4/4/11 Postscript to March 14

In his farewell piece Rich said, in effect, that the pressure of writing a weekly column was one reason for the move:

[William] Safire, a master of the form, was fond of likening column writing to standing under a windmill: No sooner did you feel relief that you had ducked a blade than you looked up and saw a new one coming down. . . .That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion.

Although Rich’s weekly column was longer that most, he found himself “hungering to write with more reflection, at greater length at times . . . .”

Now Bob Herbert has left, leaving another hole not easily filled. He wrote twice weekly, which would create even more pressure. His farewell expressed similar concern:

The deadlines and demands were a useful discipline, but for some time now I have grown eager to move beyond the constriction of the column format, with its rigid 800-word limit, in favor of broader and more versatile efforts.

As to subject matter, he said that he was moving on with “the intent of writing more expansively and more aggressively about the injustices visited on working people, the poor and the many others in our society who find themselves on the wrong side of power.” I wonder whether “more aggressively” implies that limitations were placed on his columns. Rich said not, as to his.

Rich had a kind word for another pundit: “some columnists are adept at keeping their literary bearings over long careers — George Will is a particularly elegant survivor among the generation of columnists ahead of mine . . . .”

Will, many years ago, described a columnist’s challenge: “Writing is not hard," wrote Stephen Leacock. "Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy—it's the occurring that's hard." Occurring twice a week would seem to be a challenge, but Will claimed an advantage. “Actually, the ‘occurring’ is not hard for someone blessed with a Tory temperament and sentenced to live in this stimulating era. Today, even more than usual, the world is generously strewn with fascinations and provocations.”

That is a surprising observation from a conservative, having been written in the second Reagan year, but I take his point. If the world around one is unattractive and even seems foreign, “occurring,” i.e. having a critical comment, is not difficult. When he wrote that, Will was a traditional conservative — a Tory as he put it — a disciple of “Burke, Newman, Disraeli and others who were more skeptical, even pessimistic, about the modern world than most people are who today call themselves conservatives.” Therefore the advent of the age of Reagan might leave him still dissatisfied.

“What a columnist writes in his capacity as a columnist is necessarily episodic, but there are continuities, and mine are conservative convictions,” Will said. However, he placed some distance between his concept of conservatism and some others. “The most familiar and fashionable variety . . . tends complacently to define the public good as whatever results from the unfettered pursuit of private ends. Hence it tends to treat laissez-faire economic theory as a substitute for political philosophy, and to discount the importance of government and the dignity of the political vocation.” Unfortunately, that brand of conservatism is still with us, and is dominant.