Francis, who did not seek to be great, but was

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Peggy Noonan dubbed John Paul II “John Paul the Great,” and who can argue with that? Not I. He certainly fit the description.

From the beginning, Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not seek to be great, in the coarser senses of the term. He signaled that by the first thing he did after his surprise election as pope — deciding to be the first pontiff in our time named “Francis,” after the man who chose a life of poverty, becoming a plain-robed itinerant preacher, a beggar in a time of particularly worldly clericalism.

If you wish to be a cynic (and too many do), you can call Pope Francis’ gestures — living outside the imperial quarters reserved for the pope, riding in a Ford Focus instead of a limo, saying “Who am I to judge?” — a theatrical form of PR if you like. The point, though, is that he chose to display thoughts and behavior consistent with being, first and foremost, a follower of the carpenter from Nazareth.

From the moment he came out on that balcony and said “Buon giorno” to the crowd, he was humble. He was kind. He bestowed his blessings and his love upon the poor, the suffering, the marginalized. He lived the Great Commandment: He loved God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, and he loved his neighbor as himself. Or more than himself.

He lived his life as an example, one that the world in our time sorely needed, and still needs. And as our pope, he expected us to do the same.

And now, as badly as we need him, he’s gone.

There’s a lot of simplistic conjecture about whether his successor will be a liberal or conservative — reducing the choice of a Supreme Pontiff to the same gross, ones-and-zeroes foolishness that we allow to destroy our politics in this century.

As I grew to love Francis, I listened to those who deprecated him from both the “right” and the “left” — the kind of Catholics who would vote for Trump, and the Culture Warriors who kept saying he didn’t go “far enough,” as though his purpose was to please them by granting all their fondest wishes.

All of them helped me see that this good man was my kind of pope. And we need another just like him — except maybe younger, so he can stay with us longer.

Paul DeMarco: Cry, the Beloved Country

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The Op-Ed Page

James Earl Jones in the film version of Cry, the Beloved Country.

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Alan Paton’s 1948 novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, explores the South African apartheid system, which was formally instituted in the year of its publication. The protagonist, Stephen Kumalo, is a black minister of a rural congregation whose son commits a murder in a robbery gone wrong. The white man he kills, Arthur Jarvis, is, ironically, one of the few white people who is actively opposing the new apartheid regime.

Paton’s book was formative for me. It heightened my awareness of racial injustice in South Africa, America, and around the world. Recently, I have returned to the book with a different perspective, as I reflect on the changes in my country since Donald Trump was elected. The current injustices are different from those dealt with in the novel, but have been profoundly disquieting. My previous readings have been empathetic, finding my way into Kumalo’s sorrow and anger with a reader’s detachment. However, watching our new administration operate, my detachment is gone. I have become Kumalo.

In the decade since Trump entered presidential politics, I have, despite my grave misgivings about his character and rhetoric, tried to be generous in my view of him. Some of his policies make sense and align with my own. I think his border policy is more sensible than Biden’s was. He is correct to treat China as an existential threat. I agree with him that biological men should not be in women’s sports or other women-only spaces.

But, to my Republican friends I say, you could have had those policies with dozens of other candidates. None of them would have done to our country what Trump has done. For years his defenders chided his opponents for being worried about “a few mean tweets.” I don’t like trash-talking in politics. It simply makes compromising more difficult, and every piece of significant legislation involves compromise. Since it has become an accepted part of the American dialogue, I doubt there will be any turning back. Nevertheless, calling out other world leaders, especially the presidents of Canada and Mexico, our closest neighbors and two of our closest allies, is gratuitous and counterproductive.

However, the deep, agonizing cry that is silently reverberating in many Americans’ hearts is for Ukraine. This is exactly the kind of country that America should be supporting. I’m not a war monger. I have no interest in the U.S. starting or prolonging a war. I grieve for the dead and wounded on both sides and their families. As a physician, I have seen how tragedies affect patients and loved ones. It is impossible for a person to experience war and come away better for the experience.

Ukraine had no choice but to enter this war. They were invaded without provocation by a much larger country run by a murderous dictator. They responded just as America would, with searing rage and all the firepower they could muster. Most analysts expected the war to be over in weeks. Instead the Ukrainians have bravery held off the Russians for three years. Their democratically-elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, showed commendable courage when he chose to stay rather than flee (as opposed to Trump, who dodged the draft, or his minion Josh Hawley, who ran for his life during the attack on the Capitol). Zelenskyy has made it easy for America to support him, asking only for weapons and ammunition. No American soldier will die in Ukraine.

I suspect we will recover quickly from much of the stupidity and vanity emanating from the White House, e.g., the Gulf of America, the turning of the South Lawn into a Tesla lot, or the threats to take over Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. However, Trump’s choice to forsake Zelenskyy for Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian who censors free media, jails and kills his opponents, and rules by fear, will stain our flag for years to come. The simple question is “Which of these countries aspires to be more like America?” That was, until recently, the way we chose allies. America is the best and brightest hope for the planet. Our democratic system, as fractious and flawed as it is, and our political discourse, as polluted as it is, are still the envy of the world. We are free to say and do everything we want as long as it does not infringe on the rights of our fellow citizens. We will only remain free if we support other countries trying to become like us.

I have had my share of disagreements with past presidents, both those I voted for and those I didn’t. I have been angry before, but I have never felt that the president was trying to contort the United States into a country we don’t recognize and don’t want to be. In the novel, Kumalo says of his son Absalom after he has committed the murder, “Who knows if he ever thought of what he did, of what it meant to his mother and father, to the people of his village, to the white man he had killed, to the wife and children that were left desolate. Who knows if he had remorse, or if he wept for his broken country?”

When I read Kumalo’s last question over forty years ago at the University of Virginia, I never thought I would be asking it of my president.

A version of this column appeared in the March 19th, 2025 edition of the Post and Courier-Pee Dee.

So what else have you got?

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My brother-in-law checking over the Nativity in 2019.

A brief Easter reflection. And no, it’s not too late. The Easter Season just started Sunday, and lasts until June 8…

My wife told me this one yesterday. Her youngest brother has had the same Nativity set on his lawn every Christmas season of his life — first at his parents’ home growing up, now at his own. It consists of several hollow plastic figures that I think were once lit from within, but are now illuminated with a spotlight. It’s getting a bit worn out — Mary had to be replaced a year or so ago — but it’s still something everybody in the family looks forward to, especially the kids.

His boys are grown now, and he has no grandchildren yet, so he’s been letting his older brothers’ grandchildren — who are all in the Memphis area — take turns each year with the honor of placing the baby Jesus on the manger.

This past season it was the year for the younger grandson of his oldest brother (whom we lost in 2020). Unfortunately, he didn’t get to do it on account of illness, from which he has fully recovered.

Time has passed, and the boy has gotten older — he turned 5 last month — but he hasn’t forgotten missing out.

So on Sunday, he approached his uncle and reminded him he had not gotten his chance to place the baby in the crèche. And he asked whether he could do it now.

My brother-in-law said well, no. The Nativity had been put away, because it was a Christmas/Epiphany thing. And now, it’s Easter.

So the boy thought for a moment, and tried a different angle. He asked:

“Well, have you got a tomb?”

Read a book. Please. And then go read some more…

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There are plenty out there to choose from.

At the end of my previous post, I tried to offer hope in spite of the situation I was describing. I said there are still “plenty of smart people out there,” suggesting that even though I haven’t figured out a fix, some of them might. I could have named names, but as incredible as it may sound, I was restraining myself with all my might, trying to keep the post from being any longer than the 2,899 words I ended up with.

