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Goodman columns: Just common sense |
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By The Hill Staff
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Posted: 03/25/04 12:00 AM [ET] |
Reading Paper Trail, Ellen Goodman’s latest collection of columns, is like speeding through a highlight reel of the past decade’s news: O.J. Simpson, late-term abortions, Princess Diana, Hillary Clinton, Palm Pilots, Strom Thurmond, cloning, Botox, gay marriage.
And, of course, Sept. 11.
It’s better, then, to dip in slowly, pick out a column, ponder it — and savor it.
Goodman, a syndicated Boston Globe columnist now in her early 60s, writes literate, down-to-earth prose laced with humor. Not for her the TV-talking-head type of anger so prevalent among today’s commentators.
“Opinion-writing and opinion-speaking over the course of these [recent] years have become something closer to a combat sport: opinion-hurling,” she writes. “We moved into a time when politics became polarized and political debate became more like a food fight. The Olympic sport of opinion-hurling found a stadium on talk radio and cable TV, the playing fields of certitude.”
“The columns on these pages were written for people who argue with both hands, the one and the other, and occasionally end up with them clasped together,” she adds.
Not that Goodman doesn’t express strong opinions — against human cloning, for example. “One of the things that may or may not be built into the human DNA, but distinguishes us, is a unique sense of self,” Goodman writes in a 1997 column. “It’s this very understanding that sends out warning bells at the very possibility of a Xeroxed ‘me.’ It’s the quite proper instinct that now demands a universal No! Humans are not for cloning.”
And she gives her blessing to gay marriage, in a 2003 column about the “marriage-in-everything-but-name” of her cousin Adam and his partner, Rodrick. “What exactly is so ‘devastating’ about the couple who bring an annual excess of mixed olives and good cheer to Thanksgiving? How on earth could their commitment — or marriage — for better or for worse, be a ‘fatal blow’ to my own marriage?” she asks.
The book is divided into casually grouped sections with such headings as “Civil & Other Liberties” and “Tech Trail.” “Three Steps Forward,” which deals with women and society, includes four columns on Clinton, taking her from candidate’s spouse to wronged wife to candidate to Democratic senator from New York. “Hillary Clinton has been called a lot of names from ‘rhymes with witch’ to carpetbagger,” Goodman says in the last of the four. “Now she’s called senator. The man standing behind her [Bill Clinton] is leaving office; she’s entering. This first lady gets a second act.”
Goodman also devotes a number of columns to terrorism and the post-Sept. 11 world.
But while much of the book deals with public matters, Goodman also writes about her own family: her daughter’s wedding, her new grandson, a granddaughter’s arrival from China. In one especially poignant column, from 1999, she muses on the fact that she is now older than her father — who died of cancer when she was 24 — ever got to be. “The father in my memory, the man who was once out there ahead of me or beside me — this is how you do 30, 40, 50 — is no longer available as a guide,” she writes. “From here on out, I’m on my own.”
Goodman is an unapologetic liberal, and even pokes fun at herself in a 1997 column about an angry squirrel whom she has named Hazel. Hazel is upset because Goodman has replaced her old bird feeder with a new one — one that makes it more difficult for Hazel to get her share of the sunflower seeds. And Goodman is feeling guilty about it.
“I know, I know. This is the problem with those of us who occupy the mushy left, even those who call ourselves progressives,” she writes, adding that such conservative stalwarts as Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh wouldn’t be going through the same paroxysms of anguish over Hazel’s situation. In the end, Hazel solves the problem by finding a new way into the feeder and helping herself.
“While I am progressive, Hazel is pure Darwinian,” Goodman concludes.
Whether or not you share her politics, Goodman’s work — subtitled Common Sense in Uncommon Times — is worth a look. It represents not only common sense but also some uncommonly good writing.
Book reviewed:
Paper Trail: Common Sense in Uncommon Times
By Ellen Goodman
370 pages; $25
Simon & Schuster, 2004
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