Philly.com

From: John Timpane, Commentary editor

This page offers you a handful of well-done opinion pieces, culled from our pages. I've highlighted some of the basics of effective opinion writing. When you're ready to submit an article, e-mail it here.

The first thing a good opinion or commentary piece should have is an opinion.

I receive scores of pieces each day that contain no opinion. Author after author writes "about" something that interests him or her. But they don't have an opinion about that thing -- only a general interest. These pieces may be informative, they may be pretty. But one thing they are not is argumentative. I tend not to run them.

A good opinion piece should state an opinion within the first two or three grafs. That opinion usually is that

* Something is or is not so ("It's true/not true that welfare programs create a culture of dependency.")

* Something is or is not good or worthy ("The new Senate bill requiring each family of 4 or more to own an elephant is an affront to the Constitution and most principles of home construction.")

* Something should or should not be done ("Philadelphia should/should not ban first marriages and make mental health illegal")
or

* Something will or will not happen ("If we pass the new tax-cut bill, our gross national product will plummet, skirts will rise and people named Ralph will disappear.")

Opinion pieces do many other things, but the four options above compose about 80 percent of the published opinion pieces in the world.

Below, frequent contributor Crispin Sartwell advances a worthwhile opinion: that the Rolling Stones are demonstrably better than the Beatles as the best all-time rock band.

The piece was tied into a news event: The Stones were playing in Philadelphia that weekend.

That's the second thing I crave in an opinion piece: a tie-in to the news. If you have a worthwhile opinion about a news event, and you can argue it, you have yourself a good starting-point for an opinion piece. Here is Crispin's:

IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL, AND I LIKE IT

By Crispin Sartwell

October 6, 1997

The Rolling Stones are the best band in the history of rock music. I submit that this can be proven with mathematical rigor and now propose to do so. Follow this closely.

Sartwell's First Law: The quality of a rock band is inversely proportional to its pretentiousness.

Corollary to Sartwell's First Law: The pretentiousness of a rock band can be expressed as a ratio of its artistic ambition to its artistic accomplishment. For example, on a scale of 1 to 10, the artistic ambition of the band Yes equals 9, its artistic accomplishment 1. This yields a pretentiousness ratio of 9:1, one of the very worst in rock history.

The evaluation of rock music is no longer an impressionistic expression of opinion, but rather a precise, quantitative science. Anyone who disagrees with me from now on is simply irrational.

Some quick applications: The Ramones (1:8) are better than the Talking Heads (7:7). Nirvana (3:9) is exactly as good as Pearl Jam (9:3) is bad. The worst music ever made (literally) is art rock: King Crimson (10:1), for example. Early U2 and early Springsteen, who took what were fundamentally fairly simple ditties and mounted them with an elaborateness usually reserved for Wagnerian opera, are almost unbelievably overrated.

And finally, the Rolling Stones are much better than the Beatles.

Now admittedly this Stones vs. Beatles thing is decades old. But it rages on.

Both the Stones and the Beatles started out as interpreters of rhythm and blues. They cleaned up African American music and sold it to the world, a tried and true commercial strategy for white folks throughout the century, from Benny Goodman to Elvis Presley to Vanilla Ice.

Which brings me to:

Sartwell's Second Law: The quality of a rock song varies inversely as the square of its distance from the blues. The bluesier the better.

The world's popular music is African American music because African American music is extremely intense and powerful. If you're playing music in a European tonal framework, you're not a rock band at all.

The history of rock is the continuation of the history of the blues, both in the way it is made and in the way it is received (by dancing in bars).

The two laws are connected: When was the last time you saw a pretentious blues band? Rock is a traditional, as opposed to an avant-garde, art form. The authenticity of a work of traditional art is measured by the way it venerates and explores the tradition. The authenticity of a work of avant-garde art is measured by the way it destroys or transcends the past. Avant-garde rockers have profoundly misunderstood their form.