One of the names I might have mentioned is that of David Brooks. But y’all know I admire that guy’s work; I’ve said so often enough.

I mention him now because of his most recent column, which was blessedly shorter than mine, but eloquently addressed an important aspect of what I was on about. The headline is “Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime.”

You should read the whole thing (after all, his point is that kids — and adults — today need to be reading something. I’ve tried to make it available by using the “share full article” link, but I’m still not sure whether that words for everybody if you post it on a blog, or is only meant for sharing by text or email with one or two friends).

If you can’t (or, being a person of the 21st century, simply won’t) read it all, here’s an excerpt from the top:

You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.

The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.

Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade…

Later, he quotes from a book by Jim Mattis and Bing West:

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you…

Amen to that, warrior monk.

He doesn’t get to current news until the end:

What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.

Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence…

But as I say, that comes at the end. As I said in that last post, the larger point isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the rest of us, and our own avoidance of reading, to the point that a majority of us were willing to vote for someone like Trump.

He ends with the words, “Civilization was fun while it lasted.”

Yeah. As I said…

So Brooks is one of those smart people I was talking about, and he’s offered a solution: Go out and read a book. And then read  a few hundred more. I would add that they should be history books, but hey, almost anything would be an improvement….

Is this what the end of a great civilization looks like?

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As a kid, I thought of societal collapse in terms of the fall of Rome.

As you know, I’ve been fascinated by history my whole life (and I still fail to understand why everyone else isn’t). Not as a profession, more of an avocation. I’m into it the way some people are into football. I earned a second major in it at Memphis State, completely by accident — I just took that many elective courses in the subject. (I had time for them for a number of reasons, including the fact that I didn’t go to football games.)

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been somewhat morbidly interested in one of history’s most ominous questions: What would it be like to live in a great, thriving civilization that you deeply loved, and you were seeing it falling apart all around you?

I generally framed it in terms of Rome. It ruled the known world for centuries (despite a form of government that seems unstable at every point at which I’ve studied it), and then it was just gone. Suddenly, Rome is in the hands of barbarians, the last legion has pulled out of Britain, and all of Western Europe has sunk into chaotic darkness, ruled by local warlords of one sort or another.

But lately, I’ve gotten interested more in other collapses of great cultures, such as, say, the British Empire. It exceeded the Roman in geographic breadth and possibly global cultural hegemony (the adoption of English as the current lingua franca, for instance), so its collapse from what it was in Victoria’s day is pretty remarkable. But it still isn’t as complete or as crushing as the Roman fall (I was there last summer, and London still seemed to be thriving), and when I was in school my teachers didn’t cover it. Too recent, I suppose. And no barbarians have yet succeeded the Windsors.

At the moment, though, I’ve been fascinated by an earlier event on that sceptered isle. I’ve been listening to a wonderful (not only informative, but entertaining) podcast called The Rest is History, and I’ve been entralled by several episodes dealing with the events of 1066 (“the most important year in English history”), including what led up to it, and the details of the final erasure of real English (that is to say, Anglo-Saxon) rule. The last episode was the denouement, “The Battle of Hastings.” (But wait! I see there’s a fourth episode after that: “The Norman Conquest.” What joy. Unless, of course, you’re a Saxon.)

And remember last year when I suddenly discovered, to my great embarrassment, the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Well, I’m digging deeper into that now by reading a book about it, titled 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Not that all of it — the attacks of the Sea Peoples, havoc caused by global warming, etc. — happened in that one year. It took awhile. I’m simultaneously studying the same period, or a bit later, from a different angle through James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible. (Turns out those Philistines who keep coming up in the Old Testament were actually Sea People. Who knew?)

You’ll notice I’m looking into collapses a bit more intently recently. You can probably figure out why. I haven’t paid all that much attention lately to stuff that’s happened since about a millennium ago. And considering what’s happening now, I haven’t missed too much that would give me joy.

When I was a kid, past collapses were an idle interest, and not very threatening — compared to, say, nuclear annihilation. In the 1950s and ’60s, I was growing up in a country and a period that was more firmly stable than anything I could see in the past. We were at the peak of an arc that started, as many reckoned it, with the Magna Carta in 1215. Several centuries later the process soared to previously unknown heights with the drafting and adoption of the U.S. Constitution — which was almost immediately a success, but would go through another two centuries of gradual perfection, with particularly big leaps during the presidential tenures of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and yes, Lyndon Johnson. The strains and splits that emerged in the 1960s were to me dramatic demonstrations of how resilient this rational and humane rule of, by and for the people really was. We carried on, and saw our Cold War adversaries do the collapsing.

We didn’t have an empire in the usual historical sense (despite all that nattering you heard in the ’60s), but since 1945 our global influence — and responsibility (that thing that so many on both the left and right now spit upon) — exceeded that of any emperor who ever sat upon a throne. I continue to love those stories of the incomparable Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era, but Lords Nelson and Cochrane, and my fictional hero Jack Aubrey, would have had to cut and run in the face of the Service in which my father served.

I read a lot of Mad magazines in the mid-’60s, and that’s fitting. If anyone had mentioned societal collapse to me in 1965, I’d have said, “What, me worry?”

And now, this. All this stuff going on around us, in this beautiful country and throughout the West — in fact, throughout all the developed countries that a reasonable person might have wrongly, but reasonably, assumed were beyond such societal pratfalls as we read about in history books.

Do I have to detail all the evidence of collapse all around us as our liberal republican-democracy just goes “poof” in practically an instant? That shouldn’t be necessary. I take it most of you are paying more attention than I am to the daily nightmare.

Just last week, Donald the Unready destroyed $10 trillion in weath in this country and others, on an idiotic whim (idiotic whims being the only kind for which he possesses a certain genius). A lot of people had voted for him with one of the favorite slogans of people who understand neither government nor business on their lips: “Run Government Like a Business.” I saw a crack about that on social media in recent days. I can’t remember who said it, but it doesn’t matter, because the observation was so obvious that attribution seems unnecessary. (Actually, quite a few said it on Twitter.) Something like “They didn’t know he was going to run it like one of HIS businesses.” Of course, they had no excuse for not knowing, since they’d been warned a million times since 2016 — they just disregarded anyone who told them, because it didn’t fit within the fantasy in which they so fervently believed.

Of course, a few days back, Trump did his Emily Litella routine — “Never mind!” So everything’s OK, right? Well, no. There’s this thing that a functioning society needs leaders not only to project, but embody: stability. In the business world, “uncertainty” is a scary word. It keeps businesses from planning, growing, creating jobs, and all the rest.

Expect more surprise attacks on global financial growth and stability. Just as a garnish on top of his usual shtick of abandoning allies and hugging bad guys abroad, and pouring gasoline on ANY fire that serves to divide us at home.

Now let me pause to say what it’s always necessary to keep in mind, if we can stand to be that depressed: Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is that a majority of people in this country have so lost sight of what has always made America great (not just that — they’ve simply lost common sense) that they would actually vote for someone like that — repeatedly.

And just to make sure I tick off everybody, no one on the left should be nodding smugly at this point. If we had a Democratic Party capable of projecting an image of a strong, unified movement committed to principles and causes with broad appeal, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

I cite that book Sapiens a lot — not because I agree with everything Yuval Noah Harari says, but because when he’s right about something, he explains it well. And one thing he makes plain about what separates humans from other creatures and has enabled us to work together to advance to an extraordinary extent is the ability to coalesce around unifying ideas. We don’t have to all agree, but we need to embrace a consensus about certain basic principles. All successful human endeavors involving groups larger than, say, a troop of chimpanzees (somewhere between a couple of dozen individuals and a hundred) depends on that ability. It is in fact the one major thing that separates us from those other apes.

