Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By the Erudite Redneck

Lost in my usual Sunday melancholy – which persisted even though my beloved Pokes made it to the Sweet Sixteen, even though my beloved Redheaded Redneck Stepchild (Bird) was here to watch it with me, even though the Pokes kicked historical ASS at the NCAA wrestling tournament, and even though the Pokes won two out of three this weekend in Stillwater against K-State in Big 12 baseball – I forgot the most important rule of writing:

“Shut up and write.”

Don’t feel like writing? Tough. Write anyway. Just string words together. If there is any sign of life in your head, and you’re a writer of any talent or ability, it will make sense. Won’t be perfect maybe. But it will make sense.

Hard to believe I forgot. It’s a sign of the kind of journalism I do these days, which is usually not the holy-shit-drop-everything-and-report-and-write variety. No. It’s the kind of journalism that really, seriously, doesn’t have to be done at all.

In journalism, whether you FEEL like writing has nothing to do with the fact that you write. You write because you write for a living -- in the same way that a factory worker factory works because he works in a factory for living. Show up, shut up and write, or stay home sick.

Strange, the power of ideas, especially once you get a few words rambling around in your head. Very powerful.

The flash that one does not have to FEEL like writing to write was powerful enough to keep me walkin’ past the TV just now in the other room, even though I got a glimpse of a bikini-clad coed ridin’ a buckin’ machine on a beach. It’s that shark-attacks-spring breakers movie, I guess. I wanted to see it, because it looked so campy. Now I want to pound on this keyboard more.

So, here I am, stringin’ some words together because, truth be told, it just makes me feel better – especially after I just killed so many of my babies.

Killin’ babies. I don’t know what you call it, but that’s what I call it when I have to cut some piece of writing to fit some editor’s request or demand.

It’s different from editing. It’s different from whittling, say, a 1,000-word piece down to 950 words, which happens all the time in the newspaper bidness, although we usually refer to column inches, not words.

But tonight I finally actually printed off a paper I did a year ago, submitted to a prestigious scholarly journal – oh, what the hell, to the Western Historical Quarterly – and had rejected.

Need to whack 1,000 words from the 7,500-word article, to submit it to another journal. Killing babies.

The Western Historical Quarterly intake editor missed the whole damn point, which happens in academe, I hear, all the time. She actually had the cajones to tell me I needed to pretty much scrap my entire approach and start over, and do it her way. That, too, is not unusual. However, since I’m pretty much doing this for myself, and for posterity, not really for a byline, which are a dime a dozen, no.

Kiss my ER ass. I did it my way, and I’d rather not see it published at all than to kowtow to someone’s whims masquerading as erudition.

If I have a mission in life, as a 20-year veteran of daily newspaper journalism trying to make his way in the world of scholarly historical writing, it’s this:

Some historians should accept newspapers for what they are-were: special voices and reliable vectors of ideas, if not always facts.

That’s probably why historians in general dismiss newspapers as primary sources, even when they sometimes are the only source of synthesis of thought for a certain time and place. They get facts wrong. Granted. But they seldom ever get IDEAS wrong.

Most historians use newspapers as sources to help them tell other tales. My aim is to start with newspapers, to tell tales of ideas, not the usual nuts-and-bolts stuff about where the papers published, how big the sheets were, what kind of press was used and so on.

IDEAS, that’s what gets my juices flowing, both as a journalist and as a budding historian.

That’s the point that the intake editor person missed. Sigh. I could go on, but I won’t. Such is my burden as a journalist-turning-historian.

But hey, the research is sound, the writin’ ain’t bad, and despite what the intake editor said, although it is obliquely about Lt. Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his demise at the hands of the Sioux in 1876, which, of course, has been written plumb to death, the paper I wrote, if you see it for what it is – an assessment of the ideas expressed about Custer and the Northern Plains wars in INDIAN newspapers publishing then in what is now Oklahoma – most certainly has NOT been done to death or I wouldn’ta dood it.

And that sentence is you an example of “Won’t be perfect maybe. But it will make sense.”

So, me and the cat named Mao just sat on the front porch sippin’ shiraz and wielding a pen and killing babies. Well, not killin’ them outright, but issuing them death sentences by the hundreds.

We sentenced them to death in groups of 330, 429, 184, 155, 132 and 130 – which adds up to 1,360. That means some of them babies will get a last-minute reprieve from the governor’s office of my mind.

But the hard part’s done. Soon, me and the cat, with or without some shiraz, will set some of those baby captives free, and take a machete to the rest, so that 6,500 shall live.

Writing – writin’ anything of consequence anyway – ain’t for sissies. And writin’ backwards, which is what I call the kind of baby killin’ I’m up to with this Custer paper, ain’t for the weak of heart.

END

P.S. Torn! From the front-room TV comes beach music and the sounds of a mechanical bull. From the bedroom TV down the hall comes the sounds of a bad cowboy flick on the Western channel. Oh, wait! That beach gal was wearin’ a cowboy hat. Problem solved.