Something awful happened to the Beatles about 30 years ago, something that happens to most young rock musicians who achieve extreme success: They mistook themselves for avant-garde artistes. They made, for example, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a truly bad album. They lost the blues and, to paraphrase Chuck Berry, started sounding like a symphony, a vapid symphony. They went baroque.

Now that was exactly what the Stones never did (though there was one scary moment: Their Satanic Majesties Request). They have remained, for much longer than anybody else, a knockdown, straight-ahead basic blues and rock band. Mick Jagger never mistook himself for Pavarotti or T.S. Eliot. Keith Richard never tried to do anything but make great little riffs.

Think about how hard this must have been: You can do anything you want, and instead of making a statement for the ages demonstrating what a profound puppy you really are, you just write another great, simple rock song: ``Beast of Burden,'' say, or ``Between a Rock and a Hard Place,'' or, from the excellent current disk, ``Flip the Switch.''

When Bach (10:10) made profound statements for the ages, they stuck. When Emerson, Lake and Palmer (10:1) made profound statements for the ages, they were dated before they were released. ``Twist and Shout'' and other early Beatles songs sound like they were recorded yesterday. But ``For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!'' sounds like the relic of an extinct, incomprehensible culture.

Everything the Stones have ever done, with the exception of some very early work recorded before they could sing and play competently, holds up beautifully: It's the rock of ages. Albums like The Rolling Stones, Now! (1964), It's Only Rock 'n Roll (1974), and Undercover (1983) sound perfectly fresh. There's a very simple reason for that: They are excellent examples of Sartwell's laws, completely unpretentious and always undergirded by the blues.

The accomplishment of the Stones never exceeds their grasp; they know exactly what they play well, and they just keep on playing it. Do that successfully for a year and, if you're lucky, you've got a good recording and a concert tour to show for it. Do it for 35 years, and you're the only rockers who ever have.

So there you have it: perfectly irrefragable proof that if you go see the Stones, you'll be seeing the greatest freaking rock band in history. Anybody got an extra ticket?

Also note: Good opinion pieces have good last lines.

Crispin is having some fun, but he sincerely espouses his point of view. Let me offer a completely serious piece with a very cogent, incisive opinion, argued tenaciously but with respect. It's written by our own David Boldt. He wrote this in August 1999, shortly after a school shooting had traumatized the country and spurred calls for greater security in schools. Boldt wants people to calm down and realize that things are getting better, not worse.

A good opinion piece gives concrete support to its points. The two best ways to do this are with statistics from a reputable source (always named) and testimony from eminently qualified experts in the field. Statistics and expert testimony are the two most convincing means of persuading readers that your point is reasonable. David does a masterful job with both:

HYPE BELIES DROP IN TEEN VIOLENCE

By David Boldt

August 17, 1999

As the hysteria over the sequence of school shootings slowly begins to subside, an answer to the question of what we should do about youth violence is beginning to emerge.

In short, we should keep on doing what we've been doing in recent years, because it's working.

Despite the now-indelible pictures we all have in our minds of terrified children running for their lives to escape fellow students turned mass murderers, it is now clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that juvenile violence has actually been plummeting.

The Department of Education has reported that the number of school shootings dropped sharply over the last five years and may continue downward in 1998-1999, even with the carnage at Columbine High School last spring.

School shootings have always been extraordinarily rare. (There were only 40 in 1997-98.) What's truly remarkable is the decline in teen violence generally. The overall rate for murders by 14-to-17-year-olds dropped from 30.2 per 100,000 in 1993 to 16.5 in 1997.

A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that, with only a few exceptions, almost every conceivable form of violent juvenile behavior is going down. Jack Levin, a professor of sociology who heads the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University, notes that simple assaults (fights not involving a weapon) declined from 1.4 million in 1994 to less than 800,000 two years later.

Levin believes that if anyone checked, they'd find less running in school hallways, fewer incidents of shoving on the stairs. Kids today are "doing less of everything," he says.

How can we have this general decline in violence, yet these horrendous, multi-victim episodes? One answer is that in a nation of over 250 million people anything can happen, and it's always foolhardy to try to draw any general conclusion from a handful of examples.

