Bill was kind enough to share this with me in advance, so I could set it up to appear today. Remember his “Firedog” cartoon from 2001?
Bill Day’s 10-years-after cartoon
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Category Archives: History
Once, we had a “young lady” reporter at the paper, and a governor wanted to SPANK her. No, really.
Nowadays, we have our young lady governor calling a reporter a “little girl.” In the olden days, when men were men and so were governors, they were somewhat more polite toward the youthful and female. But if they weren’t careful, they also came across as a bit kinky. I refer you to this column I wrote in 1994:
CARROLL CAMPBELL MUST LEARN HOW TO TAKE THE HEAT
State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, April 10, 1994
Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Writer
If Carroll Campbell really wants to run for President of the United States, he will have to grow a much tougher hide.
The Governor is regularly mentioned as a top contender by some of the most respected political writers in America, including The Washington Post’s David Broder. But Broder and company are missing something. To use a baseball analogy, the top sportswriters have taken only a cursory look at this rookie. They’ve seen him field, throw and bunt. They’ve yet to determine if he can hit a curve ball. Or as Harry Truman might have asked, can he take the heat?
Mr. Campbell is an extraordinarily thin-skinned man for a politician. The general public doesn’t know this because Campbell manages his public exposure with an artful care reminiscent of the way Richard Nixon was handled in 1968. He stays above the fray.
But when he can’t do that — say, when someone surprises him with a tough question, off-camera — the image can fall apart. Experienced reporters have seen that carefully groomed mask shift, with remarkable speed, into a visage of suspicion and hostility. His eyes flash, and his answers, if he responds, are highly defensive. The motives of questioners are questioned.
This flaw isn’t fatal. People can change and, in fact, over the last couple of years, Mr. Campbell has mellowed. He’s become more statesmanlike and less confrontational. In seven years as governor, he has polished some of his rough edges.
At a luncheon briefing for editorial writers at the Governor’s Mansion in January, I saw the Carroll Campbell that Dave Broder sees. He was open, talkative and articulate, exhibiting an easy command of any topic that came up. In the next day’s editorial on his State of the State speech, I wrote about the “New Carroll Campbell .”
A month later, the Old Carroll Campbell was back.
It started with the effort by former state Rep. Luther Taylor to get his Lost Trust conviction thrown out. One of the tactics his lawyer used was to say the federal investigators had backed off investigating charges that could have implicated Mr. Campbell .
A little background: In 1990, when I was The State’s governmental affairs editor, we looked into these same charges and found an interesting story about how the Legislature gave 21 people an $8.6 million tax break. But we never found any evidence that Mr. Campbell was involved. And neither did the feds, with their far superior investigative powers.
Taylor alleged that the federal agents hadn’t gone far enough. The new U.S. attorney, a Democrat, agreed to investigate. The State’s federal court reporter,Twila Decker , concluded that the only way to check the course of the previous investigation was to gain access to Mr. Campbell ‘s FBI files, and she needed his permission. So she asked.
The Governor went ballistic. He requested a meeting with The State’s publisher and senior editors. This led to an extraordinary session on Feb. 17. Assembled in a conference room at The State were the various members of the editorial board and three people from the newsroom: Managing Editor Paula Ellis, chief political writer Lee Bandy and Ms. Decker . Mr. Campbell had a small entourage. Most of us wondered what the Governor wanted.
Over the next hour or so, we found out — sort of. Mr. Campbell had brought files with him, and between denunciations of those raising these charges anew, he read sporadically from the files. Each time Ms. Decker tried to ask a question, he cut her off, usually with a dismissive “young lady.”
Throughout the session, rhetorical chips fell from his shoulder: “This young lady had given me a deadline. . . . You’re smarter than the court. . . . I will not even be baited. . . . May I finish. . . . Now wait a minute, young lady; you’re mixing apples and oranges. . . . I really don’t care what you have, young lady. . . . You seem to be obsessed with ‘lists.’. . .”
No one in the room thought Mr. Campbell had done anything wrong, and everyone wanted him to have the chance to clear the air. But we were all riveted by his agitation, particularly as it was directed at the reporter. At one point, Editorial Page Editor Tom McLean felt compelled to explain to the Governor that Ms. Decker wasn’t imputing wrongdoing on his part by simply asking questions. It did little good.
At the end, the Governor stormed out, without the usual handshakes around the table — without even eye contact.
