Getting Walt’s goat sure has rocked the boat

Northwest Passage
Jim Casey, Editor of the Sequim Gazette

Pause with me awhile, friends, on your way to learning what our merry madcap letter writers are up to today.

This is an occasion of no small significance: the time and place at which the editor of any newspaper worth its ink instructs his readers how to vote.

I’m new at this, despite more than three decades in the business, so I must look to my mentors for guidance.

Most of them had Type A personalities that they exercised by paying extraordinary attention to professional sports and politics — not that the two always could be told apart or that the editors often could do so.

Yet when it comes to sports, I pine for those vanished telecasts of professional bowling as covered by “Whispering Joe” Wilson if only for their unsurpassed somnolence. Wilson could lull a runaway train to sleep, a talent we need now more than ever.

As for politics, my profession has forced me to look much too closely at its practitioners, sort of like Lemuel Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians.

The warts loom large, folks.

Vote Hall for everything
Nevertheless, tradition demands that I dispense well-reasoned wisdom lest you black in those little boxes on your ballots with something resembling a mind of your own.

It boils down to this: Vote for Don Hall, not only for Sequim City Council Position 3 but as a write-in for almost every other office on the ballot.

Let’s get this man elected to some office or another, people, for Hall is a gem.

Sure, his appearance answers the question, whatever happened to Alfalfa of the “Our Gang” comedies, and Hall certainly is no silver-tongued spellbinder.

But he speaks from the heart — and listens more than he speaks. His goals are to make Sequim’s quality of life a bit better for his involvement in government.

Hall doesn’t demonize his opponent or his opponent’s friends and family, nor does he try to lay waste to whole quadrants of the local political landscape.

Hall sees being a councilor as citizen service, not as just another photo in his whole-life yearbook.

Most of all, he doesn’t take himself so seriously as that council candidate whose service to Sequim we’ll never forget — because he’ll never let us.

No bad publicity
Walt Schubert has achieved such a high profile that one of his detractors can publish caricatures of him in advertisements that have appeared in the Sequim Gazette.

No matter what you think of Schubert, the all-too-easily recognizable caricatures are clever, although they’re unlikely to sway many minds.

In fact, I know politicians who’d give their left — uh, never mind — to be lampooned in similar fashion because they know there’s nearly never such a thing as bad publicity.

(Walt, you look terrific in red.)

Schubert, though, has chosen to cancel his subscription to the Gazette and to publish none of his own campaign ads in the paper, charging it with failure to “edit” its advertising.

And here’s where he needs to tighten his lug nuts, because beyond libel, obscenity or bigotry the Gazette doesn’t edit the contents of its ads.

Or, beyond spelling and grammar, its Letters to the Editor.

Or its editorial cartoons, be they drawn by its own Tim Quinn or by statewide self-syndicated Frank Shiers.
They’re all part of the open exchange of opinion. Freedom of the press doesn’t belong only to the people who own the presses.

Wielding the club
Not long ago I had a lengthy exchange of e-mails with a man who asserted that a certain service club comprised an accurate sociopolitical sample of Sequim’s population — therefore, the Gazette’s Opinion page should conform to the viewpoints of said service club.

I think he was mistaken about the accuracy of the sample — and the homogeneity of club members’ politics — but most seriously wrong about the purpose of this page, the page opposite it and all the others. That includes what appears below the articles.

Not only does the First Amendment guarantee free speech; the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a person’s right to buy as much access to free speech (as oxymoronic as that sounds) as he or she wants — including campaign advertising.

I had a similar exchange of e-mails with another reader who said I should make it clear that the paper welcomes expressions of opinions of all stripes, especially hers (see letter from M.C. Clark). I thought that was obvious, but for her sake, amen.

What I’d welcome most, though, would be a prevailing attitude across the country that we should celebrate our differences and perhaps learn from them, not scream at one another over the divisions that, all things considered, really are quite tiny.

In this perfect nation, politicians would work to earn their pay — not whatever dollars they make but the votes that put them into office. They’d keep their minds open to many options, especially those offered by their detractors.

And it’s in that spirit that I send down this message from my ivory tower with its mossy shingles and warped screen door:
Put “Whispering Joe’s” old professional bowling shows into syndication.
And, seriously, vote for Don Hall.

Jim Casey is the editor of the Sequim Gazette. His column appears whenever someone suggests that he keep his opinions to himself.