AN EDITOR'S JOB IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS. Reveal the truth, unmask what's fake. Simplify, but entertain. Attract attention, but don't get noticed.
Sometimes, however, you've got to stick your neck out. So that's what I did a few weeks ago when I wrote how Commissioner Curt Hébert had become a "loose cannon" at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by sometimes refusing to go along with the full agenda. I posed a question: Was Hébert the Commission's nemesis?
Well, this time I did get noticed (em by none other than the commissioner himself. He had read the column and had sent me a terrific letter (printed on the next page) putting me straight on my Greek mythology. (Nemesis was a goddess, not a god, I was told.) But the commissioner also asked me to come down to his office for coffee to meet him and get acquainted.
When I arrived at his office he disarmed me immediately. "Call me Curt," he said. And in a manila folder, one of his assistants had collected copies of every single dissenting opinion that the commissioner had written since he had taken his seat on the FERC last November. "Here's a press kit for you."
My "press kit" contained Hébert's notable dissent in the certification case for the Automated Power Exchange. APX facilitates bilateral power trades in California using a computer algorithm program to match buyers and sellers. Hébert saw no need for certification, chiding the Commission for wanting to regulate computer software: "The majority accords APX, whose founder perfected a computer program, the same status as a utility¼ the law, however, requires us to distinguish between the physical and the digital." (Docket er98-1033-000, March 25, 1998, 82 FERC ¶ 61,287.)