Posted on 05/19/2003 7:30 AM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
I don’t give a tinker’s fig about Jayson Blair anymore. It doesn’t tell me anything about the culture of the Times I didn’t suspect already. But there are two ancillary issues that bear on the nature of modern culture. "One: the cigarette is now a symbol of shadiness and moral dissolution. Newsweek is running a cover story that features the Confabulator of Longacre Square, and he’s smoking a cigarette. Well, say no more. The guy smokes. What else do you need to know? In a few years the demonization of smoking will be so complete that a movie set in WW2 will feature a chain-smoking Hitler and an abstemious Churchill, just to telegraph to the audience who’s naughty and who’s nice."
Two: adults no longer run the Times. To me the most interesting revelation of l’affair Blair hasn’t been the way a rising star was coddled and cosseted; it’s the Moose. The Beanbag Moose. As I understand the story, some of the Timespersons were on a retreat in a rural conference center. During one of the meetings, a moose wandered into the grounds, and everyone watched him out the window - but no one mentioned him, because it wasn’t germane to the subject of the meeting. This story has become Legend, and has taken on the form of a Beanie Baby, come to enlighten those of us who see the Moose but dare not speak His name. It’s a metaphor, you see. A metaphor for unnoticed mooses. (Anyone who's ever been on one of these retreats knows exactly what would have happened if you'd interrupted a meeting on synergistic strategies to say "hey, how come no one's talking about that big moose out there?" Four words: Monday morning drug test.) Now at the Times if you wish you cut to the quick, you place on the table your company-issued beanbag herbivore to symbolize your desire to speak freely.
Grown-ups do not behave this way. Unless they are running a day care. It’s a cute anecdote for a retreat, but applied to the real world, to the newsroom, is a sign of how infantile management theory has become. The introduction of the moose splits the staff into two groups: the brown-nosers who put the moose on top of their computer monitor and give it seasonal decorations, and the cynics who stuff the damn thing in their bottom drawer next to the employee manual, the healthcare benefits package, and the rest of the crap the company expects you to read. They look at that moose, and think: if I get fired tomorrow, they’ll ask for the moose back. It’s their moose. It ain’t mine. I put this moose up on eBay, I’m going to be covering Trenton zoning meetings for the next ten years. Screw the moose.
There’s probably a secret Times subculture of Moose Abuse. No doubt the Moose has been photographed in a stripper’s cleavage, face down on a bar in a puddle of New Amsterdam lager, sitting in Thompkins Square with an anarchist’s A photoshopped on his chest, standing outside the building with a cigarette in his mouth.
This is what I was talking about yesterday with the exception of Chief Moose. I have an opinion of him also, since I do business in Portland, Oregon where he worked before moving East. This guy hit the nail on the head about him also. I was prescient, huh?
It always has been. That's why children have always been discouraged from smoking and why some religious groups have always condemned it.
My recollection is that the movie Pearl Harbor already had a nonsmoking FDR.