Later that afternoon, Consulting Editor Bill Rone, who had missed the meeting, stuck his head into my office to ask what had happened with Mr.Campbell . Bill said he had run into the Governor in the parking lot, and that he had been upset about Twila Decker . He told Bill he had been so mad he had wanted to “spank” her.
Repeatedly during the interview, Mr. Campbell had expressed indignation that he was being questioned by someone who wasn’t “here at the time.” Is that what he will say when the national press corps starts taking him really seriously, and somewhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Georgia someone in the pack asks him about that capital gains thing in South Carolina? Or the 1978 congressional campaign against Max Heller? Or fighting busing in 1970? Or the Confederate flag?
Mr. Campbell has gotten altogether too accustomed to the relative politeness of the South Carolina press corps. Our group was throwing him softballs — real melons — and he went down swinging. What will he do when he faces major league pitching?
Of course, the late Gov. Campbell didn’t mean anything kinky about it. He just wanted to punish her somehow. Putting Twila in the pillory would probably have satisfied him.
I remember one of the newsroom editors — someone who has not worked there for a long time — saying after he read my column, “Hey, I’d like to spank her, too.” He meant it the other way.
Bill Day’s 9/11 cartoon
There’s a lot of stuff coming at us about the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I’ve read some of it, meant to read more — but haven’t had time.
But I did have time to enjoy this cartoon from back then that Bill Day shared with me today. You’ll recall that my compadre Robert Ariail did some really strong cartoons at that time. But I can’t seem to find those online at the moment, and I thought you might enjoy seeing one you hadn’t seen before.
Here is some of Bill’s commentary on it:
We sold the prints for only $3.00 each, the newspaper supplies the envelopes and postage, and volunteers did all the work. We pulled in $30,000! I still get requests from firemen all over the country and never charge them. We gave checks to the families at a beautiful awards ceremony with the Fire Chief presiding with all the brass, Detroit Mayor, City Council members, and my newspaper publisher, editor, and editorial page editor there…
Did she move and change her name, or what?
Somehow, on a previous post, we got onto a tangent about persistent Democratic claims that Al Gore actually won the 2000 election, which he didn’t, as media recounts after the court case demonstrated.
Anyway, in trying to find that link above, I went to Wikipedia, and ran across the name of Katherine Harris, and suddenly pictured her in my mind, and thought, Hey, wait a minute…
I’ve been thinking since she emerged on the scene that Michele Bachmann looked familiar, like someone I hadn’t seen since…
And now the mystery is solved. For me, anyway.
What do you think?
The new normal: This is what a complete network TV crew looks like today
The other day, I was at the presser at which Jon Huntsman announced that Attorney General Alan Wilson was supporting him (which I still intend to write a post about, but haven’t had time to go back through all my notes), and at one point I happened to look around and think how very, very young most of the media people were.
When I stood in that same place two years ago representing The New York Post, in front of that same (I think) lectern, listening to Mark Sanford tell about his surprise vacation in Argentina, I didn’t think that. I saw mostly usual suspects I had known for years. (Although I did notice in photos of the gaggle later that I had the grayest hair in the bunch. It was one of those “Who’s that old guy? … oh!” moments.)
But the biggest difference between this group and the media mob scenes I experienced when I was as young as these kids were was that the TV crews are so much smaller. As I saw Ali Weinberg of NBC packing up her stuff after, I mentioned to her that back in the day, her network would have a four-person crew covering a presidential candidate: the talent, (at this point she started saying it along with me), the camera guy, the sound guy (and back then those two jobs usually were filled by guys), and the field producer. Now, it’s just her. And she’s in front of the camera, behind the camera, carrying the equipment, handling her own arrangements, Tweeting, and I don’t know what all.
Of course, it’s been this way for several years now. I remember Peter Hamby and others doing the same thing four years ago.
But seeing someone as petite as Ali getting ready to carry all that stuff kind of dramatized the situation. Yes, Ali agreed with me, all told it probably did weigh as much as she does. And no, she didn’t need any help.
Her affiliation reminds me of the NBC crew I kept running across in Iowa in 1980 when I was following Howard Baker, who was running in the caucuses that year. I rode with Jim and Flash (the sound and camera guys, respectively) through an ice storm in a four-seater plane between Des Moines and Dubuque. Just the two of them, the pilot and me. The pilot kept squirting alcohol on the outside of his windshield to make a clear space in the ice about the size of his hand to see through to fly. When we got out on the tarmac — which was covered in ice — I went to put my overcoat back on, and the wind caught it and I started gliding across the runway like a ship on the sea. (I only realized later — after the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the Potomac in 1982 — how dangerous that trip was.)
