Author Archives: bpriddy

Exonerated?

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We got a message from Eric Greitens last week proclaiming, “We’ve been exonerated.”

—as in not guilty of criminal charges.

As we discussed last week, “not guilty” does not mean “innocent.”   But the Greitens news release said the Missouri Ethics Commission found “no evidence of any wrongdoing” by Greitens.

Well, except for that little finding that his campaign has been fined $178,000 because a political action committee supposedly independent of Greitens’ gubernatorial campaign violated laws requiring independence. The commission says the failure to disclose that A New Missouri, the non-profit set up to support the Greitens agenda, paid for a poll that was given to the Greitens campaign—a violation of rules requiring the reporting of gifts.

Greitens told his faithful followers in his emails that the ruling “makes it clear…our justice system was abused. Lies were told and bribes were paid in a criminal effort to overturn the 2016 election.” He points out that “some of the people” who lied about him face criminal charges for lying under oath and evidence tampering.

Frankly, we‘ve heard just about enough of this “overturning an election” business. Getting elected is a gift, not a license. And one thing government does from time to time is take away the license of someone who misbehaves behind the wheel, in a profession, or even misuses the gift of public office.

Some of the people” actually is one person, William Tisaby, who was hired to investigate the Greitens sex scandal is scheduled for trial next month on six charges of perjury and one of tampering. Greitens resigned as governor in a plea deal with Tisaby’s boss, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, that she would drop criminal charges connected to the sexual affair if he quit.

Greitens’ email message to the faithful quickly becomes a pity plea. He cites “constant harassment and vitriol, the lies—repeated and magnified over and over again—the vicious attack on family and personal finances.” The months since he left office, he says, have been “the hardest of my life” with “plenty of dark days.” But he’s been uplifted by “how compassionate, strong, and loving most regular people are.”

Greitens is not the first political figure to experience “dark days” because he or she fumbled the big chance to be significant.

But he’s right, you know. History shows that even disgraced politicians remain human beings. To go farther, if you get a politician out of his or her theatre of operations, they’re just regular folks (most of them, in our experience). And if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that the face we wear while practicing our profession often is not the face that our friends outside the profession recognize. The ruthless politician, the toughest lawyer, the matter-of-fact doctor, the hard-bargaining car dealer, the flinty-eyed reporter are different people when they’re barbecuing hamburgers with friends or coaching their child’s sports team.

Greitens’ email shows the kind of magnanimity that people in his position eventually realize regardless of how much they maintain they have been persecuted. Dwelling on the hurt and resentment gets one nowhere. “Hang on, keep faith, and have courage—life comes back around and it offers a lot of joy, and purpose, and love.”

Sounds like the roots for another book. “A friend” told the Washington Examiner, a conservative monthly political publication, that Greitens is writing one. The same person said Greitens is preparing to launch a new service organization. The Mission Continues, the veterans services organization Greitens founded in 2007, became embroiled in the Greitens investigation when it was revealed he had used the organization’s mailing list to solicit campaign donations. The Missouri Ethics Commission fined the Greitens campaign $1,000 for that little episode (The campaign paid $100 of the fine and promised not to sin like that again with that organization). The Mission Continues continues, by the way.

However, his comment that, “The deepest possible tragedy in all of this would come if we let them change who we are” indicates an inability to grow beyond what he was. And what he was was a not-very-good-governor. He was arrogant. He was secretive. He tried to control the message although that didn’t go well in the end. He believed he could force some members of his own party to support ideas that weren’t going to fly by divulging their personal phone numbers on the internet. He was derogatory toward the legislature and saw no need to patch things up after he was in office for his critical but publicly-popular comments during the campaign.

And we shouldn’t forget that he quit when a legislative investigation headed toward likely impeachment had cornered him on possible serious campaign finance violations. The special investigative committee basically gave him a choice of revealing intertwined big-money links between various committees providing financial fuel for his political ambitions, or leaving town. So he announced his resignation, took no questions, and got out of Dodge.

It’s not altogether helpful for Greitens to suggest he’s not going to change his spots.

There have been rumors that Greitens would emerge and run for the governorship this year as an Independent; the Republican Party could hardly be expected to welcome him back. But the “friend” who spoke to the Examiner said he does not expect to seek political office this year although his options remain open for the future.

Greitens’ email says he’s not thinking of revenge, which is “about the past,” he said. “Justice is about the future…the future is bright.”

There is light at the end of the tunnel for Eric Greitens. “The future is bright.”

