Three ways to save the Washington Post: A few ‘Post Apocalypse’ musings from Alexandria
My old friend used to handle some PR matters for a union in Northern Virginia, and people still pick his brains. Here’s a rule near the top of his list. Don’t waste too much time trying to get into the Washington Post, even on the most newsworthy stories. L Street probably will just ignore you.
Similarly when an obituary dissed local history and I complained, the Post ombudsman would not even acknowledge receipt of my e-mail. The obit writer had at least given me the courtesy of a short explanation. But no more details came. Hmm. Wasn’t ombudsman Andy Alexander himself worried about the Post’s aloofness? Yes, I gave him Web links—from this site—which hundreds and perhaps thousands of surfers had clicked on. Is Mr. Alexander really Net-blind enough not to e-mail me even a few words?
The above two examples came to mind as I read a New Republic piece with the cheery headline of Post Apocalypse: Inside the messy collapse of a great newspaper. Actually the Post’s continued decline is not inevitable, and as a decades-long reader of the paper, I’d like L Street to thrive. Here are three partial remedies, overlapping somewhat with Gabriel Sherman’s TNR piece, but far from entirely. The first idea would help deal with the Post’s snobbery problem as well as with the sheer arrogance that the retired union man and I have been up against.
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A WASHINGTON novel
The Solomon Scandals blog comes out of Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac from D.C., and the novel itself is very much a Washington creature, as well as a Northern Virginia one.
But oh how the local details can travel, so to speak. During the Watergate party in Scandals, a PR man offers boozy insights about local subway etiquette on the Metro—“left-steppers” vs. “right-steppers” and “parkers,” and the sociology of it all. But you could live in New York or Moscow and understand the nuances even if the etiquette isn’t the same.
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The Skyline collapse—and property rights vs. human life
Scandals at one level is a beach read, a mix of a thriller and novel of manners. But at another, it’s about bureaucratic laxness, which can kill workers—not just drain investors’ bank accounts.The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico makes Scandals all the more timely. Penny-pinching proved to be lethal. – D.R.
Fourteen workers died and 34 were injured in the real building collapse that inspired the one in The Solomon Scandals.
The Skyline Plaza disaster at Bailey’s Crossroads in Northern Virginia happened on March 2, 1973—the result, many said, of premature removal of concrete shoring.
Fines amounted to just $300 for the shoring-related lapse and $13,000 for violations of worker safety codes. Not so coincidentally, an even worse disaster followed in West Virginia just five years later, killing 51 workers in America’s most deadly construction accident.
The Skyline death toll of 14 was minor compared to the calamity at the fictitious Vulture’s Point, the IRS/CIA building that I located in the general area of Dyke Marsh, south of Alexandria. I added a hill and other topographical features missing from the actual site on the Potomac River. The nature-lover in the right photo is “stalking the birds hiding in the cattails.”
Aided by Gordon Batson of Clarkson University and M. Kevin Parfitt of Pennsylvania State University, I came up with my own causes for the Vulture’s Point disaster, which, unlike Skyline, didn’t happen during construction.
You might also enjoy:Scandals as a Northern Virginia Jewish novel
Jonathan Stone as an Afro-American? Because Jewish protagonists are such old hat? So suggested a buddy of mine—not an anti-semite or self-hating Jewish, but an intelligent man of the observant, practicing variety. May I respectfully disagree? In fact, The Solomon Scandals in some respects is as much a Northern Virginia Jewish novel as a newspaper one. I cannot imagine Scandals any other way.
What’s more, I can’t even see it as a purely Washington novel, since there is so much Virginia in it.
Northern Virginia is just across the Potomac from suburban Maryland, where far more of the D.C. area’s Jews live. Maryland has the National Institutes of Health. Virginia has the Pentagon and CIA. Jews work and excel at all the agencies mentioned here, as well as the related consulting firms, aka Beltway Bandits (no insult—that’s just the jargon these days). But the differences between Maryland and Virginia are stark. Virginia is far more conservative. Even today a Confederate statue stands in the middle of Washington Street, the main drag in Alexandria, despite the election of an Afro-American mayor.
The fictitious Jonathan Stone has grown up near by in McLean, Virginia, among the more Waspy parts of the Washington area. While he lives in D.C. now, he is very much a son of McLean, where he still has friends and family. Jews were but a speck of the student body at Langley High School, his old school shown here.
For journalistic reasons, nothing more, Stone investigates Seymour Solomon, the leading Jewish philanthropist in the D.C. area and a major presidential contributor. Stone himself, like me, is not religious. But he faces and cares about a classic dilemma. Will he hurt the Jewish community, at the local and even national levels, if he comes out with a negative story on one of its pillars? Or will he actually help it if he belies the old canards about Zionist conspiracies in the press?
You might also enjoy:Heart troubles: Fact-checking in the cardiac ICU, post-bypass
Cardiac worries arise in several places in The Solomon Scandals. My father’s heart attack was one of the defining moments of his life and even mine. Scandals is fiction, not a memoir. But his attack took place in his early 40s when he was about to show us a movie, just as reporter Jon Stone’s father does in Scandals.
Heart disease is also a metaphor that Margo, Stone’s girlfriend, uses when discussing Vulture’s Point, Solomon’s rickety office building housing IRS and CIA workers.
The issue at hand is whether anyone can predict if or when Vulture’s Point will fall down. “Oh, maybe a decade or so, with tip-offs,” Margo says. “Like if the elevators stopped working, or the windows won’t open. It’s like heart problems, normally. You get sick before you kick the bucket. I mean, the cracks still aren’t that large.”
A skeptical Stone responds with word of his friend the marathon runner who, minus the least warning, died at 25 of a massive coronary. “Just what was ‘normally’?” Stone thinks.
In real life, only a month or so after I wrote the above dialogue, someone suffered a heart attack, then had his chest cracked open for a quad bypass. Me. I have a message. Don’t trust treadmill stress tests alone. Get the full trimmings: an MRI or whatever. I was a false negative. All of my valves were well-clogged, and at least one doctor says that confused the testing gizmos. So much for the virtues of consistency.
I did some of the fact-checking for the cardiac-related scenes while in the cardiac ICU at Inova Alexandria Hospital (photo) following my quad.
Except for an occasional little cough, a temporary complication from the operation, I’m coming along fine now, and on cardiac matters, I’m more confident than ever that Scandals is authentic.
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