Our Poor Power

I have been putting this off for a long time.

First there was the last primary, then the convention, then the day itself, then that incredible night, and, now, the moment itself is almost here, the end of the beginning and the beginning of something terribly uncertain and potent.

All of this and I still haven’t published a word about it.

It isn’t that I don’t have anything to write. There is a stack of scraps and notes and other papers next to me at this desk, written at work and on the subway; at first light and well after the last; at bars and coffee shops; at airports and on planes; in Washington, St. Louis, and a handful of other cities from here to the other end of this continent. I’m not looking at them because anything I don’t remember from them isn’t worth putting down, but they stand as a reminder of how important this is to me and how badly I need to say something about it, even if it doesn’t answer every question and straighten every inch of the path ahead.

At times there seems to be too much to say. This has been a brutal decade, and not nearly all of that is the fault of the politicians, although it is easy to believe that sometimes.

It’s hard to separate the personal and the public, too. I’ve seen more than a few beliefs obliterated in the last eight years—and as many more pressed to the point that I almost lost them as well. And I refuse to blame the president for love’s labor lost and vice versa

The buck stops here.

But there is still the question of what to do with unrequited expectations—for everyone from the highest leaders to the closest friends. I don’t know who I would be if I abandoned my hopes, but is the daily agony of idealism worth the inner peace of righteousness?

Not a new question, and not one I propose to answer here. But it is always there, especially in the greatest moments of anticipation and excitement—including this one. Should I expect anything at all from anyone else? And what? And from whom?

Again, I do not know for sure.

But I am alive, which, as Camus reminds us, is always the first choice—and surely a sign that hope hasn’t been extinguished entirely.

And there are so many stellar people in my life—people who meet and exceed my expectations every day. So there is that, too.

I don’t know how much farther that trust extends. I don’t even know if it reaches down the street to the podium where the man (whom I certainly consider one of those stellar people as an individual) will stand today and grasp the reins of our union for the first time—or to the epic lawns and streets of this magnificent city where so many will gather to watch and weep and cheer as it happens.

And I count myself among the many that I don’t trust, as a part of that great mass known as the American people—or that greater mass known as humanity.

But if there is one more person I believe in among all of this it is the individual.

Perhaps the most profound report I heard throughout the entire election was an NPR profile of John Lewis, an original Civil Rights leader and congressman from Georgia. Speaking on Election Night, he recalled not the sweeping oratory or the towering figures that so often mark the Movement, but ordinary people who stood up and did something extraordinary—something so bold that others were willing to kill them for even trying it, on this soil and no more than half a lifetime ago.

As Lewis put it, “My mind just started going back to the people who stood in those unmovable lines in Selma, Alabama some short years ago. The people who were beaten, shot, and killed in Mississippi for attempting to register to vote. Those who died and went to their graves, who never ever had an opportunity to vote for anyone, or even have an opportunity to register.”

In the chaos of hope and suspicion that is public life, it is moments like that that I cling to. Moments when people stand up for their beliefs no matter what the cost.

The report also quoted a man in Grant Park on that same night, another ordinary individual, who said, with extraordinary poise and conviction, “I’m looking forward to a change where we will say, I don’t care where you’re from . . . when you’re here, we’re going to treat you like a human being.”

A world away from Selma, to be sure, but in the same spirit nonetheless. An individual deciding to shoulder his portion of the burden. And just because he wasn’t beaten or killed for it doesn’t make it any less important. Belief in a better world begins not in the alabaster halls of our nation’s capital or even in those diners that the national media just can’t seem to get enough of, but in the heart of every individual.

As Robert Kennedy put it so profoundly the day after Martin Luther King was killed for his own extraordinary fight, “The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.”

 

 

So much of politics is unreal. A great game, an entertainment, a blood sport. Despite the surge that sometimes rises at the sight of such a spectacle, none of it seems to really matter.

But as I walk the streets of Washington this week and ride the overcrowded Metro cars, I find myself overwhelmed—despite all my suspicions—by how visceral politics feels again. There is so much love and hope. Everyone is brimming; all is one.

RFK began his MLK speech by saying, “It is not a day for politics.” But his words, for me, touch the very nerve of politics in our country. We must first strive to love and trust one another. As long as that struggle continues, anything is possible, but without it, none of our dreams can proceed.

For all of my foreboding, as I see more and more smiling faces in this city and hear more and more hopes proclaimed, I agree more and more with the words of Rep. Lewis, who remarked on Election Night that “Barack Obama is saying to America, we are one people, we are one house, we are one family.”