This will not, of course, stop the media from trying. In a case like Columbine there is tremendous pressure to attach some larger meaning, no matter how bogus, to the event, so that the tremendous investment in coverage doesn't seem to be mainly voyeurism (which, of course, it is).

No one is entirely certain why the overall juvenile violence rate is dropping. Too many things are happening at once.

The crack cocaine epidemic is subsiding and, with it, the accompanying drug wars. Efforts to get guns off the street and tougher penalties in schools are probably having an effect. (Over 6,000 students were kicked out of school for possessing a gun in 1996-97.)

Then there have been mentoring programs, midnight basketball leagues, expanded summer job programs. Conflict resolution and character education classes have been expanded, and some show positive results. In fact, behind the scenes there's a free-for-all going on among social scientists seeking to divvy up shares of the credit.

For his part, Levin, writing in the journal The Responsive Community, argues that all of these reasons would have been insufficient if there were not a "cultural revolution" under way, changing the way adults relate to children at the same time. Kids, he says, are getting a greater sense of "connectedness" to their parents, their teachers, and the other adults in their lives.

"For many years parents just went their own way and left their kids to raise themselves, and the kids didn't do a very good job," he says. Somehow, in the early 1990s, people realized that the nation had a crisis on its hands, and they started to do something about it. Parents discovered, often to their amazement, that if they were willing to talk, even teenagers were willing to listen.

Levin says he is "of two minds" about the current excessive hype regarding juvenile violence. It's bad to the extent that it's misleading, he says. "But if it scares people into doing the right thing, even for the wrong reason," well, he can live with that.

Another excellent way to illustrate your viewpoint is from personal experience. This is somewhat less persuasive than numbers or expert testimony, but it's certainly powerful. If you have had a personal experience that sheds light on the news -- if you have actually come in contact with the news somehow -- by all means use your experience. Jim Baumohl of Ardmore, Pa., wrote the following piece during a SEPTA strike, and his point is that if SEPTA wants people's sympathy during the strike, perhaps they should provide better service. This is one piece in which the opinion doesn't appear at the top -- but the story carries us along until we get that opinion, and by then, it's pretty clear anyway:

The FIFTH COLUMN SENDS AN INNOCENT TO THE THIRD RAIL

By Jim Baumohl

June 19, 1998

So I drop the rotting old car at the mechanic and walk to the Wynnewood station to catch the 8:36 R5 out to Rosemont. I buy a one-way ticket. The train is 15 minutes late.

The conductor, a slicked-back bantamweight, collects tickets on the platform. ``Gotta have a roundtrip ticket,'' he informs me. ``Gotta buy two tickets going out.''

``Gee, I'm sorry,'' I say, ``but the agent didn't tell me that. I don't ride very often, and I'm not coming back by train.''

``Too bad,'' he says. ``Two tickets going out.'' And he turns away.

I don't quite understand what's happening here, so I pursue him. ``Wait. Let me see if I get this, man. You're telling me I can't get on this train even though I have a ticket, there's no time to go buy another one, I've been waiting here for 20 minutes, and I'll be stuck for another half-hour at least? Have I got that right?''

``That's right, pal. It's not my fault, pal.''

``Well,'' I say, ``I guess you'd better call a cop, because I'm getting on.''

But I'm not fast enough. Quick as you can say, ``Slug me,'' he flips a steel plate across the lower stairs and then stands in front of it, pugnacious, ready to defend -- what? I have no idea.

I'm willing to risk arrest for trespassing, stealing a ride, disturbing the peace, whatever misdemeanor fits. But I draw the line at battery; I'm not willing to strong-arm the guy, though Lord knows I want to. I'm a lot bigger, and, by God, I am in the right! So I call him a name that rhymes with mole and go to get my ticket refunded. I feel very small. My face is hot.

