Category Archives: Personal

John Parish, dean of Tennessee journalism

That’s John in the foreground, preparing to take a picture at The Jackson Sun reunion of 2005.

Today, my friend Kevin Dietrich brought this obit to my attention:

Mr. John M. Parish, age 87, retired newsman and former press secretary to Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, died December 10, 2010….

I had not read it, but I must have received a telepathic message of some sort. Because one day this past week, for no reason, I thought of this unfinished blog post from June 28, 2007. I had started writing it after reading that David Broder piece that it mentions at the start. Then after typing away for awhile, I got sidetracked and never finished it.

But for some reason the other day, I got to thinking about John Parish. And I thought, one of these days I’ll finish it. I had no idea as I thought that that “the Bear” was already gone.

Here’s my belated remembrance of John Parish. Tennessee journalism is unlikely to see his like again…

David Broder’s column on today’s op-ed page begins with this thought:

Years ago, Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, told me of a lesson he had learned as a young man on the White House staff: It is always useful for the president to have at least one aide who has had a successful career already, who does not need the job, and therefore can offer candid advice. When he was governor of Tennessee, Alexander made sure he had such a man on his staff.

That brought back the memories, even more than seeing fellow Memphis State grad Fred Thompson yesterday.

The man on Gov. Lamar Alexander’s staff who best fits that description is John “The Bear” Parish, who became the new governor’s press secretary in January 1979, after having long established himself as the Dean of Tennessee political journalism. It was a very unusual appointment, since new governors seldom turn to such people. (Although Mark Sanford did in picking Fred Carter as his chief of staff. Mr. Carter left the office early in the Sanford administration to return to his job as president of Francis Marion University in Florence. Just as well, since as near as I could tell the governor wouldn’t listen to him anyway.)

Unlike Lee Bandy, John did not work for the state’s largest newspaper. He wrote for The Jackson Sun. The photograph above is from a 2005 reunion of folks who worked at that paper when I was there, from 1975-85. John is stepping forward to take a picture on his own camera. (That’s me in the striped shirt just over his shoulder. To my left is Richard Crowson, now editorial cartoonist with The Wichita Eagle. [But, since I wrote this, laid off like me.] On the other side of Richard is Mark Humphrey, the photographer who took the shot of me at the bottom of this post back when we were covering the Iowa Caucuses in 1980, and who is now with The Associated Press in Nashville. To my right is Bob Lewis, the former center for the Ole Miss football team who is now with the AP in Richmond. Of course, I could tell a story about each person in the picture, but what do you care, right? Well, it’s my blog, so I’ll wax nostalgic if I choose.)

John was a legend, a uniquely gifted, hard-working journalist who made a big impression on me at an early point in my own career. Frankly, I have never seen his like since. A few points from the rich mine of Parish lore:

He got his nickname, “The Bear,” from his days as The Sun‘s city editor, which predates me by a year or two. Office scuttlebutt was that John had been a bit too gruff to all the newbies hired right out of the University of Missouri’s excellent journalism program shortly after the Des Moines Register Co. bought the paper in the early ’70s. By the time I was there, he had definitely found his niche as the associate editor at the newspaper, and the paper was making the most of his exhaustive knowledge of state politics.
He wrote four or five news stories in the course of a typical day, plus — and this is the amazing thing — a daily political column on the editorial page.
Despite that volume of copy, he never made mistakes. I’m not talking about not having to run a correction in the paper. His copy was the cleanest I’ve ever seen. And in those days, nobody had clean copy. We’re talking IBM Selectric typewriters, not word processors. Not one strikeout or correction. After the first couple of times I read (I had joined the paper as a copy editor) raw copy from John, I asked someone whether he wrote rough drafts first. No. And there was no way he could have, producing a volume like that.
He couldn’t type, at least not in the way it’s taught at school. He produced all of that copy hunting and pecking, at blinding speed. It sounded like a machine gun coming from his office (John was the only person in the newsroom who had an office other than the executive editor and managing editor).
Sen. Thompson made a passing reference Wednesday to the case that launched his screen career — he represented a whistle-blower who helped bring down the fabulously corrupt Gov. Ray Blanton. But before, during and after that incident, the bane of the Blanton administration was John Parish. Day after day, outrage after outrage, John documented the governor’s gross abuse of power.
John’s wife worked for a state agency. The governor went after her to get even with John. He didn’t fire her; he transferred her job to the other end of the state. Her new commute would have been a little less than Tennessee’s full 450-mile length, but not by all that much. So she had to resign. But that didn’t stop John. Nothing stopped John.
In 1978, I was working in The Sun‘s Gibson County Bureau — quite a responsibility for a kid three years out of school. I covered everything that happened in several counties, including the one where The Sun had its second-highest circulation, by myself. (Well, actually, I had a secretary, which was my first taste of management.) But what I really wanted to do was cover state politics. That year I got my first chance to do that. Because of John and the high standard he set, the paper — small as it was — covered politics in a big way. The last month of the general election, we had a reporter full-time with each of the gubernatorial (and if I’m remembering correctly, U.S. senatorial) candidates. John no doubt would have preferred to be in four places at once, but since he couldn’t, that meant a big opportunity for me and a couple of other junior people. “Full-time” coverage, by the way, means traveling with them on the plane, in the car, eating meals with them — a kind of up-close-and-personal man-to-man coverage that is unimaginable today (papers don’t spend the money, and candidates don’t let the press that close). 20 hour days, because after the candidates were done, we had to write. Calling in stories and updates to stories from the road (in those days before laptops, we dictated). I spent a week each with Alexander and Jake Butcher, and I learned a great deal. The height of the experience came when John praised one of the stories I wrote from that time (and it WAS a good one).
Another point that year, I finagled the chance to help John cover the Democratic Mid-Term National Convention in Memphis. A conversation we had during that has stuck with me. I mentioned that some of our colleagues were in Nashville that weekend to pick up their awards at the annual state press association convention. I may have expressed my disappointment that I couldn’t be there (although I definitely preferred being at the Memphis event, working). John harrumphed. I asked what was wrong. He said he had no use for such awards, or the approval of other journalists. He only cared about the approval of the readers, and the best award they could give him was to buy the paper and read what he wrote with interest. It amuses me now to think how shocked I was at the time at this attitude. Readers? What did readers know? They weren’t professional journalists! They didn’t know what made a story good! (Mind you, I was not long out of journalism school, which fosters such silly, insular notions.) This was the first time I ever distrusted John’s judgment. But of course, he was completely and absolutely right.
Of course, Lamar Alexander won that gubernatorial election we had been covering. At Christmastime of that year, I brought my family to South Carolina for the holidays. When I got back, I got a call from my editor, who told me the stunning news — John Parish was leaving journalism to be Alexander’s press secretary. It was a really unusual move for someone of his advanced skill, experience and stature. I don’t remember ever hearing John explaining in my hearing why he made this move. But I guess he wanted to make a difference, and actually help run government instead of just writing about it. Whatever the reason, I immediately spoke up — I wanted the job covering Nashville for the paper. My editor said, “I sort of thought you would.” So I took my shot, went through the interviews. But… I didn’t get it. It went to Jeff Wilson instead (who was about the only person at the paper who maybe wanted it more than I did). Fortunately, my stock was high enough with our executive editor that he did an extraordinary thing, rather than lose me: He created a special position for me. He brought me in from the bureau and basically told me to go out and write about whatever I wanted to. I was my own assigning editor, and went covered every special assignment that interested me, from Tennessee to the Iowa Caucuses at the end of 1979. That was during the week. On Saturdays I became the editor in charge of the paper. This led to my giving up reporting for good and becoming the paper’s news editor (what most papers would call a metro editor, the editor supervising all the news reporters) the following year.