But Barack Obama is only one person, and it will take all of us, not just him, to fulfill that promise. 

To be, in the words of Walt Whitman, “superb persons.” 

To “refuse to believe,” in the words of the man our country honored yesterday, “that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”

I cannot speak to policies or statistics. I cannot grasp the facts of this new administration with any expert knowledge. But I can appreciate what it means to treat my fellow Americans with dignity. I know what it means to strive to be better to those around me. 

And if we each take up that struggle the victory will be profound indeed, if only because we have already seen the desolation of the mindless menact of violence and we know we want something better.

I do not know where exactly such a struggle will take us. All I know for certain is that we simply cannot survive anywhere else.

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Thou Shouldst Not Have Been Old: A Note on the Worst of Holidays

I have been trying, for more than a year, to figure out why I dislike New Year’s Eve. No—why be polite?—why I hate New Year’s Eve. I could say it’s because it’s a drunk’s holiday, a night that promises everything and gives you none of it; I could say it’s because it has no tradition outside of simple math; I could just say I was raised on New Year’s Day brunches rather than orgies the night before. And I’d be right to say any of that. But the real reason I hate New Year’s is that it’s a fool’s holiday—and when I say fool I don’t mean the wise little dolt who follows around after the hero in a play.

It’s a fool’s holiday because it celebrates time in the most delusionary sense. It asks us all to celebrate the same second in the same way, and anyone with a pinch introspection in his or her head knows we aren’t capable of that. We live as brave creatures, each struggling to carve out our space in the wilderness, each with our own delusions and dreams and trepidations. A good holiday remembers that—reminds us of who we are—refines us in an honest way. New Year’s, unfortunately, treats us as anything but individuals, asking us to be literally happy on cue.

Christmas, for example, is just the opposite. For all its commercialization, the experience of Christmas remains intensely personal. Ask different people what Christmas means to them and you get a different answer every time. It’s never perfect, but that’s the point. It’s human. The core of the holiday is imbedded in the home—by the hearth, in the dinning room and kitchen—and, because a fitful and fantastic sleep is an essential part of Christmas from an early age, it lives even deeper than that—in the inner rooms of each of our hearts. It’s a touchstone of hope and charity that we revisit each year with dogged faith in the good that’s yet to come. That’s the genius of A Christmas Carol: Dickens saw that each of us is reborn at Christmas because it was our first experience of hope. We live it with our whole being, past, present, and future.

Ask different people what they do on New Year’s Eve and you’ll get a story about Champagne (that probably isn’t even Champagne) and a TV program. No—the TV program. Maybe it’s just the Orwell in me, but that doesn’t sit right. Christmas may have its quirks but at least it gives respite from the madness of modern soceity. New Year’s is practically the spectacle’s magnum opus.

Thanksgiving gets the nod for the same reason as Christmas—it brings us back in from the cold, both literally and figuratively—and Easter, which anticipated either by weeks of Lent or just the hardship of winter is a fitting celebration of new life in a new world. Even political holidays, like July Fourth and MLK Day, although they might not be for everyone, are days that ask us to look back at our high ideals (and, yes, our failures, too) and summon new strength and hope.

What all of these share and New Year’s lacks is the imperative to look back before we look forward, to reach down into memory and know ourselves again. Of course, a lot of people write down their regrets and hopes, but nothing about the holiday encourages them to really face them. It’s a frat party mascarading as a sacred ritual. And where I don’t want to disparage a little fun now and then (as I sip my High Life—some real Champagne), let’s not mistake it for what’s really important. Family, community, even country: when we turn back to these we are reminded of our better selves. Even a party with good friends celebrates the faith we have in each other to be better people.

But all New Year’s celebrates is a clock, that little machine that always looks forward and never turns back. And a clock will never help us know the human heart. That operates in a different kind of time, a sacred time, a time that runs beneath our own existence and into the current of the cosmos. A good holiday is a passage into that current. To quote the great religious scholar Mirce Elide, “Participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself.” A good holiday reconnects us with the best stories and memories, which is just another way of saying it takes us back to our dreams.  

That kind of passage takes time. A long meal; a leisurely day at home; a few weeks (the real duration of Christmas, which is only half over) to travel home and back and think long thoughts during long drives and layovers and everything else in between. There’s no way one second (which only a machine can comprehend anyway), muchless the same second, offers the same redemption.

