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by Adam
“What I don’t understand is what happened to Leslie
Nielson,” Mac Verstandig says. “Because The Naked
Gun was okay and Airplane is just classic material,
and then we get 2001: A Space Travesty, and it was, yeah,
a travesty.”
We’re in the comedy section of a Blockbuster in Madison,
Wisconsin on a Saturday night because I want to hear Mac orate on
movies. He’s had full press credentials as a film critic since
the age of fourteen so he knows what he’s talking about. In
fact, on almost any subject, he knows what he’s talking about.
Compared to most college students, Mac looks all business. He’s
wearing a white button-down shirt, black jeans, and black dress
shoes. His head is shaved, he’s got a dark mustache that connects
to a goatee, and there’s a ring in his left ear lobe. He’s
built low and wide and everything about him is very adult. Mac Verstandig
is the editor-in-chief of the nation’s largest independent
college newspaper, the Wisconsin Badger-Herald.
We haven’t moved very far down the rows of DVDs that line
the comedy shelf. We started at the beginning, with movies that
have numbers for titles, hence the commentary on 2001: A Space
Travesty. Now we’re in the A’s. Mac points to American
Pie. “If the generation before us had Fast Times
at Ridgemont High,” he says, “and before then it
was Caddyshack and Animal House, I think we’re
stuck with American Pie, and it’s not entirely a
bad thing.”
Mac even has a story about The Animal, a Rob Schneider
film that earned approximately seven dollars at the box office:
“The funny thing about The Animal, which is a movie
I haven’t actually seen, but you talk about journalism scandal
in reverse, one of the quotes they used to market this movie was
fabricated. They made up the critic and everything.” He knows
because he helped bust the story on Moviereviews.org.
We leave the comedy aisle and walk down a wall of New Releases.
We’re heading to the drama section, but two girls, friends
of Mac, interrupt us. One of them tells Mac that she saw him on
TV. “That’s disturbing,” Mac says. He doesn’t
want to disrupt our conversation so he draws the girls’ attention
to my voice recorder and says, “I’m being interviewed
very subtly.”
The girls look at me, look at the voice recorder, look at Mac,
and giggle. One blurts out, “You’re, like, famous!”
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Mac Verstandig is, like, famous. Not only is he the editor-in-chief
of the Badger-Herald, but he’s also a rhetoric major,
an editorialist, a contributing guest columnist to the Wisconsin
State Journal, a blogger, a beat writer for the Wisconsin women’s
tennis team, and a frat boy. He joined the fraternity because it
was the only one in which he could find a decent intellectual conversation,
and he ended up covering the tennis team when he lost a bet. He
loves going to the matches though. It’s how he relaxes.
When Mac speaks, the rhetoric classes pay off. He sounds way older
than his age – intelligent, omniscient, like an especially
engaging politician. Everything that comes out of his mouth could
be turned into a sound byte, even his laugh, which is hearty but
quick, just as businesslike as his attire.
Mac grew up in the D.C. area, went to high school there, then escaped
to the Midwest for college. He wrote a bit for his high school paper,
but didn’t take student journalism seriously until he began
reviewing films for the Badger-Herald during the second
semester of his freshman year. From there he worked his way up the
ranks until he became the lord of the Badger-Herald manor,
a perch he seems designed for.
Mac has opinions about everything, but he’s allowed to have
them because he knows about everything. In Chipotle, a popular Mexican
restaurant on State St., as Mac and I wait to order burritos, I
mention that I did some writing for my alma mater’s school
paper, The Dartmouth. I’m not expecting him to have
read it, but he has. “Now I don’t mean to knock on the
paper you wrote for, which is a great daily,” he says, “but
I love the conservative paper.” He’s talking about The
Dartmouth Review. “It’s not the most terribly well
put together thing, but I think it’s amazing just because
it’s so hyperbolist, it’s so over-the-deep-end.”
I acknowledge this, say you have to give them credit for going balls
out, and Mac adds, “Their board of the directors is quite
the list of people.”
