Opinion A columnist’s first 50 years. (George F. Will, November 26, 2024)

I started reading George F. Will's brilliant columns in The Washington Post as a Georgetown University freshman in 1974, the same week he started there. GVWs been doing it for 50 years.  Like the late brilliant William F. Buckley, Jr., George F. Will was one of my inspirations as a reader, newspaper editor and writer, 1974-2024. From The Washington Post:

Opinion 

 A columnist’s first 50 years

One secret of column-writing: Offer platoons of facts that give readers the delight of discovery.

4 min

Columnist George F. Will, photographed in his Georgetown office in September 2021. (Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post) 

By George F. Will

November 26, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

It is tempting but mistaken to say that the current administration of the universe is defective because people are not required to read op-ed columns. That thought is too adjacent to progressivism, which, a critic has said, does not care what people do as long as it is compulsory. Besides, a smaller readership can be superior to a bigger one.

Most people do not read newspapers; most who do skip the op-ed page. This means that the few, the happy few, who do read columns do so because their mental pantries are stocked with curiosity, information and opinions. So, the columnist can assume the readers’ foundation of knowledge, which enables large arguments in small spaces.

The 15th century produced what remains the most consequential communication technology ever: Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type. Glassy-eyed Americans squinting at their smartphones for videos of kittens might consider it quaint to ascribe history-shaping potency to mere print, especially during today’s digital typhoon. Media constantly clamor for Americans’ attention, which is increasingly elusive and of decreasing duration.

A newspaper column — one musty option on a rapidly expanding menu of distractions — requires reading, which, unlike passive grazing at an endless buffet of graphic distractions, is an activity. It demands one’s mental engagement. So, a column had better be pleasurable from the start, even if its subject is not pleasant. Here is Murray Kempton (1917-1997), in a column on President Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigning in Florida in 1956:

“In Miami he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some 20 feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled ‘Colored’ and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by laws, and complimenting Florida as ‘typical today of what is best in America,’ a verdict which might seem to some contingent on finding out what happened to the Negro snatched from the Wildwood jail Sunday.”

That sinuous 75-word sentence, although stiletto-sharp, deployed Kempton’s pointed judgments obliquely. His demanding syntax drew readers into participating in his searing perception. His style, suited to concision, enabled him to make arguments by intimation — arguments that readers internalized almost without noticing.

Do notice Kempton’s desert-dry wit: “… which might seem to some contingent on …” A spoonful of humor helps the medicine (information, argument) go down.

An enchanting idea of heaven is this: endless learning. For the self-selected cohort of op-ed readers, learning is treasured as fun. Columns are properly quarantined on “opinion” pages, but a columnist’s opinions will lack momentum for respect unless they are accompanied by platoons of facts that give readers the delight of discovery: “I didn’t know that.”

It has been said that a deadline is a writer’s best friend. But if writing is a chore — a painful duty — for a columnist, he or she should find another vocation. Enjoyment is infectious, and readers will only value, over time, the company of a columnist who clearly enjoys the craft of assembling sentences, paragraphs and arguments.

This columnist is caught in a contradiction: He believes that in our market society, prices are rational. Yet he would pay for the pleasure of doing what he is paid to do. He is in the right city.

John F. Kennedy once drolly characterized Washington as a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. The city he knew was, however, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. It was acquiring a physical and cultural infrastructure worthy of a great metropolis. The Beltway opened in 1964, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971, the subway in 1976.

This columnist is, in a sense, doing what he was doing before he came to Washington. Until then, he had taught political philosophy at the University of Toronto. Since then, he has been working to discern the small kernels of large philosophical principles lurking in the welter of events.

Amid today’s rancorousness, it is difficult to remember when America’s consensus was considered suffocatingly bland. This columnist, now 83, remembers when, as he became politically sentient in the 1950s, many intellectuals lamented the absence of scalding treatises about burning questions: too much Locke, not enough Lenin.

Actually, however, in the unending American dialectic between legislatures and courts — between majorities and restraints thereon — the perennial subjects of Western political argument are constantly contested: the concepts of freedom, equality, consent, representation and justice. Americans are permanently enrolled in this seminar. And being a columnist is as much fun as can be had away from a ballpark.