So go ahead and celebrate your wristwatch. And believe, once again, that it could ever come close to measuring our existence. I spend enough of my life studying clocks as it is. I’ll be the other kind of fool tonight.

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Detail, Visions of Eternity (1936/37 ), Salvador Dali; Art Institute of Chicago

Briefly

I haven’t been able to make it through more than a few paragraphs of a story about the current financial news without consulting a dictionary—or just tuning out. This news analysis by Peter S. Goodman, of The New York Times, was the first one I read in its entirety, meaning it made sense. Also, I’m going to plug, again, this profile of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, by Steven R. Weisman and Jenny Anderson, that the Times ran about two months ago. It’s also worth reading all the way through.

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UPDATE: This one was good, too. The focus is on small banks, but it explains some banking fundamentals well. It’s by the Post’s Binyamin Appelbaum.

Creation Myths

To repeat a gentleman whose comment I saw while posting Joseph Ellis’ new book on my iRead last night, American Creation was not nearly as good as Founding Brothers.

The premise, summarized in the subtitle, is a good one: triumphs and tragedies at the founding of the republic. The triumphs, according to Ellis, involve use of space and time to the advantage of the young nation — Washington adopting a guerrilla strategy against the British, Madison crafting a government that posterity could cultivate as it saw fit. The tragedies, as one would expect, lead back to the inability of early American leaders — Jefferson, especially — to form an effective policy for Native Americans and black slaves.

This symmetry fits well in the current trend of popular scholarship on the period, wherein the author walks confidently but knowingly between idolatry and absolute suspicion, indulging, occasionally, in a lyrical portrait but striving to let fact speak louder than myth.

Ellis has a particular talent for this style, which is what makes Founding Brothers­ — and, indeed, parts of American Creation — such a pleasure for both the heart and the mind, the dreamer and the skeptic in each of us. But his latest set of essays simply doesn’t congeal as the previous one did.

Or maybe it congeals too well. One of the most frustrating things about this book is that Ellis tries to fit each story into his triumph/tragedy model, to the point where you almost feel he is abusing his subject to string together a narrative.

As is sometimes the case with historians who alternate between major studies (in the last decade, Ellis has written biographies of Jefferson and Washington) and collections of shorter works, you wonder whether some of what you are reading in the latter is just dregs of the former, and perhaps better left where it lay after the first go around.

Of course, the opposite is just as possible — an author can let a story blossom in a long essay in a way it couldn’t as a caveat to a larger narrative. That is the case with the best chapter in American Creation, “The Argument,” which chronicles James Madison’s dogged pursuit of a constitution that favored a strong national government. By turns a biographical sketch, a philosophical debate, and an enthralling tale of haggling, nose-counting, and power bargaining, the story of the great Federalist victory is well worth reading and re-reading. Put simply, it stands on its own, and seems best told as a long essay.

Too many of the others, put simply, do not. Rather than episodes in their own right, they seem cobbled together to serve Ellis’ thesis.

The opening essay, about 1776, attempts to touch on far too many events (as any essay about that year would), and does none of them justice. Even when David McCullough devoted an entire book to the year, he focused only on the campaigns of Washington’s Continental Army, rightfully rendering the clamor of delegates and journalists as mild echoes in the mind of a beleaguered commander in chief. Ellis touches on this, too, in his second essay, but seems so committed to his argument about the importance of geographical space that he makes it seem as though the most important thing the Army ever did was hunker down at Valley Forge. No small feat, to be sure, but hardly the key to success in a war that lasted more than five years.

The middle of the book, beginning with “The Argument,” and followed by essays on Native American relations and the birth of the Republican Party, are where Ellis does his best work. Yet even these chapters are marred by Ellis’ thesis, which is often dashed across the end of each essay like Zoro’s Z. His urge to count each story as either a triumph or tragedy begins to wear on the reader. You want the importance each story to speak for itself.

The result is that American Creation leads the reader on a tortuous journey, and the effect is torturous. To wander from the fervor of ’76 to the realpolitik of the Louisiana Purchase in the lives of such diverse men as the founders were and expect to emerge with coherent storyline is fanciful for a scholar as extraordinary as Ellis otherwise is.

Illin

BETHESDA, Md. — I’m sitting on a porch in suburban Washington, where I’ve been hunkered down for a week, awaiting my move into the city. It’s a perfect, late summer morning and I need to write something.

