Remove ImagesMy Rhinoceros Life
October 20, 2011
When we first moved to Greensboro in March of 1983, I was a 31-year-old father of two. My wife was pregnant with our third child. We came because in the inflation and high interest rates of the time, book advances had dried up, and I had to get an honest job.
That honest job was as book editor for Compute! Magazine, a Greensboro start-up in the era of type-in programs for tiny computers like the VIC and Commodore 64, the Atari 800, the Apple and the TRS-80. That era ended almost as soon as I moved here, with the advent of the IBM PC and Apple's Macintosh.
But for nine months I worked the 9-, 10- and 11-hour workdays of a writer, editor and computer programmer, for my job required that I be at least competent at all three tasks.
In two rented houses on Courtfield and Penn Wynne, I barely saw my family and came to know the City of Greensboro only as a route to work and a place where I ate lunch. Financially, it was a disaster – we returned our house in South Bend, Indiana, to the bank, and rejoined the ranks of permanent renters for eight long years.
The hard times officially ended, however, when publishers started offering advances again. On the strength of a new contract for my Alvin Maker series and for a novel version of my short story "Ender's Game," I quit my job at Compute! and once again worked for myself as a freelance writer.
I saw very little more of the city I was living in than I had before. With no job to go to, and with the streets as miserably unsafe as they were and are for a dedicated bicyclist as I then was, I became something of a hermit. There were days on end when I never left the house at all.
Being a Mormon, I was able – indeed, almost encouraged – to lead an insular life. Mormonism is a uniquely involving religion. While we hold down regular jobs and live dispersed in ordinary neighborhoods, we serve together in a lay ministry in which every church member is expected to hold offices ("callings") in our local congregation ("ward") or diocese ("stake").
Most of the hours that non-Mormons spend in their neighborhood or work communities, Mormons spend at church, teaching classes, leading organizations or serving as clerks, youth ministers and many other offices. Most Mormons spend between six and 20 hours a week in church attendance and service.
For me, with no outside job, my entire local social life was spent with other Mormons, who were about evenly divided between North Carolina natives and transplants from other parts of the country – mostly Utah, Idaho and California, where I had grown up.
As my work friendships at Compute! faded away, my strongest local acquaintanceships were commercial – with the people who framed art for us, with the owners of an ice cream parlor, with the dry cleaner, and most of all with Steve and his crew at Steve's Friendly BP (originally Mike's Friendly Amoco).
The only local non-Mormon I spent time with socially was my dentist. I doubt that any of these people realized that our contacts were the entirety of my connection with the city where I lived!
(As a writer, of course, I have many non-Mormon friends, including some very close ones, from my work in the publishing, teaching and film worlds. But few of them have ever lived in Greensboro.)
This is the life I was leading, into which The Rhinoceros Times came soon after it first launched. I had no idea it was new; I did know it was unusual. It was a free weekly that actually had serious content – not a common thing at all. Not only that, but in a culture increasingly dominated by strongly biased journalism that covered the news as if liberal dogmas were universally received truth, The Rhino was openly conservative.
So conservative, in fact, that I often found myself wishing that editorial positions on the Clinton administration had been toned down a little. Yet as time passed, I found myself looking forward to each week's installment of John Hammer's "Clinton Watch" column, if only as an antidote to the obvious Clinton loyalism of the supposed "news" stories on television and in the local daily paper.
Democrat though I was (and remain), I had found Clinton loathsome from the first moment he emerged in the 1992 presidential campaign. "I feel your pain" indeed – was this laughably obvious hypocrite really going to be taken seriously by the normally skeptical media? Apparently so. A former news junkie, I found myself avoiding television news just so I wouldn't have to see his pasty, lying face. How could such a clown be the head of the party of Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
Only John Hammer's Rhino column served as an antidote for the Clinton partisanship of the time. Meanwhile, my wife (a Republican) and I both became devotees of The Rhino's coverage of local news. We soon realized that the local daily was incompetent, uninterested or biased on local news stories, while The Rhino assiduously provided absolutely reliable coverage.