That editor gig worked out well, there and at two other papers, until The State decided it didn’t need me any more last year. In the last years, especially after Lee Bandy retired, I got to thinking that I was finally getting there, I was finally on the verge of becoming that gray eminence that would make me to SC politics what John Parish was to Tennessee’s. But that was wishful thinking. I never came close to being John Parish. No one could.

Another shot from the reunion. John, at right, is chatting with Kevin Barnard of The Tampa Tribune and Mark Humphrey. Mary Reed and Joel Wood are in the background.

Parking Meter Santa lives! And he’s back!

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You can have your grainy pictures of Sasquatch -- here is my photographic proof of the existence of Parking Meter Santa!

It was more than three years ago that I first posited the existence of a Parking Meter Santa, going about Columbia cheerfully plugging money into meters and chucking softly to himself, thinking of the joy he would bring to the next person to park there.

I based this on having found a space, in October 2007 (it seemed to me more recently; I was shocked that it was on the old blog) on Assembly Street with an hour and 54 minutes left on it. Ho, ho, ho.

This morning, I found one with 1:09 left — 1:08 by the time I took the picture. Not as generous as the time before, but more than I needed. (Perhaps I haven’t been as good as I was in 2007.)

This leaves me feeling much cheerier about the season.

Last night I watched part of Ben Stein’s documentary in which he seeks to debunk the anti-religious gospel of such famous atheists as Richard Dawkins. Well today, we have a settler for those who don’t believe in Santa… Ha! Take that!…

Bobby Hitt at Commerce

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Pretty much everyone who follows such things has said Nikki Haley’s first big test would be choosing her Commerce Secretary. And now we see how she has chosen. And it is very… interesting.

For the last couple of hours, since I heard that she had picked Bobby Hitt, I’ve been thinking back over my long association with him and wondering what I can legitimately say that is relevant to the situation.

You see, I know Bobby Hitt. I’ve known him for years. I served with Bobby Hitt. And you, senator, are no…

Wait, wrong tape loop…

Here’s the thing: Bobby Hitt used to be my boss, back when he was managing editor of The State and I was the gummint affairs editor. We worked together in a tumultuous time, as newsroom management was in transition from the old, family-owned regime to a new breed that, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the Knight Ridder editors. Bobby was a leading light of the first category, I was the vanguard of the second (I was the first editor in the newsroom from a KR paper — in fact, I think, the first who had ever been an editor outside South Carolina — after KR bought The State). I didn’t feel like an interloper or a spy — as a native South Carolinian, I just felt like a guy who had come home — but a lot of people regarded me as such. And Bobby was the new generation of the old guard. Some sparks were inevitable.

When I came to work at The State in 1987, Bobby was away doing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, which sorta told me he was no dummy. When he came back in ’88, he was elevated to managing editor of The State (he had headed The Columbia Record before that). In 1990, Gil Thelen replaced my good friend and Bobby’s mentor, Tom McLean, as executive editor. About a year later, Bobby left the paper. What happened in between is a bit of a whirl in my memory, as it was the year of the Lost Trust scandal, the departure of Jim Holderman from USC, and about a dozen other scandals that had my staff running like crazy to stay ahead of them. (A time Cindi Scoppe alluded to in her column about me when I left the paper.)

Working with Bobby was … interesting. Bobby is a character and a half. He’s intense, and has a manner that works well with folks who think, “This guy will flat get some things done,” and very much rubs others the wrong way.

Bobby went to work for Nelson Mullins when he left the paper, and when BMW came into the state and hired that law firm to represent it, Bobby was delegated to help the Germans negotiate the complexities and peculiarities of public and governmental relations. They were so impressed by the job he did that they hired him away from Nelson Mullins, and he’s been up in Greer ever since, playing a key role at the operation that still stands as the big ecodevo success of the last two or three decades.

His intimate knowledge of the workings of such a business and what they’re looking for in a home should stand him in good stead, and no doubt was a huge factor in Nikki Haley picking him for this job. (An anecdote Bobby told me a few years ago about why BMW picked SC… Two reasons: First, our storied tech school system, which they relied upon to train their workers. Second — a BMW exec went on a driving tour of residential neighborhoods in the Greenville-Spartanburg area. He approvingly noted the neat houses and well-kept yards, and decided that people who took care of their property and community like that were people they could work with. The first is an ecodevo asset we understand and are happy to exploit. The second was intriguingly intangible.) The BMW name is political magic, and she’s no doubt hoping some of that magic will rub off on Commerce.

Oh, one other thing of interest: I can’t really tell you for sure what Bobby’s politics might be. News people didn’t speak to each other about such things. But I know he’s Rob Miller’s uncle. Assuming Nikki knew that, kudos to her for not letting that get in the way.

I’m going to be listening with interest the next few days to what business leaders say about this pick. Not what they’re quoted as saying in the paper, but what they say more informally. They’ve mostly been VERY anxious for a new approach to ecodevo in both the governor’s office and Commerce, which is why a lot of them supported Vincent Sheheen against the Sanfordista candidate. Nikki knows that, and knowing it, she has made a rather bold and unconventional pick.

Bobby is a unique individual, from his thick Charleston accent to that slightly mad, conspiratorial, insinuating grin that explodes out of his scruffy red beard at the least provocation. He’s certainly not the standard-issue CEO type that one expects in the Commerce job. No man in the gray flannel suit is he. I feel confident he’ll grab ‘hold of Commerce with both hands, and make something happen or bust a gut in the attempt. His uniqueness will either blow up in Gov.-to-be Haley’s face, or pay off big time. I hope, for South Carolina’s sake, that the latter is the case. I’ll be rooting for Bobby (and Nikki for that matter — she’s the only governor we’ve got), and if I can ever help him get the job done, I’ll be glad to do what I can. We need a win. We need a bunch of ’em.

“Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, tail on his hat…”

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A reader this week reminded me of something that I may have known, but had forgotten — that long before he was the funniest deadpan comic actor in America, Leslie Nielsen was … “The Swamp Fox” on TV. She wrote:

I occasionally post on your blog as Abba. Would you consider posting this clip from YouTube showing Leslie Nielsen, who died this week, as South Carolina’s Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, in Disney’s series from the early 1960s – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vvQJ7ZDg1Y. Here’s a longer version – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGN1pDzYAY&feature=related. Leslie Nielsen never looked so good! This clip has the catchy theme song that I remember so well from my childhood. We used to play the Swamp Fox on the playground at school, and many of the boys in my class had tri-cornered hats with fox tails attached. Hear the song once, and you’ll be humming it all day long! A fitting tribute to Leslie Nielsen from our corner of the world, I think.