Unless, of course, that’s the headlight of a locomotive.

That House investigation shut down after the resignation before all the questions were asked or answered. He would prefer those efforts not be resumed in his future public life.

Eric Greitens will have a political shadow over him for a long time. He still has a core group of believers of seeming Trumpian loyalty that he was speaking to with his emailed statement. But it will take more than commercials showing him blowing up stuff and claiming he was wrongly persecuted to convince the general public it can trust him again.

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Dr. Crane on quitting

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Nineteenth century poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem on perseverance that was in one of our textbooks in high school, I think. It’s called “Don’t Quit.”   Part of it goes:

When things go wrong as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all up hill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit—
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

—He finished the poem with these two lines:

So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit—
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

Dr. Frank Crane looked at quitting a little bit differently a century ago.   We pass along his thoughts to join those of Whittier in these times when many who are fatigued by the meanness of so much rhetoric want to withdraw, to quit the noise of our argumentative society. This entry also is something of a prelude for our entry Wednesday.

THE QUITTER

History is full of quitters. They furnish some of the most spectacular characters upon the world stage.

It’s an illustrious roll-call: Elijah, Jonah, Pilate, Romola*, Charles V., Hamlet—and how about you?

Some of these quit only temporarily and took hold again. With the others the quitting was fatal.

Running away and giving up were never a noble business.

The side-stepper does not cut an edifying figure.

At one time men imagined the ills of the world might be cured by deserting the world. They retired into caves and walled retreats. They gave mankind up as a hopeless lot and devoted themselves to getting themselves plucked as brands from the burning.

In Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” Christian is pictured fleeing his city and family, his fingers in his ears, bound for Heaven.

The world has got over this unwisdom. The church now sends missionaries into the world. Social reformers go and live in the slums. These systems indicate a healthier idea.

The question whether the world’s progress swill be furthered best by our activity or by our desertion needs not be discussed. Humanity will doubtless continue to advance whether you and I assist or not. Destiny has its own long plans; and if one man will not play the part it assigns him, another will be found who will do quite as well.

The only question is, not what will happen to the universe, but what will happen to me if I refuse to work. As Mordecai said to Esther when she hesitated to intercede with the king for her people, so it might be said to you or me: “If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, doubtless deliverance shall arise from another place, but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed.”

The point is that one’s fullest enjoyment of life is only found infighting courageously in that small corner of the battlefield where he has been stationed. No man ever found worthy content by running away.

To quit implies moral weakness.

Sensitiveness is not to be coddled, but to be overcome.

Go on, forget your wounds, never mind the bruises upon your soul, despise the danger, drop regret, brush aside premonitions, do your work, and you will get a quality of joy the deserter cannot know.

They say the sharks will shy off from a man if he keeps splashing about lively. The fear-birds will not settle upon a soul in vigorous movement.

The noblest drop of consolation that can cheer one’s last hour is to say, whether he has won or lost, “I have fought the good fight.”

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*Romola, the least-recognized of these six names, is the character in a three-volume novel by English Victorian-era novelist George Eliot (who was really a woman, Mary Ann Evans) that tells of a manipulative 15th century stranger in Florence, Italy and Romola, the daughter of a blind scholar. There are other characters in a plot that is too tiring to relate, as it is too tiring to discuss why Mary Ann wrote under the name of George. Look her up on the internet on your own. If you want to wade into the novel, it’s available thanks to Project Gutenberg at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24020/24020-h/24020-h.htm

If you begin reading it, remember Dr. Crane: “To quit implies moral weakness.”

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Innocent

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A brief observation about the vote on President Trump’s impeachment:

One of the things we journalists were taught early in our careers is that a “not guilty” verdict in a criminal court case does not mean the accused person is innocent. It only means the prosecution failed to convince the jury “beyond a reasonable doubt” of the guilt of the accused.

Another word sometimes erroneously used after such trials: “exoneration.” Finding someone “not guilty” does not absolve someone from blame, which is what “exoneration” means.

The partisan nature of the vote on the impeachment articles aside, the outcome in no way bestows innocence on President Trump. If the results would have been identical but reversed they would not have bestowed guilt.

To use a tired phrase, it is what it is. Claiming it is more is dishonest.

Of course, all of this is lost in today’s world of “Forever Trumpers” vs. “Never Trumpers,” a world in which reason, perspective, and understanding of a process are lost in the shouting.

But somebody had to mention this and it might as well have been mentioned here.

There is a third word that is appropriate: acquit.

