INSULT TO INJURY: A CANARY IN A COAL MINE, A CURMUDGEON IN THE MAKING: MY LIFE IN THE MEDIA

From the moment I became a reporter (excuse me, a journalist), I've done my best to cultivate the image of a crusty old newspaperman. I started wearing rumpled, coffee-stained suits, grunting and harrumphing my replies to questions, and frowning much more than ever before. Next week, I'm going in to have my face surgically set in a permanent scowl.

I've yet to develop a taste for either cheap scotch or bad cigars, but, hey, I'm still fairly young.

And by newspaperman I don't mean the namby-pamby mild-mannered Clark Kent type with horn-rimmed glasses and perfectly coiffed hair. Puhleeeze. My image is of Perry White from "The Daily Planet," barking orders at neophyte cubs like Jimmy Olsen. "Great Caesar's Ghost!"

Then there was Joe Maurer.

Joe was the editor of my hometown paper, "The Belton Star-Herald," and the father of Eddie Maurer, one of my best friends when I was growing up. The Maurers lived across the street in a house that became the hub of activity for all the kids in the neighborhood. I got to know Joe up close and personal.

Joe drank bourbon and ginger ale, chain smoked Camel cigarettes (no filters, please), and managed to curse every chance he had.

On Friday evenings, even after the progressive pronouncements of Vatican II, he'd spurn meat of any sort and scarf down Chef Boy-ar-dee cheese pizzas with canned anchovies scattered liberally across the top. He was a second father to us all, and we loved him.

His job -- newspaperman -- seemed so much more glorious, more romantic than my own father's job as a banker. Who wants to fiddle with amortization tables when you can stain your sleeves with newsprint and bleed ink?

So I finally made it.

This image of a newspaperman is, of course, far from accurate, but it's the one I'm stuck with from watching too many old movies and reading all those Superman comic books as a kid.

Truthfully, very few of us who write the news manage to change the world either for better or worse. And even if given the chance to try, we wouldn't know how. Still, at times I can't help but imagine the job of a journalist to be something noble and self-sacrificing, akin to that of a canary in a coal mine.

Seems that miners used to take a caged canary with them into shafts to test the air for the odorless, noxious gases that sometimes fill the mines. Canaries, being more sensitive to poison gas than humans, would keel over long before the miners were in grave danger. But when the canary collapsed and died, the miners knew it was time to haul their haunches outside.

Novelists Walker Percy and Kurt Vonnegut both compared writers to canaries in a coal mine. Because writers are more sensitive to the dangers of life, Percy and Vonngegut said, they have the job -- nay, the duty -- to let others know of the dangers that surround them. A noble calling.

When I took this position, I believed that to be the job of a newspaperman as well -- to act as a canary in a coal mine, not by creating dangers that aren't really there, but by being supersensitive to the dangers that exist, dangers that seem at first invisible and undetectable by others.

Now, I confess, I have my doubts.

There is a growing segment of society that looks upon the media as the enemy of all that is virtuous and fair. Newspapermen are regarded not only as the herald of bad news, but likely the very cause of that bad news. We are expected to take the blame when things are printed that people don't like, as if the message and the messenger are the same thing.

Or even worse, we are ignored altogether. Many times I have written things in this column waiting, expecting, even hoping for complete and utter vilification for some outrageous hoopdedoodle I have penned, only to receive instead nothing -- complete and utter silence.

No wonder we in the news biz are so grouchy. No wonder so many become curmudgeons.

Unless you're like Voltaire's Candide and believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, that everything is beautiful and that things always work out for the best, then you must admit ours is not a perfect world. Sometimes things don't work out the way we want. Most of the time, in fact.

Injury and pain, trouble and turmoil, exist in our world. The life of humanity is, as Thomas Hobbes said, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Nearly every major world religion has as its basis an attempt to understand why there is evil in the world and how that evil may be redeemed and overcome. An attempt to justify God's ways to man.

Oh, we can respond to it in different ways. We can accept the pain as a part of life as any good stoic would. Or we can try to change it, to redeem it, like a zealous reformer. We could also just wait for the pain to be redeemed by something outside ourselves, if not in this life, then in the life to come.

Or we can laugh.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Point and laugh. Laugh hard, laugh long. Look at the world and laugh. Add insult to injury. We may not solve any of the world's problems that way, but at least we acknowledge that the problems exist.

Sure beats the silence.

~Jeffrey Jackson is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.