I loved that show, which ran from October 23, 1959 (right after my 6th birthday) to January 15, 1961 — hardly more than a year.

Like the far, far more successful “Davy Crockett” series and generally forgotten “Gray Ghost,” these shows inspired me and other very young kids to run out and play at being actual figures from history. (Anyone remember that goofy, overly elaborate way Col. Mosby saluted? I thought it was cool, and used to go around imitating it. Wouldn’t you like to see video of that?)

Actually, to take that a bit farther… to this day, whenever I hear the words “Tory” and “Patriot,” I think of first hearing them used on “The Swamp Fox.” So while my understanding of the term was to grow and expand later, I actually had a minimal working knowledge of what a “Tory” was at the age of 6. If I ran into a 6-year-old who used a term like that today, I’d be shocked. But it was common currency among fans of “The Swamp Fox.”

I can also remember a conversation I had with my uncle about “The Gray Ghost.” I was confused about the whole blue-vs.-gray thing (especially since I was watching it in black-and-white), and I asked him during one show, “Are those the good guys or the bad guys?” My uncle, who was only a kid himself (six years older than I) could have given me a simplistic answer, but instead, he said, “Well, they’re both Americans…” and went on to suggest that a case could be made for both being good guys. That sort of rocked my world. There was no such ambiguity on the Westerns I watched. This was my introduction to the concept that in war, in politics, in life, things can be complicated, that there are many shades of gray. Perhaps the track that set mind on has something to do with why I don’t buy into the whole Democrat-vs.-Republican, left-vs.-right dichotomy that drives our politics. After all, they’re all Americans. And in the wider world, they’re all humans. Even the Nazis. (Of course, this doesn’t keep me from understanding that when humans’ actions go beyond the pale — as with Nazis, or terrorists — they must be opposed, with force if necessary.)

Also, while at first I didn’t think I remembered the “Swamp Fox” theme song, as I listened to it repeated over and over on that clip above, I had a dim memory of being struck by the odd syntax of that second line, “no one knows where the Swamp Fox at” — I didn’t know WHY it sounded odd (I was just learning to read, and hadn’t gotten to grammar yet), it just did.

In other words, these shows — which presented very simplistic, often inaccurate glimpses of history — not only helped feed a lifelong interest in history, but helped foster the ability to think.

So… TV doesn’t actually have to be junk, although it’s often hard to remember that these days.

Bad Things Arising (got to shake these from my head)

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Over the weekend, I had some silly be-bop song running through my head, after hearing it on a CD my wife was playing in the kitchen. Perfectly harmless, and no permanent damage. I’ve already forgotten what song it was.

Today, something more ominous has gripped my mind… I’ve got two songs from “Jesus Christ Superstar” running through my mind — “This Jesus Must Die” (which is bad enough) and “Judas’ Death.”

This is what I get, I suppose, for not going to Mass yesterday. I had a cold, I was scheduled to administer the Eucharist, and under the circumstances I thought it best not to show.

Now this.

Sample lyrics from the first song:

Caiaphas:

Fools! You have no perception
The stakes we are gambling
Are frighteningly high
We must crush him completely
So like John before him
This Jesus must die
For the sake of the nation
This Jesus must die
Must die, must die
This Jesus must die…

And a sample from the second:

Judas
My God, I saw him
He looked three-quarters dead
And he was so bad
I had to turn my head
You beat him so hard
That he was bent and lame
And I know who everybody’s
Going to blame
I don’t believe he knows
I acted for our good
I’d save him all the suffering
If I could
Don’t believe
Our good
Save him
If I could

Now, in my defense, the first song really has some appealingly clever lyrics, before you get to the bloodthirsty ones:

Annas
What then to do about Jesus of Nazareth?
Miracle wonderman, hero of fools

Priest
No riots, no army, no fighting, no slogans

Caiaphas
One thing I’ll say for him, Jesus is cool…

What then to do about this Jesusmania?
How do we deal with the carpenter king?
Where do we start with a man who is bigger
Than John was when John did his baptism thing?

But nevertheless, this is not a good way to start the week…

November 22nd in Dallas, 47 years on

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Elections oracle Larry Sabato Tweeted this morning:

Eerie to be in Dallas on a November 22. Weather (early rain, clearing,sunny 70s) similar to 47 yrs ago. No formal commemoration.

So consider this your opportunity to share your memories of the day. And if you’re too young to have memories of day, well then who cares what you think? (Aw, now don’t go crying to your mommies about how mean the old man was to you…)

My favorite “Where were you?” story was the experience of Richard Nixon, which I read about once in a book about the 60s compiled by Rolling Stone. On this day 47 years ago, he was being driven through a residential neighborhood in an unfamiliar city, when suddenly a woman ran out of her house and looked around her desperately. She had just heard the news. Nixon, who had NOT heard the news, told his driver to stop. He got out of the car and walked toward the woman, asking whether he could be of any assistance.

The woman took one look at him, and then she really freaked out.

My own experience was atypical. I was out of the country, my Dad being stationed in Ecuador on U.S. Navy business.

We didn’t learn about it until later in the day. I was in the 5th grade at the Colegio Americano, which was way the other side of town. My bus ride home on Don Enrique (buses had names, and personalities) took about an hour. I was one of the last ones on the route. My best buddy Tony Wessler was dropped off six blocks before I was.

When I got home, I rang the doorbell at the security door at the foot of the stairs (we lived in the upstairs of a large duplex). My mom hit the buzzer, and as I started up the stairs I was startled to see Tony standing at the head of the stairs with Mom. What’s up? I asked. “The president’s been shot!” I kept walking up, and asked, “The president of what?” Mind you, I had already lived through one coup in Ecuador that year. So maybe there had been another, more violent, overthrow in a neighboring country.

“The president of the United States,” came the answer. So that was what had caused Tony to outrun the bus…

That hit hard. It was particularly strange to be in another country, as the dependent of a representative of the United States, and know that back home our president had just been killed, and we didn’t know why or by whom or what might happen next. (And mind you, since I was personally familiar with the potential instability of governments in a way that few Americans were, the feeling was intensified. “Seven Days in May” didn’t seem like such wild fiction to me.) It felt like being abandoned to fend for oneself. Wild thoughts went through my head. I thought of the .38-cal. revolver that my Dad kept on a shelf in my parents’ bedroom closet, which had been issued to him just in case. (I don’t think my Dad knew I knew it was there, but you can’t hide anything from kids.)

Then there was Kennedy himself, who personified the youthful strength, the can-do attitude, of my home country. If he could die, just like that… I had not been a big Kennedy supporter initially. For reasons I’ve written about elsewhere, I had been for Nixon in 1960, at the age of 7. But after that I had been fully co-opted into the whole P.T. 109/Camelot mystique, and was proud that JFK had various initiatives going on (to counter Castro, but I didn’t know that) to help Latin America, such as Alliance for Progress.

But not just expatriate Americans were shaken. I witnessed a generous mourning from Ecuadoreans, who identified with this Catholic president as they had no other. Our school yearbook for that year would have a dedicated page with the headline, “Kennedy Ha Muerto,” and a picture of the president and his bride and kids outside a church before or after Mass — Jackie wearing the obligatory veil on her head.