The word “acquit” seems to be a better fit. The Senate vote discharged the president from the accusations against him, which is one meaning of the word.   There is a second meaning: to conduct oneself in a proper way, particularly in stressful situations

So now that the president has been acquitted, we shall see how he acquits himself, to use both definitions in the same sentence.

 

Dr. Crane and true grit

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“Grit” is a word we don’t hear much these days. Years ago, Grit was an enjoyable weekly newspaper to read at the grandparents’ home in rural Kansas. Grit is still around but is a magazine now and is often found at rural-oriented supply stores.

Sometimes we equate “grit” with courage.

But grit is something else. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth learned as a seventh-grade teacher that IQ wasn’t the only thing that separated struggling students from successful ones. She found that “grit,” which she described as “passion and sustained persistence applied to long-term achievement with no particular concern for rewards or recognition” was a quality that indicated success. She wrote a best-seller about her research, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. The subject also is addressed by Caren Baruch-Feldman and Thomas R. Hoerr in The Grit Guide for Teens.

It is also addressed in direct terms by Dr. Crane.

IT TAKES GRIT

It takes Grit to do anything worth doing.

All real progress is upstream.

All the real crowns—soul-crowns and achievement crowns, not gold crowns—are rewards for fighting.

It takes Grit—

To be Patient,

To keep your Temper,

To improve your Mind,

To Exercise, and keep your Body fit,

To diet, that is, to eat for Health and not for Sport,

To save Money,

To push your business,

To tell the truth,

To keep your mind clean, your Mouth clean, and your Soul clean,

To say No,

To do what you don’t want to do, which means Discipline,

To pay your Debts,

To be Loyal—to yoru ideals, to your Wife, to your Husband, to your Friend, to your Country,

To say “I don’t know,”

To do your own thinking,

To resist the mob,

To be honest, simple, and straight,

And not to worry.

But these things are easy:

To be irritable,

To give way to impulse, to say “I can’t help it,” and to make no effort to control yourself.

To be mentally lazy, read nothing gbut trash, and have no habits of study,

To loaf, and to exercise only when you feel like it,

To eat what you please,

To wait for something to turn up,

To lie, to be disloyal, and to be unclean,

To agree with those you feel to be wrong, just to avoid trouble,

To side-step,

To go in debt, and to say, “Charge it!”

To join something and use partisanship for loyalty,

To go with the crowd,

To acquire a bad habit, and to nurse it along,

To follow your impulses and not your intelligence,

To fill your body with disease, your mind with error, and your soul with evil,

To slump, to pity yourself, to make excuses for yourself, to magnify your ego and ruin your character,

And to commit suicide.

It’s easy going down.

It takes Grit to go up, to get on, and even to keep decent.

Lord, but do I ever need baseball!

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It’s gray and it’s cold and it’s been gray and cold far too long and far too much. Or maybe grey and cold.

Life is so bad that I have been driven to ask what the difference is between “gray” and “grey.” Which one has fifty shades (It’s “e”). Is it Thomas Grey or Thomas Gray who was the 18th century English poet who wrote “Elegy Written in an English Churchyard,” a poem with the original ending that doesn’t do much to improve the mood on these cold, gray days.

No more, with reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool sequester’d vale of life
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.

Gray (not “e” but “a”) rewrote the 128-line poem with a different conclusion but it offers no more solace on days like these.

I have been driven to Grammar (“a” not “e”) dot com for help. It wasn’t real helpful.   Look for yourself.

The past few weeks have given us the leaden cloud of impeachment, the weight of which has left us tired and has left our political system with a terrible burden of public distrust precisely at the time we must start deciding who, if anybody, can lift our confidence in government, which is—after all—led by those we, ourselves, select.

It is easy on days like these to think of ourselves as victims of government instead of what we really are—partners in government.

We have attended too many funerals of friends in the last year, read far too many letters to the editor that are little more than partisan political popgun skirmishes, watched noble aspirations for public benefit wither under the power of campaign donations, seen too few films or shows or television series that leave viewers uplifted, and watched too many late-night comedians whose one-note monologues encourage fleeing to bed and seeking refuge fully under the covers.

Yes, the Chief won the Super Bowl but then the President tweeted that they made the state of KANSAS proud and I wondered if he could identify Ukraine on a map without country names printed on them.

Lord, do I ever need baseball.