I have no idea who sits on The Review’s board of
directors because I’ve never bothered to look. Mac has stepped
on my own turf and shown that he knows the lay of the land better
than I do. As an aside, Mac tells me that Dartmouth football got
their asses kicked by Penn today, which is information I could do
without.
When those girls in Blockbuster reference Mac’s television
stardom, they’re talking about his appearance on The O’Reilly
Factor, starring FoxNews’ caustic star, Bill O’Reilly.
I ask Mac what that experience was like, but I have to wait because
we’re sitting in a Chipotle booth now and Mac has a mouthful
of burrito. I’m closer to finishing my burrito because I keep
asking Mac questions and he keeps having to put down his food to
respond. When Mac’s done swallowing, he lifts an eyebrow and
calls the experience, “Sudden… strange… and unique.”
He and one of his columnists appeared on The O’Reilly
Factor in the wake of a series of sex scandals involving Wisconsin
professors. O’Reilly was gentler than expected: “For
a show that’s notorious for screaming matches and talking
over people, neither of us were interrupted until the very last
fifteen seconds, at which point, yes, it descended into a screaming
match.” His eyebrows are moving again, rising and falling
to accentuate his points. “I’m a long-winded person,”
he says. “I talk slowly and deliberately. In my first two
answers, I wasn’t cut off, I got all my thoughts in, and they
showed up on television. Pretty cool.”
I do have to wonder if Mac had a good experience on The O’Reilly
Factor because they were fair and balanced or because he’s
a self-described “nasty conservative,” the type that
proudly drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a Bush sticker on the
bumper, the type that has a blog called The Right Side of the
Road, the type that fits well with FoxNews’ managing
philosophy. “I’m a very conservative guy in a very liberal
city,” Mac says.
I’m curious to know how a nasty conservative writes a fair
and balanced editorial. “Oh, you don’t,” Mac says.
“You run a fair and balanced paper. Everything in news should
be balanced. You show both sides, you quote both sides, etc. The
editorial page – you can’t be balanced in each article,
you just have to have a balanced page. You let the liberals speak,
you let the conservatives speak. You let the anti-university people
speak against the university people and it doesn’t even need
to be in one day. There will be days when the paper leans one way.
My hope is just that students, if they read the paper for a week,
they read it for a month, they read it for a semester, or they read
it all four years, will come away having seen stuff from the left,
the far left, the right, the far right, and something in between.”
Does he succeed? “I’m happy with that aspect of the
paper, yeah.”
I have to keep reminding myself that this kid isn’t the editor
of the New York Times, he’s just a senior in college,
younger than I am.
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The Badger-Herald office is the perfect union between
newsroom professionalism and college anarchy. Newspapers, white
printouts, and notepads cover the long table that runs down the
center of the hardwood floor. A stray six-pack of beer, one bottle
missing, sits on a smaller table. In a corner near the editorial
desk, on top of a filing cabinet, are two empty kegs, trophies from
the annual softball game against the rival UW paper. Mac’s
desk is in an equally cluttered corner, with a large green plant
looming over his chair and a stuffed monkey clinging to a standing
coat rack. From amidst this jungle, Mac’s desk, complete with
placard reading MAC VERSTANDIG, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, juts like an outpost
of authority.
Two years ago, a Wisconsin student named Audrey Seiler went missing,
and before it was discovered that her absence was nothing more than
a hoax, the national media descended upon Madison. Several members
of the Badger-Herald staff were to be interviewed, but
the news personalities decided that the office didn’t look
enough like a real newsroom to be used as a backdrop. “It’s
not a real newsroom,” Mac acknowledges. “It’s
a college newsroom. But you know what? We can break any story we
want out of here.” Behind him, the September 11, 2001 Badger-Herald
is tacked to the wall. Mac points out that there’s no headline,
only a picture. It’s flanked by a Clinton/Gore ’92 poster
and a Bush/Cheney t-shirt.
You’d be hard-pressed to find another college student more
in touch with the world than Mac.