On another occasion, the producer of that crew — a pretty young woman who reminded me of the actress Paula Prentiss — overheard my photographer, Mark, and me discussing where we were going to stay the night and holding open our wallets to see what was left inside. She offered to put us up if we were in a bind. Producers had that kind of cash to throw around in those days. Like Ali today, we said no, thanks.
Those days are long gone.
Before the storm: “Irene!”
Thursday, Friday and Saturday, as different parts of the East Coast anticipated the coming battle against the elements, and I heard the code word over and over and over, before anything had happened in the area where the name was coming from, I kept thinking of the above.
The relevant part is all in the first 27 seconds of the clip. Excuse the language. These are soldiers, heading into battle (and to sudden death, in the case of one of the men saying it), and their mothers aren’t around.
The things we run across looking back on a newspaper career
Bill C. and Bill D.
Occasionally, I have reason to open one of the many boxes containing the roomfuls of files I brought home from The State when I left (in my last two weeks, there was barely time to load it up, and practically no time to go through it, although I did throw out a few things), and sometimes I post one of the finds here.
Looks like cartoonist Bill Day, formerly of The Commercial Appeal, has been doing something similar. He sent me this picture today, taken in the mid-90s, with this commentary:
I thought you might enjoy this photo. This was at the Detroit Free Press. He was a great sport posing and loved talking about cartooning. His staff told me that he was looking forward to talking to me because he’s a big fan. About a month later I received a White House photo of him showing it to everyone in the Oval Office. He signed it: ”To Bill Day, Thanks for the laughs! Bill Clinton”
Bill’s the kind of cartoonist who would get a kick out of meeting Clinton. Robert Ariail is more of a Bush guy — although Robert had so much fun with Clinton when he was in office (Clinton was a large part of his inspiration both times Robert was a Pulitzer finalist, if I recall correctly) that he would have enjoyed meeting him, too — to thank him for providing so much fodder.
That reminds me of a picture I need to show you that involved Bush — and Tony Blair. I’ll try to track it down tonight or over the weekend.
I receive a welcome Elvis Day invitation
One of the doughnuts Chris left me back when some of the King's loyal subjects still worked at newspapers.
This rubble used to be the Krispy Kreme Chris went to in Tuscaloosa. Took a direct hit...
When we worked together at The State, Chris Roberts used to bring me a jelly doughnut every Aug. 16 in honor of the King.
He’s not in a position to do that now — he’s in Alabama — but he did show he was thinking of me by sending this:
He went on to say that he would have tried to get a doughnut to me, but the local Krispy Kreme got knocked down by a tornado back in April.
So I sent him a picture of one.
Chris knows how special this day is to me, because I was one of the first people in the world to hear the awful news in 1977:
MY GOOD FRIEND Les Seago was the man who told the world that the King was dead. But before he told the world, he told me.
I’ve always appreciated that, even though it didn’t do me much practical good at the time.
On Aug. 16, 1977, Les was the chief Memphis correspondent for The Associated Press. I was the slot man on the copy desk of The Jackson Sun, which meant I had been at work since 5:30 a.m. By early afternoon, the paper was on its way to readers. I had also been a stringer for Les for years, and I was used to his calls to see what was going on in our area. But he didn’t have time for that this day.
Was it too late to get something in? he demanded. Well, yeah, it was, just barely, but why…?
It looks like Elvis is dead, he said, explaining quickly that he had a source, an ambulance driver from Baptist Hospital, who told him he had just brought Elvis in, and he was pretty sure that his passenger had been beyond help. Gotta go now, ‘bye.
He must have broken all speed records getting it confirmed, because I had just begun to tell my co-workers when the “bulletin” bell went off on the wire machine as it hammered out the news.
Les himself was found dead at his home two years ago [this column ran on this day in 2006], at age 61. Though his career had spanned many years and he had covered Martin Luther King’s assassination, The Associated Press identified him in his obituaryas the man “who filed the bulletin on the death of Elvis Presley.” His ex-wife Nancy said “He wasn’t wild about Elvis, but he was glad that he did break the story.” That was Les…
Long live the King.
Way to go, guys: You made the Top Ten!
