The Public Interest

You could call this my “say it ain’t so, Joe” moment.

I’ve long admired and envied the efforts of A.C. Kleinheider on his blog “Post Politics,” a blog which I check probably a half-dozen times a day, at least. He has graciously linked Public Interest posts as recently as this week, and I’ve linked him quite a bit over the past year as well. (and, full disclosure: he and I are “friends” on Facebook, though we’ve never met in person, and rarely communicate with each other directly).

Yesterday, for the many of you who don’t keep up on the Tennessee blogosphere, he stepped in a big pile of poo with the post headline, “Is That Jason Powell in Blackface?” a title for which he got some flack in the comments, some of which is deserved and some of which isn’t. (Click on the link to catch yourself up, I don’t have time to recount it all here).

(Before going further let me disclaim here that I am not by any stretch perfect, and have committed comparable, but, in my view, far worse offenses in my career, including inadvertently identifying a sexual abuse victim who was related to her abuser on the air. We all make mistakes, and what matters is what we learn from them.)

I personally wasn’t offended at A.C.’s headline, but knew well enough that it represented a severe lack of judgment on his part, a blind spot to how a word like that would touch off a firestorm of criticism, and stand out like a zit on the end of one’s nose. In the comment thread on that post, I pointed out it’s like a man thinking it’s okay to make a joke about menopause - 99.98% of the time, it’s a topic in which the best advice is to just leave it alone. A.C. has certainly seen the effects of that lapse in judgment.

He apologizes - in a sense - today, in a new post. He hasn’t taken the original post or its inflammatory headline down. That’s his call, and I’m not going to pile on like others have for that poor choice of words in the original post’s title, or his subsequent apology.

But I actually did take offense at an inference he made in that apology:

“As aggregation can be a bit boring, I like to spice up the titles a bit. Sometimes it is a movie reference, occasionally some interesting alliteration, sometimes a joke. Often irreverent and frequently disrespectful, they are designed to give a chuckle or make one think. Many times they are vague and ambiguous forcing the reader to ask “What does that mean?”

In fact, I often get emails asking that very thing about titles and I am loathe to explain. I like ambiguity. It would be silly to call blog post titles “art” — clearly they aren’t. But, to me, they are similar in that they frequently are better left unexplained.

Those that know, know. Those that misunderstand, misunderstand. And those that come away with something totally different than my intent share their impressions and make me think.”

Emphasis mine.

Blog post titles aren’t considered ‘art?’ You’ve gotta be kidding, A.C. My highest admiration for any aspect of Post Politics is your continually creative choice of titles. And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Absolutely it’s an art. Thought into my posts titles probably represents at least a quarter, sometimes half, of the effort I put into each post. Maybe it’s not “art” for hanging in a museum, but it definitely fits into my broad definition of what constitutes “art.”

So I hope Kleinheider’s being humble rather than oblivious to this fact.

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