Free Dominion by Randy Alcorn

imagined it. He’d show them the black community had a whole different face, a much bigger one than the isolated and slanted glimpses they caught in news stories. That vision once fueled him, energized him.
Clarence finally arrived at the archipelago of partitioned desks that comprised the sports section. He sat down in his semi-private columnist’s cubicle. It wasn’t an office, just a self-contained space enclosed on three sides, with partitions rising three feet above the desktop, rather than the standard eighteen inches. He’d never felt comfortable with those eighteen-inch dividers any more than with those obnoxiously low partitions in some public restrooms. His work station was adjacent to the main maze of partitions. People could see his backside, but by journalistic standards it was private. He could almost ignore the hum of the newsroom, even if it required popping in his foam earplugs when deadline loomed.
Clarence settled into his desk, figuring he was somewhat safe. The guys in sports weren’t the touchy-feely type, and there were just two women on the sports beat. Not that he didn’t like women. Just that he didn’t want to be blubbered over. The guys wouldn’t know what to say, so they’d either talk business or stay away. Either was fine with him. The last thing he wanted was to have some sensitive man of the nineties come over and tell him he understood his pain.
He wasn’t too worried about the women. Penny was a third-year reporter, still getting throwaway assignments. Laurie was a seasoned twelve-year vet who recently moved to sports columnist to take up some slack for Clarence’s transition to general. He hoped they would act less like conventional females than jockettes and refrain from picking the scab of his grief.
Sure enough, for his first hour back at the desk it was just a few hands on the shoulder, a few “I’m sorrys,” a few “Good to have you backs,” and more hushed conversations than usual. But at least nobody sat down to walk him through the fourteen stages of grief.
On his desk lay expressions of sympathy, one signed by the marketing department, another by the guys down in production. He tried not to be moved by them, but set them carefully in his briefcase to show Geneva.
Clarence made a quick rendezvous with the sports section coffeepot, where the coffee was always stronger than anywhere else in the galaxy, as if sportswriters needed the extra kickstart since they’d probably gotten home from a late ball game the night before and stopped for a few beers after logging their stories. He poured in the creamer, swirling it into his coffee, the black and white disappearing into each other, producing a mellow brown.
The newsroom had a feel to it, a superior feel. From here you stood and looked down at the goings on of the world in a way that let you imagine you were above it all—until you got mugged or diagnosed with terminal cancer or your child died. Journalists are a cynical lot, Clarence long ago had decided, and over the years he’d become more cynical than most. It always surprised him how many journalists remained liberals, since liberalism’s assumptions about the goodness of man were daily disproved in most stories you worked on.
Journalists had to pry beneath the surface of apparent goodness and show the corruption that usually lurked underneath. Thus, the vice they originally found repugnant became their bedfellow, especially as they tried to compete with television news. They seethed with righteous indignation but became addicted to that indignation as Type A’s become addicted to their own adrenaline. Hence their consuming attention to the titillating morbid lives of the world’s Amy Fishers, Lorena Bobbits, Menendez brothers, Tonya Hardings, O. J. Simpsons, and an endless parade of social misfits and afternoon talk show guests.
Like most seasoned journalists Clarence had long ago cast aside the idealistic notion he could change the world. If you couldn’t