A parable from more than a century ago still works

Lou Marzeles
Editor and Publisher

     Take the time to read Mark Twain’s short story “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” sometime if you haven’t; it’s readily available online. In it, Twain’s protagonist explains how he, a big-city journalist, came to take the editorship of an agricultural newspaper. He did so with misgivings, he said, as would a landsman taking charge of a ship. And with good cause.
     Soon he becomes the object of fascination in the town; people are marveling at him, and he presumes the attention to be admiration. However, someone confronts him one day and asks if he did indeed advise his readers never to pull turnips because it injures them and instead to send a boy up to shake the tree. Another asks him whether or not he actually remarked that the guano is a fine bird and if in fact he wrote that the pumpkin as a shade tree was a failure Twain goes on to write, in his satirical way, that it’s people who know the least about a subject who become known as experts in those fields.
     The editor of this paper knows well not to tread into areas of agricultural expertise, for fear of emulating Twain’s character; we rather rely on the wise counsel of those who know what they’re talking about. But Twain’s parable speaks to situations other than journalism. It is, after all, an election year.
     It’s certainly true that often one’s experience in a particular office can indeed give him or her true expertise in that field. And it’s no less true that often that experience affords a person no expertise whatever. It is, we conclude, the person that makes the difference—not necessarily the experience.      Experience in the right person does add a richness of background, a deep vocabulary, so to speak, in a field. It gives one resources to draw upon in a knowledgeable way. However, the same experience in another person can end up virtually without value if the person does not first have the inner resources to make adequate use of it.
     All of which is to say that an electorate does well to look closely at its candidates, beyond their resumés. That’s true of every election level, locally and nationally.