This just recently in from The Wall Street Journal:
Today’s rout ranks as the sixth-largest point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in history. Here is a list of the top 10:
Date and decline
9/29/2008 — 777.68 points
10/15/2008 — 733.08 points
9/17/2001 — 684.81 points
12/1/2008 — 679.95 points
8/8/2011 — 634.76 points
4/14/2000 –617.78 points
10/27/1997 — 554.27 points
10/22/2008 — 514.45 points
8/4/2011 — 512.76 points
I just want everybody involved in this achievement to get credit. So when I say, “Way to go, guys,” I’m including everyone. The SC5 and their spiritual brethren, of course — couldn’t have done it without you. No one played a bigger immediate role in recent days. But let’s have a big hand for Speaker Boehner and the Establishment crowd, for not standing up to them and keeping their caucus in line. And to President Obama for, I don’t know, for failing to magically make people come to the table. Or for the stimulus that didn’t help enough. Or whatever. And W. for creating the new prescription drug benefit without paying for it. And LBJ, I guess, for giving him the idea by creating Medicare.
And let’s not neglect the private sector, the engine of America’s lack of prosperity: There are, of course, all those scared-of-their-shadow investors. And all the corporations and others who have been sitting on cash and refusing to take the risk of investing it throughout this four-year crisis. And the American consumer for failing since 2008 to keep the economy afloat by spending like it’s going out of style, the way they did for the few years before that. (I did MY part, right up until this past weekend.)
Everybody give everybody a great big hand…
What it cost me to go to college in 1973-74
I’m going through some old boxes of stuff, and ran across a wallet I carried in my college days. I scanned for you three of the items I found in it.
The first, above, shows what I paid for a semester at Memphis State University on Jan. 14, 1974. As you can see, the total cost for 16 credit hours — as usual, crammed with journalism classes I had to take, history and English classes I didn’t have to take but wanted to, and some PE to force me to get some exercise — was $174.00.
That’s one HUNDRED — not even thousand — and seventy-four dollars.
Me, at about that time.
Below, I include a receipt for my room and board for the previous semester — $235. This was not for a regular dorm. This was for a room in a private dorm, right on the edge of campus. Few people actually stayed on campus at Memphis State; it was a huge commuter school (a lot of people called it “Tiger High” because people just continued on there from high school without leaving their parents’ homes). Housing was such a low priority there that there were a lot of us who couldn’t find official campus dorm space at all, but who were willing to pay private rates (that is to say, my parents were willing to pay) for the experience of staying there.
Central Towers was two 10-story towers with the boys on one side and girls on the other, although the procedures were keeping us apart were not what you would call stringent. Making this an even more fun community was the fact that the dorm would periodically throw FREE beer busts with no limit. Enough said about that.
And all of that, including pretty decent food, cost $235 a semester.
Just for fun, I’ve included a ticket stub, also from that wallet, from when my then-fiancee and I went to see Elvis — Presley,
not Costello — on March 16, 1974. It was one of seven shows in a row he did at the Mid-South Coliseum. It was originally going to be fewer than that, but the hometown demand was so great they kept adding shows. It was the first time he had performed publicly in Memphis since 1961, and almost the last time ever.
I don’t know how much it cost, but in those days it was almost certainly less than $10. The usual price I remember paying for concerts then (Bob Dylan with The Band, Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez and the like) was $5.
Equal time for Robert E. Lee
Since I did a post about Grant (sort of), I thought I’d share with you this article that Stan Dubinsky brought to my attention this morning:
How Did Robert E. Lee Become an American Icon?
After President Dwight D. Eisenhower revealed on national television that one of the four “great Americans” whose pictures hung in his office was none other than Robert E. Lee, a thoroughly perplexed New York dentist reminded him that Lee had devoted “his best efforts to the destruction of the United States government” and confessed that since he could not see “how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me.” Eisenhower replied personally and without hesitation, explaining that Lee was, “in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. … selfless almost to a fault … noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities … we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.”
The piece goes on to explain in detail why Lee became a revered memory, without trying, while others such as Jefferson Davis who so avidly sought justification failed.
It’s interesting. I actually haven’t finished it yet. Y’all can read it while I do.
Lee Bandy was at Rotary today!
I was blessed with a pleasant surprise today at the Columbia Rotary Club meeting — Lee Bandy! He was there as a guest of member Joe Jones.
It was awesome to get to see Lee, my good friend and longtime colleague — tanned, rested and ready. More than two decades ago, the guy had to put up with me as his editor, and he’s never held it against me.
For you youngsters, Lee was the dean of SC political journalism until his retirement four or five years ago. Who replaced him as dean? Well, they retired the position.
