I’ve known some columnists to wonder what real use they have. I happen to have been one of them once, a self-styled arbiter of omnifarious issues, handing down his ruling in 800 words or so every week. Others have done it as often as three, even four, times a week; I guess the oftener you do it the less time you allow for self-doubt—or the more chances you have to make up for the stinkers you belatedly realize you have produced.
Anyway, incarnated in these pages as a less pretentious and happier trouper through life, I can look back on my life as a columnist with more detachment. Also, privileged now to write as the spirit moves me, I’m spared the tyranny of deadline.
I still remember how, brought too close to deadline, I’d sometimes feel my left (invariably the left) begin kicking against the shoetop and something in my upper arm (also the left) begin constricting into a marble. I imagine that in the worst of those cases I stank worst. But even if I had smelled better, what good would it have done?
There’s a book that gave me some reassurance, “Sketches in the Sand” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), a collection of writings by James Reston, nearly all of them columns he published in The New York Times, where from reporter he went on to become executive editor.
After over 30 years as a columnist, he says, he got the impression most readers have only “the dimmest idea” what a newspaper column really is. There seems a popular support, he says, “for the notion that a good column is one that supports the reader’s convictions and a bad column one that does the opposite, but the reason and purpose of the thing are not well understood.”
At any rate, the idea of the column suits newspaper publishers, says Reston: “They could buy opinion and even philosophy by the yard at a weekly fee less than the cost of… a janitor, and meanwhile avoid the awkward business of having to produce and defend ideas of their own. Reporters, of course, loved it: If they could get a column, they could escape at last from the clutches of the enemy copyreaders. Of course, they might write rubbish, but it was their own rubbish, and after a hard day’s work and a good night’s sleep, they could field the morning paper on the first bounce and glory in their own unmolested prose.”
Motives
I don’t know that the motives of Philippine publishers are anything like what Reston says; it’s certainly atypical of the Philippine case, however, that the columnist is also a reporter or even a former reporter, although, again, rubbish is perfectly within any columnist’s capability.
Still, I could identify with Reston’s own reason—or excuse—for being: “As for the public, they seem to be irritated by columnists a good deal of the time, and no wonder. For here we are every day or so, blowing through our hats about a whole variety of complicated subjects that normally baffle and humble even the most intelligent members of the human race. How could you be so almighty smart? Why should we take your judgments when government has more information about almost everything than you have?
“The main answer to this, I suppose, is that a democratic society is expected to operate by the consent of the governed. The final judgment lies with the people, who make up their minds by watching and listening to their officials, following the arguments of the political opposition, listening to the news on the radio and television, and reading the reports and comments in the newspapers and magazines. Reporters and commentators merely try to make this process a little easier for the citizen. The voter cannot read every document or hear every argument going on… and democratic governments cannot be left to pass judgment on their own acts any more than a baseball player can be allowed to call his own balls and strikes.
“The newspaper column is merely one of the instruments in this process, and it differs widely from one writer to another.”
Reassuring
All that comes from Reston’s own introduction to his book, whose title, which I borrow for this essay, comes in turn from the self-description—one I find at once humbling and reassuring—of the man who may well be the father of the modern newspaper column, Walter Lippmann: “A puzzled man making notes… drawing sketches in the sand, which the sea will wash away.”
With absolutely no Restonian or Lippmannish pretensions—but with apologies to them all the same—I still get ratified or harangued by some who have run into my sententious words, old and new (for I sometimes cannot help backsliding into commentator habits).
But, in my careless age—having lived longer than most anyone (if that’s any valid reason or excuse for setting down one’s thoughts for public consumption)—who cares, indeed?