Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century. Steve Chapman
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been a good century for the country or the advocates of assertive government. The Iraq war proved the fallibility of our leaders in diagnosing dangers, formulating strategy and handling unforeseen events. The recession persisted despite the Obama administration’s $800 billion stimulus package and the Federal Reserve’s prolonged commitment to easy money and low interest rates. Obamacare was botched in execution and, so far, remains a work in progress. Anyone who began the 21st century believing that the government does few things well would not be dissuaded by the record of the past 16 years.
But there is some good news. In some respects, individual freedom has made big gains. Gay marriage is the law of the land. Four states have legalized recreational marijuana. Gambling, once confined to a few outposts, has spread to 48 states. The Internet has put free expression beyond the power of censors, at least this side of China. The death penalty is used only rarely, and 19 states have abolished it. Economic regulation is far less extensive and heavy-handed than it was a few decades ago.
Barack Obama, after preserving George W. Bush’s program for surveillance of phone records, agreed to take those records out of the government’s hands and limit their use. The Iraq war has soured the public on ambitious wars of choice. The nuclear deal with Iran has averted another potential war, at least for the time being. There is considerable resistance to new free trade agreements, but little appetite to roll back old ones. International commerce faces fewer barriers than it ever has.
My views are broadly libertarian. I believe democracy, capitalism and the Bill of Rights are among the most beneficial things ever created. I note that government programs often fail at their objectives and sometimes backfire. I think that people should be allowed to make their own choices as long as those choices don’t inflict unwarranted harms on other people. I have little confidence in the ability of our government to transform foreign nations by force.
But I have an allergy to dogmatic ideology. Any ideology – this seems so obvious it shouldn’t need to be stated, but it does – has to be constantly tested against the evidence of how the real world functions. And when the two conflict, as they sometimes do, I prefer reality over presuppositions. Judging from some politicians and commentators, that is not a universal preference.
I have been writing a column for The Chicago Tribune since 1981, but here you will find only columns written since 2000, because that period strikes me as more than sufficient for a single volume. I’ve chosen the entries partly to cover the most important issues and events, partly to address matters that have been overlooked, and partly to entertain.
As an opinion writer, I am habitually prone to optimism even during the worst of times. Without it, there would be little point in trying to contribute to debates and change minds. Of course, I could be delusional. If so, please let me go on that way.
The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once wrote, “Anyone desiring a quiet life has done badly to be born in the twentieth century.” The same could be said of our era, but this century has a long way to go to equal the horrors of the past one. And has 85 years to do better. Besides, as Ohio Gov. John Kasich exclaimed on the campaign trail last year, “But my goodness! We live in America. I mean, we have a lot going for us.”
Acknowledgments
There are four people without whom I literally would not have had a career in journalism: Nancy Sinsabaugh, Scott Kaufer, Nicholas Lemann and Michael Kinsley. They’re just the first in a long line of those I have to thank. The late executive editor Maxwell McCrohon hired me at the Tribune, and his successor, James Squires, entrusted me with a twice-weekly column. I’ve worked for five different editorial page editors at the Tribune: the late Jack McCutcheon, Jack Fuller, Lois Wille, Don Wycliff, Bruce Dold and John McCormick. No journalist could ask for better ones. Likewise with the Tribune’s editors, who include Howard Tyner, Ann Marie Lipinski and Gerould Kern.
I have had many valued colleagues on the board, the current ones being Marie Dillon, Elizabeth Greiwe, Marcia Lythcott (who edits my column), Michael Lev, John McCormick, Kristen McQueary, Clarence Page, Scott Stantis, Lara Weber, Paul Weingarten and Eric Zorn. They provide endless stimulation, provocation and friendship. Among the former editorial board colleagues I especially miss include Dianne Donovan, Terry Brown, Pat Widder, Storer Rowley, Alfredo Lanier, Naheed Attari, Ken Knox, Cornelia Grumman, Dodie Hofstetter, Laura Moran Claxton, Kristin Samuelson, Megan Craig, Megan Crepeau and Jessica Reynolds.
My column is syndicated by Creators Syndicate, to which I was recruited by Rick Newcombe shortly after he founded it in 1987, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with a string of excellent editors. Among those who worked on the columns in this volume are Karen Duryea, Jessica Burtch and David Yontz.
My education on a variety of topics over the years has had abundant help from many people. Among those who have contributed more than their fair share are John Mearsheimer, David Boaz, Barry Posen, David Henderson, Ronald J. Allen, Geoffrey Stone, Richard Epstein, Karlyn Bowman, Thomas Hazlett, Daniel Polsby, Ethan Nadelmann, Albert Alschuler, Allen Sanderson, Stephen Schulhofer, Franklin Zimring, and Gary Kleck. Richard Norton Smith has been a close friend and an inexhaustible well of information on politics and history since our college days.
My perfect children, Ross, Keith and Isabelle, have furnished me with many insights, opinions and column topics, as well as unending love and support. I’m lucky to have been embraced and informed by my matchless stepsons and daughters-in-law: Chris and Cassie Mycoskie, and Craig and Amy Mycoskie. The first reader for my columns is a born copy editor and the love of my life, Cyn Sansing Mycoskie, whom I had the good fortune to marry in 2007. For her and all of the above, my gratitude is immense but inadequate.
Dedication: “For my parents, Betty and T.J. Chapman”
Geographic snobbery at home in the news media
Sunday, January 30, 2000
It’s well-known among journalists that across this broad land, people dislike the news media. Why those of us who spend our working lives fearlessly bringing the truth to the American people should be met with such ingratitude is a mystery. But the average person tends to think of journalists as arrogant, insular and condescending. I can think of only one obvious explanation for this perception: In many cases, it’s true.
This will not come as breaking news to Southerners, who are used to being lampooned in the national press as snaggle-toothed bumpkins prone to marrying their underage cousins and keeping rusted-out jalopies in the front yard. The arrival of out-of-state reporters in Atlanta for the Super Bowl provided the occasion for some of them to wax scornful about the city’s countless shortcomings.
USA Today sports columnist Jon Saraceno, who is to humor what Mike Ditka is to self-control, felt the need to joke about his dissatisfaction with the host city, whose enumerated sins include John Rocker, Ted Turner, bad traffic and the bomb that went off at the 1996 Summer Olympics. In an effort to be fair, he did express regret that Tampa Bay didn’t make it to the big game so we could have had “our first Bubba Bowl. . . . For all the grits.”
Saraceno also had to acknowledge that he had once bought a truck in Atlanta, and “it didn’t have a gun rack, a CB radio or tobacco juice splattered all over the dash.” Gee, you think he got a discount?
But that one tolerable experience was not enough to justify the NFL’s inexplicable decision to play the Super Bowl in the Georgia Dome: “Atlanta has hosted only one previous Super Bowl. Personally speaking, I could’ve waited until Y3K for the second.”
Saraceno should commiserate with New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, whose snobbery toward the Southern provinces is even more pronounced. After North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms spoke recently at the United Nations, Friedman was sputtering with outrage. “Who authorized him to speak for America?” he demanded. “Why don’t they send Jed Clampett from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ to the UN too, so we can hear what he has to say about foreign policy?”
Maybe Friedman, who seems more at home in Jakarta than in Jacksonville, has been spending too much time