Yes, The Rhino had an attitude, but it still covered both sides of every story, unlike its competition, which ignored most stories entirely until The Rhino forced them to take notice, and then weighed in with coverage so hopelessly one-sided that I marveled at the ability of some of its writers to call themselves journalists with a straight face. Clinton-style hypocrisy seemed to be the rule.
The Rhino displayed its attitude openly, instead of pretending to be dispassionate; yet it fearlessly presented the views of those it opposed, so that in reading The Rhino I saw both sides. I could make up my own mind, which I did, sometimes reaching quite different conclusions from Hammer's – yet relying entirely on his coverage of events, partly because he was so scrupulously honest and thorough, and partly because in Greensboro there was usually no other source for local news at all.
Then an odd thing happened. We started getting The Rhino in the mail.
My wife and I asked each other how such a thing had happened. The Rhino offered no subscriptions that we had noticed – after all, it's distributed for free! Neither of us had contacted The Rhino, asking for such a service. We were baffled.
My wife jokingly suggested, "Maybe they want you to write for them." I laughed. After all, if they wanted me to write for them, they had only to ask. But what would I write? I was no journalist.
Yet as time passed, the idea of writing for The Rhino began to occur to me more and more often. For one thing, at book signings or other events I occasionally ran into John or Elaine Hammer (never both at once – they divided their efforts in order to cover more ground), who would take a picture and then chat for a few minutes.
I found both of them very likable and intelligent – it was a pleasure to converse. I think they had no idea that by conversing with me once a year or so, they had moved into the forefront of my social contacts with non-Mormons in Greensboro!
They mentioned that I ought to write something for them, but they were very vague about what I should write. That is, they would say, "Oh, anything," but I can't write about "anything." I have to write about something, and I didn't see how anything I might write would fit into The Rhino's format.
Besides, they never mentioned payment, which clearly implied that they had no budget. I support my family from my writing; as Samuel Johnson famously said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."
Samuel Johnson quotations are an excellent guide in a writer's life: "He who praises everybody, praises nobody." "He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything." "I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."
And the most valuable quotation of all, which my father quoted to me all my life: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
The trouble is that I have never mastered this one, for I have given preference to a couple of other maxims, which as far as I know, I wrote myself:
"What good is it to know the truth, if you don't tell anybody?"
"The best way to find out whether an idea is either true or useful is to speak it publicly and then pay attention to the answers you receive from people who know more than you."
So even though The Rhino was not offering money, I had a lot of ideas for which I had no forum. In my fiction, I almost never insert my own opinions, since I feel that my first obligation is to present the beliefs and opinions of my characters, which almost never coincide completely with my own, and often contradict my views quite sharply.
And most of my opinions simply wouldn't fit in novels at all. How many times can I have characters pop into real restaurants so I can review them? How interesting is it to have characters discuss recent books or movies?
The fact is, I thought then and think now that excellence is only maintained when it is encouraged by positive public mention, or when its absence is publicly decried. Everything should be subject to review, on every relevant criterion. Consumer Reports, Zagat Guide and book and movie reviewers offer a valuable service, but they all seem so limited in scope.
Our culture consists of many things besides commercial products, and everything is worthy of comment, even foolish comment, if it induces wiser responses.
So from time to time I'd mention to my wife, "I wonder if The Rhino would want a column in which I review absolutely anything that people use or experience – soap, toilet paper, airports, local TV stations, the weather, schools, magazines, anything."
But I never mentioned this thought to anyone at The Rhino. Not until the fall of 2001.
It was in the aftermath of the attack on America by Muslim extremists – there, I said it, we were attacked by Muslims in the name of Islam, regardless of whether there are also Muslims who are not attacking us – that I decided I really wanted to be part of the public discussion of a war that had been forced on us (by one view) or invited by our pusillanimous foreign policy (by another).
So, after years of knowing the Hammers and receiving The Rhino by mail, I actually did the unthinkable. I picked up a phone and asked whether they'd be interested in, not one, but two weekly columns from me, one called "War Watch" (in imitation of Hammer's old "Clinton Watch" column) and another called "Uncle Orson Reviews Everything."
To my surprise, they readily agreed, and by January of 2002 I was writing two columns a week.