That was reassuring.

Anyway, that was my experience 47 years ago today.

It’s not always all about me, as things turn out…

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We had a little early Thanksgiving dinner/birthday celebration today at ADCO, and as we were eating I kept hearing some of my coworkers saying:

Brad paisley… Brad, paisley… Brad… paisley

Which made me a little self-conscious, I’ve gotta tell you.

But you know what? This is going to be a real shock to you, I’m sure, but they weren’t talking about the tie I chose to wear today. Go figure.

It’s not just that he’s black, because he isn’t

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On Election Day, The State ran a Eugene Robinson column connecting the Tea Party ire to the fact that the president is, well, black. He was quite moderate and reasonable about it, taking pains to say that “It’s not racist to criticize President Obama, it’s not racist to have conservative views, and it’s not racist to join the Tea Party.” This was followed, as you might expect, by a significant “But…”

And I think he makes a fair, if not airtight, case for the argument that the Tea Party would not be as big a phenomenon as it is if this president were not noticeably different from every president we’ve had before. I think that’s true. And I think for a lot of people, his alleged blackness forms a part of it. But that’s only because most Americans, black and white, seem to buy into the idea, promoted by the president himself, that he is, indeed, black.

But not I. As you know, I’ve never considered him to be black. I set out my reasoning in that double-length column in October 2008, “Barack Like Me” (in which I argued that Obama had as much in common with me as he does the average black American). Rather than revisit every word of it, I’ll give you one short reason why he is not “black” in the sense that it is used as a sociopolitical designation in this country: Not ONE of his ancestors was brought to this country as a slave. Not one. This puts him entirely outside the American narrative of race.

Aside from that, he was not raised as a black American. Blackness was something he personally decided to embrace as a teenager looking for an identity, as kids — particularly kids with childhoods as unrooted as his — tend to do.

And because of all that, I think Robinson gets it slightly wrong in his conclusion:

I ask myself what’s so different about Obama, and the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black. For whatever reason, I think this makes some people unsettled, anxious, even suspicious – witness the willingness of so many to believe absurd conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, his religion and even his absent father’s supposed Svengali-like influence from the grave.

Obama has made mistakes that rightly cost him political support. But I can’t help believing that the Tea Party’s rise was partly due to circumstances beyond his control – that he’s different from other presidents, and that the difference is his race.

I come up with a different answer when I ask myself that same question — “what’s so different about Obama”? Sure, his being the child of an absent African father and a white mother makes him different from any other POTUS, ever. But so do several other rather glaring factors that may be related to his alleged blackness, but which could exist completely independently of the ambiguous color of his skin. Such as:

His name. “Barack Hussein Obama.” It’s extremely foreign. Set aside the connection with Islam and Arabic, and all the freight those carry at this point in history (such as the uncanny closeness to the name “Osama”), for a moment. Just in terms of being different, it’s easily light years beyond the name of anyone else who has even come close to occupying the Oval Office. The most exotic name of any previous president, by far, was “Roosevelt.” I mean, “Millard Fillmore” was goofy-sounding, but it sounded like an English-speaker. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the first Catholic to receive a major party nomination had the vanilla/whitebread name “Al Smith.”
His father was a foreigner, regardless of his race. He was a man who spent almost none of his life in this country. He came here briefly, fathered a child, and went home. Show me the parallel to that in the biographies of former presidents.
While he never really knew his father (he had to learn about him at a distance, the way we learn about figures in history), he did know his stepfather, who was Indonesian. Young Barry spent a goodly portion of his childhood in Indonesia. In my earlier column I drew a parallel to my own childhood sojourn in South America, but I was there undeniably as an American. Barry Obama lived in SE Asia as an Indonesian, or as close to it as someone of Caucasian/African heritage could.
The fact that, to the extent that he is connected to African roots, it is a heritage that is totally divorced from most presidents’ sense of connection to Europe. I didn’t fully realize that until the Churchill bust episode, which caused some Brit to note something that hadn’t fully occurred to me: This is the first president the modern UK has had to deal with who doesn’t have the Special Relationship hard-wired into his sense of self, if not his genes. In fact, quite the contrary: Unlike any previous president (except maybe Kennedy, who spent his adult life living down his father’s pro-German sympathies leading up to WWII), Obama’s grandfather actually experienced political oppression at the hands of British colonialists.
His unearthly cool. His intellectual detachment, the sense he projects that he takes nothing personally. Weirdly, this takes a trait usually associated, in most stereotypical assumptions, with Northern Europeans, and stretches it until it screams. He looks at problems the way a clinical observer does. Probably more maddeningly to his detractors, he looks at his fellow Americans that way — as though he is not one of them; he is outside; he has something of the air of an entomologist studying beetles with a magnifying glass.

Bottom line, I think that last trait probably contributes most to the alienation many feel toward him. They sense that detachment, and they find it off-putting, and their minds grope for explanations, and they see all the other different things about him. That last one is one with which I can identify to some extent. I think one reason I’m a journalist (as are a lot of military brats) is that I moved around a lot as a kid, and was never quite of the place where I lived, and tended to look at a given place and its people with the detachment of an outsider. It wasn’t until I moved here to the place of my birth in my 30s (and I was only born here; I grew up everywhere else) that I embraced fully the identity of being a South Carolinian, but as a conscious act of will, rather like Obama’s decision to be “black.” I have a certain claim to it — mostly genetic (my family tree is three-fourths South Carolinian) — just as Obama has a genetic claim to blackness, but it’s nothing like the SC identification of someone who has lived, say, in Cayce his whole life.

As you can see, I still feel an affinity for Barack Obama, as I did in 2008. He has my sympathy, and since he IS my president, I hope he is successful as president — even though I supported McCain. And I in no way excuse the extreme, personal hostility to him among many of the voters who voted the Tea Party way on Tuesday. But I do find myself trying to understand it, based upon available facts. And I think the factors I listed above are at least as relevant as the color of his skin, if not more so.

How were YOUR election stats? Here are mine

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On Tuesday, I almost, but not quite, posted a list of exactly how I voted on everything. Blogs are confessional in nature, and now that I no longer have a newspaper to embarrass, why not let it all hang out?

But then, my latent respect for the confidentiality of the voting booth kicked in. It’s one thing to be honest with people, and to tell them ALMOST everything. But to go all the way? I don’t know. I’m still pondering.

When I was at the paper, by the way, I generally voted a straight editorial board ticket. (This is NOT the same as voting a straight-party ticket, a sin for which the punishment should be immediate, permanent loss of the right to vote. A straight-party vote means the voter has surrendered his right to decide to another entity. The paper’s endorsements largely reflected my own careful discernments, aided by interaction with other smart folks.) Not always, though, because I didn’t always win the endorsement arguments (and despite what they say about me, I DID sometimes bow to a consensus, even though my colleagues were, of course, wrong). And sometimes I’d do quirky things like decide to vote for a write-in, whereas I had insisted that the board choose the lesser of two undesirable candidates who had a chance. But usually, a straight ticket.

