Remembering L T Anderson

Instead of watching Mad Men last night I read the packet of old L T Anderson columns Gazette Editor, Jim Haught, was nice enough to send me. I got to chat with Haught at the "Textbook Wars" discussion at the Culture Center and mentioned to him that I was a huge L T Anderson fan and that I was looking for any collections of the late columnist's work. Jim graciously mailed me a huge packet of Anderson's stuff - mostly from 1971, 72 and 73, the same period in which I was a Gazette delivery boy in St. Albans and started every day reading the Gazette opinion pages before I delivered my papers.

I had forgotten how many anti-war columns Anderson wrote and how many of his columns held up what passes for Christianity to ridicule because of its failure to oppose war, indeed, for its Old Testament style eagerness to cast America in the role of Old Testament Israel - the good guys - and anybody some American president happens to declare war on in the role of Philistines or other Old Testament bad guys. And L T didn't just excoriate what passes for Christianity these days for its failure to oppose the Vietnam war until practically all the godless opposed it first, L T knew that what passes for Christianity these days is an enthusiastic military recruiter and PR department for the old, white, rich politicians who send poor young men off to war by invoking God and justifying their sacrifice by assuring grieving parents that their children died "defending freedom" or "defending their country" and were not sacrificed in vain.

I had also forgotten how much fun L T Anderson had with faith healers like Charleston's "Lacy The Stranger" and with "Honk If You Love Jesus" bumper stickers.

And I had forgotten that L T shared my love of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

What I had not forgotten was that L T Anderson was, in Jim Haught's words, "a genius". Haught told me he used to send Anderson's columns, ten at a time, to the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Twice a finalist, Anderson never won the Pulitzer though his many fans think he was robbed.

Anderson died in 2004 at the age of 83. I wish he could have lived long enough to lampoon today's version of what passes for Christianity but the absence of Andersonian theological commentary on what passes for Christianity today is less tragic than it would have been had Anderson not predicted that paunchy, red-faced Baptist preachers would still be lap dogs for old, rich, white politicians who want to send their parishoners off to be maimed and killed.

The columnist whose sardonic wit made me giggle with every folded paper I threw in the 70s, would not have been the least surprised that the church of the 21st century campaigned for a president who used a terrorist attack as a pretense for attacking a country that had nothing to do with attacking the US.

Why Becoming A News Snitch May Save Your Local Newspaper (From Itself) and Save You Some Tax Dollars

I was lucky enough to grow up in a great newspaper town - Charleston, WV, one of the few 2-newspaper towns left in America - and in a household that, for much of my childhood, took both the "Democrat" paper, the Charleston Gazette, and the "Republican" paper, the Charleston Daily Mail. By the time I was in high school, I was a total newspaper junkie. I couldn't get enough of LT Anderson's columns and James Dent's political cartoons. Each morning before I delivered the Gazette, I had already read most of it.

It's a wonder I didn't become a newspaper man myself since, as a kid, I could imagine no nobler profession, no higher calling, than keeping elected officials and other scoundrels accountable - which is what great newspapers do.

As I write this post, Sue Wylie is on her WVLK radio show asking if the Lexington Herald-Leader made a mistake when it ran a sports column on the front page of today's paper. Yes. When newspapers start putting opinion columns on the front page where only hard news belongs, they relinquish their raison d'etre and demonstrate why newspapers are going out of business and why the experts are saying that even major cities may awaken one morning to find that they must now get all their news from TV, radio and internet.

But please note: without the Lexington Herald-Leader, Sue Wylie didn't have a show from 10 to 11 today.

I once heard WLAP's talk shows do 6 hours of locally-originating talk radio on one op-ed that was published in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

What would blowhards like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh talk about if newspapers didn't report the news?

We're dangerously close to raising an entire generation of people who don't know the difference between news and commentary on the news, between facts and opinions, and it doesn't help when newspapers run sports columnists on the front page.

If newspapers have forgotten how to be great, there's something you and I can do to help them remember: we can become snitches.

It was a snitch who helped Woodward and Bernstein bring down the Nixon administration.

Lack of a snitch made Lexington Fayette Urban County Government a safe haven for a child molester who was using his city job and city resources to gain access to the children he molested. You can't tell me somebody in city government didn't know something that, if leaked to a newspaper reporter, may have saved dozens of kids from molestation.

And if you're not morally outraged by the knowledge that a Lexington city worker used his cushy job to victimize children, maybe you'll be outraged by the increased tax bills you're going to pay as Lexington pays $millions in legal costs.

I can't prove it, but I suspect the Herald-Leader's exposes on misuse of taxpayer money at the airport, the public library and the Kentucky League of Cities benefitted from insider information.

These whistleblowers have dislodged these abusers of the public trust from our wallets and saved us a lot of money.

What I'm saying is that even a newspaper that runs sports columns on the front page has enough sense to do investigative journalism when "average citizens" point them in the right direction so help newspapers keep the scoundrels accountable. Go to your local newspaper's website and look up the fax number of the news room or the email addresses of some reporters and start leaking news. Not only will you save your local newspaper from itself, you'll save all of us taxpayers some money and occasionally put some bad guys in jail where they belong.