The rambling monument
By the way, if you were surprised when I told you back here that the Confederate monument has not always been in the most prominent location in Columbia, you might be interested to read this excerpt from a column I wrote for July 2, 2000 — the day after the flag moved from the dome to the monument:
Well, here’s a fun fact to know and tell: The state’s official monument to Confederate soldiers was not always in that location. In fact, that isn’t even the original monument.
I had heard this in the past but just read some confirmation of it this past week, in a column written in 1971 by a former State editor. When I called Charles Wickenberg, who is now retired, to ask where he got his facts, he wasn’t sure after all these years. But the folks at the S.C. Department of Archives and History were able to confirm the story for me. It goes like this:
The original monument , in fact, wasn’t even on the State House grounds. It was initially erected on Arsenal Hill, but a problem developed – it was sitting on quicksand. So it was moved to the top of a hill at the entrance of Elmwood cemetery.
The monument finally made it to the State House grounds in 1879. But it didn’t go where it is now. It was placed instead “near the eastern end of the building, about 60 feet from the front wall and 100 feet from the present site,” Mr. Wickenberg wrote.
But another problem developed: The monument kept getting struck by lightning. “The last stroke” hit on June 22, 1882, and demolished the stone figure.
At this point, if I were one of the folks in charge of this monument , I might have started to wonder about the whole enterprise. But folks back then were made of sterner stuff, and they soldiered on, so to speak.
At this point a new base was obtained, with stirring words inscribed upon it, and “a new statue, chiseled in Italy,” placed at the top. On May 9, 1884, the new monument was unveiled and dedicated in the same location in which we find it today.
Of course, my purpose in writing that was to suggest, The thing doesn’t have to stay there! There were, and are, plenty of other places for it — places that seemed quite suitable to the generation that actually experienced the War.
A photographic slice of SC political history
Thought y’all might be interested in this huge (about as tall as I am) poster over at GOP HQ. Chad Connelly and Matt Moore showed it to me when I arrived for the interview this morning.
They didn’t know where it came from — they found it when they moved in to the HQ — but they assume from the available clues in the photo that it’s from 1960. Note (if you can; this being too big to put on a scanner, I just shot a picture of it with my iPhone — and it was pretty grainy to start with):
- The prophetic declaration, “DIXIE IS NO LONGER IN THE BAG” — which was not yet true from a GOP perspective.
- What you can’t see around the slogan “ALL FOR NIXON” is the names of Old South states (they were hard to see in the original, too).
- At least one, and probably other, leaflets on the ground say “Kennedy!”
- I was amused at the van near the State House steps that said “Wilson” on the back. Seems like Joe’s always been in politics, doesn’t it?
- The flags, which are located far below the dome, and of course do not include the Confederate flag. This is before the General Assembly and Fritz Hollings put the Dixie flag up to mark the Civil War centennial. Are there also flags atop the dome, or were there no flags there then? I don’t know.
- The men wearing hats. After JFK won South Carolina and the presidency, he put a stop to that style. Or so they say.
- The license plate on the hearse, which provides proof that Paul was dead before we’d even heard of the Beatles.
OK, I was kidding on that last one. Y’all have fun with the picture, too.
Anybody besides me remember this?
Yeah, I’m still here. Been really busy with ADCO work. Maybe that’s a good sign for the economy. I don’t know; too soon to tell.
Anyway, we’re working on a couple of thing with environmental themes, and today I was brainstorming with our Creative Director (speaking of creative directors, I’m trying to carve out a niche in the ad game where all I do is what Don Draper does, which is look briefly at the product of someone else’s hard work and say, “That doesn’t work” — kind of like I used to do at the newspaper — then I’d have a drink and take a nap in my office), and… where was I before that parenthetical?
Oh, yeah. So suddenly it hit me. There’s no widely-understood symbol for environmental concerns. Not a single one, that could suggest everything — clean air and water, recycling, concern about climate change, conservation, carbon footprint, etc. Oh, you can do a stylized picture of a tree. Or the whole Earth, as seen from space (satisfied now, Stewart Brand?). But those could mean different things. And the recycling arrows are too specific. There’s the word, “green,” and you can do various visual things with that, but… there’s no one, shorthand symbol.
Then suddenly I thought of the theta symbol. But then I remembered it had been something like 40 years since I had seen that one used. But when it was used, it was used to express the whole shooting match. It was to environmentalism (which was a word we did NOT yet use, as I recall) what the peace symbol was to the antiwar movement.