I was conscious of that in the booth on Tuesday, and made note of the degree to which I agreed with my former colleagues this time. And I ran other dichotomies as well — Democrats vs. Republicans, won-lost, etc. I sort of got into the habit of doing this with The State’s endorsements several years back at the paper. And then each year, I’d add new stats to the running totals. One grows tired of people spreading the canard that one’s candidates always lose (when close to 75 percent of the paper’s endorsees won), or that one “always” endorses Democrats, or “always” endorses Republicans (the cumulative over 12 years was almost exactly 50-50, with the Democrats slightly edging out Republicans, but with the paper never breaking its string GOP endorsements for president — although we came very close in 2008). You can see a discussion of those stats back here, and here is my simple little spreadsheet.

So here’s what I found:

Here are The State‘s endorsements. Among the very few candidates they endorsed, I agreed on three and disagreed on one. So congratulations, Cindi and Warren, y’all were 75 percent right.
Ditto with the four constitutional questions. The paper went “no, no, yes, no,” and I went “no, yes, yes, no.” More about that in a moment. Of course, I agreed with the paper on the sales tax referendum, but since I live in Lexington County, I didn’t get to vote on that.
I voted for four Democrats, and seven Republicans. None of the Democrats won. Of course, one was a write-in. All but one — also a write-in — of the Republicans won. (The paper went with one Democrat and three Republicans.)
Not counting the two write-ins, which wouldn’t be fair to my stats, five of my choices in contested races won, and three lost.
I didn’t vote for either treasurer, where Loftis faced no opposition, or for secretary of state, where I knew nothing about Mark Hammond’s opponent (but knew he would win). I DID vote, however, for Gen. Livingston even though he had no opposition, because I’ve heard many good things about him.
About the write-ins… I voted for Joe Riley for the U.S. Senate. Hey, if he’s not going to run for governor, I might as well vote for him for something. Then, trying to think of a Republican (to balance out Mayor Riley) in the 2nd Congressional District as an alternative to Joe Wilson and Rob Miller, I went with Nathan Ballentine. (He does live in the district, right?)
Finally, a confession. And don’t tell Cindi Scoppe about this. But I did something I would never have done as an editorial page editor… I voted on a constitutional amendment according to my own political attitudes, rather than in keeping with the larger principle of not cluttering up the constitution with political statements. I voted “yes” on the amendment to make union-vote ballots secret. Yeah, I know it will be invalidated by whatever Congress does, and the constitution is not the place for empty gestures. But I agree with Lindsey Graham on this, and I said so with my vote. Maybe I was influenced by that “Johnny Sack” video I saw a year or two back. I’m kinda embarrassed about it — it smacks of voting my “gut,” which is unseemly — but there it is.

Mind you, I was keeping track of all this stuff, making little notes to myself, having little internal debates on several of the candidates and issues, even while being distracted by that little drama going on in the next booth. So I was in there awhile. I always am. I take my franchise VERY seriously.

What I said to the telecommunicators

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Here are the brief remarks I prepared this morning for my election post-mortem address to the SC Telecommunications Association‘s Fall Conference at the Radisson.

I had planned to just jot down some notes in my notepad over breakfast, but chickened out and, before leaving the house, typed out the following to read.

Of course, most of the time was taken up with questions and answers, which is the way I prefer it. I feel SO much more comfortable reacting to questions than I do delivering a prepared speech. I relax and that point, because I know we’re actually talking about something that interests the audience, or at least a portion of it. But the conventions dictate that your say SOMETHING before the blessed relief of questions, so this is what I prepared, and more or less read:

What happened Tuesday?

Well, not a whole lot.

On the national level, we saw the usual thing happen: The party that did NOT hold the White House gained seats in Congress two years after the president’s election. This phenomenon was intensified somewhat by the fact that the Democrats had gained big for two cycles, and the Republicans were overdue to win some of those seats back.

There was extra emotional intensity this time because of the Tea Party movement, which arose in connection with general voter dissatisfaction in a time of prolonged economic anxiety. There was a lot of anti-incumbent anger out there, and the party in power took a big hit as a result.

What will happen next? Well, what usually happens. Congress will not suddenly become a more highly functional institution. In fact, given the platforms on which many of the newcomers were elected, expect to see a lot more yelling and posturing without anything new actually happening. On election night, I recall hearing one Republican say that the GOP would repeal the new health care legislation every day and send it to the president for his veto. This is not a recipe for getting the public to think more highly of the folks in Washington. And even THAT is going to be pretty tough to accomplish since the GOP didn’t win control of the Senate.

And yes, I realize that threat was probably mere rhetorical hyperbole, but in terms of productivity, I don’t think the result it would produce is terribly different from what we’re likely to see actually happening.

So what will we see happen? Well, in two years, or perhaps four, the pendulum will swing back to the Democrats. And we’ll continue to see this kind of back-and-forth until Americans get totally fed up with the two parties, and some viable alternative emerges.

Here at home, we saw what we expected to see – a Republican sweep in a state where that is pretty much the norm now, especially in a year in which Republicans were winning everywhere.

The forces causing this to happen were so powerful that they caused voters to sweep aside a number of concerns that had been raised about the GOP gubernatorial candidate, from her failures to pay taxes on time to her somewhat sketchy employment record. As it happened, she won, but with a smaller margin than any other Republican running statewide. It will be interesting to see whether she does anything differently than planned as a result of having garnered less than a mandate in a year in which a GOP nominee should have had a landslide.

Going forward, we’re going to see a phenomenon we’ve already seen advance and become more pronounced: With the Republican Party being so dominant, we’ve been seeing for some time the emergence of factions within that party. It’s like the days when Democrats were so dominant: Since essentially everyone in power was a Democrat, factions emerged, and the characters of individual Democrats became more important. Since everyone was a Democrat, just being a Democrat wasn’t much of a recommendation.

Expect a power struggle between the faction of the party that strongly supported Nikki Haley – and her mentor Mark Sanford before her – and the current legislative leadership. The question remains whether the present leadership will be the future leadership. But whether they are or not, the main conflicts we see in the State House are going to be in the future, even more than we’ve seen in recent years, conflicts among Republicans.

Democrats won’t agree with me on this, but in a way I see this as a fundamentally healthy thing. Any trend that causes people to disregard party labels – which I regard as extremely destructive to the deliberative process upon which our system of representative democracy depends – and look at other, more meaningful factors, is essentially a promising thing.

Now, I’d like to go to your questions.

And fortunately, questions were forthcoming, and they were thoughtful. I got engaged in a conversation afterwards with a gentleman who wondered whether the current divide between the largely Democratic urban areas and the generally Republican rest of the country would continue to be worse. I had no idea, beyond agreeing with him that suburbs and exurbs tended to foster GOP sentiments, while more densely packed people tended the other way. And we were probably on the verge of something interesting as we discussed how population density had a profound effect on basic economics (something a man in the telephone industry would certainly understand), it led to different assumptions about what should be done in common via government and what should not. But at that point I had to run to ADCO. I really do have to buckle down and do some real work, now that the election is over.