Every day he reads a handful of papers, a handful of websites, and
at night, the AP wire. He watches several television programs and
his cell phone receives news updates. He also subscribes to Newsweek,
The Economist, the New Yorker, and Cigar Aficionado,
although he’s not sure if Cigar Aficionado counts
as a news source. A box of ISOMs (an acronym for “Island South
of Miami”) sits on his desk and on his blog site, RightSideOfTheRoad.com,
there’s a picture of him holding a cigar and blowing a thick
cloud of smoke at anyone venturing down the wrong side of the road.
It’s a grown-up indulgence, his love of cigars, and its just
one of the things that separates him from his cigarette or pot-smoking
fellow students. Wisconsin is a big school with over 28,000 undergraduates
and it’s easy to become lost in the crowd. Mac’s student
ID number is one digit longer than his social security number. But
in a course load full of large lecture halls, Mac makes an effort
to be more than just a number. “I socialize with my professors,”
he says. “I’m one of those really dorky students who
you will see at a bar on a Saturday night with a professor on occasion,
and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I show up to office
hours even though I used to get made fun of for it, and half the
time it’s not to talk about what the lecture material is.
I love nothing more than sitting around with some of them and discussing
politics.”
No, it’s not normal to hang out with your professors on a
Saturday night, but perhaps it should be. This is a university,
after all.
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Mac, as I mentioned, is not a big man in stature, nor does he appear
to have spent many hours in the UW fitness center. But he has the
ability to intimidate with his mind, through his directness and
professionalism. He clearly knows more about the business of interviewing
someone than I do, which makes him a difficult interview. Honestly,
I’m scared to misquote him. As we walk down a Madison street,
Mac asks if I want a good laugh. I say yes. He says it’s off
the record. He proceeds to tell me what’s so funny and I do
have a good laugh, but I can’t tell you why. Mac won’t
let me.
He’s not just a big man on campus, he’s a big man in
the city. “There’s a lot of very arrogant moments that
I try to downplay,” he says. For example, the office phone
will ring, someone else will answer, and say, “Mac, phone
for you.” Mac will tell them to put it on hold, but sometimes
it’s the mayor of Madison and he needs to speak to Mr. Verstandig
right away.
I ask Mac how he keeps himself in check, how he prevents his shaved
head from inflating to abnormal proportions. One thing he’s
done is add an ombudsman to the Badger-Herald. “It’s
a weekly opinion column and it criticizes the paper both positively
and negatively,” he explains. He’s enlisted the former
editor-in-chief to write it. “I thought it was a great way
to keep the paper honest to our readership, to let them know that
we do care about what they say, their complaints, their concerns.
That we’re not holier than thou. And I thought it was also
a good way to check myself. Having someone call me out in public
once a week is pretty good. You know, I worry that some people may
not jump to criticize me as readily as I would hope.”
It’s no wonder that some people are slow to criticize Mac.
He just knows too damn much. I doubt that Mac loses many political
arguments. All of his stances, even the most controversial, are
deeply researched and articulately phrased. His absorbs his ammunition
from those newspapers, magazines, and websites. They are his machine
gun rounds of rhetoric.
Spend some time with Mac, or hell, just look at his blog picture,
and you’ll know that Mac has the ability to use those machine
gun rounds to blow apart any hurdle that may stand in his way. He
doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do with his life –
he’ll try law school and see where that leads him –
but he knows he has plenty of options, and he sees the rest of his
generation having these same opportunities.
“The American Dream is very much alive and well,” he
says from behind his newsroom desk. “I’m sitting here
in Madison, Wisconsin; it’s the heartland of America. I’m
in dairy country, I go to school with a lot of people that grew
up on farms. A lot of them never saw a stoplight until they came
here, and it doesn’t matter. All of the doors are open. If
you try hard, you’ll get far. If you work hard, you’ll
get far. And if you don’t, the interesting thing is our generation
may be okay anyway.”
Take Mac’s word for it. He’s a knowledgeable man.
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