Mike Barnicle Does It Again; Mass. Murder

"Hey, what are you hearing?" Blow says. (What are you hearing? outstrips even How ya doin'? and Hi! as the most common salutation in town.)

"Not much." (Music to Blow's ears.)

"I was just told Sen. Horne's been caught in an affair with his secretary."

"Oh, yeah. Jennifer Legg. Too bad. She's a nice kid." (A blow to Blow.)

"Well, he's having a press conference at 2." (Blow recovers with a nugget.)

"No, they had to reschedule it till 4."

If you told non-Washingtonians that such a chat would wreck Blow's day and make yours, they wouldn't believe you. But it would. The best evidence that Washington works like this is the way the place looks during the holidays. Most parts of the country are pretty lively between Christmas and New Year's. But between Dec. 24 and Dec. 31 (the day everyone comes pouring back into town for parties), you can find yourself the only passenger on a bus, the only patron in a bookstore, the only diner in a popular restaurant. Everyone's out of town. Everyone's out of town because there's nothing in the newspapers, and therefore nothing to show off about knowing before it gets in the newspapers.

But then I remember that New York now has Mike Barnicle at the Daily News. If newslessness and journalistic banality are causes for residents to pack up and go on vacation, the man is a one-man evacuation notice. Back in his Boston Globe days when Barnicle was vying for the mantle of Most Overrated Columnist in the Nation, he would use this time of year to write one of those anyway-I-was-just-thinkin' columns, piling random banalities into a stack of paragraphettes. They were like barroom conversation without the barroom that would have made it understandable. Or the barroom companions who would have made it rational. Or the humor that would have made it bearable. Such columns are so easy that practically anyone in the country could write one in 10 or 15 minutes, but there were a few things that made Barnicle's stand out. The first was his insistence (as tribune of the poor) on inserting a few references to sports, which he neither knew much about nor had any interest in. The second was the tone-deaf way he would hammer on the same themes a half-dozen times in the same column. The third was the strident and angry moralistic denunciations of phenomena that would strike all readers as self-evidently bad, like nuclear annihilation, lynching and rape. So you'd get something like:

George W. Bush and Jeb Bush. George & Jeb. Sounds like a country music duo.

Too bad about Jason Robards. The guy had real class.

Same with former Steelers QB Jeff Gilliam.

Donna Shalala. Sounds like the chorus from a 50s doo-wop song.

Here's wishing Marvin Lemieux lots of luck in his comeback with the Penguins. The guy's got a lot of class.

Some people are calling the killing of seven people at an office complex a wake-up call. I call it a tragedy.

Hey, did anyone see Maryland in this year's bowl games? What happened to them? They used to be a great team.

Am I getting old, or does Katherine Harris need a facelift?

Too bad about the murder of 10-year-old Damilola (sounds like a sports car!) Taylor in London. Some people are calling it a sad sign of the times. I call it a tragedy.

Whoever killed him had no class.

To be fair to Barnicle, no one else has much of an idea how to write a midwinter column, either. David Broder writes a "Goofs" column, in which he assesses all the predictions he made in the course of the past year. While he describes it as his "annual year-end exercise in self-humiliation," it reads more like an annual year-end exercise in self-stroking. "As I was rereading the Broder columns of 2000..." he modestly begins. What a way to spend New Year's week.

The New York Times doesn't go in for that kind of roundup columnizing. Instead its editors pour all the banality of which they are capable into reporting. This year the offending series was a five-part Clinton retrospective of the he-made-us-laugh-he-made-us-cry variety. President Clinton, Man of Paradox. Did he drive his party to the right, or did he reinvigorate the left? Did America benefit from his personal strengths or suffer under his personal weaknesses? There's a high-end Barnicle-ism about this kind of paradox-seeking. It appears to be a patient and subtle way of looking at a complex issue, but most often the seeming patience is merely an indifference to whether there exist any difficult, nonsuperficial truths about Clinton (or whatever the subject) that could be brought to the surface by a bit of hard thinking.

The only columnist who fared even slightly well during this newsless passage was the endlessly creative Marjorie Williams of The Washington Post, with a list of clemencies she'd offer public figures. But that was about as good as it got. The reader can pass his own judgment on whether it's a good use of one's time to write a roundup of the roundups.

Mass. Murder Michael "Mucko" McDermott's "alleged" killing of seven people last week at the Wakefield, MA, offices of Edgewater Technology depressed me profoundly, as news seldom does. First, it took place about a 20-minute drive from where I grew up. I had always assumed that my part of the country was immune to that kind of wacko gun violence, and the history of such incidents bore me out. Starting in 1995, the country's major workplace shoot-'em-up tragedies have taken place in Texas (twice), California (twice), Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Hawaii and Connecticut. Aside from the last two, they're all either in the South or in redneck California, where the Second Amendment is often mistaken for the Second Commandment, where pride is the most piquant of emotions, and where revenge has more of a hold on the popular imagination than it does up North. Virtually every index we have of violence over the last 200 years has shown the South to be consistently the most murderous part of the country. Not that the South doesn't have its good points; that's just one of the bad ones. And the problem has been worsened by Americans' mobility over the last three or four decades, which has restructured the South and the West more than elsewhere. The New South and the New West may be more namby-pamby and upper-middle-class than the Old, but they're also now carved up by highways into isolated suburban tracts, miles away from stores, culture and places to meet friends. Kids grow up trapped in an anomic and isolated existence of tv and masturbation, spending half their existence begging their parents for rides to places where something resembling life is occurring, and the other half avoiding their parents so they can log onto some slasher or porno website. This has always struck me as pretty much the whole of the story behind the Columbine High School massacre. The rash of dysfunction that has plagued the high school kids of Littleton, CO, since the incident provides pretty good supporting evidence.

It's not that Massachusetts was immune to these pressures?the Bay State, too, has automobile suburbs, televised junk and the Internet. But it also has a countervailing small-town culture almost everywhere, which tends to bind people?not excluding the craziest?into important relationships that are the best way of defusing sociopathy. Obviously that culture was insufficient in McDermott's case. A partisan of small-town New England could claim that the guy had spent six years in the Navy, that he'd been formed by the years he'd spent elsewhere, but that's beside the point, which is that he was able to move back to his home state and go silently, anonymously, familylessly out of his mind.

There's another depressing thing about this killing. It's that, in this age of excessive conformity, it provides conformists with a pretty unassailable debating point. Edgewater Technologies has 200 employees in Wakefield, and who goes off the rails? The fidgety, longhaired, taciturn, bathing-averse, revoltingly fat, Internet-obsessed loner. As one of McDermott's coworkers, Mike Stanley, told any newspaper that cared to listen, "Of all the people who I think could have done something like this, it was him."