But quite suddenly, we have lost that special gift. Now we can’t even agree on what facts are, much less work together effectively to change and shape a commonly perceived reality.

(At this point, I should point out to you that I’ve been thinking about writing this post since sometime last summer but have not for a reason that should by now be evident to you: It just takes too much time, and too many words. After about 1,500 of them, I’m really just getting into the meat of the problem. And I’ve been writing it, in short bursts at a time, for two or three days. I’ll redouble my efforts to get to the end as quickly as possible…)

How do we pull out of this nose dive? I have no idea, which is one reason I haven’t written much on our current plight, and have spent more and more time on the distant past.

As elusive as solutions might be, it’s somewhat easier to diagnose the problem. I refer you back to every post I’ve written in the last couple of years that uses the term “Rabbit Hole.” You should probably start with this one.

Of course, now some of you are warming up your intense objections to the Rabbit Hole thesis. Some of your fave arguments are:

  • That I’m ignoring all the things that led up to the current situation. No, I’m not. I would never. The thing is, every major development has antecedents. The creators of those works I mention above touting 1177 B.C. and 1066, know full well that a great deal led up to those pivotal dates. For instance, England had been invaded successfully by non-Anglo Saxons exactly a half-century before 1066. (Check out King Cnut‘s big takeover in 1016.) But nothing so decisively changed the present and the entire future as what happened at Hastings in October 1066. And it was all quite sudden, as Harold Godwinson would tell you if he could. A similar book or podcast or whatever addressing what I’m talking about in this post would have “2016” in the title. That doesn’t mean a lot of it hadn’t already happened by that time, or that it isn’t still developing now. But that year was pivotal. It’s when some definitive disaster fell — a disaster that would have been impossible at any previous time in this one nation’s history. (Of course, this one nation isn’t the whole story of that year. Remember Brexit? The collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? The election of Duterte in the Philippines?)
  • That Brad has a helluva nerve trying to tell you that the end of newspapers and its replacement by technology that could be (and pretty much always is) programmed to always tell you what you want to hear plays a huge role in the Decline of the West. Does he really think we’re too stupid to see the utter transparency of such self-interested pleading of a has-been career newspaper editor? No, he doesn’t. But he’s still confident in making that assertion, whether you accept it or not, precisely because of his extensive experience communicating all day every day in both eras.

So, those objections having been dealt with, I’ll get back to my premise…

The thing is, evolution grinds slowly — very slowly. It took many tens of thousand of years after humans got clever before they settled down to farm life, which led to the development of cities, kingdoms, empires, money, and writing, along with a gazillion other things. That started about 12,000 years ago, and we haven’t fully adjusted well to the changes. This very recent development is a big reason obesity is such a problem. Any hunter-gatherer with initiative stuffed himself with as many calories as he could, whenever he could. He had to. Now that most folks in developed countries can gorge themselves on sweets and other carbs without limit, our brains still haven’t completely evoved to the point that we understand that we shouldn’t. (Other creatures have to mutate for big things to happen. It is both the great advantage and flaw of humans that we just go ahead and change, and don’t wait around for new hardware and software to be installed.)

So consider what happens if you live in a modern liberal democracy with a deliberative system built to allow people to engage in lively disagreements, but do so in a manner that still allows for, even encourages, effective, amicable solutions. And then, all of a sudden, practically no one seems to believe in the abstractions necessary to such a system — the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, pluralism, Voltaire’s “I disagree with what you say…” principle, liberal democracy itself, all of it. They’ve all suddenly gone “poof,” in what amounts to a microsecond in evolutionary terms. (Of course, despite the words that follow, it wasn’t just our beloved technology that did this to us. There’s the classic American attitude that history is, as Henry Ford said, bunk. We are not a grounded people, in terms of internalizing the most important principles we have inherited.)

The internet, and a decade later social media, made it possible for the first time in human history for a sad, maladjusted person (and there are millions who fit this description on the planet; it’s not just that one guy) to communicate instantaneously with thousands (out of billions, a statistical fact in which we once could take comfort) of other people just as deluded as he is, and he and they become instantly convinced that they must not be crazy, because so many people agree! He, and every one of those thousands, now possess greater power to publish their musings than anyone previously in the history of written communication — and to do so instantly, and to the entire planet at once.

Consider the case of RFK Jr. In previous decades, he would simply have been (and I suppose was, up until recently) the embarrassing secret of a great American family. But today, he can in short order find himself leading an army of anti-vaxxers, and eventually become United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. In what previous time, since the U.S. Constitution was drafted, was such a thing possible? (Sure, the sadly lacking, even demented, son of a prince might once have raised an army and taken the throne, but isn’t one of the main points of this country the fact that we’ve put that sort of thing behind us? We had, and now suddenly it’s back.)

As a people, we have by and large simply turned our backs on the great American experiment. We were not overrun by Sea Peoples or other enemies. No Vesuvius went off and buried our cities in ash. We did it as whimsically, and unnecessarily, as Trump erased that $10 trillion in market value. We didn’t even do it consciously, near as I can tell. We just did it. And to the extent we’re conscious of the damage wrought, we’ve blamed it on those other guys (who used to be our fellow Americans).

How long will it take for our species to find its way through this unforeseen shock? How long will it take us to adapt, if we do?

I do not know. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, it was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Europe would not see another republic for 1,000 years. And that didn’t involve a new technological development that outstripped the human capacity to think clearly.

Am I saying things are hopeless? Nope. I’m not giving up. It’s not in my nature. Remember, I’m the guy who set aside everything he was doing to try to unseat an incumbent white Republican in South Carolina in 2018 — two years after that ominous date mentioned above.

But at the moment, I’m sort of out of ideas as to how we pull out of this. I suppose I’ll come up with something — that is, we’ll come up with something. I’m just describing the situation: that technology and our weaker tendencies have already done something to our cognitive abilities that we were not ready for. And mind you, AI hasn’t even gotten warmed up. Anyway, that’s my diagnosis over the last few months. Beyond that, I’m hearing a paucity of ideas regarding effective remedies.

But I’ll keep listening. There are plenty of smart people out there, even though it’s often hard to tell at the moment. And if I think of something myself, I’ll give you a heads-up. You know me.

In the meantime, maybe some of y’all have an idea, one that has so far escaped notice, for how we can return to building a rational civilization together. But don’t waste your breaths, as some tend to do, telling me I’m wrong. I’m not. Boy, do I wish I were…

But did the KIDS get the jokes in ‘Unfrosted’?

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Running across that Jeannie Gaffigan column reminded me of a hilarious movie I rewatched part of while on the elliptical this morning.

I’m talking about “Unfrosted,” in which her husband co-starred with Jerry Seinfeld. Both were great, as were the rest of the ensemble cast. So was the film itself, which you might find surprising if you just saw or heard a description of the premise when it came out last year. It’s “Loosely based on the true story of the creation of Pop-Tarts toaster pastries.”

For that reason, I had ignored it on Netflix for some time before giving in and checking it out. But you know, sometimes the things that sound the dumbest when you first hear about them turn out to be the greatest discoveries. (I’m thinking, apparently irrelevantly, of the 1992 alternative-history novel The Guns of the South, which Wikipedia summarizes thusly: “The story deals with a group of time traveling members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) from an imagined 21st-century South Africa, who supply Robert E. Lee‘s Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47s and other advanced technology, medicine and intelligence.” See what I mean? But it’s awesome.)

So I enjoyed every one of those 10 minutes on the elliptical (I’ll walk some more later, I promise!).

