This is a column about columns; if you were trying to impress a comp-lit preceptor, or have a philosophy preceptor toss you out a Marx Hall window, you might even call it a "meta" column. Something is missing from most newspapers, from this one to the major nationals, something that is absolutely vital to the journalistic enterprise: a personal touch. I want to say a few words about this facet and why we should care about it.
First, and perhaps most obviously, you will not, no matter how hard you try, find a personal touch in news articles. We expect journalists to be more or less mechanical. They are to track down and record the facts on issues we care about, assuming journalists still believe there are facts to be found. A brazen few try to make us care about things we ignore, but, not being able to cross over from reporting into advocacy, they rarely succeed. A news piece manifests the quality of the journalist's work, showing how well leads have been pursued and how deeply the issues have been researched, but it does not tell us anything about the qualities of the journalist as a person.
So much for the news; are things any different in the oped pages? We do, after all, value columnists' opinions, and not just for their informative analyses of — or, more cynically, "spins" on — current affairs. The deeper reason we value opinion columns, I wager, is that opinions are deep and abiding qualities of the people who hold them. We are defined, per Marx, not by how we transform the outer world, but rather by how we form the inner world of our beliefs. By expressing our opinions, we express our very selves; so, by hearing the opinions of others, we come to know something important about them. Is this the "personal touch" I'm interested in, you ask?
Partly, but not entirely. Beyond what opinions they have, I really want to know where columnists come from — not merely where they grew up, but rather what cultural soil they sprouted from, and what they make of both that culture and our culture as a whole. I'm interested in the columnist as an anthropologist in the basic sense of the word, as someone who studies and articulates what makes a human a human, and how that changes across time and place. A column that embodies these properties is one worth reading and rereading; it is food for thought, as we say, the cud we chew in our minds long after we've thrown away the paper.
The columnist as cultural critic and commentator, then, is my ideal, and one that I find few writers live up to. Of those few, Garrison Keillor is one of the best. I first heard Keillor's radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, during a several-year infatuation with National Public Radio in my early teens. Keillor, along with the loony Magliozzi brothers from Car Talk, helped me while away many a weekend day and convinced me that radio was not a dead medium, despite the efforts of Clear Channel and its partners in broadcasting crime.
More recently, I've become a faithful reader of his weekly newspaper columns. Why? Because Keillor, more than any writer I've encountered in print or in the trash heap known as the blogosphere, imbues his column with a personal touch, a genuine sense of what matters and what doesn't — a sense that has been sadly lost on many people today. His columns read like good back porch conversations on lazy Sundays, which is a rare quality in a world where back-porches, good conversations and lazy Sundays can be so hard to find. There's a sense in which to understand your culture you have to talk to an outsider; the utterly anachronistic Keillor is enough of an outsider to teach us a lesson or two about how zany our lives really are.
I think that's the most valuable thing a columnist can do. Unfortunately, very few of us, especially yours truly, have the wit or sense to do much more than write down our two cents about what we think people care about, for it takes a brave and perceptive columnist to make people care about the things that really matter, instead of the things that don't. And what does matter? That we live with sincerity and zeal, with warmth and kindness, without taking ourselves so seriously that we forget to laugh at the cosmic joke we rather grimly call life. Matt Hoberg is a philosophy major from Kennett Square, Pa. He can be reached at mhoberg@princeton.edu.
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