I’m guessing people were turned off by the symbol’s association with death — which was, as I recall, one reason why it was used as a symbol for the movement. It was a warning that we were poisoning the Earth.
In any case, I once had a T-shirt with the above “Ecology Flag” on it. (Which the Web teaches me was created by artist Ron Cobb — not to be confused with the notorious SC lobbyist — in 1969.) At about the same time, I had a Kent State-themed one that was plain white in the front, with a big target on the back, with the word “Student” under it. I wore that around the USC campus in the fall of 1971 — my one semester as a Gamecock. Other kids wore garnet and black; I preferred to be different.
But I digress. Do any of y’all remember the theta being used to express ecological sensibilities, or am I alone here?
And that’s all the Post has to say about it?
Just saw this on Twitter:
18½-minute gap in Watergate tape remains a mystery http://wapo.st/kXHbBc
And clicked on it to find that, instead of some exhaustive Woodstein-type report, the paper that (according to legend, anyway) owned the Watergate story was basically offering an AP story that… didn’t say anything.
Not that there was anything to say. I mean, we know what happened, right? Rose Mary Woods stretched way, WAY over, and it just happened. It was like a miracle or something. What? You don’t believe in miracles…?
Anyway, don’t you hate it when Tweets seem to promise something interesting, and then you get there, and there’s not much more than the Tweet itself? I do.
What is marriage? (Hint: It’s not what Ron Paul thinks it is)
One of the more foolish things said in that debate last night was said by Ron Paul and I responded thusly:
Paul: “Get the government out” of marriage? What? What? What does he think marriage is? A secret agreement between 2 people? It’s a CONTRACT!
(Are you proud of me that I went with the more traditional “What? What?” rather than resorting to “WTF?” I am.)
To elaborate — and I fear I must elaborate, because for whatever reason this seems counterintuitive to a lot of folks — it is instructive to think for a few minutes about why we have marriage. Yeah, I get what Ron Paul thinks — that it’s some sort of private and/or religious thing. And yes, for us Catholics, it is indeed a sacrament.
But we had marriage long before there were Catholics. We had it before the Hebrews discovered monotheism. We had something like it, anyway, if it involved no more than jumping over a stick, or living together openly in the eyes of the whole community (thereby inviting its censure or assent). Because when humans are gathered into tribes or clans or whatever, it’s an important institution. It has to do with the fact that human offspring are so difficult to raise from the time they are born — no clinging to the mother from birth while she goes about her business the way apes do.
It is in society’s interest to have the male responsible be bound in some way to the female he impregnated. Yep, we’re still struggling to accomplish that today. (And much of the social dysfunction we struggle with today arises from our failure to get it right, as a society. Which only underlines the stakes in continuing to try to get it right.) But bottom line, that is the legitimate motivation of the full society in having such an institution. It gives the whole village somebody to yell at when there are all these kids underfoot: “Hey, you! Can’t you control your kids?” The village was wise to come up with this practice, to protect itself. And then, gradually, to develop the idea that it’s wisest to keep males and females apart, or turn hoses on them or something, until you have arrived at this society-protecting contract. (Something we’ve sort of forgotten in the past generation, but some in the more culturally conservative halls of academia are rediscovering it.)
So we started the institution, and developed all sorts of rules and regulations and codicils and rituals around it, such as the rehearsal dinner, and bridezillas. In a time when there was no notion of separation of religion and civil authority, it was perfectly natural that religious rituals and practices would become intertwined with the civil expectations and obligations. We should not, as a result of that, make the mistake of thinking it is “merely” a religious arrangement.
Of course, as well as “What does he think marriage is?” I could ask “What does he think government is?” Well, it’s nothing if it’s not simply the arrangements we come up with among ourselves for living together in a crowded society. I realize that libertarians think it’s some THING “out there” that’s menacing them, but it’s just us. Particularly in this country, the one with the longest-running experiment in self-government, it’s just us.
Anyway, to recap: We have marriage because long, long ago, it was noticed that if you left a man and a woman alone together, there was a tendency to have all these kids running around in short order. Primitive societies realized they needed to mitigate the potential ill effects of that explosive situation, and invented marriage. Put another way, we don’t have marriage for the couple, or for their priest or whatever. We have it for the kids, and the village they have to grow up in.
Talk about a contrast between substance and triviality…
At one moment yesterday on Twitter, about half the Tweets in my feed were about this Weiner guy (or should I say, “this weiner guy” — either way, it makes sense). Something about his wife being pregnant.