But, as I did the time or two that I saw it before, I couldn’t help wondering: Could anyone but a Baby Boomer get it? So much of the comedy comes from lampooning cultural touchstones of the early-to-mid ’60s, or shortly thereafter (such as the “Godfather” references). Some examples:

Milkmen. Actually this is less a thing we all experienced in the ’60s — of all the places I lived growing up as a Navy brat, I think there was only one place where milk was delivered to our doorstep. But it was still an standard cultural reference that everyone still recognized. And we could understand how they might have resisted the milkless Pop-Tart.

The Schwinn Stingray bike. They had to reach to pull this into a comedy about breakfast cereal, but they made it work.

Artificial sweeteners. My most vivid memory regarding this phenomenon comes from 1965. I’ve written about that period when we had just returned from Ecuador and I was happily mainlining television every second of the day, and I just had to have everything touted in a commercial. The Diet Pepsi ads were particularly successful in convincing me the product actually tasted better than regular cola that I begged my Mom to buy a six-pack, and she did, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

The ‘Leave it to Beaver’ lifestyle. I mean Jerry Seinfeld as an executive stepping out of his front door each morning in his suit and tie, after a bowl of Kelloggs, and smugly taking a kiss on the cheek from his lovely wife before setting out with his briefcase to win the Wonder bread for his fam. Sure, my Dad was in the Navy and was often at sea for months at a time, but I was pretty sure that civilians lived just like that. Because, you know, TV doesn’t lie. Except about Diet Pepsi.

Jack Lalanne. Yes, I also faithfully watched his show during that period of addiction, and was convinced I, too, could be that fit. Of course, that didn’t work out much better than the Diet Pepsi.

The Space Program. Most specifically, the satirical restaging of the famous press conference in which the original Seven Mercury Astronauts were unveiled to an admiring, applauding public. Actually, it was a restaging of a previous satirical restaging in “The Right Stuff,” which was a great scene. But Wolfeian overstatement aside, the Right Stuff version wasn’t that far from the original event. And it inspired a warm-but-sad nostalgia for me. It evoked a time when we all knew that if Americans worked together, we could do anything. And none of us were embarrassed about applauding heroes.

So lots of chuckles — some rueful, but all quite warm. For me, and for people my age.

But did kids get it at all? I dunno. That just hit me this morning when I mentioned it to my daughter, but stopped myself and admitted that she might not find it nearly as funny.

Of course, kids do like to laugh at anything that regards Boomers. And they might have had these cultural references crammed down their throats enough to see the jokes. But they can’t possibly appreciate them fully…

Good for you for trying, Jeannie Gaffigan!

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Here’s another thing Brad’s been doing (for the last few days, at least) instead of blogging: Trying to get through all that email that has been piling up since we went to Europe last summer.

In fits an starts the last week or so, I’ve managed to get back to Nov. 1. Which is like digging back a thousand years — to a time when at least a few people in our country could still think straight, and a decent human being who was not trying to destroy human civilization was president of the United States.

And that’s how I ran into this piece in America magazine by Jeannie Gaffigan. Y’all remember Jeannie. I wrote, with enthusiastic approval, about a previous column of hers back in 2020. Here’s a snippet from that earlier Gaffigan column:

As much as some of my well-intended fellow Catholics will hate to hear this, it is crystal clear to me that the right thing to do is vote for Joe Biden. I believe it will be impossible to tackle these other issues with a president who is working overtime to sow division and hatred in this county through insults, intimidation, fear and blatant racism. This venomous “us against them” mentality is trickling down, seeping into our churches and poisoning our pulpits. To a culture of life, vipers are deadly….

Amen, amen, amen!, said I.

Of course, Jeannie had more to work with at that time — our fellow Catholic Joe Biden, the only qualified candidate to run for our nation’s highest office in the last two election cycles. And, of course, the aforementioned decent human being, which is probably his most defining characteristic.

Jeannie Gaffigan

But Joe had been hounded into doing something I’d thought he would never do: he quit. Up until then, he was willing to spend his last breath struggling to save our country, and doing a fine job of it. But it became too hard for him to focus on the mission when the whole country — including people who should know better — were screaming “QUIT, JOE, QUIT!!!” 24 hours a day.

This put Jeannie, and me, and many others, into the uncomfortable position of urging people to vote for Kamala Harris, who tried hard — you’ve gotta give her that — but was still what she had been in 2020: unready. (And I don’t use that term lightly.)

The only advantage Kamala Harris — and those who would advance her bid — had was that her opponent was Donald Trump, for whom no one could possibly justify voting. And no one did. Justification was something these folks didn’t even attempt. Having gone substantially madder since 2020, they just voted for him anyway.

They ignored Jeannie. They ignored me, too, but I have no room to complain, because now we see that I also ignored Jeannie.

But not intentionally. Anyway, in case America will let you read it, here’s her column of Nov. 1. And if the Jesuits are wanting you to subscribe, here’s an excerpt:

An appeal to the moms out there: If you think parenting temper-tantrum toddlers or rebellious teenagers is nearly impossible, try letting them run your government! What would that look like? It’s a chilling thought but one that we can’t afford to ignore…

Amen again. And right now, a bunch of people on Wall Street who may have ignored you and me in November are now seeing exactly what you were talking about…

Sure and it’ll be stout soon. But you have to wait…

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Just a bit of something for the day. Over our corned beef and cabbage this evening, I got to looking at some of the images I shot during our trip to Ireland in 2019.

This was taken a couple of days before St. Patrick’s, in the great brewery in Dublin itself.

I was taking a class in the art of pulling a pint of Guinness, which of course is far more complex and important that pulling a pint of anyt’ing else.

The best part is, after we passed the class, we got our own pint for free…

Enjoy watching…

Here’s hoping you were among those viewers on Facebook

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Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t  know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

— Timeline, by Michael Crichton

The book being quoted is no great work of literature. But I found the idea of a novel about historians who have the opportunity to go back in time irresistible, and I’ve read it more than once. And at least the book was way less lame than the movie it inspired.

But whatever the book’s shortcomings, that’s a great way of summarizing our nation’s greatest problem. Nothing could be truer than the idea being set forth with that analogy. Tragically, we live in a world densely crowded with such trees, bearing such leaves. And since the leaves have no idea they are part of a tree, they don’t have the slightest indication that the forest exists, or what maintains it and has caused it to flourish to this point.

Only in a world like this could a man like Donald Trump be taken seriously for any position. But whatever his shortcomings, his emergence as a perceived leader in the minds of millions points to the larger problem — the sickness of ignorance that has infested the whole tree. Because only people who have no notion of the origins of this country and the principles that made it great, people who have no idea how important this liberal democracy is to the entire world (and don’t care), could possibly turn this precious country over to him.

But don’t those of you on the “left” read that last paragraph with smugness in your hearts. You’ve got serious perceptive issues yourselves. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be just as eager as the Trumpistas to elect a majority plus one so you can cram your agenda down the throats of the despised other side. That’s because you’d understand that this is supposed to be a deliberative republic in which we sit down with people who disagree with us, speak and listen respectfully, and grow wiser as we work to achieve things together.

I learned about the faults of right and left during all those decades as a newspaper editor. Mike Burgess — remenber Mike from the last post? — learns it every day in an even harsher environment. And he’s pretty sick of being battered constantly by the left and right, both wanting history taught in ways that advance their agendas.

Our nation is dying because it is awash in ignorance and apathy. Mike’s trying to address that with all his might. When he’s not teaching the kids at River Bluff High School, he’s traveling around our state addressing adults on the subject he spoke on today at Richland Library. This would be an uphill fight even if everyone were required to attend and listen, and do that rare and magical thing: think.

