[Swprograms] NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Columnist: The Bond Across the Pond

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Bond Across the Pond

March 31, 2004
 By WILLIAM SAFIRE 



 

WASHINGTON — "In rhetoric, however," I lazily wrote,
"parrhesia has a specialized meaning." 

In zinged a mock-irate letter from Alistair Cooke, founder
of what he called Sanpickle, "Safire Nit Pickers' League." 

Did I write this unnecessary ize, he demanded, on
personalized notepaper, to be read by customized shirts?
"Your little flourish of bloviation provoked spasms of
sarcasm, like, `I suppose if he got in trouble in England
he'd go looking for a Specialized Constable, i.e., a
constable appointed for specialized occasions.' " 

Then there was the time I wrote "our mutual fascination,"
an error that drew Cooke's "You mean `our common' or `our
shared' fascination. `Our mutual fascination' means our
fascination with each other: `Our mutual fascination with'
anything is nonsense, you dummy! And I thought you were the
American language wallah!" He signed it "Your mutual
pedant." I sent him a copy of the Dickens novel "Our Mutual
Friend." 

The wry, literate and wise BBC radio commentator and
television host with whom I shared a linguistic fascination
and delightful correspondence died this week at 95. He
spent the first third of his life as a British subject and
the last two-thirds as an American citizen, but in 58 years
of "Letter from America," on a weekly basis, always seemed
to be the British interpreter of life in the daughter
country. 

(Oh, how Cooke despised word-padding like in nature, a
period of, process, area, or on a basis. He proposed the
song title "Stars Fell on the Alabama Area.") 

His obituaries - many prepared decades ago - and
appreciations from fellow commentators as a modern-day
Tocqueville (better lose -day) cite his wartime reporting
and his speech to Congress on the U.S. Bicentennial, as
well as his mastery of the conversational style on the air.


He wrote as one would speak, complete with sentence
fragments and self-interruptions. But he also spoke as if
he were writing: instead of "Come over for a drink,"
Alistair would cite his friend E. B. White's line that the
most beautiful sound was "the tinkling of ice at twilight."


As the years went by, and he was afflicted by "my friend,
Arthur Itis," the question arose: what kept him going so
productively? Not only was he living longer than most, but
living with his mind more actively engaged than most. 

"I try to stay on top of the news," he told me as he
entered his ninth decade. Neuroscientists tell me that a
disciplined contact with the world around us keeps the
brain's synapses snapping. Deadlines keep our minds alive. 

When retirement means lollygagging on a beach or
vegetating in a rocker, the once-active brain atrophies and
the mind wanders. But when forced to keep focusing, in many
cases the exercised brain keeps in shape. 

I know another supergeezer in the opinion dodge: Daniel
Schorr, who will be 88 in August, writes and delivers three
commentaries a week on NPR, plus an interview on Saturday
morning, which puts Dan within striking distance of
Alistair's iron-man record. He is why I have a button on my
radio preset to NPR. 

Cooke's radio tradition, now carried on by Schorr, suggests
that people who lead active lives should do their best to
keep at it, switching only when necessary to new careers or
educational challenges with other disciplines or pub dates.
In tomorrow's long-lived generation, retirement will be
replaced by redirection. 

Cooke's life also reminds us that the English-speaking
alliance around the world, with its tradition of free
speech and inclusiveness for immigrants, offers a standard
for other nations. 

In the past century, a statesman and a journalist
exemplified Trans-Atlantic Man. The political figure was
Winston Churchill, who coined the term "special
relationship" to describe the unique bond across the pond.
The journalist was Alistair Cooke, son of Britons who
became an American, who would have made certain nobody
changed that clear English to "specialized relationship." 

Correction: The Martian division of Sanpickle notes that a
NASA rover landed in the Gusev crater on Mars, and not, as
I wrote, in the Sleepy Hollow crater or depression. (The
whereabouts of Judge Crater remain unknown.) 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/opinion/31SAFI.html?ex=1081722865&ei=1&en=42c75bf1f94900a9


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