Saturday morning I speak to a partisan crowd — the Lower Richland Dems. This will be a new experience for me. I have spoken to groups that turned out to be quite partisan, to my dismay, but were not billed that way. The message they get will be essentially the same, although maybe I’ll think of some stuff to add between now and then. It will be interesting to see how they react to it.

Comment on election results HERE…

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… and I will do my best to keep up with them and approve them in something close to real time.

Remember, I’ll be on WIS from 7 to 8 tonight, and then again from 11 to midnight, if my voice holds out (I seem to have come down with an untimely cold).

So watch me, watch the returns, comment here, and I’ll try to keep up. I’m not sure what the accommodation will be at WIS for my laptop, but I’ll try to figure out something…

Restraining myself while voting

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The Quail Hollow precinct at 12:09 p.m. Most of these folks had arrived well before noon, so this is not the lunch rush..

Quail Hollow precinct at 12:09 p.m. All of these people had arrived BEFORE noon (newcomers were still outside), so this is not the lunch-hour rush. In fact, weirdly, it sort of slowed down during lunch hour...

First, several quick Tweets I wrote while standing in the queue:

Standing in a moderately long line at Quail Hollow precinct (I’ve seen longer). 400 voters so far. Man who just left said it took an hour…

Close to 500 voters have shown up so far at Quail Hollow at noon. Veteran poll worker says 700 to 800 is the normal total for all day.

Man behind me tells companions, “This right here might be the most important vote we ever cast.” I agree, but don’t dare ask what HE means.

Not good for Sheheen: My precinct is heavily Republican, my daughter’s is strongly Democratic. Big turnout at mine, a trickle at hers.

A suggestion: If you favor Vincent Sheheen, or merely distrust Nikki Haley, now would be a good time to get your lazy behind out and VOTE.

Of course, on those last couple, I could have been making an incorrect assumption: I’ve heard so many Republicans say they can’t bring themselves to vote for Nikki that maybe, just maybe, enough of them will vote for Vincent. Yeah, that’s a big maybe, and perhaps I’ve just been talking to the brighter sort of Republican, the kind who pay attention and think before they vote. You can’t count on everyone, or even a majority, doing that in an election.

For instance, a friend who usually votes Democratic told me the story of her husband — who ALWAYS votes Republican — a few minutes ago. He has planned all year to vote for Nikki. She asked him this morning before he went to the polls and he said yes, he was still going to vote for. My friend, and her mother, both remonstrated with him about it. Later, he texted his wife to say that he had voted for Vincent. Once he got into the booth, he just couldn’t bring himself to help put Nikki in office.

But now that it’s too late to ask, I find myself really wondering what that man meant when he said, “This right here might be the most important vote we ever cast.” I told my friend in the above anecdote that, and she said she couldn’t imagine a Nikki supporter being that eager to vote. Surely, anyone voting for her, ignoring all her startling negatives, is simply grimly doing what he perceives to be his duty to a party. I told her she was mistaken: Tea Party types think they are part of a great, exciting reform movement. And they seem convinced, despite all the contradictions, that she is part of it, too. They really do, near as I can tell. A Tea Partisan planning to vote for Haley would say something like that.

The same gentleman, discussing the constitutional questions on the ballot with the ladies accompanying him, said it was simple — vote “yes” to all. I restrained myself again. One of the ladies said she wasn’t so sure about that hunting and fishing one, and the man said she probably wouldn’t understand, since she doesn’t hunt and fish. I REALLY held myself back at this point, stopping myself from delivering a soliloquy on how we shouldn’t clutter the state constitution with superfluous language, particularly to indulge our personal whims, and how the issue isn’t whether you’re for hunting or fishing, but whether you think it belongs in the constitution… Such a lecture from me at that time would have been most unseemly, since I was about to violate that principle by voting for constitutional language indulging one of my own political attitudes, which I would normally be dead set against doing. So it’s doubly good that I said nothing.

But the greatest test of my discretion came when I finally got to the booth itself. (Or whatever you call those things, more like a TV table with blinders. A “half-booth,” perhaps.)

It was awkward to step up to the booth at all, because the lady at the one next to me was for some reason standing backed up away and toward me rather than squaring up to her own booth. I could hardly get to mine without brushing against her back. The reason for this became apparent as a poll worker came up to help her with some sort of trouble she was having.

From that point on, I had to struggle to concentrate on my own voting because of the intense scene being played out right at my elbow. At first, I didn’t notice what was said, until the lady bristled, “I don’t appreciate you speaking to me that way! You have no business doing that…”

YOU try not listening to something after hearing that, especially coming from someone you’re practically touching. I mean, I’m a gentleman and all that, but…

BEING a gentleman, I scrupulously didn’t look that way, but I recognized the voice of the poll worker as that of a woman I’ve known for decades. She was using a perfectly professional, calm tone, but she made the mistake of urging the voter to be calm, which really set her off. She was apparently embarrassed at needing help, and extremely sensitive as a result.

At least once more, she demanded that the worker stop “speaking to me that way.” But eventually, she did calm down somewhat, and said that she only cared about voting for two people, and they were both Republicans, so it was probably fine. The worker insisted that it was NOT fine for her to vote a straight Republican ticket if she had not intended to. (God Bless that poll worker! If only it were illegal to surrender your thinking to a party! If only it were not the first choice offered!) They went back and forth on this, with the embarrassed voter wanting it to be over with, and the worker insisting that it was important that her preferences, and only her preferences, be accurately tallied, and that they could fix this…

I don’t know how it came out. But it was hard not to intervene and say “Listen to the poll worker, lady!” But a gentleman doesn’t intervene in, or take any notice at all of, an unseemly disagreement between ladies. Unless it comes of course to fisticuffs, in which case he turns to the other gentlemen present and places wagers…

Imagine a smiley face at the end there…

… which means I would never leave there

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I don’t think of myself as a particularly materialistic person, or a sensualist per se (except within certain parameters). And I am most definitely, certainly not a foodie. Personally, I find foodism… off-putting.

But there are two things that I look forward to every day, and that are hard for me to forgo — coffee in the morning (and sometimes in the afternoon), and beer at night.

And now Kathryn brings my attention to this:

Starbucks Explores Possibility Of Selling Beer & Wine

Hey, you can have the wine. And I’d rather that the cheese not be in the same building. But the best coffee in the world, followed by beer? I would never want to leave.

Precious little savages at the Fair

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As I mentioned in the texting post, last night I met up with the twins, and their big sister and parents, at the Fair.

I found them sharing a smoked turkey leg, making like a couple of cave-dwellers.

Note that Twin A has a new do. She took scissors to her own hair, and butchered it to the point that her mother took her to get it cut into a Pixie — then promptly got her ears pierced so no one would think she was a boy. As if anyone could; she’s so pretty. Twin B has thus far shown no interest in doing a makeover, which is probably a wise choice on her part.

The good news in this is that now, people other than the inner circle can actually tell the girls apart.

About the George Will thing…

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Another editor who left The State about when I did cited the second of those two pictures I posted of myself with Vincent Sheheen, and asked:

Brad —
Anybody mistaken you for George Will lately? You could pick up some nice money on the lecture circuit …

To which I replied yeah, I get that sometime. I first heard it at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta in 1988, from one of the delegates. Coming from a Democratic delegate, of course, it wasn’t entirely a compliment.