Which is why I say in the headline, I hope you saw and heard the video. Our turnout today was respectable, but not what it needed to be. However, our videographer came up to me as the event ended and said something like 300 people had watched on Facebook Live.

That’s very good news. They couldn’t ask questions, which Mike had saved half his time to allow them to do — and the folks present took full advantage of that. But it’s still very good. I wasn’t sure I had heard the number right, because of my hearing problems, and the fact that the program was over and a lot of people were talking at the same time.

But I checked on Facebook, and it appears that at least part of it has been seen now by 596 people. I hope some of y’all were among them. If not, here’s your chance:

Mike Burgess, 3/14/2025

(The little clip you see at the top of this post just shows a couple of random moments when I happened to turn my phone to video. It’s not a highlight or anything like that; I just figured it was better than a still picture.)

If you prefer to read, here’s a version of his speech, which he gives regularly.

Watch, or read, and let’s discuss it…

This was right at the beginning; a few more folks came in after this.

A great free lecture at Richland Library on Friday

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History teacher Mike Burgess speaking at the museum last year.

What does Brad do when he’s not blogging? Well, lots of stuff. Some of it involves work for ADCO‘s clients, one of which is the Relic Room.

For the past year I’ve been particularly wrapped up in a project I particularly enjoy, which is arranging, coordinating and publicizing the frequent live programs on military history that we call Noon Debriefs (they used to be called “Lunch and Learns,” but there was no actual lunch, so it was changed).

They are free lectures featuring such speakers as veterans, historians and others about some aspect of military history bearing on South Carolina. This is one of my favorite things to work on, because I always learn from them. They’ve been a bit of a challenge, though, since last June, since the room usually used for lectures at the museum has been tied up by renovations.

But that’s been an opportunity to reach out to the wider community, and Richland Library has generously let us use the Theater room at their main location, which is a fantastic venue for such programs. To simplify the transition, we relied at first on museum staff as speakers, but we’ve recently resumed our usual practice of having quest speakers from outside. There, we’ve presented such lectures as:

  • Joe Long, curator of education at the museum, on American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton, stressing prisoners with South Carolina connections. Video.
  • Joe again, talking about “The Unpronounceable Patriot,” Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and his SC involvement during the Revolutionary War.
  • On this past Veterans Day, Fritz Hamer, former curator of history at the Relic Room, spoke about the Battle of Ia Drang at that time of year in 1965. That’s the battle that the film “We Were Soldiers” was about. Video.
  • Joe again on “Wade Hampton’s Great Beefsteak Raid” in 1864, which may have been the biggest cattle-rustling episode in American history.
  • Moss Blachman (the first at the library with a guest speaker) on his experiences as an Air Force intelligence officer in Vietnam in 1965-66. This was a return engagement after a presentation Moss made at the museum last year. Video.

We’ve got another great guest speaker tomorrow at noon. Mike Burgess, who has in recent years been dubbed the best history teacher in the state more than once, will talk about the increasing difficulty of teaching the subject in public schools amid America’s roaring political battles over our past.

Mike addresses the subject quite fearlessly, as I can tell you based on the similar lecture he gave at the museum last year. And the past year, of course, has only made his job more difficult, as the Kulturkampf flames have been fanned ever higher.

Anyway, since his topic is the very nature of history itself, and why it is essential in a functioning republic, I figured this would be a good time to give y’all a heads-up on these programs. I assure you it will be an informative one.

We’ll continue to present such fascinating programs at Richland Library in the coming months, and perhaps even after we get the Education Room at the museum back. And in May, we’ll branch out further, with a couple of programs at the Cayce/West Columbia Branch of Lexington County Libary.

If you want to learn, as I have been doing, come on out. Oh, and we’ve started offering something extra the last few times — a free tour of the Relic Room itself, following the program. If you haven’t been to the museum before, you should definitely take advantage of that. I particularly urge you to check out the Vietnam exhibit in the Cistern Gallery (which is one reason so many of our recent programs have emphasized the experiences of South Carolina veterans in the conflict)….

Moss Blachman spoke at the library Feb. 14 about serving as an intelligence officer in Vietnam.

‘Abby Someone… I’m almost sure that was the name…”

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I’m having my annual physical next Monday, so yesterday I went in to have blood drawn. You know, the standard “fasting lab.”

The fun thing about having medical tests done these days is that you don’t have to wait to learn the results. You can diagnose yourself, and make bets whether it will turn out you were right when you see the medico. I could have seen them last night, but I forgot to look until I was eating lunch today.

I like the way they inform you if any of the results are just a bit off. Off course, it would seize my attention even more effectively if the “ABNORMAL” were in a red box rather than plain buff, and it flashed, and was accompanied by a loud klaxon sound.

It would cause one to respond, “I say: What’s all this then?” And you might even click and look at the results. In my case, I’d have opened it without the warning sign, because I’m always curious about a couple of the data points. And yes, it turns out I am still low on both sodium and choride (“abnormally” so on the chloride), so I can keep having all the salt I want. In fact, I’d best get right to it.

As for the “ABNORMAL” bits, well, they’re kinda dull when you look at them. Oh, maybe one day one of them will be something bad, but you can’t tell by looking at them. Or I can’t.

Anyway, the point of this post was that it gave me an excuse to share one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies.

Enjoy.

Behold my fig tree grove!

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And now, today, behold — leaves!

Well, the jury is still out on whether I properly pruned (or destroyed), the two fig trees in my yard.

But while I’ll be very sorry if I killed them, particularly the one my uncle gave me not long before his passing, some small comfort is on its way — thanks to our friend Scout.

OK, you can probably see the leaf structure better here…

You’ll recall I ran into Scout at the recent demonstration. I mentioned to her the recent pruning incident and my concerns about it, and she said she would be glad to let me have some cuttings from the trees in her yard. Which was welcome news, because I’d seen those trees in the summertime, and they were just exploding with figs.

Whereas my trees produce barely a dozen figs each per year. You can’t feast on them, or make fig preserves, which I love. (Although in their defense, they do provide a nice, moderate snack now and then.)

So I went over last weekend, and Scout and her husband not only let me take some cuttings, but gave me a container of root accelerant they had in their garage.

I only took four, but I researched rather carefully how to turn cuttings into trees, and amazingly, I think maybe I did it right (with my wife’s careful guidance).

Take a look at this grove, this plantation, this forest of growth I’ve got going on. I put four sticks, with a slight greenness at the tips, into the soil, on Ash Wednesday. See below. The image at the top is a mere four days later, and you can see identifiable leaves coming out at the top.

At this rate, before long, I’ll have enough fig leaves to open a clothing boutique in the Garden of Eden. Can fig preserves be far behind?

Ash Wednesday: Mere sticks, with the slightest bulge of green at their ends…

 

 

DeMarco: USAID merits reform, not demolition

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The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

I’m no foreign policy expert, but I have an advantage over most Americans trying to understand the shutdown of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). I have seen its work overseas. In February 2020, I was part of a small group of doctors and medical students from the University of South Carolina who traveled to Tanzania to work in one of the nation’s major referral hospitals.

In my two weeks there, I discovered that Tanzania’s health system is decades behind ours. Due to the lack of medical infrastructure, Tanzanians suffer and die of diseases like HIV and TB at much higher rates than Americans. I met an American couple, both doctors, who had chosen to work for several years in a clinic run by Baylor University dedicated to the prevention of HIV and the care of children and families already infected. Baylor had built a welcoming, modern clinic on the campus of the hospital. One of the funders of the clinic was USAID.

