Good leads make for good reads

What was perhaps the week’s greatest lead paragraph ran Tuesday morning in the Spotlight section of news blurbs on Page A3 of this newspaper: “MAGNOLIA, Ark. – James Cotton looked just like any other Wal-Mart customer buying a bolt cutter at 4:30 in the morning – until the cashier noted that Cotton was wearing handcuffs.”

If that opener didn’t pique your interest and make you want to plunge onward, let me suggest that your interest is quite probably not pique-able.

It was the type of story that, in the old days, some harried journeyman printer up against a press deadline and spotting no editor within hailing distance, might have cut at this crucial point for use as filler to shoehorn between D Section ads, leaving high and dry any reader who may have been interested in learning the minor details. Today, with glitzy high-tech computerized equipment spewing out type and laying it into the newspaper page untouched by human hands, such mindless mischief seems to have pretty much gone the way of metal type and the newsroom glue pot.

In the story at hand, it turned out that Wal-Mart’s handcuffed customer had earlier kicked out a window in a police cruiser and escaped after he had been arrested and cuffed on charges of battery and possession of a narcotic. The clerk coolly took the man’s money, bagged the bolt cutter for him, handed him his receipt and sent him on his way with the obligatory command to have a nice day.

In lieu of testing the bolt cutter on the cashier’s necktie in retaliation for such parting nonsense, the goober made the more pragmatic choice of ducking into the men’s room to cut off his handcuffs. That’s when the cashier called the cops. The jig, as you might imagine, soon became up, leaving only one unanswered question.

Was it the bolt cutter, the handcuffs, or the combination of the two that suggested to the cashier that something about the early morning customer didn’t quite add up? The story did not say, and I’m no Sherlock Holmes. Still, the answer, I believe, is elementary, my dear Watson: It was the bolt cutter, and not, as one might presume, the handcuffs that most likely did in the man.

In this particular week, if the harried chap had arrived at the cash register in handcuffs while toting some purchase other than a bolt cutter – a sexy negligee, say, plus a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a smushy valentine for his woman waiting outside in the getaway car – would the clerk’s early-warning system have kicked in so efficiently?

I rather think not. It was, after all, 4:30 a.m., for God’s sake. At that hour, after dragging most people out of bed you’d not only have to slap handcuffs on them to force them to go shopping, you’d have to put them in leg irons, as well, blockbuster Wal-Mart early-bird sale on bolt cutters notwithstanding. So a paying customer arriving in handcuffs before sunup is not something that should have attracted undue attention in and of itself, even in Magnolia, Ark.

Another story in the same section of the morning paper on another day, was also good for snickering purposes. It reported that Hassan Ghul, the highest-ranking member of the terrorist organization al-Qaida to be arrested in Iraq, was believed to be cooperating with interrogators, which was nice to learn. But when the story disclosed that the man “is known as a facilitator who can move people and money around” it lost my vote of confidence.

Six months ago, Hassan Ghul didn’t know what a “facilitator” was, and now he are one? I don’t think so, sports fans. Far as I can tell, there are no “facilitators” outside of this country’s halls of academia and the government bureaucracies, where the goal is to keep alive the ongoing review mechanisms which produce the synchronized reciprocal flexibility that such an integrated management concept demands.

I suspect that the only place where the aforementioned al-Qaida terrorist is known as Hassan Ghul, The Facilitator is in the imagination of the wire service reporter who wrote the story. Most likely the poor wretch long ago had his consciousness raised by the gender-neutral crowd that lives for such feel-good words. Next time we meet up with old Hassan Ghul we can only hope that he has not morphed from a “facilitator” into a “chair,” or, worse, a “selectperson.”

If ever I’m caught using such new-speak bafflegarb in a legitimate sentence, which is to say without the face-saving quotation marks, would someone please just shoot me?

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.