Sydney Harris

     Growing up, we got the Detroit Free Press delivered to our home. It was the newspaper my Dad chose. When I was old enough, I would read the comics and check-out the baseball standings and individual stats every day during the season. Gradually over time I would read an article here or there, mostly sports and some news.
     I was not big on the opinion, editorials, and the syndicated columnists that populated those pages. I knew of Sydney Harris because I saw his articles, but I never read them. When I started at Ford Motor, my dear friend Robert K. Jones was commenting on a recent article by Sydney Harris on day. It sounded very interesting and I admitted that I knew of his column but had never actually read one. RK told me that I was missing out, I would benefit from reading Mr. Harris, and that he actually thought I would like him. So, I read the next column and never stopped. RK was right. I loved the way Sydney Harris wrote and what he thought even when I did not entirely agree with him.
     Sydney Harris was born in London in 1917. When he was five, his family moved to Chicago. Chicago became the city where he grew up, went to school, and worked. He was an alumnus of the University of Chicago. He worked for various Chicago newspapers as a drama critic and columnist ended up at the Chicago Sun-Times. The Detroit Free Press picked up both Sydney Harris and fellow Sun-Times writer Mike Royko. I became ardent fans of both though they couldn’t be more different in both subject and style.
     I liked his writings so much, I bought his book, The Best of Sydney J. Harris: Chosen from 30 year of writing by one of America’s most perceptive columnists. I bought the book

in 1976 or 1977. I loved it and would read random selections and several over and over again. I am not sure where that book went. I may have lent it to someone, I may have lost it, or inadvertently given it to a library book drive. I was sorry to know longer have it.
     I had not really given it any thought until I was discussing my favorite Sydney Harris column with a colleague, Professor Gianfranco Farrugia. It was a brilliant piece about how he tended to drift to opposite point of view when amongst people that were die-hard conservatives or liberals. I loved it because I am the same way. When I first read it, it vindicated my middle of the road, consider both sides, perspective. Up until then, I believed something was wrong with me for not having the resolute views so many others espoused.
      I thought Gian would enjoy reading the piece. As I didn’t have the book any longer, I thought I would be able to find his columns online. There were plenty of quotes on the usual quote sites but no columns. Sydney Harris seemed to have fallen between the cracks as the world went from analog to digital.
     So, I did the next best thing. I went on Amazon.com and bought another copy of The Best of Sydney J. Harris for the typical, very affordable, used book price. When it came, I was delighted to see that Mr. Harris had signed the book. How cool.
     I immediately looked for my favorite column and in short order found it and read it. I was amazed at how good, how profound, the writing was. I was worried that I had exaggerated the quality and impact of this piece overtime and was actually prepared to be a bit disappointed. I was not. It was still an incredibly strong piece. This might be projection, but I saw the influence of Mr. Harris’s style in my own writing. I could see, also, why I like the blogging I have been doing this year.
      Sydney Harris died in 1986 at the age of 69. He had heart issues and passed on from complications of a bypass surgery. I was sad. I would miss his writing. But I am glad to have his book again and am once again reading one of my favorite writers.
     I typed up that favorite column and include it here, so others may find it and benefit from it as I did.

Why There’s Danger in Extremism by Sydney Harris
     A friend of mine, whom I have always considered a calm and stable personality, told me recently that he is regarded in some quarters as a wild-eyed radical, and in other circles as a stony conservative – when actually he is neither.
     “It’s an irresistible urge I have when I get together with extremists,” he said. “I promptly swing over the other extreme, just because I am so irritated with their one-sided view.”
     I was delighted to learn that somebody else reacts that way, too. For years I have deplored my own tendency to do this. In most cases, it gives a false impression of my views – but when I am confronting an extremist, I become a passionate defender of the opposite view.
     With ice-cold reactionaries, I sound like a rabid Bolshevik; with professional liberals, I take on the tone of a fascist; with ardent culture-vultures, I pretend to read nothing but comic books and lovelorn columns; with pugnacious lowbrows, I refer haughtily to the French symbolist poets and the ontological existentialism of Kierkegaard.
     This, of course, is a senseless way to behave; it is over-reacting to a situation. But, in all fairness, there is something about extremism that breeds its own opposite.
     The complacency of the bourgeoisie makes me yearn for the Bohemian life; the sloppiness of the Bohemian brings out my primness; loud-mouthed patriots prompt me to take a stand for the French way of life; and moist-eyed lovers of all things European give me the urge to hop on a chair and being waving Old Glory.
     The danger of extremism is that it forces its opponents to adopt an equally extreme view – thus hurting its own cause more than it realizes.
     The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was a natural historical result of the repressive monarchy; the Satanism of Stalin sprang out of the soil of Czarist cruelty. 

     Not a single way of living is exclusively right. Combination is all. Life is the art of mixing ingredients in tolerable proportions, so that all the varied needs of man are somehow satisfied, and no important hunger is neglected. This is what extremists forget, with their too-simple slogans for the good life.