It’s not just Twitter. He (or rather, the debate among Democrats over what to do about him) LED The Wall Street Journal‘s “What’s News” column this morning. Normally, that briefing column exhibits a very fine sense of what is significant and what is not. But not today.
Yes, I get why other people think it’s important. It has to do with the never-ending war between the parties in Washington, and who’s up and who’s down, and which party is being embarrassed and which party is taking advantage of the other party’s embarrassment, yadda-yadda. NONE of which, I’m here to tell you, is actually important. I wouldn’t give two cents to have either party in the majority at any time, because as was said by Simon and Garfunkel, either way you look at it, you lose.
So take away that veneer of “importance” laid on by the daily partisan talking points, and all you have is a sex scandal, which is of no greater importance than a similar scandal involving one of those people on “Jersey Shore.”
A Twitter exchange I had a couple of days ago helps illustrate the difference between the dominant view and my own. Todd Kincannon — local attorney and Republican — retweeted this:
How many “objective” journos were more desperate to prove Palin was wrong about P. Revere than proving Weiner was wrong about his P?
I reacted by saying, “Who cares about either? Not I…” I mean, those are TWO “news stories” I was doing my best to know nothing about — and failing, of course. (Oh, and having learned more than I wanted about the Palin thing, I’ll just say that you’ve REALLY got to be a Palin fan to think anyone had to lift a finger to “prove” her wrong; any schoolchild should have known without checking.)
Todd responded: “I would be in your camp if Weiner (a) wasn’t married and (b) hadn’t lied.” To which I said, “He has NOTHING to do with me — nothing. I am NOT a NY voter. And I HOPE Palin never becomes relevant again, either…”
Of course, I can downplay and belittle this garbage all I want, and it’s not going to stop other people from making a big deal about it on a slow national news week.
But what I CAN do is take some pleasure in small things. Such as the above-pictured page in The Wall Street Journal yesterday. I thought the ironic contrast impressive. Here you have a story about this self-involved Weiner loser, whom everyone just goes on and on about and can’t get enough of… right next to a story about a man who lived an extraordinary life of service and accomplishment — but about whom no one is buzzing on Twitter (OK, no one I saw, anyway).
John Alison, who died at age 98:
- Was deputy commander of the Flying Tigers (actually, the successor unit to the Flying Tigers), defending China from the Japanese
- Innovated night fighter operations. Actually, that doesn’t describe it. He flew up at night and shot down two Japanese bombers, when no one knew you could to that.
- Led glider-borne commandos behind the lines in Burma.
- Played a key role in the Lend Lease program helping Britain and the Russians hold back Hitler.
- Was there when the German army reached the outskirts of Moscow.
- Advised Eisenhower on the use of gliders for D-Day.
As I once wrote in an editorial, that was the generation that Did Things. Him especially. And I’ll bet most of you never heard of him before his death. Meanwhile, we just can’t shut up about a guy who supposedly took pictures of his privates and sent them to women. Or something. Like I said, I’m trying to ignore it.
This is what we have come to.
Doug Nye, and the things we remember…
A few days ago, I saw on Facebook where a mutual friend had visited Doug Nye, and he wasn’t doing well. And I thought, “I need to check on him,” and now he’s gone. My mom called me last night to say it was announced at the USC baseball game…
It’s funny the things you remember about people. Doug was a great guy to talk to about all sorts of things, and not just westerns. To many people he will be remembered as the Father of the Chicken Curse, in terms of having popularized the concept. There are complex permutations on the Curse beyond what Bill Starr wrote about this morning that I could get into, but that’s not what I remember best about Doug.
Here’s what I remember best, and most fondly: Doug and I had a number of conversations sharing our childhood memories of watching “Spaceship C-8,” a kiddie show on WBTW out of Florence, hosted by the late “Captain Ashby” Ward, who was also the news anchor. I really didn’t have all that many specific memories about the show (Doug, being older, remembered more), despite having spent many an hour watching it during the summers I spent with my grandparents in Bennettsville. (Doug watched it from another end of the coverage area — I want to say Sumter.) But I enjoyed talking about it with Doug on multiple occasions.
It was about way more than one kid’s show; it was about remembering an era, a time before media saturation. A time when WBTW was the only station you could reliably get clearly in B’ville with a home antenna (WIS also came in, depending on the weather). Then, in the late 60s, along came cable to small town America, LONG before it came to cities. That way, you could get all three networks, plus some duplicates from different cities. There was less demand in cities, because they could already get three or four channels.
