Lessons Never Learned At Fox News
Michael Ryan has written, directed and produced films, television, and theater, published several books of humor and satire, and worked as a Washington and foreign correspondent and editor for major magazines.
Quantity, not quality, seems to get you places in this world, whether you are an academic or a conservative pundit.
Archer John Porter Martin died recently, and, as I read his obituary, I found myself thinking about people like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Tucker Carlson. Unlike them, Archer Martin took to heart the lesson that Mister Ed tried to teach us all a generation ago: he never spoke unless he had something to say. If only the Fox News crowd had the same amount of horse sense.
Archer Martin would never have been a success on Fox News, or talk radio, or tabloid newspapers.
Those of you who wasted long undergraduate afternoons in chemistry laboratories might remember Professor Martin as the inventor of partition chromatography; those of you who didn’t...well, trust me, you don’t even want to know about it.
He was a scientist with, as far as I could tell, little interest in politics, but I found myself mentally comparing his career to those of the wind-em-up-and-let-’em-blab right wing performance artists who afflict our lives. You can’t turn on cable TV -- at least not Fox or CNN -- without seeing one of them. You can’t pick up a paper -- at least not the New York Post or the Boston Herald and God knows how many others coast to coast -- without reading them. You can’t turn on talk radio without hearing them blab away.
For years, I’ve been wondering where they get the time to compose the millions of words they regurgitate every week. Granted, it doesn’t take much thought to come up with the sort of blather they retail, but just the time it takes to type the number of words they produce is truly awesome.
When you consider that some of the conserva-blabbers, like George Will, have separate subspecialties in things like baseball, you can only gasp in awe at the superhuman strength it takes to produce enough words to fill the Encyclopedia Brittanica, all day, every day.
Which brings us back to Archer Martin, an unassuming chemist who, from his obit, seemed painfully lacking in the skills of bureaucratic infighting.
Six decades ago, he needed to find out how to separate various amino acids in organic tissue, and set about to find a way to do it. He succeeded. He was lured away from his comfy gig at a British university to take a job at the University of Houston, where he taught part-time for many years, until they declined to renew his contract. The reason: in his entire life, he published only 70 papers. The average chemist would have published at least 280. Obviously, he was not up to snuff.
The university bureaucrats seemed to have forgotten that Paper Number Nine won Archer Martin the Nobel Prize.
Apparently, the good professor took it all with good grace, and went back to Britain to spend his declining years. No doubt he was replaced in Houston by someone whose obituary will not be printed around the world, but who at least produced hundreds upon hundreds of papers.
Imagine what a wonderful world it would be if Sean Hannity only made 70 public appearances in a lifetime, but actually had something worth saying at each of them.
In a world like that, maybe even Ann Coulter could win the Nobel prize.
This is Michael Ryan for TomPaine.com.