Some friends at the YMCA, knowing of my media background, have asked if I can get them tickets to a New York Yankees-Chicago White Sox baseball game to be played near the small Iowa town of Dyersville, Iowa, population about 41-hundred, this summer. Dyersville, as you probably know, is widely recognized as the home of the National Farm Toy Museum and the home of the Ertl Company, which makes die-cast metal alloy scale models of farm equipment and other vehicles.

There’s also THE baseball field, the filming site of Field of Dreams, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary last year.

Major League Baseball has been pretty close to the vest with information about tickets for the Dyersville game but there won’t be very many. https://www.mlb.com/news/field-of-dreams-game-tickets-and-faqs

The teams taking part were announced last November:

https://doyouremember.com/108307/mlb-field-of-dreams-game

Beyond that, there’s been little information. We do know the game is scheduled for August 13 and it will count as a regular season game. It will be played in a specially-built ballpark owned by Go The Distance Baseball, the present owners of the movie site. The park has only 8,000 seats and it will be north of the movie ball diamond, connected to it by a path cut through a cornfield.   There will be windows in the outfield walls so fans can see the corn. The owners say they’ll find other things to do with the ballpark after the game.

No, I can’t get tickets for you. But like you, I’ll probably watch the game on the teevee.   Who will throw out the first pitch?   Your guess is as good as mine but I’ll bet it’s a pretty close.

But baseball is coming near. And, boy howdy, do I ever need it!

Chasing down information about the ball game at Dyersville brought me to several Youtube sites about Kevin Costner, the movie, and even the composer of the theme music, James Horner, who was killed in a plane crash in 2015 and is best remembered for the soundtrack to Titanic.

And that, of course, led to James Earl Jones intoning his ode to baseball near the end of the movie. It’s been cited so often that it is almost corny. But, gosh, is it good.

“They’ll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces….The one constant through all the years…has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past…It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

In the offseason we’ve watched baseball writhe because of the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. We’ve watched the free agent meat market produce players paid sums beyond our imaginations. The Royals have changed managers. The Cardinals still have enormous potential waiting to break through.

But when we hear the sound of baseball hitting leather or wood hitting the baseball, all of that offseason stuff fades away because games are played in their time and it is only the game that is important. Uniforms change, players once young and now old at 37 come and go. But it is still 60’6” from mound to plate, still 90’ from plate to first, still 127’ 3 3/8” home to second. The eternal dimensions contain the game.

The rules are clear and mostly unchanging year to year, decade to decade. Lines clearly mark what is fair and what is foul. Every batter has an equal chance to get a hit—three strikes and four balls. The tag of the bag in the first part of the double play, the infield fly, obstruction, the balk—all have rules requiring specific actions or situations. Baseball will be played this year with the same basic rules and dimensions it used last year. It’s one thing we can count on in otherwise unstable times.

Go to a baseball game and for a few hours you know how the game will be played. In the time before the game and the time after the game, we live in a world much less certain.

And the game is all there is for however long it takes to finish it. Cold, gray days, politics and impeachment, popgun partisanship in the letters to the editor page, and most of the cares of the world fade to insignificance because baseball is baseball, a game that by its eternal dimensions tells us there can be stability in life and that what once was good could be good again.

Lord, I do need baseball!

Dr. Crane on being on rascals and revolt

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(Dr. Frank Crane, who died 92 years ago, had words in his early Twentieth Century newspaper columns that resonate in today’s events. In this one, he wrote of the dangers of tolerating intolerable behavior.)

WHEN TO INSURGE

It’s all right to be resigned, to take things as they come, and not to complain; but there are things which we ought not to accept smilingly, against which we ought to kick strenuously, and protest loudly.

“When it rains,” says James Whitcomb Riley, “why, rain’s my choice.”; and this is a sample of intelligent resignation. To the thermometer and the barometer you should adjust yourself. When you accidentally break your leg, there is nothing to do better than to look pleasant and try to think it is all for the best.

When death separates us from our beloved, when the market goes down at the moment that we expect it to go up, when old age comes, when the hour-hand on the clock moves, and when the sun goes down, we are face to face with the inevitable.

But there is a world of other conditions in the presence of which cheerful adjustment is little less than a crime. There are certain events of which to say, “The Lord’s will be done!” is blasphemy, when it is not cowardice; for it would be much more honest to say, “The devil’s will be done!”

For instance, to begin at home, the unruly, spoiled, petulant, self-willed and selfish child who rules the house by sheer force of disagreeableness. This is no case for pious resignation.

