What's the collective noun for editorial writers? I need to know because a
whole herd of us is coming together this week here in Little Rock. But to
call us a herd gives us too much credit for organization. I know it's a
coven of witches, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, but what do you call
an agglomeration of editorial writers?
My nomination: a clatter. As in the sound made by those old Royals and
Underwoods in the noisy, crowded, smoke-filled newsrooms of yesteryear.
There was something romantic, promising, alive about that sound. There still
is, which may be why there's a market even now for manual typewriters among
the sentimental, or just wistful.
We won't be a full-fledged clatter until the program gets under way with
greetings from Mike Huckabee, formerly a governor and presidential
candidate, and currently political commentator and bass guitarist with his
rock 'n' roll ensemble, Capitol Offense.
There'll be some other Big Names on the program, like syndicated columnist
Juan Williams and John Shelton Reed, the DeTocqueville of Dixie. He's
rounded up a whole passel of eminent sociologists to talk about the latest
incarnation of that curious ethnic/geographic/cultural group known as
Southerners.
We'll talk about the Wal-Mart Effect and the impact of Hispanic immigration,
too. The obligatory tour of the Central High Museum is to follow a
discussion about the ever-evolving historical significance of the Little
Rock Crisis of 1957. It'll all be in keeping with the convention's theme
this year: "The Next South, the Next America."
Who knows, we may even get around to discussing editorial writing at some
point.
All in all, this conclave should be quite a show. It could even prove an
education if we pay attention.
Editorial writers should be trickling into the lobby of the Peabody Hotel
here in Little Rock all during the day. One by one they'll set down their
luggage and the obligatory laptops that have replaced the old Royal and
Remington portables, and start looking around for old friends or, even
better, old enemies. Some of us have feuded for so long we've started to
like each other.
You grow fond of people you see Same Time Next Year - year after year. And
I've reached the age where I not only see old friends but a ghost or two,
editorial writers from the past who used to be at these conventions but have
made their last deadline. Tony Snow, a lapsed editorial writer who wound up
a presidential press secretary, had been invited to speak at our final
dinner, but had a previous engagement. Dang, it'd be good to see him again
at one of these things and renew the past, slightly rewritten to give
ourselves much better lines.
And I still miss Ann Lloyd Merriman of the Richmond News-Leader and later
Times-Dispatch, our historian and keeper of the flame, who left a hole the
size of a continent in this outfit's institutional memory when she died a
few years ago. How describe her? She was a combination of Virginia gentility
and invincibility, of Lee and Jackson, only wrapped in a cloud of cigarette
smoke and sipping a bottomless libation. In short, a helluva newspaperwoman.
As you would imagine, given newspapermen's talent for organization, the
National Conference of Editorial Writers is a kind of anarchists'
convention, a mix of class reunion and debating society. And I can hardly
wait for it to pick up steam and get really rolling.
How describe our membership? H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, and a man
who could write a mean editorial in more than one sense of the word,
attended one of the first of these editorial writers' conferences. His
writings remain fruit for the mind-a mix of verbal razzmatazz and cold
observation that still cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. For example,
here's his summary description of the nation's editorial writers at that
early conference of same:
"Copy readers promoted from the city room to get rid of them, alcoholic
writers of local histories and forgotten novels, former managing editors who
had come to grief on other papers, and a miscellany of decayed lawyers,
college professors and clergymen with whispered pasts. Some of these botches
of God were pleasant enough fellows, a few even showed a certain grasp of
elementary English, but taking one with another they were held in disdain."
Certainly they were by Mr. Mencken, who never mixed his talent with tact. In
his case, that would have been a sad dilution.
We've grown considerably more respectable since Mr. Mencken's time, more's
the pity. The modern, contemporary editorial writer, alas, has an abundance
of tact and all too little talent. Like any patron saint, Henry Louis
Mencken is much honored amongst us, but too little followed. Literal-minded,
imagination-short, terribly solemn, dutiful to a fault, we now might find
eloquence in bad taste, or at least a violation of the stylebook.
Year after year, these conventions grow more like a wake for the great
editorial writers we've lost, and for the old, Menckenesque editorials page
that took no prisoners. This year we'll be told, again, that editorial
writing is a dead art, and we just don't know it - and had better learn to
blog. But as Truman Capote said of the works of another author, that's not
writing, it's typing. So we write on, the happy few of us who are left, and
still think of our newspapers as personas with a history, character and
opinion of their own to express - through us.