Thursday, October 01, 2009
On timeless advice, etc.
John Long
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
My meandering mind: an occasional list of random thoughts and observations that collect in my head and must be periodically emptied.
n It's been a mournful year for readers of conservative commentary. First the great William F. Buckley passed on in February; then the "Prince of Darkness" Robert Novak died in August. Now this week we lost William Safire. (I hope George Will is taking his vitamins!)
Safire's elegant and eloquent -- OK, often irascible -- commentary on the news always got me thinking, even when I disagreed with him. (He voted for Clinton in 1992, for instance, though he became a vocal critic later.) But I especially delighted in his language columns, which produced many gems of advice I never remember to follow: Remember to never split an infinitive. Proof read carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with!
n Remember a couple of years ago when Valley View Mall banned teenagers without parental supervision after certain hours? Apparently a few loitering troublemakers were so disruptive that legitimate shoppers were spending their money elsewhere. I've never given much thought to how well that program has worked, since my wife and I are not frequent mall-goers. But she had to take one of our daughters not long ago, and reported that the teens are indeed gone. In their place, there seemed to be a new population of 18- to 25-year-old loiterers, who as legal adults can't be as easily evicted. So if the mall managers want to correct that problem, I say let the middle-schoolers back into Valley View. Nothing like roving bands of pubescent kids to scare off Generation Y.
n Does it seem to you that a lot of modern governance is aimed at protecting us from our own folly, instead of encouraging us to avoid folly altogether? I suppose that's fine up to a certain point, but then who protects us from the protectors?
n So the Washington Redskins lost again last Sunday! I was once a Skins fan, of sorts, before the behavior of NFL players ruined professional football for me. But checking the scores I couldn't miss the irony of the Redskins breaking the 19-game losing streak of the Detroit Lions. I guess Detroit can always count on Washington to bail out a failing enterprise.
n Looking for a growth industry in which to invest? Try hand sanitizers. Every time a reporter uses the phrase "H1N1" the sales must jump. Big jugs of sanitizer have started appearing in classrooms, stores, churches -- anywhere a germ may be passed. The president himself has started giving advice on hand cleanliness. Next, invest in moisturizers, because all that evaporating alcohol is going to chap a lot of skin.
n It went unnoted, as far as I can tell, but this summer marked the 100th anniversary of an interesting day in local history. In June of 1909, African-American leader Booker T. Washington made a stop in Roanoke and Salem as part of a goodwill tour sponsored by the Virginian Railroad. His purpose, he said, was to "promote friendly relations between the black people and the white people," no small challenge in the era of Jim Crow. At a speech on Salem's Water Street (then the main thoroughfare of Salem's segregated neighborhood), Washington urged the large audience of both races to work hard, get an education, save and invest money, and not to be "loafing around the barrooms and dens of vice and misery."
To his own race, Washington counseled his audience to stand up for their rights as free citizens, but not to forget that "to a very large extent you have the future in your own hands"; that decisions made today shape circumstances of tomorrow. Pretty timeless advice, it seems to me -- a message folks of all races and creeds still need to hear a century later.
n Finally, a note to readers who e-mail me with comments, whether in agreement with or dissenting from my points of view: Thanks for reading and writing. The early rush of the semester has kept me from responding as diligently as I should, but I appreciate that you give my ramblings some of your time.
Long, director of the Salem Museum and a history teacher at Roanoke College, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