The Wynnewood ticket agent rouses herself grudgingly from the newspaper. She gives me a form to fill out. I explain what happened and ask why she didn't tell me I needed a roundtrip ticket because of the strike. ``I gave you what you wanted, sir,'' she says with the practiced, patronizing tone of someone who spends all day humoring morons. She goes back to her paper. End of conversation unless I want to raise the ante. I contain myself. I doubt that station agents are trained to be dolts; I think some of them are just gifted that way.

To cool off, I walk a mile to the Ardmore station. It's a humid, unpleasant morning, and the walk doesn't do much. I'm still in a froth when I get to the window, and I tell the agent my tale. The conductor acted illegally, she thinks. At worst, she says, he could have sold me a second ticket on the train. He had no business keeping me off. That was wrong, she says. That was really wrong. And the whole scene could have been avoided, she adds, if the Wynnewood ticket agent had shown a little more interest in her job. She shakes her head. ``You should do something,'' she advises. For the first time all morning, someone who works for SEPTA makes sense. My rage subsides.

But this whole episode has been eating at me. And now, sometimes I think it's more sinister than isolated jerks and cretins. Maybe the car-and-highway lobby, to hide its own tax-eating, pays strategically located people to make us hate public transit with the ferocity of rural Republicans. You know, the agent provocateur, union-busting, private-sector sabotage-of-the-state thing. Maybe sneering, alien pod people are running the railroad in the interests of GM. Has anybody deposed the House leadership on this question? I mean, this is what happened to the Red Line in Los Angeles in the '40s, remember? Where do you think they got the plot line for Roger Rabbit?

My wife says I should have my Prozac level checked. Maybe she's right. Maybe it's as sad and simple as the fact that we love our big, slobbering sport utes, so SEPTA is broke and dilapidated and its employees need drugs as much as I do. Maybe that's all it is.

On the other hand, maybe that's exactly why management wants them all to undergo drug tests: to see if they're human! Maybe management knows about hordes of power-mad little alien conductors, in constant communication with Toyota dealers, oil companies and big road contractors -- conductors who, through the future vigilance of citizens like us, will soon need some bridgework of their own!

Oh, man, I really should have clocked the guy.

There's another good last line. Our next Hall-of-Famer is New York writer Cynthia Kaplan. It's about Alexis de Tocqueville, the oft-quoted 19th-century French political theorist. Another thing opinion writers should strive for is voice. Crispin Sartwell, David Boldt, Jim Baumohl, and certainly Kaplan has voice: the sense of the personality behind the words, as if the author were giving voice to the words themselves. Kaplan's voice is conversational, but no one would call it unintelligent. She puts her trenchant opinion into the fourth paragraph:

ARISTOCRAT LEFT NO TOPIC UNTOUCHED

By Cynthia Kaplan

July 5, 1998

Here's something to ponder. Why has the 19th-century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville been quoted so frequently by American political figures as disparate in their views as Newt Gingrich and Hillary Rodham Clinton? Alexander Haig and Richard Holbrooke? Dan Quayle and Gary Hart?

Because Tocqueville wrote a behemoth, two-volume, 1,000-page tome titled Democracy in America, that's why. It's a good title. This is America and we're a democracy. If you had to write a speech, or an article or even a book about the United States, and you wanted to do some research, you might just reach for a big book called Democracy in America. Chances are you'd find something quotable. Tocqueville covered a lot of ground. Actually, he covered all the ground.

Democracy in America, written after a visit to the United States in the 1830s, was Tocqueville's assessment of the social, political and cultural ramifications of democracy on the lives of Americans. It seems today as if he prophesied the effects social equality would have on the human condition with alarming accuracy.

But he was accurate because there is so much of Tocqueville. That's why culling Democracy in America for suitable quotes isn't much of a strain no matter who you are, when you were born or what you believe. It is sort of like the five endings shot for the season finale of the sitcom Friends. Given that many choices, one of them is bound to air.

And he's got a fancy name, you know? Foreign. Aristocratic. Americans love foreign aristocrats. Always have. And a name with a ``de'' in it is especially good. Alexis ``of'' Tocqueville. He is known throughout Tocqueville. Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville says: I'm a smarty. Unless of course you are Dan Quayle, who in a speech in Singapore pronounced the author's name ``TOCK-a-vil'' rather than ``Toke-veel.''