My days are mostly spent applying for journalism jobs, which, on the whole, makes me feel disposable and inhuman, then commiserating with my friends, who reassure me that I am quite employable/not useless. I don’t know if I could do this without them, fragile soul that I am. I’d like to think I’m capable of separating the personal and the professional in myself, but something deep down in there — the poet, perhaps — is roiled by the thought of someone judging me by a few piece of paper, without ever having met me. Such is business, though, I guess. And, thus, the importance of friends and family and literature — and all the other people and things that address you as a complete person.

It’s also just frustrating not to know what you don’t know. At least if I apply to graduate school again I’ll know what I like and don’t, and won’t feel like an idiot for criticizing what I potentially don’t even understand, which is kind of how I feel about what I’m writing now. I hate that. I can only read so many Bob Woodward books; at some point — now, fortune willing — I need to get in that scrum.

Despite my doubts, I remain assured that there are qualities you want in an employee — no matter the profession — that you can’t see until you give them a chance. A well-rounded person has a share of interiority that you only discover after you give them some liberty, and I think good employers realize that. Now I just need to find one.

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Revision

What follows is a revision of my letter of professional intent.

It seems impossible that I — as a newcomer to this city and, in a way, to this profession — could know precisely how a statement like this might affect my application for a job in journalism, so I will simply tell you where I stand and what I hope for.

For six years, I have been working on my education, earning BAs in English and political science and an MA in English. Now, I’m working on my career. Put simply, I intend to be a writer, and print journalism is the profession I trust more than any other to prepare me for that.

I do not have professional journalism credentials to flash around, but I do have experience in the fundamentals of researching and reporting news, and in the craft of writing. I also believe strongly in the importance of this industry I’m trying to enter.

I side with Orwell in believing that without good writing we are incapable of good thought — that good journalism keeps high the caliber of public life, and that poor journalism erodes civilization. I’ve developed this belief throughout ten years of school, throughout study of literature, journalism, politics, history, and philosophy, and throughout countless hours of research and redrafting, copy editing and editorial deliberation. Not to mention two years running a weekly paper and a year of teaching freshmen at Boston College the fundamentals of the English language and the purpose of the written word.

All of which I would almost trade — as I stand anxiously at the border of this strange, unknown country called professional journalism — for a few clips outside of student papers. But I know all of this will serve me well, even if it might not get me a job as quickly as I want it to.

What I need is a start, a job where I can work hard and begin to learn the idiom of professional journalism that only a newsroom can teach. Researching, copy editing, reporting; strange hours, tedious tasks — I’m ready for it all.

If I strike you as a potential employee, you can reach me at iversja@gmail.com, and I would be happy to provide a resume (and clips, such as they are).

Cordially,

Andrew Ivers

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Russert Redux

In the month since Tim Russert’s death, there have been many laudatory appraisals of the NBC anchor’s career, but there has also been a counterchorus asking whether he was really a model journalist. After I threw in with the former, a friend and former theology professor of mine, Mark Chmiel, sent me a column from the latter by Alexander Cockburn.

Here’s the nut:

Was Russert so extraordinary a fellow, to elicit so tumultuous a farewell? Surely not. He could be a sharp interviewer, but I can’t remember any occasions when I said to myself, ‘Russert has given me a whole new insight into the way the world works.’ There are many journalists and broadcasters I would put miles ahead of him.

…

Russert had the power, the clout and the venue to ask tough questions in the run-up to the war in Iraq which began in March, 2003. There were plenty of serious people with informed views about whether or not Saddam Hussein really had nuclear missile to level London and bio-weapons to kill millions. But Russert was part of the Amen Chorus for a war that sent countless men, women and children to their deaths. When it mattered, he entertained no dangerous differences with the White House line. Was this a performance worthy of ‘a true American patriot’?

Did this ‘true American patriot’ commanding the attention of millions every week not open his mouth to lament the fact that the U.S. government has been trashing the Constitution and tossing the Bill of Rights in the toilet? Negative on that one too.

We’ve had seven years of craven, culpable journalism — across the mainstream board. No one honors the reporters at Knight Ridder newspapers, who were among the few ones in the mainstream press, pre-war, to hammer away at the WMD lies. They never led off Russert’s or anyone else’s show. Russert was managing editor and host of Meet the Press, host of The Tim Russert Show on MSNBC, senior vp of NBC News, NBC Washington Bureau Chief, and regular political analyst on the Today Show, The Nightly News. So he was as responsible as anyone for the press collusion with the Administration. But now that the administration is looking bad, he’s not a collaborator but a tenacious knight, jousting with them, ‘truth-telling,’ getting ‘the bad guys’ for ‘we, the people.’