Consequently, we spent an awful lot of time doing stuff other than watching TV, or engaging any other mass medium. A time that in many ways was about as close as Huck Finn’s fictional existence as it was to what kids experience today.
Odd, I suppose, that the thing I would remember best from knowing the longtime TV writer was talking about days that were practically pre-TV. But that’s what I remember. It won’t really mean anything to you, I suppose, but I’m confident it would make Doug smile.
I remember that, and the fact that, as I said, Doug was a great guy to talk to about anything. Always a ready grin (that’s why I know he’d smile at my trivial remembrance), the kind of naturally affable guy who you took a moment to chat with rather than just rushing past in the course of getting through a day’s deadlines. He stood out among newspapermen that way. Not that newspapermen were so awful; I just mean Doug stood out. Which is why so many will remember him fondly.
Longing for the virtues of a democratic republic
You hear people of various political stripes saying apocalyptic things about how the country is going down the tubes, or WILL go down the tubes, if this or that faction is or is not elected, and so forth.
I started my adult life with a sort of fatalistic attitude that caused such warning to sound far, far too late. In college, I took so many history electives that shortly before I graduated I realized to my surprise that I was within reach of a double major (the other major being journalism). There was no plan; I had just had a lot of room in my schedule because I had tested out of a number of courses others were required to take — foreign language, and math — and took things that interested me. And that tended to included history courses concentrating on the early decades of the United States. (I also took a few courses in Spanish and Latin American history and political science, but that has little bearing on my point today — aside from instilling in me a deep appreciation that for all our country’s flaws today, it was built on a far better foundation that those others.)
I was particularly impressed by the wisdom of those who chose to establish a republic, and resisted the fatal temptation to fall into the madness of pure democracy. And then, as I read on, I watched it seem to fall apart. There was the election of Andrew Jackson for starters, and then… well, we have simply come to accept, even demand, “leaders” who govern with all ten fingers in the wind, like the master of an old sailing vessel seeking to squeeze maximum advantage of whatever winds prevailed.
To question pure democracy today is to seem unAmerican. When, in truth, this experiment started in a different place altogether. (Oh, and before some of you start in about how it started with blacks and women and the propertyless having no say, you know that’s not what I’m talking about. We’re talking about parallel phenomena, not factors that are dependent on one another. It’s not about upper-class white male leaders with their hair tied into queues. It’s about thoughtful, restrained leadership of vision, regardless of the demographics of those providing it. Frankly, I think Barack Obama has it in him to provide the kind of leadership that the Founders envisioned, unlike anyone who has thus far gotten much press on the GOP side. He has the ability to rise above the popular passions of the moment and see beyond them — which is one reason why so many of the most passionate today despise him so.)
Anyway, that introduction was longer than I intended. I just wanted to call your attention to a David Brooks column from a couple of weeks back — one which I missed, but which was called to my attention today by Kelly Payne via Facebook (she brought it up in a context I didn’t quite follow, but I was glad to see it nonetheless). An excerpt:
… As Kristol points out in the essay, the meaning of the phrase “public spiritedness” has flipped since the 18th century. Now we think a public-spirited person is somebody with passionate opinions about public matters, one who signs petitions and becomes an activist for a cause.
In its original sense, it meant the opposite. As Kristol wrote, it meant “curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility.” Instead of self-expression, it meant self-restraint. It was best exemplified in the person of George Washington.
Over the years, the democratic values have swamped the republican ones. We’re now impatient with any institution that stands in the way of the popular will, regarding it as undemocratic and illegitimate. Politicians see it as their duty to serve voters in the way a business serves its customers. The customer is always right.
A few things have been lost in this transition. Because we take it as a matter of faith that the people are good, we are no longer alert to arrangements that may corrode the character of the nation. For example, many generations had a moral aversion to debt. They believed that to go into debt was to indulge your basest urges and to surrender your future independence. That aversion has clearly been overcome.
We no longer have a leadership class — of the sort that existed as late as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations — that believes that governing means finding an equilibrium between different economic interests and a balance between political factions. Instead, we have the politics of solipsism. The political culture encourages politicians and activists to imagine that the country’s problems would be solved if other people’s interests and values magically disappeared…
Brooks is concerning himself with rather prosaic, although nevertheless important, issues such as spending (“The democratic triumph has created a nation that runs up huge debt and is increasingly incapable of finding a balance between competing interests”). And doing so rather from the position that we do too much of it. But there are broader themes in what he’s saying, and those are what appealed to me.