Remarks by Chris Powell
Academy of New England Journalists
Boston, Massachusetts
Thursday, November 16, 2006
(Presented by James H. Smith)
Please forgive me for not being with you to thank you in person for the Yankee Quill Award and my election to the Academy of New England Journalists. I had a
longstanding commitment to be far away from Boston this week on behalf of a non-profit group of which I’m an officer and for which a lot is at stake. Where I am I will not be getting any awards and will not be able to eat and drink as much as I would with you tonight. I’ll just have to make up for it when I get home.
The Yankee Quill seems to be a sort of lifetime achievement award for New England journalists, something meant to prompt a little reflection. So it reminds me of what Groucho Marx said toward the end of his life, in 1972, when Roger Ebert asked him to reflect on his career on stage and in the movies, radio, and television.
Groucho replied simply: “I’d trade it all for an erection.”
In those days such an observation might have been considered distasteful by almost any audience except an audience of journalists. But of course today
Groucho could parlay that observation into another career in television, courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry and its advertising agencies, and hardly anyone would be offended. Indeed, since half the country now is close to what was Groucho’s age then, most people today probably would share his point of view..
Like many of you I cannot look forward to another career; it’s too late. There’s not much else we can do. Whether journalism remains in large part a matter of newsprint or becomes entirely electronic, we will be stuck with it. But maybe that’s not so bad, since, as Woody Allen suggested, most of success is just a matter of showing up, and in journalism if you stick around long enough you’re almost sure to get an award — maybe even a few awards every year. At least I have been hiring people for my newspaper for more than 30 years and I’ve yet to find even the greenest applicant just out of college who wasn’t already an “award-winning journalist.”
OK, the Yankee Quill isn’t just any journalism award. Unlike other awards, it seems that you can get it only once, and then you’re one of the elect. This year’s recipients even get to be mentioned in the same breath with William Lloyd Garrison of the early abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, who made it into
“Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” for declaring that, in his opposition to slavery, he was in earnest, he would not equivocate, he would not excuse, he would not retreat a single inch, and he would be heard.
Even before founding The Liberator, Garrison had already done prison time in Maryland for denouncing slavery, which was considered libel there, so he was very much in earnest. And if Garrison thought Boston would be much safer and more enlightened than Maryland, he was wrong. After he founded The Liberator here, a mob put a rope on him and dragged him through the streets of the city — and he wasn’t even a Republican yet.
If tonight’s posthumous award for Garrison is the academy’s way of coming out against slavery, better late than never. Let’s just hope it’s not noticed by the busybodies over at the Labor Department’s wage and hour division; let’s not give our young award-winning colleagues any ideas. In journalism one should be able to survive on one’s awards.
But seriously, folks. … Well, I am being serious, as serious as anyone should be about something that, as much as we may love it, is just a means to a much greater end, not an end in itself.
In college I took a poetry course that introduced me to some fine things, like W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of William Butler Yeats,” as well as to the work of Yeats himself. Yeats had been the literary giant of Ireland, and when he died Auden wrote:
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen. …
So much for poetry, I thought back then; Yeats and Auden should know. But maybe, I thought, journalism could make something happen, and it didn’t even have to rhyme. So I left college early for the newspaper job.
I still think journalism can make something happen, or prevent something from happening, which may be just as good, and that’s a reason for sticking with it, but it’s not so much my reason anymore. No, I stick with it more out of spite. I just couldn’t stand for certain people to think that nobody is on to them.
Now maybe this is not much to offer for such a big award presented so generously at the instigation of friends, but after sticking around so long it’s the best I can do. If the academy wants to impeach me over it, be sure to hold a public hearing first. I promise to show up for that.
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Chris Powell column 