 21
It’s really not fair or accurate to say this administration has declared war on religion. Its policy isn’t that clear. If it has one. And if it does, that policy keeps changing, depending on who’s exerting what pressures at the time.
Happy days are here again
posted: 02/15/2012 5:33 a.m. Comments 14
Happy days are here again The skies above are clear again So let’s sing a song of cheer again Happy days are here again No wonder the Titanic became not just a metaphor for a whole, calamitous century but a cliché. The story of its maiden and final voyage in 1912 featured a whole pantheon of modern gods that have failed: Science and technology, expertise and efficiency, mathematical probability, the worship of the biggest and best. . . .
A moment of clarity
posted: 02/08/2012 5:51 a.m. Comments 14
Those who run the Komen Foundation, and make a mighty good thing of it, too, sound confused in the worst way: morally confused.
COLUMN ONE: Econ 101: Change happens
posted: 02/05/2012 3:04 a.m. Comments 4
A presidential campaign is the health of economic illiteracy. Every four years, ignorance comes into its quadrennial own. There are voters to mobilize, resentments to stoke, dull gray truths to be replaced by shiny new shibboleths, and the gullible 99 percent to be fired up against the evil 1 percent.
COLUMNISTS: The next war
posted: 02/01/2012 6:06 a.m. Comments 15
I t happens every between-the-wars period.
COLUMN ONE: Just read the words
posted: 01/29/2012 2:36 a.m. Comments 21
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’’ —The First Amendment Constitution of the United States The words are old, the First Amendment having been adopted in 1791 along with the rest of the Bill of Rights. But even today, whenever they’re read, the effect is the same. The heart beats just a little faster.
Past light
posted: 01/25/2012 4:44 a.m. Discuss
There is a quality to light, as every great painter knows. Sometimes it explodes, at other times it only brings out the darkness. Only now may we see the light of distant stars that are no more. Yet they still shine, even illuminate.
COLUMN ONE: Two brothers
posted: 01/22/2012 3:44 a.m. Discuss
We sit in classrooms listening to another boring lecture.
There goes another one
posted: 01/18/2012 4:51 a.m. Comments 4
Oh, dear. Still another Iranian nuclear scientist has met with a fatal accident. Accidents will happen, especially in the Middle East and to Iran’s nuclear scientists.
COLUMN ONE: The Idol and the Republic
posted: 01/15/2012 3:36 a.m. Discuss
It is that time again, mixing mourning and gratitude, to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. And now we can gather at his still new memorial in Washington.
COLUMN ONE: In brief
posted: 01/08/2012 3:46 a.m. Comments 8
Congratulations to Media Matters on winning Politifacts’ award for the Lie of the Year for 2011—the bald-faced claim that “Republicans voted to end Medicare.” Politifacts may not be the most reliable source of press criticism around, but it deserves congratulations—for not letting its usual prejudices get in the way of its judgment this year.
The Comedy Club
posted: 01/04/2012 4:13 a.m. Discuss
According to the indispensable In the News column on the front page every day, where it belongs, former U.S, Senator Arlen Specter has undertaken a second career as a stand-up comic. He’s now switching occupations the way he once switched political parties.
COLUMN ONE: New year, new man
posted: 01/01/2012 3:49 a.m. Comment 1
The road to the Other Place is paved with new year’s resolutions. The skeptic sees the new year as but an opportunity to renew old habits. A believer named G.K. Chesterton saw it differently: “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year.
I loved that boy
posted: 12/28/2011 5:50 a.m. Comment 1
It was in the dead middle of one of those gosh-awful book-promotion tours publishers love and those who have to take them loathe (egomaniacs excepted). Three cities in six days. Or was it six cities in three days? It all blends into one blur of exhaustion, disorientation and general boredom. Is there anything more tedious than having to explain what you’ve already written? If you’ve written it so badly it needs explaining, it can’t be worth reading. In short, whoever invented the book tour ought to be sentenced to an eternal one.
COLUMN ONE: ’Tis the season
posted: 12/25/2011 12:47 a.m. Discuss
To many Americans, the season wouldn’t be complete without at least a few scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life. The movie wasn’t a box-office hit when it was released in the 1940s, but it’s become a seasonal favorite since—and even acquired some critical acclaim.
‘Excuse me, sir . . .’
posted: 12/21/2011 3:45 a.m. Comments 2
Call it the instinct for self-preservation. You can never tell when one of them might approach you, sometimes threateningly, sometimes not. Sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you see them coming from afar off. Or they can suddenly materialize at your side. “Got a match?” “Sir, I’m stranded here and just need a few more dollars to get a bus back to Bearden. . . .” “Could you help a. . . .” Most of them are harmless, some amusing, and then there are the others. You know the kind. Which is why you’re wary of all of them.
COLUMNISTS: What is Chanukah?
posted: 12/20/2011 5:43 a.m. Comment 1
Tonight we light the first candle of Chanukah, for it’s the first night of this minor eight-day Jewish holiday that’s become a major one over the years. There are blessings to be recited, songs to be sung, latkes to be eaten. . . but just what does Chanukah celebrate?
COLUMN ONE: The Angel’s Dictionary
posted: 12/18/2011 3:57 a.m. Discuss
With apologies to Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary: Advice, the miser’s substitute for charity.
Things I should have learned
posted: 12/14/2011 4:26 a.m. Discuss
It’s time to update the list of things I should have learned long ago. It just keeps on growing. By now it’s almost as long as all the things I need to unlearn. Here’s this year’s list: Few things are less wise than the conventional wisdom.
COLUMN ONE: Return of the Newt
posted: 12/11/2011 3:54 a.m. Discuss
It’s not his character flaws that make it hard to take Newt Gingrich seriously as a presidential candidate. The American electorate is notoriously, perhaps even admirably, forgiving of personal failings in a politician. The ability to forgive, even forget, is as mysterious as it is virtuous. I wish I were blessed with more of it. That’s something else I’ll need to work on.
Facts are stubborn things
posted: 12/07/2011 3:52 a.m. Comments 13
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.’’ —John Adams That quotation may be among the best known in Adamsiana. Not as well known is that John Adams would utter it years before he became a wise old man, and was still a brilliant young one.
COLUMN ONE: Bonjour Tristesse
posted: 12/04/2011 3:39 a.m. Comments 11
Hello, Sadness, It was wholly a pleasure to get your email, mainly because it reminded me of my grandmother.
The banality of evil (cont’d)
posted: 11/30/2011 5:09 a.m. Comments 2
Everything was in order at Penn State. For the longest time. All the necessary reports had been filed. Any crimes had been reported to the proper authorities on campus years ago. There was no need to go any further. Couldn’t we just keep this in the family? Why involve police and courts and all that? Or anyone but the school’s idolized football coach, Joe Paterno. Who could read his press releases and doubt he would do the right thing?