But no, we were not separated at birth. Nor do I think I look much like him. I mean, you ever see George Will smile? Come on.

I did have lunch with him one time at the Capital City Club, but one could say that about a lot of people.

This reminds me — two of my daughters say they’ve seen a guy at Yesterday’s who looks so much like me that people have gone up to him thinking he IS me. But he isn’t. I sort of want to see this guy, but I sorta don’t. Ever meet someone that everybody thinks looks like you? It’s generally a huge letdown to learn what people, even your loved ones, think you look like.

Anyway, one of my daughters saw the guy at the Italian Festival and pointed him out to my wife, and my wife said he didn’t look like me at all. Which is a relief…

Speaking the same language, but only technically

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You know how I just got HD? Well, this process all started with me wanting a Blu-ray player so I could watch Netflix without waiting for the discs to come in the mail.

That part of the project has been… tricky. I’ve spent several late nights in the past week trying to get that one simple thing done.

I thought I’d share with you my conversation — excuse me, “chat,” which isn’t the same thing — about the problem with a tech at Sony. As you read it, imagine unexplained pauses of five or 10 minutes while I wait for short, incomplete answers from the tech. Of course, when I took a couple of minutes to go try what the tech suggested (going through the process on a different browser), I got “Please acknowledge my question, so that I can assist you better.”

Note that, while it’s all in English, there is a distinct… disconnect… in the flow of communication. I get the sense that each comment is being run imperfectly through a translator. And it was amazingly frustrating. I was so desperate to work effectively with this person that I even slipped into a stilted version of English myself, hoping it would facilitate things (“Yes, it persists.” To which I got another deadpan, Hal-9000 answer):

Corinne_ > Hi Brad. Welcome to Sony Online Support. I’m Corinne. Please allow me a moment to review your concern.

Brad Warthen > Here is a full description of the problem:

Brad Warthen > I’m trying to get Netflix on my new Blu-ray player. I have an internet connection, but when it tells me to go to internet.sony.tv/netflix on my computer and enter a password, I run into trouble. That address asks me for my e-mail address and a password. So I enter my e-mail address, and the password that the Blu-ray player told me to use, and I get “The password you entered is invalid. Please enter a valid password.” So I try the password I created when I registered my player, and I get the same message. So I click on “Reset or Forgot your Password” and follow the directions, and you send me a new, temporary password. I’ve done this THREE TIMES now, and each time I enter the new, temporary password minutes (sometimes seconds) after receiving it, and I get “Your temporary password has expired. Please change the existing password at SonyStyle website.” Every time, same message. So what in the world am I supposed to do now?

Corinne_ > I am sorry that the BD Player can not be registerred in the Sony Essential website.

Corinne_ > Thanks for waiting, Brad.

Corinne_ > I’ll be happy to assist you in this regard.

Corinne_ > Do you have a SonyStyle account?

Brad Warthen > Yes.

Corinne_ > Did you try using different Web Brower?

Brad Warthen > No. I just used Firefox.

Brad Warthen > Hello? Are you there?

Corinne_ > Yes, I am online.

Brad Warthen > I said no, I just used Firefox. Is there a preferred browser?

Corinne_ > Brad, it is recommened to open the Eseential website in either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox 3.6.

Corinne_ > Please check the operation with a different web browser.

Brad Warthen > I’m using Firefox. 3.6.10. But I’ll go try IE as well.

Corinne_ > Sure, please go ahead.

Corinne_ > Please let me know if the issue persists.

Brad Warthen > … that is, assuming it still works… I never use IE; I always use Firefox or Chrome…

Corinne_ > Please let me know the result after using Internet Explorer.

Corinne_ > Please acknowledge my question, so that I can assist you better.

Brad Warthen > Yes, it persists.

Brad Warthen > I tried all my passwords, then requested a new one. When I entered the new one, I got “Your temporary password has expired. Please change the existing password at SonyStyle website. ” Again.

Corinne_ > I am sorry to hear this.

Corinne_ > Thanks for the additional information.

Corinne_ > I am really sorry for the delay in response.

Corinne_ > This is a dead lock issue.

Brad Warthen > What does that mean?

Corinne_ > This deadlock issue can handled by our next level of support over phone.

Brad Warthen > OK, what’s the number?

Corinne_ > They are our next level of support and better eqipped to help you resolving the issue.

Brad Warthen > OK. What’s the number, so I can call them?

Corinne_ > They are available at: 239-768-7547.

Corinne_ > Their hours of operation is:

Corinne_ > Mon-Fri 8:00AM-12:00AM (Midnight) ET

Sat-Sun 9:00AM-8:00PM ET

Brad Warthen > OK, I’ll call, and tell them it’s a “deadlock issue.”

Corinne_ > I am sure that they will be more than happy to further assist you resolving the issue.

Corinne_ > Please mention that you have contacted Chat Support Team for the same regard before while contacting the.

Corinne_ > Hence, theyb will be further assist you fixing the issue.

Corinne_ > Thus, you can access Netflix fine in the BD Player.

Corinne_ > Are you able to take it from here?

Brad Warthen > Yes. I was trying to copy the text of this chat so that I’d have the number and times, but the text box doesn’t allow me to select it. Could you e-mail me the info?

Corinne_ > Sure, Brad.

Corinne_ > I’ll forward this chat transcript to your Email ID for future reference.

Brad Warthen > Thanks. Goodbye.

Corinne_ > This Chat Transcript has been sent to: [email protected].

Corinne_ > You are most welcome.

Corinne_ > It was really nice chatting with you.

Corinne_ > Have great time ahead!

Corinne_ > Good-bye and thank you for contacting Sony Online Support.

Corinne_ > Analyst has closed chat and left the room

So I guess tonight, I’ll be on the phone for several hours.

Gamecock fans, you may now thank me

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How did the Gamecocks topple the No. 1 college football team in the nation? Well, I’ll tell ya…

Saturday was the first time I watched an entire Gamecocks football game ever. So of course, it follows that they had their biggest win since I moved back to SC in 1987.

As you know, I’m not a football fan. But I now have HDTV in my house. I got the TV for my birthday, and Thursday the cable guy spent 7 hours at my house hauling it out of the 18th century. So this was the first Saturday since I got HD, and as I always suspected, I DID get interested in football once I had HD. Something about the color and spectacle of it, rendering in super-sharp digital imagery. (“Hyper-intense eye candy,” as I described it after the first time I experienced it.) A true case of the medium being the message, I guess.

And I enjoyed it. I say again, I’m not a football fan, but there’s a certain enjoyment to be had in watching someone do something well. Back when I was a reporter and sometimes helped out the sports department by covering a game for them in one of the rural counties I covered, I used to always sit in the stands — the press box held no charms for me — and when there was a good play by either team, I’d get so into it, I’d stand up to applaud. Which was awkward if the stands I happened to be sitting in was occupied by fans of the opposite team.

And on Saturday, we saw Stephen Garcia (selected as national Offensive Player of the Week by the Walter Camp Football Foundation), Marcus Lattimore and the rest of the boys playing football just as it should be played. Which was fun to watch.

