Misinterpretation muddle

LITTLE ROCK — Y’all keep those letters to the editor coming. They normally make my day.

Be not deterred by the fact that I’m getting ready to slap a couple of letter writers upside the head-metaphorically, of course.

I’ll let garden-variety meanness slide. But a couple of recent missives wandered so far afield that they cried out for public correction.

I’m not mad at anybody. I feel sorry for two letter-writers. That’s all.

I’ll comment first on that snide letter the other day chiding me as an unintended comedian. That was for praising former U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder as an ethical paragon for opening his home for a fundraiser for the petition drive for an initiated act on ethics reform.

What was so funny, the letter asserted, was that Snyder himself is a lobbyist for Arkansas Blue Cross-Blue Shield. That supposedly provided rich unintended irony considering that I lauded Snyder’s support for a proposed ban on legislators becoming lobbyists for two years after leaving office.

It reminded me of a genuinely comical telephone call I got the morning that column was published. It came from a Republican officeholder.

“John,” my caller said plaintively, “don’t you see what you’ve done? You praise Vic even though you said yourself right there in that column that he lobbies for Blue Cross.”

No, I didn’t.

Yes, you did.

Look at it again. The column says Snyder “labors” for Blue Cross. While the word “labors” bears great similarity to the word “lobbies,” they are, in fact, not the same.

Snyder is a corporate medical director for external affairs, but not a lobbyist.

That he is a medical doctor with a law degree and long service in the Congress qualifies him for healthinsurance-company management beyond simple lobbying, in which he does not engage.

There was a pause. My caller was scanning the column.

Then he said: Sorry. Never mind. Don’t tell anyone what I just did.

I’m telling it now, but I’m not identifying him.

It is possible that Snyder manages to advise Blue Cross on political matters.

But it is simply inaccurate and unfair to call him a lobbyist, much less imply that he is a hypocrite.

Snyder eschewed lobbyist favors when he heldpolitical office and he, alone among Arkansas politicians, deferred campaign fundraising until 90 days before elections.

He thus has sterling credentials to throw open his home for a fundraiser for a campaign to impose stricter ethical standards.

Now to the other letter. It’s much more personal.

A couple of Sundays ago we reprinted my 2010 Father’s Day tribute to my late dad.

One paragraph referred to my dad’s having been retired on disability after falling from a warehouse ceiling and crushing his ankle, after which he dragged that crushed ankle up a ladder to paint houses.

So some fellow wrote a letter to the editor to suggest that my dad, dead 22 years, was a cheat.

He implied that my dad was defrauding good employers such as himself who paid for disability coverage for employees.

My phrasing was bad-“retired on disability.”

In fact, my dad, in his late 40s with a wife and daughter at home, was declared permanently partially disabled. His employer and his employer’s insurer offered, and he accepted, a pitiably low lump sum to settle his Workers’ Compensation claim and surrender his employment and otherwise go away.

There is nothing illegal or unethical-but quite the opposite-abouta man taking a low-ball Workers’ Comp settlement that is offered him without solicitation after an on-the-job injury, walking away from that job and any further Workers’ Compensation for his permanent partial injury as part ofthat settlement, then finding a new and independent and honest way to make meager bucks to feed his family.

The letter-writer admitted in his letter that he didn’t have all the facts. Rather than asking me for those facts, he decided to jump head-first to slander publicly an honorable man who has been dead for more than two decades.

Rushing to predisposed judgment from superficially erroneous information-that’s probably the bigger and more widely relevant point in both these cases.

John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.