A writer and an editor are out camping. A large pot of stew is cooking over the fire. Writer comes up to campfire and is distressed to find the editor peeing in the stew.

“Making it better,” the editor replies.

A priceless quote:

“I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write them.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1807

I think I can say I have officially joined the Wave of the Future, which means:

• We had a swell union contract in which the company paid all our health insurance premiums. The new one which we’ll be voting on soon obliges us to pay 20 percent of these premiums.
• Our new contract also changes the way vacation pay is accrued in a way that will cost me $5,000 if I stay at the paper beyond the next couple years.
• Our new contract freezes our pension and switches to a 401k. If I reduce my takehome pay by 6 percent, the company will match half of it. So instead of the company contributing to my pension fund — managed by financial professionals — I reduce my standard of living by another 6 percent and become wholly dependent on my ability to play the financial markets for the next 30 years. Good thing I majored in journalism.

Somebody at work mentioned a theory on why my employer decided to tell everybody we were subject to layoff rather than just those whose jobs were actually at risk: to ensure everybody felt the anxiety, to increase the likelihood that our union would accept these concessions. A hard-nosed tactic, for sure.

A lot of this sounds like a kick in the teeth — and I’ll definitely be buying fewer camping toys in the near future — but I’m working in a troubled industry: we know there will always be a demand for news, but these days we’re deeply unsure how to turn a buck tapping that demand. Until we figure that out there will probably be more demands for concessions, more anxiety over lost jobs, more of the bosses playing hardball. And more newsies sucking it up. Not like we’ve got much choice: The paper going broke is not useful to any of us.

Sometimes I wonder how much good a union is doing me, personally. Unions do help slackers keep their jobs and make it harder for the bosses to reward the workhorses. But I learned one thing on this latest contract negotiation: in tough times people have to band together to protect their interests.

Our company had a laundry list of far harsher concessions it could have imposed at will on a non-union shop. Management abandoned those ideas in the interest of getting what it needed most: us to pony up more of the cost of health care. Frankly, this was only fair.

Perhaps the greatest concession on the company’s part was accepting our union’s right to have a say in who does what jobs. Companies don’t hate unions because they demand better wages and benefits: they hate unions because unions challenge their power to do as they damn well please. Perfectly understandable from a manager’s standpoint.

In the current environment there is simply no way that I could’ve negotiated a better deal than the one our union negotiated. One copy editor has one copy editor’s sway. Which ain’t much.

Sure, unions are a pain in the ass, but sometimes they save your ass.

Ten a.m. passed without incident — no Phone Call of Doom to report.

More than a dozen of my colleagues presumably did get The Call, though, so I’m not exactly dancing in the streets at this turn of events.

I’m off to work, where the office will no doubt compare favorably to a funeral parlor.

Our union and the paper have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract, with the company cutting its layoff number by more than half. The threat of layoffs was designed to extract concessions from the Guild, which appears to have succeeded. The company had a list of draconian concessions that it eventually abandoned in the interest of getting us to agree to take on more of the cost of our health insurance premiums.

I won’t breathe totally easily till 10 a.m. tomorrow but the statistical odds of me being among those shown the door have been reduced.

Snow in P-town, originally uploaded by busybeingborn.

Ed, my stepdad in the Peoria area (downstate from Chicago) and my mom have a place in the country with a nice paved driveway. He even has one of those mini-bulldozers to plow his drive. But when the big snows come, the county snowplows leave a ridge of frozen, filthy snow that has the folks locked on their land for now.

The tracks in the snow here are as far as the ol’ Jeep Grand Cherokee could make it, apparently.

Times are tough in the newspaper biz these days, and perhaps none tougher than at the good ol’ Mercury News, which has nevertheless seen fit to overlook my many character flaws and keep me on staff for seven-plus years because I can crank out headlines quickly and alertly redirect misplaced commas to their proper homes.

Come Tuesday the newspaper will have its chance to rectify this oversight. A couple months back the paper’s execs told us that about 15 percent of the newsroom staff will be given their walking papers in December. Tuesday’s the day of reckoning. Our instructions are to sit by the phone between 8 and 10 a.m. and if the phone call doesn’t come, we should report to work as scheduled. If it does come, we’re free at last to pursue intriguing careers in fast food and long-haul trucking.

I’d very much like to stay on at the ol’ Mercury News, and not only because keeping this job is so much easier than finding another one. I’ve worked with excellent people, helped cover important stories, learned a lot about the Bay Area by being in a news room when big news breaks. I’ve seen people respond with incredible calm and professionalism in the midst of computer system meltdowns. I’ve seen people keep their sense of humor when it seems like the world’s going down the drain. (In our biz, that’s pretty much every edition. World not going down the drain is not news, you understand.)

So that’s where I stand now. If I have time on Tuesday I’ll post an update (though you must understand what it means to have time to update one’s blog when one should be leaving for the office).

Dan taking shots, originally uploaded by Tom Clifton.

I spent the predawn hours hiking to the top of Mission Peak with Dan Mitchell, in the photo above; Tom Clifton, who took this picture; John Fedak, who joined me at Mount Shasta in October; and a hiker named Randy who reads my hiking blog.

Details of the hike posted at Two-Heel Drive.

What a sunset, originally uploaded by busybeingborn.

I looked out the window of the house tonight and saw this; ran back to fetch the camera before it went away. Arrived just in time.

Americans cannot stand a unified government, and there’s at least a scrap of evidence that unified government doesn’t like America. To wit:

1960s: Democrats run everything. Result: Calamity in Vietnam.

2000s: Republicans run everything: Result: Calamity in Iraq.

The saying goes that power corrupts and ultimate power corrupts ultimately. Think of all the small-government Republicans who stormed into office in the past 12 years with the earnest intention of cutting the size and expense of government. They had the comfort of standing by their principles with the comfort of knowing they wouldn’t survive a Clinton veto.

Bush comes to office, veto threat disappears and suddenly they discover the vastness of American power right there in their hot little hands, and so what do they do? Abandon their small-government principles faster than poop through a goose.

In the ’80s the country prospered with a Republican president and a Democratic Congress. In the ’90s it prospered with a Republican congress and a Democratic president. In this decade the economy did OK but the overseas adventure cost the country dearly on the international stage.

Power in the United States is divided roughly five ways: Courts, Legislature, Executive, Wall Street, and the Media. With the current election the Democrats control the Legislature with friends in the media, while the Republicans control the executive and the courts with friends on Wall Street. This still gives the Republicans a 3-2 advantage, so they don’t really have all that much to complain about.

Checks and balances seem been bred into the DNA of Americans. For 30 years, conservative operatives did everything in their power to discredit their opposition and place themselves at the power pinnacle but when they got there, they choked. Maybe it’s because they’re Americans, too, and have no concept of what to do with unchecked power.

Maybe a bit of sanity can return now that we’ve gotten through this bad patch.