“No one should be denied access to the medications they need”

In the P-I today, in an article about the expansion of Wal-Mart’s $4 generic prescription program to Washington State.

“No one should be denied access to the medications they need, and this program is a big step in moving our customers and communities toward access to affordable medicines,” Wal-Mart Chief Executive Lee Scott said in a statement.

Astonishingly, the article fails to mention that the “no one” in Lee Scott’s statement does not include the company’s thousands of employees nationwide who have no health insurance. The piece mentions that “critics” call the $4 program a “publicity stunt” — but what press release isn’t a publicity stunt when you’re the world’s largest private employer? And the article doesn’t get to the heart of more crucial criticism: job one for the company ought to be providing its own employees with health care, including prescription drug coverage.

But heaven forbid the mainstream press talks directly about workers. As usual, it’s all consumers, all the time. (ok, not all the time — sometimes they speak as investors instead.) So the piece is organized around what drugstore competitors will do in response.

The answer: basically, nothing. Confirming that the program in fact is pretty much a publicity stunt.

Against blocking the halting?

Today’s Seattle P-I on Dave Reichert’s win in the 8th Congressional District:

“As the UW’s Jones observed, “He was able to distinguish himself from the Republicans on issues that mattered to that district” by voting for federal money for stem cell research, against Arctic oil drilling and against blocking the halting of life support for the terminally ill Terry Schiavo.”

Read that last clause again:

“against blocking the halting of life support for the terminally ill Terry Schiavo”

There must be a better way to write this instead of the triple or quadruple negative (depending on whether you consider “terminally ill” to be a negative)! I’m not sure if it’s even possible to parse that clause as written at normal reading speed, unless you already know what Reichert’s position on the issue was — in which case all you actually need to read is “Schiavo.”

The issue itself is not what’s complicated. After all, when this was a hot issue, most Americans had strong opinions about it. So no doubt, the issue is completely understandable. The problem is, it’s far easier to understand than it is to write. We think about “halting of life support” as a single concept, but on the page, it’s not so compact.

Complexity is fun to distill, sprawling phrases rewarding to contain. I’d suggest:

“..and opposing efforts by Republican leaders to keep terminally ill Terri Schiavo on life support, against the wishes of her husband.”

Classified Haiku

Try to write a classified for a few minutes and you’ll realize, as I just did, that the line between classified ad & haiku is a finer one than suspected.

“How much was it that they charge per syllable?”

Safire: Discrimination Expert?

To the New York Times Magazine editor:

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, William Safire takes time out to render a judgment on whether or not the term “urchin” is offensive. Safire says it is not.

I don’t have an opinion on how suitable the term “urchin” is for polite conversation about African adoptions, though I suspect that Dickensian children are not a protected class in the eyes of contemporary law.

But I do have my doubts that William Safire of all people is qualified to render judgments in such matters. He’s a former Nixon speechwriter for god’s sake. And he’s staunchly opposed to the bulk of the contemporary civil rights agenda, from affirmative action to redistributive taxation to any given social justice effort. But because he’s made a second career out of rendering grammatical judgments, Safire gets to make judgments on offensiveness as well?

And so clearly he lays down his decision:

“The word is neither racist nor sexist.”

Again, Safire gets to decide this? How about we let those being described as “urchins” (and those close to them) decide? A descriptive view of the vocabulary of taking offense is far preferable to a proscriptive view–no matter what your take on the grammar of Standard Written English.

In any case, I hope the urchins of the world have protectors of more repute than William Safire to look after them.