Oh, and if you doubt that they won because I was watching, here’s proof: I didn’t quite watch the entire game. I wandered away from the TV during halftime, and missed the beginning of the second half. Yes, I was out of the room when Garcia bizarrely threw for a safety. In other words, the Chicken Curse briefly asserted itself when I wasn’t watching.

As a new business model for the blog, I may turn from advertising and instead get Gamecock fans to pay me to watch every minute of every game in the future. If the price is right, and it’s on HD, I just might do it…

That wonderful, marvelous Adam Smith

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I said something about “Adam Smith sermonizing” in The Wall Street Journal back on this post.

Speak of the devil, I just happened to read a book review in that paper this morning about the book, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (I am not making this title up), By Nicholas Phillipson.

Talk about your gushing. The reviewer writes, breathily,

Even his appearance is a mystery. The only contemporary likenesses of him are two small, carved medallions. We know Adam Smith as we know the ancients, in colorless stone.

It is a measure of Nicholas Phillipson’s gifts as a writer that he has, from this unpromising material, produced a fascinating book. Mr. Phillipson is the world’s leading historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. His “Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life” animates Smith’s prosaic personal history with an account of the eventful times through which he lived and the revolutionary ideas that inspired him. Adam Smith finally has the biography that he deserves, and it could not be more timely.

Smith’s fame, of course, was made by the “Wealth of Nations.” The book appeared in 1776, a good year in the annals of human liberty. Its teachings are so fundamental to modern economics that familiarity often dulls our appreciation of its brilliance.

Smith constructed his masterpiece on a few ingenious insights into the workings of a commercial economy….

He’s so wonderful, but so unknowable! His ways are so far above our ways, and his thoughts so far above our thoughts, that we know him only through colorless stone! Quick, a paper bag — I’m hyperventilating…

Of course, I must admit, I haven’t read Wealth of Nations. For two centuries and more, I’ve been holding out for the movie version. Maybe it’s all that and more. But at the moment I’m giving myself a break from nonfiction to reread O’Brian’s The Wine-Dark Sea, which of course actually is wonderful. (Speaking of the movie, I watched “Master and Commander” last night on Blu-Ray. If only someone would undertake to make a separate film on each book in the Aubrey/Maturin canon! As soon as it came out on Netflix, you wouldn’t see me for a year…)

After that, I’m going to read the books I got for my birthday, starting with Tony Blair’s new political autobio. Then there’s Woodward’s Obama’s War. Only then will I allow myself the pleasure of reading the latest Arkady Renko mystery, Three Stations.

Then, before I read Adam Smith, I will go back and finish Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, which I set aside to read Bob Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed, back-to-back. Then, sometime after Trotsky, I’ll go read Adam Smith — right after I poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick. Twice. Colorless stone, indeed.

What really happened in Ecuador (one version, anyway)

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I really hate that my only regular source of information about what happens in Latin America — now that I no longer have my subscription to The Economist that the paper paid for — is the opinion columns of Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal. They’re all written from the standard WSJ point of view — free markets good, government bad — and while I certainly prefer that to, say, the twisted neo-Maoism of Hugo Chavez, or the native populism of Evo Morales, or the demagoguery of Rafael Correa, I would still prefer my reporting without the Adam Smith sermonizing.

But whaddaya gonna do? In this country, the MSM panders so to the extreme apathy of Americans toward anything beyond their borders that the only way I’ve ever kept up with our own backyard is by reading British publications (such as The Economist).

All of that said, having Ms. O’Grady’s observations delivered to my door each week is better than nothing.

And I read with particular interest her piece this morning about what happened in Ecuador last week. An excerpt of her debunking of Mr. Correa’s claims of a “coup” attempt:

Mr. Correa says that, once inside the hospital, the police “kidnapped” him for 10 hours, in what he is calling an attempted coup d’état.

Not so, says Ms. Zaldumbide, at least one other patient, and two doctors and a nurse who were on duty at the time. They say Mr. Correa retained all his presidential privileges and was never without the protection of his security team.

They also say he was offered an armed escort to leave but refused it. Ecuador’s minister of internal and external security has also said that the president was never detained.

Nevertheless, at 9 p.m. Mr. Correa, who was doing telephone interviews with the state-controlled media during the time he was supposedly “kidnapped,” ordered 500 army troops to the hospital. The soldiers arrived with tanks and submachine guns and opened fire on the police. A fierce gun battle lasted 40 minutes, took the lives of two men, and terrified hospital staff and patients.

Wow. Although there apparently was no coup at all, what did happen certainly sounds more exciting than the real coup I lived through in Ecuador when I was a kid.

Back then, we knew how to have a revolution without our hair getting mussed. I say this because I was, like Forrest Gump and just as clueless, present as history was made.

We lived in the upstairs of a large house owned by a captain in the Ecuadorean Navy. One day in 1963 when my parents were out, they told us to go hang out with the kids downstairs, in the landlord’s part quarters. While I was there, the capitan had a visitor. A few days later, that visitor (an admiral) was the head of the junta running the country, and our landlord held some high post in the government. I want to say minister of agriculture.

When my parents told me there had been a coup, I asked what a coup was (I was only 9 years old). They told me it was like a revolution. So with some apprehension, I went over to the window and peeked out at the intersection of Maracaibo y Seis de Mayo, expecting to see violence in the streets. I saw nothing. Things looked pretty normal over across the street at the home of the chief of police, which always had a guard walking up and down the sidewalk outside. Perhaps, I thought, the fighting was elsewhere.

But there was no fighting. The story I remember hearing at the time — and it may be totally apocryphal — was that the junta waited until el presidente had a bit too much to drink, then put him on a plane and let him wake up in Panama. Presto — instant revolution.

What I saw subsequently certainly jibed with such a peaceful transfer. The only time I ever saw violence in that country when I was there was when some friends and I went downtown to see a Western movie with a title that I suppose caused a lot of people to think it was in Spanish (I want to say “Comancheros”). The crowd was queued up on one side of the theater, then a rumor spread that the tickets would be sold on the other side, and I got knocked down in the stampede. Then there was that other time when I was at some event in a park, and was pushing my way through a crowd to the front to see what was happening, and popped through the front ranks just as a line of cops pushed us back at bayonet point — but I don’t remember what that was about; I just remember my surprise at the bayonets, which seemed excessive. (Or was it just rifles without bayonets? I was so young, and it was so long ago — and a boy’s memory tends to romanticize, especially when living the sort of TV-free, Tom Sawyer existence I experienced down there. Everything was an adventure.)

Now, looking back, I read that the junta canceled elections. I don’t remember that. I do remember that they canceled Water Carnival. Water Carnival was a deeply cherished (by 9-year-old boys) tradition that involved having permission for several days to assault strangers with water balloons. To me, the canceling of Water Carnival has always stood out as the very epitome of oppression.

Of course, it may just be that my parents told me it was canceled…

Come to think of it, Ms. O’Grady’s accounts are probably more reliable than my memories. What do kids know? I later learned that several of the adults with whom I regularly interacted — including my guitar teacher — were working for the CIA, or U.S. military intelligence. Who knew?

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Category Archives: Personal

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