"War Watch" quickly broadened its reach, incarnating itself as "World Watch" and "Civilization Watch" depending on the topic. But there were many weeks when I had nothing useful or intelligent to say, and in some of those weeks, following Johnson's admonition, I actually said nothing.
But "Uncle Orson Reviews Everything" never lacked for material. Indeed, though the column quickly grew to 2,000 or 3,000 words a week, I have never written about even half of the things that came to mind. And I found I simply enjoyed writing UORE much more than the Watch columns.
Then Obama was elected, and I stopped writing Watch columns almost entirely. Partly this came from despair – if a man this ignorant of world affairs and this ideologically skewed could be passed off as mainstream by our leftist media and elected president, what good did my writing actually do?
Mostly, though, I didn't want to be one of those partisans who doesn't give a person a chance to prove who he is. So what if he didn't know that Russia had a veto on the UN Security Council? He might learn. And indeed, Obama began reversing many of his stupidest campaign pledges – Guantanamo remained open, the war continued to be prosecuted.
So why not give the man a chance, without putting all his actions in the worst possible light, the way Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity seemed determined to do?
Eventually I began writing the occasional Watch column again – and The Rhino always received them eagerly, since I think John Hammer believes they are more valuable than my reviews of often trivial things. Nobody ever picks up my review column to reprint it nationally, while every now and then a Watch column attracts some national attention.
I write enough words in The Rhino each year to make a book or two. But I still have to give priority to writing for which I'm paid, or my employees won't get their salaries and I will have to give up my restaurant habit.
But all writing, paid or not, is work. And in my ongoing program of trying to make my writing worth reading, I can't just sit down and spew. I have to think things out, read constantly and revise my opinions as I gain more knowledge.
We live in an era of widespread and highly promoted deception and ignorance – this is an anti-science age that pretends it is science-based, an ahistorical culture that pretends to learn from history. I don't want to subtract from the current low level of intelligence and information. If I can't add to the sum of human knowledge or wisdom, to the best of my ability, then I would do better to keep my mouth shut.
The result, to the chagrin of The Rhino's staff, is that I am almost invariably late, holding my columns until the last possible moment. This is never my plan – I usually have my column outlined and "ready to be written" by the Friday before. Yet often I only work up the heart to write it mere hours before the last possible moment it can be submitted.
Perhaps this is a sign that I should quit doing it. But I know myself well enough to know that if I ever stop, I will soon wish I were writing it again.
In an odd way, I actually live my life for that review column. I get out of the house and do things, try things, go places, talk to people with the thought in mind that I might be able to write about it in UORE in The Rhino.
I never buy a book or see a movie solely in order to review it. When it's obvious that a movie or book or TV show is one that I'm going to detest, then in all likelihood my review of it would be worthless. I'm a firm believer that no book can survive a hostile reading, and the same applies to all the other arts.
In a way, John Hammer reinforced this attitude when he asked me not to write negative reviews of local restaurants I found disastrously bad. Speaking practically, as an editor and publisher, he had to think of all restaurants as potential advertisers; a bad review loses a potential buyer of column inches.
But it's more than that. I'm no fan of Southern cooking; so how could I possibly review a barbecue restaurant? What would I say that was worth reading? Likewise, how could I review a book by Bill or Hillary Clinton, since I start from the assumption that they are both crooks and liars? I would be wasting my time and yours.
Of course, there are those who think that all my writing is a waste of time – but those people are obviously not in my audience, so I don't have the slightest concern about them. I'm not speaking to them, and they would be fools to waste a moment on my writings.
My concern is that I not waste the time of people who do enjoy my columns. If I don't provide accurate information and well-thought-out opinions, then I'm betraying their trust. So why write about things that I would never have liked?
When something is nationally released by big companies or famous artists, and is potentially harmful or ridiculously bad, then I will call attention to it and indulge all my penchant for savage evisceration of pretentious twaddle.
But local companies or less-well-known artists get a complete pass from me. In such cases, silence is the cruelest negative review. I spend my time providing information that I think might be useful or entertaining, and calling attention to wonderful experiences that my readers might otherwise miss.