As I typed my remarks about Russert, the thought did cross my mind more than once that he was part of the mainstream journalism behemoth that lumbered right along with President Bush in the months before the invasion of Iraq, and that perhaps that was worth mentioning.

I don’t know why I didn’t, exactly, but it was probably because I didn’t really watch his show back then. Actually, I can’t remember the last time I’ve watched a full episode of Meet the Press. On a good Sunday morning, I’m usually flipping between CBS and NBC to see if I can catch any juicy quotes (unlikely) while I read real news in the papers and online.

I think that’s how most people do it. Let’s face it, the shows that actually hook current elected officials and policy advisors are often just elaborate tape recorders for political blather. They have to be. Powerful people — whether they are or not — usually have to behave like intellectual morons when they’re in public because it’s just too damn costly not too. Why nod when you can wink, right? So you get the chair of the suchandsuch committee on there and ask him about soldiers in Iraq pulling some bullshit like Abu Ghraib and this guy with a law degree from Yale comes on like old pappy suckin on a corncob pipe in front of the general store — “Well, ya know, sometimes a few rotten apples….” — while meanwhile The New Yorker in my lap has Sy Hersh blowing open the whole story in painful detail and in the Times Magazine Susan Sontag has written 4,000 words on torture and why the administration’s talkingpoints, so faithfully delivered by Senator Milquetoast, are a shameful copout.

Yes, this is your average Sunday morning on the Big Three. That’s how it goes when you interview department heads and committee chairs. And it’s why everyone is actually reading the Washington Post article that anonymously quotes two of the senator’s aids and a policy expert from the Pentagon and actually says what is happening.

If your show had a reputation for talking honestly about what happened in Washington, the Faces wouldn’t come anywhere near it for fear of telling one too many lies or getting caught on camera stubbornly — and suspiciously — refusing to answer a question like a kid in the principal’s office. And those people who’ll talk about what’s really going on? Well, having every other guest filmed in a dark room with his or her voice altered until it sounds something like Buffalo Bill’s doesn’t exactly make for good television.

Is this, too, a copout? Perhaps. If Judy Miller got canned for dangerously sloppy reporting, Russert and everyone else probably should have gotten canned for passing it out, unvetted.

But I don’t entirely condemn Russert’s style. There are different types of journalists, and to be a good one you don’t necessarily have to be a gadfly — in fact, for every gadfly, there needs to be a fly on the wall, someone who has made his or her reputation for getting the facts right but also eschewing any biases, someone who watches and notes and produces those quotes that seem innocuous enough until the muckrakers dig up the real story and then the Russerts and the Bob Schieffers don’t have to say “You’re a liar!” when what’s-his-face comes back on the show — they just have to play the tape.

This probably isn’t a satisfying explanation for Alexander Cockburn, and that’s because he’s one of those beautiful muckrakers, as is Lewis Lapham, former Harper’s editor, who in a recent New York magazine sidebar quipped that Russert was “essentially a shill for the government.” That’s fine; we need them just the way they are. But we also need responsible people to do the other kind of journalism.

It’s worth noting that the last seven and a half years have been particularly stupefying — and if you’re the stenographer you don’t have much control over that but nonetheless come off looking just as addle. (One of the great hopes Barack Obama brings with him is that the dialogue between politicians and the public (or at least the news media) will be a little less moronic than it has been. One of the things a President Obama must do is be courageous enough to sit with the more cantankerous members of the fourth estate and answer their questions honestly. He owes us that much, after the farcical press conferences old 43 has put us through.)

Yes, maybe Russert could have been a little punchier. And, yes, he and a whole slew of popular journalists should have probably lost their jobs over the Iraq debacle. Just because your bosses and colleagues all committed the same mistake you did doesn’t mean you can all just take a pass.

But, more generally, so long as politicians will only sit with amicable journalists, I’d rather those journalists know what the hell they’re talking about, even if they can’t say it out loud. I stand by what I wrote a month ago, that Russert had a gift for making complex politics important by distilling its essence rather than diluting it into sensational blather. This gift came out most in his campaign coverage, which is a different kind of journalism than I’ve been discussing and maybe his most important contribution to the airwaves. I would have preferred he did more of that and fewer Sunday morning shills. Still, I’d rather have him conduct a dozen snoozers for that one zinger than turn on my TV every Sunday morning and see some bubbly FoxNewsette giggling with cabinet secretaries about, you know, whatever you want to talk about.

