Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

Facts, liberal fantasies and a conservative bias

John Frary of Farmington

Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow is too lazy to form an opinion. -- Will Rogers

This is the way it works in American journalism: reporters are not supposed to have opinions -- they are supposed to be lazy enough to be broad minded; editorialists are supposed to have opinions and they may be conservatives or liberal, but they are not supposed to be partisan Republicans or Democrats; columnists are supposed to energetically espouse opinions and they are allowed to be openly partisan. So I write as Republican and a conservative.

Readers who want an objective opinion must make their own. They have no other source but their own powers of reason. It is helpful to compare writers from both sides of our political-philosophical-ideological divisions, but useless to look for a purely objective sources of opinion. They do not exist.

That is not the same as saying there is no objective truth. When Margaret Thatcher, the great British conservative, asserted "facts are all conservative" she was arguing conservatives deal with reality, liberals and leftists deal with fantasy. I agree, but the reasons I agree are too complicated to deal with here.

I mention this just so readers will have a clear understanding of my biases.

Facts are facts, all the same, and a columnist is obliged to avoid factoids. This word is regularly misused to refer to bits of trivia. The novelist Norman Mailer coined it to describe assertions that sound like facts, are stated as facts and believed as facts, but are either false or unproven, or unprovable. You see the suffix -oid means "resembling." A humanoid is like a human, an asteroid is like a star and so on. Factoid is a useful word and there is no handy substitute for it.

I doubt there's a single mortal columnist who hasn't unintentionally passed on a factoid from time to time. John Locke explained the problem in his Second Treatise on Government:

"For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns, or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's, opinions?"

No, I neither have incontestable evidence of all that I believe, nor of the falsehood of all I dispute. All I can say for certain is I don't make up factoids, that I have an immunity to liberal factoids and I don't have the same immunity to conservative factoids.

In an ideal world, the Internet provides a columnist with a horde of voluntary, unpaid editors ready to pounce and correct an inadvertent factoid, lapse of logic or faulty analysis. My email address can be found below. Readers may provide instant commentary or send prompt letters to the editor through cyberspace.

In the imperfect world we live in this rarely happens. Over six years of writing columns and blog commentaries, I've received hundreds of hostile and disputatious responses. Very few have had any corrective value or initiated interesting dialogues.

The responses are typically ready-made, push-button opinions evoked by a single sentence or phrase. Worse, there is never anything new. I've spent decades of intense study of the branch of entomology called "liberaloscopy."

These push-button responses are all familiar and boring.

Don't misunderstand me. I welcome hostile responses. All responses are welcome to a columnist. They mean someone is reading him. And I like to think that the hostile correspondent lies awake at night tossing and turning and gritting his teeth in impotent rage. This can lead to an early death and removes him from the voting rolls. This hope is motivated by patriotism, not hatred.

I haven't felt hatred for anybody since July 1975, when I was seriously annoyed by a guy named Jimmy Hoffa.

Never mind the details of that.

John Frary of Farmington is a former Congressional candidate and retired history professor, a board member of Maine Taxpayers United and an associate editor of the International Military Encyclopedia. He can be reached at: jfrary8070@aol.com