The result is that since I started writing for The Rhino, while my Watch columns became intermittent, I have never missed a week of "Uncle Orson Reviews Everything." Surely people in The Rhino office have been frustrated or downright angry at my late deliveries. But I (and they, I think) fear that if I ever have a week in which no column of mine appears, then such weeks will become more frequent and eventually my writing for The Rhino will disappear altogether.
Yes, I know, there are those who would find that to be a relief (please, Rhino staffers, don't all raise your hands at once!). But for good or ill, there is a certain percentage of The Rhino audience that would mourn a little if my work weren't there. And since The Rhino is in the commercial business of selling readers' attention to advertisers, my column presumably contributes some small amount to The Rhino's revenues.
But I would be the one who lost most if my columns ceased entirely, because to my great surprise, writing "Uncle Orson Reviews Everything" has given me an enormous gift: I now feel like a citizen of Greensboro.
Until I wrote the column, I dwelt in Greensboro, yes – but I really lived within my Mormon ward, touching Greensboro only across the counter at various stores.
Now, though, I don't just shop in stores, I review them – positively. No, it doesn't mean they give me free stuff. I'd refuse it if I did, for two reasons: It would compromise my integrity to get, in effect, valuable rewards for good reviews, and – perhaps more important to me – I want good companies to stay in business, and so it's important that they continue to make a fair profit from my business.
I move through my life in Greensboro as a participant in the city's life. Because I write about anything that happens, I'm part of what happens. I'm still a Mormon – I'll never write about bars because I don't go in them; I can't review coffee because I don't drink it, and so on.
But I'm now part of Greensboro in a way I never was and never could be before I started writing about it. Most of you are part of the city because you work here, you derive your salary from what you do in the city. But I don't – my income derives overwhelmingly from sales of my work in other cities and overseas.
It's the unpaid work I do, published in The Rhino, that makes me a citizen of this city.
I loved living here from the start. After all, as a freelance writer I could live anywhere, and Greensboro is far from the least expensive place I could go. (It's way more expensive to live here than it ever was or could be in South Bend, Indiana, the last place we lived before moving here.)
When I was offered that job at Compute!, I was also offered a better-paying job at Coleco in Hartford, Connecticut. New England is a beautiful place. But when my wife and I visited Greensboro, we fell in love, not with the scenery (lovely as it is), but with the town.
We had moved out of Orem, Utah, precisely so that our children would not grow up in a monoculture, where nearly everybody was Mormon and white. We were bitterly disappointed in South Bend, Indiana, in that life there was almost completely racially segregated – the only time a white guy like me met a black person was across a counter.
In Greensboro, we saw at once that whites and blacks, however they might complain about each other, actually talked. Our children would grow up knowing different races, and would spend time in school with people who were not Mormon.
In short, Greensboro fit exactly with our goals as parents, to make sure our children were of the post-racist generation of Americans, and to make sure that they knew what it meant to be Mormon because they had actually met people who were not.
We have lived here almost 29 years, and our youngest living child is in her last year of high school. I can tell you that Greensboro has been everything we hoped it would be in the raising of our children. Along the way we have picked up many friends and, since I started writing for The Rhino, we have actually acquired some non-Mormon friends for ourselves, including some of the people we love best in the world.
So even though my columns for The Rhino go up on the web, I still remain a local writer. If my out-of-town readers don't care to read about a local high school play or a gelato or chocolate shop in Greensboro, they're free to skip those reviews, because I think those are the most important reviews I write.
Indeed, that's the most important thing about The Rhino – the fact that it is local, local, local. If you're reading The Rhino, you know what's happening in town, in the government and in the culture. The things a Mormon like me will never write about, Scott Yost covers with delight.
And you can bet that even though the editors at the local paper grind their teeth over what John Hammer writes in The Rhino, they read it every week. They have to – it's how they find out the local news, so that after a few weeks or months they can cover the same stories that Hammer and Yost wrote about when they were still new.
And guess what? I've now written something even longer than my usual column. I think what the Hammers asked me to write about in this special 20th anniversary section of The Rhino was "a few paragraphs." So ... they're always free to cut it into sections and run it in installments, with one segment appearing every 20 years.