Some Strange Things I Read in Today's New York Times

Perhaps it is because if I am awake these days I am editing – wrapping up work on our new book. I think maybe all that sculpting with words has made me read differently, or just made me a bit odd. I notice things in a slightly different way. So it is that in my daily perusal of the New York Times on-line today (some habits even survive sixteen hours a day of editing) I found a few strange things that I would like to share.

1. The Times Obituary for Kurt Vonnegut

One of the other things I do when I enter the twisted world of round the clock editing of a book (I have been here before) is that I read novels with the same voracity and that my dogs chew up food slipped to them under the table (please don't rat me out to my family on that, thanks). I am on my seventh novel in four weeks, about 3,000 pages give or take a few hundred. One of the books I started with on this binge was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, so for that reason I took special notice that Mr. Vonnegut died yesterday. The obituary in the Times described him as the "Counterculture’s Novelist", as opposed, I suppose, to being a "Pro-Culture Novelist."

More peculiar, however, was this sentence in the Times' lead:

"[Vonnegut] was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island."

The number and location of his homes was right up there with the titles of his three best-selling novels. Great, I can see it now:

"Shultz was 97 and owned neither a home, a vehicle, or a TV set. He did, however, possess a lovely collection of chipped coffee mugs."

2. World Bank President Apologizes for Arranging Job for Woman with whom he has a "Personal Relationship".

This one reminds me of the whole thing about Bill Clinton getting impeached for lying about sex but George Bush not getting impeached for lying us into a war.

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is in hot water today over disclosures that he pulled strings to help get a woman with whom he has "a personal relationship" a big money job at the State Department. “I made a mistake, for which I am sorry,” he said in a statement. According to the Times, the woman was on staff at the Bank and Mr. Wolfowitz, a former senior Pentagon official in the Bush administration, pulled a few strings and helped her get a $193,500 a year gig (almost as much as I make!) at the State Department (even more than the Secretary of State takes home).

So now, just as the Bank's board of directors gets ready to meet in Washington this weekend, Mr. Wolfowitz finds himself in, well, an awkward position. That would be the same board of directors that rolled over and accepted Mr. Bush's appointment of one the Iraq War's earliest boosters as the man best equipped on the planet to address global poverty. To be frank, exactly how big a screw up do you have to make before you don't get promoted in this administration? Just curious.

Anyway, Al Capone got nailed for tax evasion and now maybe a key architect of the war gone wrong will get nailed over "a woman with whom he has a personal relationship." But let's be honest, shall we? Don't you think that 99.9% of Times readers really just wanted to know what "personal relationship" meant? Guess we have to go see if the National Enquirer is available on-line.

3. Ooops, it was that Damn Delete Button Again.

Finally, today's Times also carries an article titled, "White House Says It May Be Missing Attorney E-Mails". Apparently the White House says it has "lost" some of the emails subpoenaed by the U.S. Senate in connection with its investigation of politically motivated firings of eight U.S. Attorneys by the Justice Department. “It can’t be ruled out,” said the deputy White House press secretary.

As someone wiser than me once said (maybe it was one of our Blog commenters), "History does not repeat itself, but sometimes it echoes."

It seemed obvious that the image to go with this particular Blog post needed to be something from the New York Times (as continuing readers might have noticed, I like finding images to go with these post. Most popular: Spy vs. Spy). And, given this story about lost emails I saw the chance to post my favorite Times front page of all time (above). Three decades ago what the Senate subpoenaed was Nixon's oval office recording tapes (technology has advanced) and, shockingly, 18 and half minutes of those tapes got lost too, courtesy of some mighty fine office aerobics by Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods (History buffs, see the photo here.)

Now, when I was in the fourth grade I used to "lose" my homework a lot too, so much that my teacher, Miss Upton, once memorably announced to the class, "Jimmy Shultz, if your head wasn't screwed on you'd probably lose that too!" But one might expect staff at the White House to be a tad more careful than a fourth grader from Whittier. I am really, really hoping, for history reasons only, that it turns out the Bush White House lost 18 and half e-mails. I love stuff like that.

The best part of the Times article was this little note about reaction to all this from the Senator who issued the subpoenas:

On the Senate floor, Mr. [Senator Patrick] Leahy was skeptical that the e-mails are indeed missing. “You can’t erase e-mails, not today,” he said. “They’ve gone through too many servers.” Mr. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who just turned 67, is considered one of the more computer-savvy members of Congress, despite having grown up in the era of typewriters.

Ahhh, good writing has no substitute.