In any case, Democracy in America has a chapter on just about everything - the Constitution, political parties, local government, war, the press, religion, women and the equality of the sexes (yikes - plenty here for those Southern Baptists), science, industry, morality, manners, family . . . I think Pia Zadora could find a quote here.

As I flipped through the indexes of new nonfiction books at my local bookstore, I encountered, well, a ton of Tocqueville. Monica Crowley's Nixon in Winter, Richard Holbrooke's To End a War, Charles Adams' Those Dirty Rotten Taxes, Gary Hart's The Minute Man, Michael Knox Beran's The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy, and George Will's Bunts (about, yes, baseball) - all, somehow, found room for a little Tocqueville. Surprisingly, though, he was not invoked in Strong Women Stay Slim.

Perhaps some future oeuvre by President Clinton, who has been known to conjure our boy Alexis in the past, could lift the title of one of the chapters in Democracy in America, to be called "How Democracy Renders the Habitual Intercourse of the Americans Free and Easy."

What's odd about Tocqueville's popularity in America is that he is not exactly complimentary to Americans. The caste system of the European aristocracies was still deeply ingrained in him as the only cultural order capable of producing greatness. Equality engendered conformism, mediocrity; it was incompatible with personal liberty, the kind of liberty that allows men (I'd like to add ``and women,'' but he didn't) to say and write what they think. A chapter on the arts is titled ``The Example of the Americans Does Not Prove that a Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude and No Tests for Science, Literature or Art.'' Why, thank you. Nice double negative. And you can find quite a few not-nice observations about American life. How about this: ``Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so antipoetic, as the life of a man in the United States.'' Funny. I haven't come across that quote again anywhere.

Tocqueville is a favorite of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. I know this because the abridged edition of Democracy in America I purchased for this article has a red sunburst on the front inscribed with the words ``Newt Gingrich's . . . required reading.'' Abridged Tocqueville is kind of like watching That's Entertainment! for a class on the history of film, but, hey, if it's good enough for Newt, it's good enough for me. As Tocqueville said, ``In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.'' Dumbing things down for mass consumption? That's democracy!

But here's a good way to impart the lessons of Tocqueville. Read The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss. It's an allegorical tale about the illusory benefits of having a star tattooed on one's stomach. It portends the lessening influence of aristocracy in the new world order and yet at the same time addresses Tocqueville's great fear that the ``tyranny of the majority'' will lead to the destruction of the individual. And it can be read in one sitting.

``That day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches, and no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches. That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars, and whether they had one, or not, upon theirs.''

Interpret this as you would your Tocqueville. Loosely.

Our final Hall-of-Famer is Jonathan Weiner, who wrote the following piece in response to a decision by the Kansas state board of education that, in effect, took evolution out of the state's mandatory school curricula. As a greatly experienced science writer, Weiner could have condescended to the other side, or shouted at them, or called them stupid.

In fact, he does none of these things. He is respectful of the other side. He finds their decision not idiotic but puzzling.

The reasons I'm ending with this piece are many. It is beautifully written. It has a good opinion, illustrated with both fact and personal experience. It certainly has voice. But it has something even more advanced: an understanding that the last thing you want to do in an adult argument is raise your voice. The first one to shout loses. Too many writers, smoking angry, lose sight of this basic rule. Treat your audience, and your opponents, with the utmost respect. It will strengthen your argument. Too many writers think ridicule is the way to go, or agonized, antagonized, aggrieved disbelief. Wrong. In fact, these tones and poses are a beginner's mistake. In fact, it strengthens your argument to concede the good points in the other side's quiver, to qualify your ideas according to the strengths of the other side. I think Jonathan's piece is a lovely illustration of just how powerful the steady, strong -- but not screaming -- voice can be:

