However mythologized his life may have become, he was a real man with real wisdom to share.
As I say on my site, "To many people, Confucius is nothing more than the setup to a one-line joke." The whole "Confucius say" genre comes from the structure of the Analects (the word means "selected sayings"; a better translation of the Chinese title is "Discourses and Proverbs"), in which the bulk of the collected quotations are prefaced with "The Master said."
If you read through it, there's prime material in there, very straightforward yet very profound stuff, all about the cultivation of virtue and the application of it in the public sphere.
Confucius wasn't wishy-washy about ethics; he maintained that anyone who truly wanted to be virtuous wouldn't have to reach far to find it, although it would be hard work to keep up.
Also, even though it took a couple of centuries for Confucianism to catch on widely in China, it shaped nearly 2,000 years of that country's culture -- if it weren't for Mao's crusade against Confucianism, it would be as well-known and influential today as Christianity and Hinduism -- not to mention about 1,000 years older than Islam.
Heh. Well, I've been working on a translation of the Confucian canon that I'm trying to tailor to a modern audience, because so many of the respected translations of the past, while valuable from a scholarly perspective, sound stilted or stuffy -- they don't preserve the conversational tone of the original.
At the same time, however, sexism was a fact of ancient (and not-so-ancient) Chinese society. How does one produce a gender-neutral translation -- as I'm trying to do in order to show explicitly that these teachings are of value to everyone -- when of the "Five Relationships," four of them are relationships of superior and inferior, and husband-wife is one of those four?
There are also a small number of very awkward passages, one of which always leaps to my mind when this subject comes up: "Women and petty people are hard to handle. If you let them get close, they become presumptuous; if you keep them at a distance, they resent it."
It will be quite a challenge to remain faithful to the spirit of the original while dealing with these issues, but I believe it can be done.
You know, I have never been aggravated by anything about New York City except the fact that it's so hard to get into from anywhere north of Poughkeepsie. I'd be down there at least once a month if that weren't such a pain in the ass. I go to Boston instead.
Of course, I'm not a native New Yorker -- I grew up outside Chicago.
But I get the impression from my adopted townsfolk that the most
aggravating thing about New York City to them is either (a) that
they don't live there or (b) that Albany doesn't offer everything
"the City" does.
It's funny -- I know I've scooped the daily a few times, and I know it felt good when I did it, but those aren't the stories that I really remember.
The two stories I've been proudest of were both feature stories: one looking into the suicide of a small-town school superintendent, the other comparing municipalities' approaches to dealing with teenagers. (I still think the former was my best, though my editor says he preferred the latter.)
I don't think a daily could have produced either, the former because it would have had a different window of timeliness to work within, the latter because it's not the sort of story a daily can report on in a caring way -- the dailies just can't spare the personnel for something that's too weighty for a Lifestyle feature but not crunchy enough for an investigative piece.
Oh, yeah -- we've ignored it.
Seriously, we don't have to sell papers, only ads. People pick us up regardless of what we put on the cover. So we have the luxury of being able to indulge whatever news bent we like.
As a general rule, of course, most alternative papers like to cover the stuff that the dailies disregard, overlook or do a shabby job on. In this case, the dailies (accessories to the broadcast media, which I think are the real culprits) are cramming more of this crap into everyone's brains than any cogent person could bear.
Given that, what on earth could we add? What would we WANT to add? Although I would like to point out that we endorsed Ralph Nader, who was on the ballot in New York, for president in 1996. We didn't need any semen-stained dress to tell us we wanted someone other than Clinton.
What this whole thing has given us the opportunity to do is provide the public real news while the dailies are wasting space trying to second-guess sealed-courtroom testimony.
Well, it's a Hearst paper, so there's the corporate angle. And there's the fact that it's in bed with the mayor, who's a confrontational bully, and has traditionally been squeamish about criticizing anything he or his people are too close to (though it's getting better about that). And there's the old newspaper-as-business-booster conflict.
But the thing that always gets me about the mainstream news media (again, I'm lumping dailies in with broadcast) is the competition -- or, more to the point, the effects of competition.
The faster we can deliver news, the harder it is to get one's story in ahead of the next guy's, and so for a good 10 years at least all the major news media have been hip-deep in the next logical step: reporting the news BEFORE IT HAPPENS. Predicting the future.
And the absolute worst consequence of that -- even worse than the total disregard for one's own credibility -- is the opinion poll. Look, people, when you publish an opinion poll, what you're telling people is that the election is a fait accompli. You're telling people that their votes don't count. You're breeding smugness in the leaders and hopelessness in the losers, and both of those attitudes keep people home on Election Day.
You want to know why voter turnout is down? It's the polls, stupid! If all the space devoted to opinion polls were devoted to coverage of the relevant issues in a given race, people would at least have the CHANCE to be informed, even if they didn't take it. The dailies don't give people the chance.
That may be the best thing about working for an alternative newsweekly.
We're on a different cycle. Unless a daily completely disregards
something we're covering, we CAN'T scoop it. So instead we fade
back and give the story some thought and a little extra research,
and we report on it when we're good and ready with something that
gives people -- well, maybe not the WHOLE story, since nobody's
omniscient, but at least a meal instead of a tasting spoon.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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