This young couple and their small children were not part of a “criminal organization” as Elon Musk posted on Twitter on February 2nd, nor were they working for one that was run by “radical lunatics” as Donald Trump said the next day. These were exemplary, highly trained Americans serving sacrificially far from home, in a way that should make us all proud.

It is Trump’s prerogative to shape agencies according to his governing philosophy. It is reasonable for him to roll back programs that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion as he said we would in his campaign. I may disagree with the hysteria over transgender Americans that Trump was glad to stoke. I may support the simple idea that diverse groups are usually stronger and more productive than homogeneous ones. But Trump won the election, and I respect his right to make changes that will perturb me.

What I object to is a purge of an organization that is so important to America’s standing in the world. USAID has more than 80 missions in approximately 130 countries. As of this writing, all of them have been closed. USAID workers, both those devoting a few years like my friends in Tanzania, and others who have spent their careers overseas, are now locked out of their offices, unsure of their next paycheck, and trying to make contingency plans thousands of miles from home.

There is a sensible way to reform USAID. Conservatives have long complained that USAID is too autonomous and that some programs, such as funding for Palestinian NGOs, were not aligned with American interests. This is a legitimate policy dispute. Some would argue that we should provide humanitarian assistance to families ravaged by a war they had no part in making, others would argue that too much of the aid would end up in the hands of Hamas.

Let’s have those debates. Let’s consider the pros and cons of putting USAID under the control of the State Department. But let’s do it without upending the lives of American citizens abroad or putting the lives of our allies at risk.

Endangering the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is particularly egregious. PEPFAR was created in 2003 by George W. Bush and has been the most successful anti-HIV effort on the planet, saving millions of lives and preventing untold numbers of cases of HIV, including the most devastating, maternal to infant transmission.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued waivers for critical humanitarian assistance, but there is much confusion about what the waivers will cover and how the new funding streams will operate. It is certain that many patients’ daily HIV medication supply will be disrupted.

Any interruption in PEPFAR services could be disastrous. One of the weaknesses of current HIV therapy is that when patients stop taking their medication, the virus can become resistant and much more difficult to treat, resulting in complications and even death.

HIV has, thankfully, been reduced to a controllable chronic disease here at home. Most people who are diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. can live a normal lifespan. I have about a dozen HIV-positive patients in my practice. All of them have their HIV controlled with a simple daily regimen. Many of us have forgotten what it was like at the peak of the epidemic in the 1990s when thousands of young people were dying, emaciated and terrified. But HIV is still poorly controlled in some of the developing world such as sub-Saharan Africa and India, where USAID is doing lifesaving work.

I’m disappointed by my evangelical Christian brethren, most of whom voted for Trump. Churches usually ask for a 10% tithe. USAID’s budget is less than 1% of the total budget of the United States. The vast majority goes to work that Jesus asks us to do in the 25th chapter of Matthew – feeding the hungry, inviting in the stranger, caring for the sick. So much for Christian nationalism when it comes to how we treat our neighbors around the world.

All of this was easily predictable and preventable. But that’s no concern for Trump and Musk, who seem locked in a battle for who can demonstrate the least empathy. The shutdown of USAID exposes the current administration as incompetent and cruel.

A version of this column appeared in the February 19th, 2025 edition of the Post and Courier-Pee Dee.

The Doctors DeMarco: Paul and his daughter Grace, then a 4th-year medical student, in Tanzania…

We’ll be killing a guy by firing squad in two days

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A communist insurgent is blindfolded and executed by firing squad, Cuba 1956./Wikipedia

We’ve discussed this before, but now we have a fresh reason. From last week:

COLUMBIA — South Carolina’s death penalty history could be rewritten March 7 if condemned state inmate Brad Sigmon is executed by firing squad, as he has chosen.

Though the firing squad is authorized as an execution method in five states, it has been used only three times since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1976. All three took place in Utah, with the last one in 2010.

Sigmon, 67, has picked a shooting death over electrocution or lethal injection, according to documents he filed Feb. 21.

He was given a death sentence for killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, Gladys and David Larke, at their home in Taylors in April 2001. Gladys Larke was 59 and her husband 62…

When we’ve talked about firing squads in the past, I’ve brought it up in large part because of people saying how “barbaric” it is. Which, within the context of other such practices in which our state engages, is nonsense. I’ve gone into that before:

Between the lines of the reporting and comments I’m hearing what I perceive as a flavor of “Firing squad? How awful! How barbaric!”

To which I’m going, Yeah, so? My God, who wouldn’t choose that? I know I would. In fact, of all the forms of execution current in this country, the firing squad is by far the least objectionable from the point of view of the condemned. It’s quicker and more certain than hanging.

And to me, lethal injection is by far the worst, the most blood-chillingly terrifying, the most cruel and unusual way to take a man’s life.

It’s so cold, so sterile, so deliberate, so clinical, so pseudo-nonviolent and therefore most morally chilling. Like, we’re going to kill you, casually and dispassionately, in a staged setting that makes a mockery of the healing process.

This, of course, is related to my fear of giving blood, which I overcome every time I go to the Red Cross. It’s the cold, clinical, deliberateness of that that has always chilled me. What if the point of slipping that needle into my vein was to kill me, deliberately and legally, with all due ceremony?

Maybe it doesn’t strike you that way, but it seems the most evil, Room 101 thing you could do to another human being.

But a firing squad, the straightforward, quick, honestly retributive violence of it, is to me the most morally defensible form of capital punishment. I don’t believe in ANY form of execution, but if I were king and had to choose for someone else, or if I were given the devil’s own choice of deciding for myself, that’s definitely the way I’d go.

When I started my newspaper career, executions were banned in every state in the union. We had followed other civilized countries (and in the ’70s, this was a civilized country, disco aside) in putting that behind us. Then Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah in 1977 — by firing squad.

You young folks might find it hard to imagine, but it was a huge deal when the country took that big, atavistic step. Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, which was made into a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore. I never read the book or saw the movie. I felt I knew enough about it.

The most vivid memory for me comes from a time in, I believe, 1979, when I went to Death Row in Nashville (at the old state prison that looked like something out of an old movie, or perhaps a nightmare) to interview some of the condemned. After a long interview with one, I paused in front of the cell of another of the condemned and chatted for a moment. He had a picture of Gilmore attached to his cell wall. This prisoner agreed to my taking a picture of him. It’s pretty creepy, and if I run across that image, I’ll share it with you. The guy I was talking to was standing in exactly the same position in his cell as Gilmore was in the picture on the wall.

Oh, by the way, before you folks who think it’s A-OK for the state to kill people by the numbers cry that I’m “romanticizing” the condemned or ignoring what they did to their innocent victims, you’re wrong. Those two guys I just mentioned were as bad as anyone I’ve ever met. The guy posing like Gilmore wanted his wife dead, and had hired the guy I interviewed at length to kill her — which he and an accomplice did, in a particularly brutal and inept manner. She was still barely alive when, after raping and choking her, they stuffed her into the trunk of a car and left the car in the parking lot of the main Memphis public library, where she was found dead days later.

They both got the chair for it, and if ever anyone deserved it, they did. But whatever anyone deserves, the state has no business degrading itself to their level by killing them — not when they’re safely locked away, and present no danger to the public.

But if the state is going to do it, the firing squad is the way. At least that way, we all know what it is we’re doing, and no one can pretend it’s “humane.”

Well, now I know how to say it (I guess)…

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This kind of cracked me up.

This morning I was rereading one of my Patrick O’Brian novels over breakfast (yes, I AM reading other things, but I LIKE these), and saw a reference to HMS Indefatigable (the 1784 version, not the 1901 version that was sunk at the Battle of Jutland).