KANSAS ANTI-EVOLUTION VOTE DENIES STUDENTS A FULL SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

By Jonathan Weiner

August 15, 1999

The Kansas Board of Education voted last Wednesday to strike evolution from its statewide science tests. The decision saddens everyone who understands what children in Kansas classrooms will now be missing. I'm particularly sad and puzzled, because I've spent the last 10 years looking over the shoulders of biologists who watch evolution happen. In 1991, I traveled to the Galapagos Islands, also known as Darwin's Islands, because the beaks of the finches and mockingbirds there helped lead Charles Darwin to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

There, I visited a few field biologists who have spent their working lives observing and measuring tens of thousands of birds, generation after avian generation. These biologists see Darwin's process in action, in Darwin's islands, with Darwin's finches.

I have also visited laboratories where specialists in the science of molecular biology are studying the inner workings of the gene. If Darwin's theory was the great discovery of the 19th century, the gene was the great discovery of the 20th.

In the labs, I watched molecular biologists use fruit flies to isolate and dissect individual pieces of DNA and explore evolution from the inside out. Change one gene and you change a fruit fly's body plan so that it has eight legs instead of six. Change another gene and you change the fly's instincts, so that it runs away from the light instead of going toward it.

In the Galapagos, you can see that evolution by natural selection does sculpt the beaks of the birds, just as Darwin argued: only the changes happen faster than he thought, fast enough for us mortals to watch.

And in the laboratories, which may become, in the next century, for better and for worse, our new Galapagos, you can begin to see how it all happens at the level of the genes: how the smallest of mutations can lead to evolutionary changes both small and large.

Being a writer means being a perpetual student, and these have been some of the greatest lessons of my life. I will never forget the moment when one of Darwin's mockingbirds landed on my spiral notebook and perched there -- as innocently as a bird in the Garden of Eden -- to watch my pencil make squiggles on the page. In the labs, innumerable mutant fruit flies also landed on my notebook, which was a less glamorous experience.

But out in the field or inside the lab, I felt that I was standing in the middle of something extraordinary; I had come as close as I could get to the process that Darwin discovered at the heart of all of life on earth.

Kansas sits precisely in the geographic middle of the continental United States. It is a pity that the center of our country will now turn out students whose view of life will be so off-center. It isn't just that evolution is the unifying principle of biology, and that all well-educated students need to know about it by the time they reach college. And it isn't just that evolution is happening all the time, literally under our noses.

Every time doctors at a hospital run into a staph or strep infection that resists antibiotics, those doctors are confronting evolution in action. Every time a farmer sprays pyrethroids and cotton moths go right on eating his cotton, that farmer is confronting evolution in action, too. A biologist told me once, "These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer any more?" Pesticide resistance is Darwin's revenge, you might say, except that Darwin was too mild and good-natured a country gentleman to feel anything but sympathy for a farmer.

These are good, valid, pragmatic reasons why Kansans should teach their children about evolution. But the reasons they should not miss the view are not only intellectual but also emotional and spiritual, and this is what I find most troubling about the state board's decision.

Darwin's process is a tremendous challenge and shock to the system of anyone who tries to take it in. This is a view of life that challenges the mind, the heart and the soul. We need everyone engaged with scripture and with science if we are going to see life whole, and somehow take in all of this view, not leaving anything important out.

We are all perpetual students. Darwin's theory isn't finished; scientists who know it best feel that they are perpetually at a beginning. Our spiritual journey is not finished; those who travel that road most seriously also feel this sense of perpetual beginning. And every line of life around us is constantly studying and improving itself in order to survive.

Anyone who pretends to have all the answers is shortchanging students. Those students should be exposed to the questions and to the whole range of our best answers; they should all have a chance to go as close to the middle of the mystery as they can get. It was in that spirit that, when I finished my book about Darwin's Islands, I put on the frontispiece a quotation from the Book of Job:

And where is the place of understanding?

It is hid from the eyes of all living

And concealed from the birds of the air.

From time to time, other essays will be added to John Timpane's Hall of Fame. Look for yours here!