And that, for now, is the way it is.

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Mala Mater

In Re: SLU Bars Avis Meyer from The University News Office

To the Editor:

When Avis Meyer registered the name of the U. News last spring, he was doing what he thought was best for the newspaper that he has shepherded for more than 30 years. But when he found out that keeping the name might be a considerable hassle for the students at the paper, he relinquished his claim.

That should have been the end of it. An action was taken that was thought to be helpful, but turned out to be hurtful, and the party responsible made amends. This is the way that reasonable people behave—they fix the problems that exist rather than inventing problems for selfish reasons. It is the way that adults ought to behave. Would that Saint Louis University’s administrators understood this.

They saw an advantage, and they pounced. Originally, they seemed to have a sound, if excessive, legal claim. They wanted to be comped for alleged legal fees they incurred getting Dr. Meyer to drop the name (although if the University is really hard up, they should hire a less expensive typist—Six Large for a couple of letters?). But now, a year later, since Dr. Meyer still hasn’t paid, they’ve revealed the prize they really want. Rather than spring for the fees, now upwards of $40,000, SLU is willing to forfeit almost all of the compensation they have been demanding (all but a few thousand) if Dr. Meyer quits the U. News forever. How can they expect us to believe this is anything but a campaign to eliminate their old nemesis? Only a few months ago, Fr. Biondi wrote of how essential this recompense would be as the school struggled to “stretch every dollar to fund scholarships, salaries and other expenses.” Now, it seems, DuBourg Hall would gladly forgo the purse—which was apparently needed desperately for paychecks and electricity bills!—so long as it can have its pound of flesh.

It used to infuriate me (and, yes, still does a little) that the administration has been so barbaric in its treatment of the U. News. (Although, I will say, if I learned nothing else in my ten years of Jesuit education, it was to revere power—and Fr. Biondi certainly has that! May his chest swell with pride when he thinks of how he and his team of full-time helpers repeatedly blitzed and bombarded one of the only student groups on campus that gives a damn about the affairs of Saint Louis University! You sure showed us what for!)

But I’m over that, more or less. And now I’m worried more as an alumnus than as a former editor. It’s sickening that the only time our alma mater is in the press is when it’s done something wrong. And, unlike Fr. Biondi, I don’t blame the news media for that; I blame the reckless behavior of the administration. Saint Louis University is beginning an age of great growth—and, yes, that is largely due to the leadership of Fr. Biondi. Why, then, are we allowing this petty personal scuffle to cloud these accomplishments and taint a name that more and more people are finally starting to respect?

Apparently the new arena and research building are not enough for our president. He sees his triumph not in the prosperity he ensures for the future of the SLU community, but in the professional tombstone of Avis Meyer, a man who more than 30 years of students and colleagues can attest is a model professor.

When Dr. Meyer first acquired the paper’s name, he did so with the best interest of the U. News in mind. He did it not for himself, but for everything that the U. News has stood for at SLU. He did it so there would continue to be an independent voice on campus. Opinions of Dr. Meyer vary, but almost everyone who knows him will admit that he’s fair and usually selfless to a fault. To persecute him like this goes against everything the University should stand for.

Perhaps, now that Fr. Biondi has fluffed his feathers and shown the greater St. Louis area who’s really boss, Dr. Meyer should pay some sort of fine. But to strip him of his family—and, yes, the U. News is his family—at a time in his career when most professors are thanked for their decades of service and allowed to savor a lifetime of accomplishments? It would be despicable.

Is this who we are at Saint Louis University? Is that how we show our appreciation for a professor who has taught generations of students, in the newsroom and the classroom, the value of critical thinking, accurate reporting, tireless editing, and clear and power writing? A man who is an example of hard work and selflessness, showing up every U. News production night like clockwork despite a full courseload and, until recently, a part-time job at the Post-Dispatch copy desk? A man who when he realized he had made a mistake owned up to it quickly and without all the moaning we hear so often when his counterpart in DuBourg Hall is criticized?

I’d like to think we are better than that, and that someone will be an adult and broker a reasonable compromise that appeases the University but lets Dr. Meyer keep the honor he has earned in his time at the U. News.

It is not too late to fix this situation and let all parties involved—most importantly, Saint Louis University itself—abide with their reputations intact. It is not too late, that is, but it might be very soon. And what will people think of our school then?

Andrew Ivers ’06

U. News Editor in Chief, 2004-2006

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