There are the bullying husband and the nagging wife and the mischief-making neighbor. Here what you need is spunk, not sweetness and forbearance.

When you climb; over the end-seat hog in the street car, the righteous thing to do is not to move softly and apologize, but, quite by accident, of course, to drive your heel right into his pet corn.

When your city is owned and run by a gang of grafters it is time to arise and smite.

When shrewd thieves manipulate the world of business so that stock that is pure water is made to pay 16 per cent dividend, while the workers’ wages are reduced, that is no time to be praying to be content in the position in which Providence has placed you. You have not been placed by Providence, you have been flim-flammed by rascals.

When streets are unswept an backyards are unclean and alleys vile with rubbish, and the pest comes along and begins work upon the children, that is no time for fasting and prayer, or for kissing the rod. It is time to blow the horn and summon the trouble-makers to battle.

Submission to the unavoidable is good, but submission to the devices of wrong, crafty, cruel, or lazy people is contemptible.

“We make the greater part of the evil circumstances in which we are placed,” said Southey*, “and then we fit ourselves for those circumstances by a process of degradation.”

A man who is always satisfied, calm, and equable, who does nothing but smile and smile in this world where villainy is far from extinct, is either a fool or a knave. Every decent man ought to get angry about once in so often, just to maintain his self-respect.

Dr. Crane of truth and lying

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(The cynical observation that “you can tell when a politician is lying; his lips move” is easy to make in these times but it also is unfair to the large majority of people we elect to serve us. We like to think good people are elected to work in a badly-flawed system where they find their principles challenged daily. Make no mistake: there are liars abroad which is why we have extensive fact-checking after each presidential debate or presidential rally, news availability, or statement. It is comforting to think, no matter how realistic such thoughts are, that the more honest person will emerge victorious. The real world doesn’t always work that way but we cannot abandon hope. Here’s Dr. Crane on

THE TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

Listen, young man! The cleverest man in the world is the man that tells the truth, and tells it all the time, not occasionally.

Sometimes you can profit by a lie, but it is like dodging bullets; you never know when you are going to get hurt.

Lying is a game. Sometimes it is a very exciting game. But it is essentially gambling. And gambling, any sort of gambling, is not business.

The fundamental laws of business are just as accurate and as well established as the principles of geometry.

It is hard to see this, for our visual range is limited. Most us can see the crooked dollar coming today, but not the ten straight dollars it is going to lose us tomorrow.

Real business success is cumulative. It grows like a snowball. And the one thing that makes it keeps us growing, even while we sleep, is our persistent truthfulness and dependableness.

If you put an advertisement in the paper announcing goods worth five dollars for sale at two dollars, and if the people come and buy, and find out the stuff is not worth ten cents, you may make a one day’s gain, but you have alienated a lot of indignant customers and have started to saw away the posts that sustain your reputation.

If you have a store rented for a week only and propose to conduct a sacrifice sale of goods that will make everybody disgusted who buys then, then perhaps you may lie with a high hand and stretched-out arm.

But if you are in the town to stay, and want regular, returning, increasing, satisfied and friendly customers, it will pay you to stick to the old-fashioned truth.

Exaggeration is lying. It does not take long for the people in the community to get the habit of discounting twenty-five percent of all you say.

If you continually overstate and vociferate you must keep on getting louder, until you soon become incoherent.

But if you habitually state only what is soberly, honestly true, by and by everything you say will be away above par.

A man’s repute for truthfulness is as much a part of his capital as are his store and stock; so much so that he can raise money on it.

As civilization progresses, business becomes more and more an affair of credit, of trust. The very foundation of big business is trustworthiness. Therefore if you are ever going to get beyond the peanut-stand and push-cart stage of merchandise you must establish a basis of dependableness.

There is not one thing in this world, young man, that can be of as much value to you as building up a reputation such that men will say, “your word is as good as your bond.”

It is well to be clever and keen and Johnny-on-the-spot, it is well to look out for number one and to know a good bargain, but best of all is to have the world say of you:

“Whatever that man says can absolutely be relied upon.”

Let America Be America Again

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For many people, America has never been as great as some have nobly proclaimed it to be or proclaim to have made it. Again.

It’s good. But great? Yes, for some. For others, no. Can it be great if it is not great for all? We explore that issue today through the words of a great Missouri writer.

Langston Hughes is considered one of the nation’s greatest African-American authors, a Joplin native whose poetry and prose spoke powerfully of the African-American experience from the time his great grandmothers were slaves to the days when segregation was still a powerful and widely-accepted social institution. He died in 1967, still writing about what this country was but aware of what it could be or should be.

