DATE: Friday, September 26, 1997            TAG: 9709260033

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Keith Monroe 

                                            LENGTH:   87 lines

FUN WITH MAIL: A THUMB-SUCKER UNLEASHES VITUPERATION PEOPLE SAY THINGS IN LETTERS TO THE EDITOR THEY WOULDN'T CONSIDER SAYING IN PERSON

It's time for another edition of Fun with Mail. One of the masochistic pleasures of writing for an editorial page is reading the letters to the editor that one provokes.

Anyone who deals with the public quickly develops a hide like a rhinoceros, and nowhere is that more useful than on a newspaper. An old movie villain was known as the man you love to hate. To a considerable fraction of the public, those of us in the news racket seem to evoke similar feelings in the customers.

Our letter writers are capable of kindness, wit and charm but also of brutal honesty, surliness and outright hostility. Something about setting pen to paper seems to unleash streams of vituperation that are kept in check in face-to-face encounters.

Frequently our mail resembles a drive-by shooting. People say things in letters to the editor they wouldn't consider saying in person to their worst enemies, to Joe Stalin or Ted Bundy.

We rarely print the more inflammatory outbursts - often because they are libelous, frequently because they are anonymous. But one assault this week is too good to ignore.

On Tuesday we ran an editorial celebrating the 210th anniversary of the Constitution of the United States. It belonged to a genre known in the trade as a thumb-sucker.

A thumb-sucker, as the name implies, may give more pleasure to the perpetrator than to the spectator. Generally these are editorials characterized by gaseous musings on topics of no particular controversy that arrive at no particular conclusion. Often thumb-suckers are written under the pressure of a deadline to fill a hole.

I was the author of this particular thumb-sucker, and I have now revealed several guild secrets. Rather like a lawyer admitting that all those law books in the office are really fake bindings, or a doctor admitting that he has never been able to hear anything through the stethoscope except the sound of the sea.

In this particular editorial in praise of the Constitution, I mentioned in passing a familiar story of a Philadelphia bystander in 1787 asking what kind of government the convention had concocted. And I quoted from memory the answer: ``A democracy, if you can keep it.''

Writ in haste, as they say. But I did pause for a moment, dear reader, worried that the quote didn't sound quite right, fearful that it was republic, not democracy. I trotted out a couple of books on the Constitution and four or five books of quotations but failed to find a reference.

I faced a decision: Take it out and be safe or leave it in and risk being sorry. Because there are only three things sure in this life: death, taxes and if you print an error in the paper at least one eagle-eyed reader will pop up to tell you - with maximum relish - just how wrong you are.

Sure enough, a fax duly arrived from Donald F. Hawker of Virginia Beach to wise up ``which ever Editor is responsible.'' Mr. Hawker writes as follows:

``I assume you are the product of the public schools. The question really was asked, but the answer was: `We have given them a Republic, if they can keep it.' I do not know for certain if your substitution of the word Democracy for the word Republic is a product of your ignorance or your ideology. Probably both. In any event, I am not surprised to discover that none of the leftist-socialist-liberal ideologues employed on your editorial staff has ever said the Pledge of Allegiance (. . . and to the Republic, for which it stands,. . . ). It seems we could not keep the Republic, The Constitution, or our freedom, and so called `News Papers' such as yours are a large part of the reason why.''

All that from one measly misquotation! You've got to admire a piece of prose that swashbuckling. In some modern buildings there are multipurpose rooms. This is a multipurpose kvetch. Not only did I misquote something, but I did it out of ignorance and ideology. And I am not alone to blame but all my editorial writing tribe who are uniformly of a questionable political bent.

Furthermore, I am apparently unpatriotic. And I was self-evidently educated poorly by the public schools. That widens the field of fire to take in the government and probably unions. And since such errors are typical of newspapers, an entire industry is implicated. Worse, the industry turns out to have played a decisive part in losing Americans their republican form of government, undermining our Constitution and squandering our freedom.

I really should have checked that quote.

On the other hand, the whole episode reinforces my view, Hawker notwithstanding, that it really is a fine old Constitution. Thanks to it, I'm free to make slovenly errors in print and Hawker is free to tell me just how lame an excuse for an editor I am. So God bless the First Amendment, Free Speech, a Free Press, all who are free to misquote and all who are free to take them to task for it. Things could be worse. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot.

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