Of course, the ship’s name is a word I’ve read and understood my whole life, but have never had occasion to say out loud. So I thought I’d take a second and find out how to say it out loud.

I’ve found YouTube helpful with such things in the past, but the voice telling me how to say the English word doesn’t usually sound like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

Or maybe like this guy below on “The IT Crowd.” Anyway, now I know how to say it, if I ever want to do so while speaking on ze pheun…

I’m guessing it was like this

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Someone this morning sent me something that I had to look for in my email Inbox, which I seldom visit. The Boston Globe regularly sends me headlines via email, so I saw this:

Elon Musk is not a Cabinet member. But as he addressed Trump’s meeting, it was clear where real power resided.

I didn’t have time to read it, but I did have a reaction: Trump has a Cabinet? (You know I haven’t been keeping up with such details lately.)

The idea of what Trump’s Cabinet would look like, all assembled together, now that he’s totally off the leash intrigued me for a second. But I almost immediately realized the answer to that. See the exclusive video below. Of course, it’s not exactly the same. Gov. Le Petomane was hilarious. There’s nothing funny about President Donald J. Trump or what he and his pals are doing to the country and the world…

Say buh-bye to those Google ads

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For years I tolerated those Google Adsense ads on the blog. Even though they were not a very rewarding proposition for me. Every few months, whenever their Scroogish algorithm things added what they owed me up to more than $100, they would send that amount to my checking account.

Yeah, $100. For every few months. I would not sell a solitary ad here for anything close to that rock-bottom price for one month, much less for several, and this was a bunch of random ads, not merely one.

But… it cost me no effort at all — I didn’t have to sell the ad, post it on the blog, send out invoices or anything, really. So, as another blogger persuaded me, why say no to, say, another buck every couple of days if it cost no sweat on my part?

So I allowed the ads in, and they were no trouble. I even sort of enjoyed watching the way the AI worked, posting ads that the algorithm imagined were related to something I had put on the blog. Occasionally, the stuff was tacky or even offensive (to me; I didn’t like seeing an ad favoring some political movement or politician I disapproved of appear here, just because I had recently mentioned said movement or pol). But it was more often amusing. Here are some of the comments I’ve made here about them in the past.

But then, Adsense started going overboard. First, the banner ads got bigger, so that you couldn’t even see my top headline on the first screen. Then, a year or so ago, they started with the pop-ups:

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I almost ended the relationship right then. But I thought it would be trouble to figure out how, and decided to wait awhile.

Then, the finally went too far: They started putting multiple ads in the main body copy, as opposed to just one, as they used to do. Often, multiple copies of the same ad. You’ve seen this on plenty of other sites — which has increasingly destroyed any enjoyment I get out of reading those sites. And they seemed to have a special mad, destructive genius for placing these nuisances right in the middle of an important transition in the text, not only making it ugly but ruining the flow of the argument. Like, you know, why did I even try?

So I’ve had it. I closed my account today. They said the ads would be gone within 24 hours:

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They’d better be. Because I don’t want to waste time trying again to do something that ought to be easy, although they do their best to make it look complicated.

In the meantime, though I have carefully placed my own relevant images where they needed to be in the text to explain my points, they will likely be interspersed with rude, random ads that make the whole post look like visual gibberish. When I saw them place one between the last words of my last post and the image of the late Chris Carrizales that the words went with, that really was the last straw. That’s what made me act today…

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Thanks for letting me know about this public servant, Sam

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Earlier one of our friends posted a long and thoughtful comment on a previous post, and among many other points he noted the importance of “investigative reporting” to “help restore trust” in our society.

Well, yes and no. The investigative stuff is important, or at least it used to be. Woodward and Bernstein have been heroes of mine since the start of my career in the mid-70s. But I hope you’ll notice that it doesn’t mean as much today. Woodstein reported the truth about Watergate, and Nixon resigned rather that be impeached. Media expose outrage after outrage after outrage about Trump (which doesn’t take much investigation, since he boasts to the world of his sins — he is even impeached, twice, and gets conficted of crimes.

And what’s the public’s reaction? They cheer at his rallies, and elect him again.

And you know, an overemphasis on investigative journalism in my generation — the post-Watergate generation — has something to do with that. Every cub reporter (or at least, most of the ambitious ones) entering newsrooms since 1974  has come in busting to rip the cover off public officials, and they’ve done a lot of it, constantly. (I told one reporter who wanted to drop everything to chase after a lead because he wanted to “hit a home run” that he needed to stop swinging for the fences, and concentrate on getting on base. I wanted him to cover his beat. Even in those days of full newsrooms, I was never fully satisfied with my people’s coverage of the everyday stuff.)

And you know what resulted from all that fervent investigation? The public at large came to believe that that was all government was about — corruption. Say “They’re all a bunch of crooks” to the average guy, and he’ll nod his head.

Journalists knew better. We were out there covering public officials up close. Sure, there were slimeballs out there, but we knew most of them were decent, honest people doing their best to serve the public. But that’s not the way we covered the public sphere. Decent, honest folks don’t give you home runs.

That’s why I appreciated a feature we had at The State when I first arrived in the late 80s, back when had not only plenty of people but loads of space. We had a weekly page in the special Sunday section that included in-depth stories about the past week, the opinion pages, and related stuff (back then, all papers had these sections, and gave them names like “Perspective,” “Impact,” “Insight,” “Review” and such.) In that section, my team (governmental affairs) had a full page to fill about goverment and politics.

And we had a centerpiece feature on it that in the newsroom we called “bureaucrat of the week.” That’s because we considered it a pain in the posterior. We passed the duty around among the staff, everybody having to write one, and each reporter groaning when his turn came up again. (They’d rather be out there swinging at the fence for something on the front page.)

But I thought it was great. It was a weekly profile of one of the thousands of little-known people out there working hard at state agencies, explaining what these people did and why they did it instead of earning more money out in the private sector.

It was an example of a type of public journalism (or civic journalism, or community journalism; it was called different things and defined different ways, but I tend to think of it in communitarian terms), a movement that arose in the 90s because some editors were smart enough to realize that people were getting a skewed view of the world. It was about covering all that went on in a community, not just what went wrong, giving the public a full, holistic picture of reality.

Well, it was a noble goal, and I believed in it, but I seldom really practiced it day-to-day. Even in those flush days, resources — people, space and time — were finite, and you had to cover the plane that crashed, couldn’t afford to cover all of the thousands that land safely.

I say all that to explain why I appreciated this Facebook post by Sam Johnson, a young local attorney who was a close aide to Steve Benjamin during his years as mayor of Columbia. He wrote this about a neighbor of ours who died this week:

True public servants lie in the shadows. You often never know their name. Or, that they were even there. They weren’t there for that reason…for you to know them or the recognition. In today’s world, these types of public servants are rare breeds. They serve because they believe in something bigger than themselves.
Chris Carrizales was a true public servant. He was a brother. He was a friend. He didn’t care about the accolades. He wasn’t posting every cool interaction he had for the clout. And, while he was often in the shadows serving our country and serving Columbia, he very much deserves his flowers.
And, when you are serving together, others might just see the highs…but true brothers see your lows. Chris was there for the lows…with you. My wife, just yesterday, reminded me of several.
Chris worked in the last two mayoral administrations here in Columbia. In short, he was family. He never met a stranger. He cared. He did the work. Often it was an all day, more than a mere 9-to-5 requirement. Like I said, he believed in service. And, he did it all with style, grace, and class. My brother was special and he will truly be missed.

There was a similar accolade posted on the city website.

