with Sam Donaldson. It may come as news to him to discover yet another alleged sin on the list — that in the mid-1970s, he inspired an impressionable college student to squander his life scribbling opinions.
I know, because I was that student. Back then, anyone who was not left of center found the climate on a college campus as oppressive as the Everglades in August. But one day I opened a copy of The Washington Post to the op-ed page and suddenly felt a blast of cool air. I had discovered George Will, and there is no shame in saying I would never be quite the same.
Anniversaries are an occasion for acknowledging debts, especially those that are impossible to repay, and today is an important anniversary for me. Twenty years ago, in an event generally overlooked outside the Chapman household, I wrote my first newspaper column, for the Chicago Tribune. Since then, I’ve written more than 2,000, and I blame them all on Will, whose work gave me the idea, still unproven, that writing commentary might be a useful vocation.
At the start, I read his columns because he was a conservative and so was I. But I kept reading because he was also an exceptional writer and thinker. With his densely satisfying style, his flair for applying philosophical principles to political issues, his allusions to history, his unfamiliar quotations, and his often self-mocking sense of humor, Will performed a kind of alchemy — turning daily journalism into literature.
These days, the way to fame as a commentator is to become a pundit on TV, where volume can drown out logic and the worst vice is failing to be utterly predictable. Will is the rare columnist to gain fame on the strength of his prose and the force of his reasoning, which advance a coherent ideology without being harnessed to any partisan cause. This, after all, is the same guy who celebrated Ronald Reagan’s rise to power, only to spend the next eight years arguing that, contrary to Reagan’s insistence, Americans were undertaxed.
Beginning a Will column, or even a Will sentence, is like sitting down to a meal at a five-star restaurant: You know there are surprises ahead, and you know they will be pleasant. He is probably the only Ph.D. in political science who has applied the tools of that discipline to explain why it’s morally praiseworthy to steal coat hangers from hotel rooms.
Grumbling about a recent holiday, he said, “ ‘Inclusiveness,’ one of today’s values, is served by Presidents’ Day, which renders the Father of Our Country an equal ingredient with Warren Harding in a bland pudding of presidents.” When XFL founder Vince McMahon announced that the new league would dispense with an NFL rule protecting quarterbacks, Will said “McMahon, who has played as many NFL minutes as Madonna, says this rule turns quarterbacks into ‘pantywaists.’ ”
By modern journalism standards, Will’s writing can be abstruse and convoluted, demanding more effort than some readers want to make over their first cup of coffee. The fact that he has remained the most influential political commentator of his era — an era of shrinking attention spans — is evidence that if you give people a good reason to slow down, they will.
You can read many columnists for months without coming across a sentence that you would want to remember, much less quote. But someone could assemble a large volume of Will’s memorable remarks. Bill Clinton “is not the worst president the republic has had, but he is the worst person ever to have been president.” Football combines “three deplorable features of American life: It is violence punctuated by committee meetings and analyzed in an impenetrable argot.”
You can disagree with Will, and those of us whose sensibilities are libertarian rather than conservative often do. But even when you disagree, you may still find it impossible not to enjoy him. Future historians may read him to catch the flavor of the political debates of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Or they may read him just because it’s fun.
With his Princeton doctorate and a personal style at odds with American informality, Will is not exactly a focus group’s idea of a successful commentator. But by doing things his own way, he expanded the possibilities of journalism. Americans may feel about Will what, according to Will, Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes’ fans felt about him: “They are not quite sure what he is, but they know he is no imitation.”
Free from free speech
The trouble with kids today is that they believe all that talk about liberty and justice applies at their schools
Sunday, June 3, 2001
Schoolchildren throughout the country begin each day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, but school administrators are discovering that this practice has its risks. Many students, it seems, actually believe that stuff about liberty and justice for all — to the point of assuming they have liberties that may be exercised, even during school.
Heaven knows, countless schools have labored to eradicate this notion. Public school pupils have come to understand that their lockers may be searched, their urine chemically analyzed, their persons and belongings inspected by metal detectors, their backpacks and trench coats banned, and their words scrutinized for any hints of violent intent.
The zero-tolerance approach, also known as the zero-thought approach, has yet to run out of steam, even though it frequently turns school officials into targets of ridicule. Recently, a Maine girl got expelled for taking a Tylenol. The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma went to court last year on behalf of a 15-year-old girl exiled for 15 days for allegedly putting a hex on a teacher. In Florida, an honor student was suspended last month for five days after someone spotted a steak knife in her car in the school parking lot.
Some kids just never learn. They continue to operate under the delusion that in supervising youngsters, school officials will formulate sensible rules and then apply them sensibly. Some students also endeavor to think for themselves, without first clearing those thoughts with responsible adults. When that happens, they are asking for trouble.
The most conspicuous current example can be found in the South, where dozens of districts have adopted dress codes forbidding students from displaying Confederate emblems. The ACLU of Georgia is representing nine students in Seminole County who were threatened with punishment for wearing T-shirts adorned with the rebel battle flag.
Never mind that schoolrooms across Georgia display exactly the same symbol — which happens to be incorporated into the state flag. If school officials want to brazenly exhibit a Confederate symbol, they’re allowed to. But letting students do the same thing of their own free will is another matter entirely.
Lawyers for the Seminole school district say they have nothing but good intentions. The student body is evenly divided between black and white, and many African-Americans understandably find Confederate emblems offensive.
The district, says attorney Sam Harben Jr., has the right to prohibit any student expression “that is disruptive of schools, or that presents a safety threat to other students.” Black students, he notes, have long been prohibited from wearing T-shirts with racial slogans or homages to Malcolm X, and for the same reason.
Based on what the Supreme Court has said, it’s true that the school district has a perfect right to restrict student speech to prevent riots, brawls, and general unrest. But the school district can’t ban any form of expression it wants just on the off-chance that it might generate a hostile reaction. Wearing a slogan or symbol on a shirt is a form of expression that has some protection even in the halls of a public school. And absent some genuine likelihood of significant trouble, administrators are obligated to swallow hard, grit their teeth and put up with it.
That was the verdict in a landmark 1969 decision known as Tinker vs. Des Moines, which involved two youngsters suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. “There is no indication that the work of the schools or
