In Sunday's New York Times, two of their senior writers employed a literary technique that any writer or presenter would do well to use to his or her advantage: Bookends, where a figure of speech--a quote, a title, an incident, a person--is referenced at the beginning and then again at the end of a story. This simple culminating device adds continuity to any story or presentation.
The writers in this case are opinion columnists Frank Rich and Nicholas Kristof, each of whom used bookends in his article about a current controversy; Mr. Rich on implied racism in the Republican party and Mr. Kristof on the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
Republican governors Robert McDonnell of Virginia and Haley Barbour of Mississippi had issued proclamations in their states marking April as Confederate History or Heritage Month, but each of them neglected to mention slavery in their proclamations. In response to media charges of implied racism in these omissions, both men issued denials.
Mr. Rich's article charged that the governors were being disingenuous. The opening paragraph in his article read:
It's kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season's episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month -- the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress -- was also a mirage.
After about another thousand words of evidence to the contrary, his closing sentence read:
They were, it seems, only whistling "Dixie."
Mr. Kristof's article noted that the abuse charges roiling the male-dominated Vatican is only one aspect of the faith. Lauding the role of women in "a truly noble Catholic Church in the form of priests, nuns and lay workers toiling to make a difference," his article began:
I heard a joke the other day about a pious soul who dies, goes to heaven, and gains an audience with the Virgin Mary. The visitor asks Mary why, for all her blessings, she always appears in paintings as a bit sad, a bit wistful: Is everything O.K.?
Mary reassures her visitor: "Oh, everything's great. No problems. It's just ... it's just that we had always wanted a daughter."
His closing paragraph read:
It's high time for the Vatican to take inspiration from that sublime -- even divine -- side of the Catholic Church, from those church workers whose magnificence lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness. They're enough to make the Virgin Mary smile.