I didn’t know Chris Carrizales, but I miss him now. And I appreciate Sam for taking the time to bring him, and his years of devoted service, to our attention.

 

Giving the birds a chance

5 Replies

This just in…

I complain mightily about the squirrels that regularly hog the seed in the bird feeder, despite all my countermeasures, and I always rush out to chase them off when I see them.

But I enjoyed this peaceful scene a few minutes ago.

Finding the feeder empty this morning, I replenished it, thereby making it extremely attractive to squirrels… and, you know, birds.

But I just looked out there, and was pleased to see this guy stretched out on the deck (on a cushion, of course), sunbathing.

And of course, the feeder crowded with birds, just a few feet away.

I thought this was impressively magnanimous of him, kicking back for awhile and letting the birds have a chance at that fresh seed. And smart, too. That sun had to feel good, since it was 37 degrees out there.

And no, he wasn’t sick with bird flu or anything (can squirrels catch that? — I dunno). Shortly after this was taken, he lifted his head, scratched himself a bit, and climbed down and ran around as usual.

I watched for a while to see if he would now take a flying leap at the feeder, but he didn’t. Not then. Still being magnanimous.

Not that he won’t before the day is out. But you know what? When he does, I might give him a few minutes to gorge himself before I go out and holler to make him flee. He’s a pretty decent squirrel…

I keep getting these vapid appeals for contributions, alas

7 Replies

I’ve gotten pretty aggressive about responding “STOP” to appeals via text for political contributions, and I think the volume of them has noticeably dropped. But I still get them. And as usual, they generally do little to improve my overall impression as to the perspicacity of Homo sapiens.

This one from yesterday is a good example:

It’s Ro Khanna. I really need you to read this text.

(But if you’re short on time, please kick in $15 to replace the abysmal Republican House before you log off: rokhanna.us/218b?t=JBZO6O )

I don’t need to tell you that Congress is broken. Republicans have done a great job of that.

So instead, I’ll tell you my plan to fix it:

✅ Ban *all* PAC and lobbyist money from Congress
✅ Ban Congress members from trading stocks
✅ Enact term limits for Congress members and SCOTUS Justices
✅ Ban Congressmembers from ever becoming lobbyists

Hear me when I say this: So long as Republicans are in control, my ambitious plan to hold members of Congress accountable is dead in the water.

So today, I’m calling on my grassroots supporters to replace the catastrophic Republican Congress with progressive Democrats who will actually do their jobs.

I need 185 gifts before my midnight deadline to stay on track. Can I count on your $15? >> rokhanna.us/218b?t=JBZO6O

Thanks,
Ro

Text STOP to quit

OK, so you start out bemoaning “the abysmal Republican House,” suggesting that’s why you’re running, as a Democrat, for office — that is, for re-election to office. The implication being that you are the answer to the problem.

But you don’t talk about how the Trumpistas are tearing our country and its magnificent constitutional representative democracy apart — which is, you know, the problem with that other side.

No, you trot out a list of hoary alienated-populist proposals that make you sound for all the world like you are one of them:

  • Ban all PAC and lobbyist money from Congress (because we don’t trust people with money)
  • Ban Congress members from trading stocks (because we don’t trust markets or business people in general)
  • Enact term limits for Congress members and SCOTUS Justices (because we don’t trust anyone in power, which doesn’t say much that’s good about you)
  • Ban Congressmembers from ever becoming lobbyists (because we wouldn’t want people who know the system to help groups out there to make their cases to elected representatives)

(Remember my old column from the ’90s about how most of our problems in America wre the result of the decline of trust? Well, now that things are exponentially worse, I regret to say I told you so.)

Admittedly, the first two items would appeal to Democratic populists more than Republican ones, but hey, that’s why I’m not a fan of Bernie Sanders, either. But the third one is right out of the right’s playbook.

But more than that, it’s right out of the playbook of alienated people who don’t trust our system, don’t trust anyone in the system, don’t trust experts, and really don’t have the slightest understanding of any of those things.

Think about it. Those are Trump’s people. I mean, seriously: Do you really believe that the problem with this Republican Congress is that it’s full of the old populist stereotypes who start out all right, but get “corrupted” after any extended period in the system, and no longer care about the will of the people who elected them?

Set aside the fact that’s always been an absurd notion. If there’s a problem with a lot of people who have been in office for multiple terms, it’s that they are so interested in staying in office that they become mindless slaves of polls, which means they’ll do everything they can to do EXACTLY what the folks back home want. And to me, that means they are no longer worthwhile representatives.

A good representative should of course know his constituents, and keep their values in mind. But he should NEVER go to Washington (or Columbia) with a lot of half-baked notions about this and that specific issue held by good (or bad) people who have never studied such issues.

A representative should arrive with wishes and plans, but also humility, because he knows he has yet to study complex issues in any depth, or — and this is critical — engaged in extended debate with smart people who don’t see it the way he or his constituents do, and just may have greater understanding of the details than they do. And that is the rule more than the exception — capital cities are crammed with smart people who actually do know the issues better than the average guy on the street.

People such as lobbyists, to name one category (along with good staff people, academics, etc.).

Yes, all of us can cite cases in which big corporations with deep pockets hire armies of lobbyists that easily overwhelm the scrappy Mr.-Smith-Goes-To- Washington folks opposing them.

But scrappy groups that look out for the interests of the poor, the elderly, children, the environment, and whatever your favorite cause may be, have lobbyists, too. And the interests of the people and causes they represent are well served by their work, even though they may not be (OK, they are NOT) as numerous or well-paid as those who represent Big Pharma. If you don’t think they do good work, follow Sue Berkowitz of SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center, or our own Lynn Teague of League of Women Voters as they make their rounds, and become educated.

But I’m letting myself run off on tangents and pound on some of my personal pet peeves, and failing to explain what’s REALLY wrong with that text:

He calls the Republican Congress abysmal, and he’s absolutely right. But why is it abysmal? It certainly not because of the things he’s proposing to address, particularly not because of staying in office too long. The problem is yahoos who just got there and don’t know squat, and actively hate people who do know squat.

If you could bring back some of the Republicans who served for many years before this new crop of nihilists came along — people like Lamar Alexander, Howard Baker, Bob Inglis, Richard Lugar and on and on — Congress and the nation would be in fine shape today. Any decent Republicans — ones who might have filled the shoes of such as those — who are still around today have either quit running for office, or they tremble in fear of the ignorant, unprincipled yahoos with the torches and pitchforks who could replace them in a skinny minute in the next primary. Especially in the House, thanks to Republicans having succeeded a bit too well at redrawing districts so that the primary IS the election.

And their fear gets even greater when they see what the fear itself can do: Look at what happened in 2023 in the U.S. House itself. The five or so craziest members of the caucus managed to take down the speaker. Why? Because more sensible (to various, modest degrees) Republicans were too terrified to stand up to Matt Gaetz el al. Their own cowardice has since led them to be more afraid than before. The terror snowballs, at an exponentially increasing rate.

Give me people who have managed to stay in office for 30 years or more — since long before Trumpism, or the Tea Party — and while they will inevitably include a healthy share of mediocrities (as a result of too often consulting polls so as to follow popular opinion), I will take them any day before the kind of people who rush in these days to try to take their elders down — and succeed.

I probably haven’t persuaded anyone who didn’t already agree with me. Issues such as these tend to divide people almost as much as abortion, or guns — but with less intensity, of course.

The problem isn’t the system, even as much as it’s been damaged by the real problem — a general electorate that has lost its sense of responsibility as voters.

But I guess it’s hard to come up with a simple four-point plan to address that.