TEN YEARS OF MAKING FOLKS LAUGH AND CRY OR RANT
AND SPUTTER
It was 10
years ago this month that the Atlanta Business Chronicle asked me to
write a column giving my view of Atlanta two years after the 1996
Centennial Olympic Games. I had been the managing director of
communications and government relations for the Atlanta Committee for
the Olympic Games and the paper wanted to know how I thought the city
had changed after hosting the world. Or had it changed at all? The offer
was too good to resist.
I started
by saying that Atlanta had blown a once-in-a-lifetime chance to put
itself among the great cities of the world. What the world would
remember instead was the city’s tacky — and spectacularly unsuccessful
— street vendors program that did nothing but clog up the streets. I
said Atlanta failed because there was no leadership in the city — not
in the timid business community, not in a local media way over its head
and certainly not in the race-obsessed city government. Needless to say,
the column caused a stir.
The
editors at the Business Chronicle were delighted with the furor and
asked for some additional flame-throwers. The occasional column became a
weekly column and then came an opportunity from my longtime friend and
esteemed veteran political correspondent, Bill Shipp, to syndicate my
efforts. Now, here I am 10 years later heaving politically incorrect
barbs to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million households a week
across the state. It’s not Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, but it’s a pretty
good neighborhood for this former robber baron.
It has
been a marvelous experience that has lasted longer than I ever imagined.
I have made new friends, lost some and jerked a lot of chains over the
past decade.
There
have been misfires. When the USS Cole suffered a sneak attack in 2000
and 17 innocent sailors were killed, I called all Arabs a bunch of
“cowards,” which upset Arabs around the world (an understatement). I
later softened that to “Muslim extremists,” which I probably should have
said the first time. That only upsets self-styled comedian Bill Maher’s
Kool-Aid drinkers.
Over the
past decade, I seem to have worn out my welcome with the higher-ups at
the University of Georgia and with some — but not all — of my former
colleagues at BellSouth. It is the university’s attitude that is most
puzzling. Given my passion for my alma mater and the reach of my column,
I would have made me UGA’s best friend had I been their PR counsel. But
academics don’t think that way. That is why they are academics.
This
column has afforded me some great experiences. The most memorable was
the opportunity to be embedded with the men and women of Georgia’s 48th
Brigade Combat Team in an area of Iraq known as the “Triangle of Death.”
It was a scary time made more so when our Humvee hit an IED. Only today
do I realize how close all of us in that vehicle came that morning to
becoming statistics in a war that has gone on far too long.
After 10
years, I figured I had said just about everything I wanted to say and
planned to spend more time honing my skills as an artist. Then I wrote a
column about a group of Marines in the remote killing fields of
Afghanistan who badly needed supplies air-dropped to them. The response
from readers across the state was beyond anything I could have imagined.
That reminded me that filling this space is more than pricking humorless
thin-skins and watching them squeal. There is the opportunity to do some
good, too.
I get a
lot of mail — most of it good — some of it critical, all of it
welcomed. Of all the letters I have received over the past ten years,
the one I treasure most came a few weeks after the attacks of September
11, 2001. A reader, reacting to some of my silliness, said, “Thank you
for making me laugh. I never thought I would again.”
Ten years of making
folks
laugh and cry or rant and sputter. It has been an absolute blast. I
wouldn’t trade the experience for all the sweet tea in Georgia.
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