In 1935, he wrote a poem that portrayed the two Americas—the one he dreamed would come with a counterpoint describing the America he knew.

In our turbulent times today, it’s a good idea to think about Langston Hughes, who hoped for a better country while the real world around him seemed far from it. His voice from 85 years ago is a voice for many in these times and a challenge for others who are comfortable with their station.

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Langston Hughes reminds us from generation to generation we have much work to do before we should proclaim ourselves great. Proclamation is cheap. Achievement of greatness is hard and the quest for it should be never-ending if we really want to create, “the land that never has been yet—and yet must be.”

It not a matter of “again.”  It’s a matter of “yet.”

Dr. Crane on thinking

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(Dr. Frank Crane left the pulpit as a Methodist minister after 28 years to become a writer and newspaper columnist. The New York Times wrote in his 1928 obituary, “His message always was one of uprightness of living, sincerity of thinking and ‘sweet reasonableness.’” We could use a few doses of that sort of thing these days of division and derision, so we have been sharing some of his thoughts at the start of each week.)

SLOVENLY THOUGHTS

Clean up your thoughts.

Don’t have your mind looking like the dining-table after a banquet, or the floor after a political meeting. Sweep it and dust it and put the ideas away where they belong.

Don’t have a waste-basket mind.

Or a top-bureau-drawer mind.

It doesn’t do you much good to have a grand idea, or a wonderful impression, or a strong passion, if you don’t know where to put it.

I notice when I talk to you that you have a good many interesting notions. The trouble is they are all higgledy-piggledy; they have no unity, coherence, order, organization.

You think, but you don’t think anything out. Your wheat is full of chaff.

Perhaps I can help you if you will lend me your ear for a space.

  1. Don’t pick up some opinion you hear and make it your own because it sounds fine, and go to passing it out, without carefully examining it, scrutinizing, cross-questioning and testing it.
  2. One of the best tests of any opinion (not an infallible, but very valuable, test) is “Will it work?” If it won’t something’s wrong with it, nine times out of ten. That last brilliant notion of yours—hundreds of sensible people have had it, and discarded it, because it wouldn’t work.
  3. Don’t let anybody make you think you owe a certain amount of belief in a thing simply because you can’t disprove it. Nor be deceived by the argument, “If that doesn’t account for it, what does?” You don’t have to account for it at all. Some of the most pestiferous bunk has got itself established by this kind of reasoning. You don’t have to believe or disbelieve everything that comes along; most things you must hang up and wait.
  4. Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” It’s a sign that you know what you do know.
  5. Ask questions. Don’t be ashamed of appearing ignorant. What you ought to be ashamed of is seeming to understand when you don’t.
  6. Classify. Education is nothing but the art of classification. Keep a scrap-book. Keep an index rerum. And classify.
  7. Waste no time in acquiring “general information.” Always read and study with a purpose. Look up subjects; don’t just read books. Books are to be referred to, consulted, not to be read through—that is, as a rule.
  8. Be a friend and daily companion to the dictionary and encyclopedia. Look things up.
  9. Define. Practise defining. Practise telling what a thing is not, as well as what it is.
  10. Get clear ideas of what you don’t know. Then you can see better what you do know.
  11. Write. Not for publication, necessarily, but for yourself. Writing accustoms you to choose just the right words. Beware of adjectives, especially two of them. Favor nouns. Use simple, short words. They mean more and carry further.
  12. And never hurry or worry.

Whose Money Is It?

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—OR, how a $2 fee is having a multi-million dollar negative economic impact in Missouri.

This entry will be lengthy because we have to use a lot of numbers to make our point.

A number of bills changing Missouri’s gambling laws have been filed for this year’s legislature. But we wonder if any of them should be considered until a significant problem with one of our existing laws is corrected because it has turned into a growing economic drain on our state.

Regular consumers of these pages know that the author has been advocating a fee increase for the casino industry to pay for the creation of a National Steamboat Museum.

As we’ve researched that issue we have come across a lot of interesting other issues and concerns. We passed some of them along to the House Interim Committee on Gaming that met this fall. In some cases we think we have some answers but here’s one where we don’t. Maybe some of our lawmakers will try to provide some. Or maybe somebody will ask the court system to do look into things. Our voice, however, is puny compared to the politically influential voices of a large, wealthy, and politically persuasive industry.

First, the scenario.

In 1993, the legislature required the casinos to pay the state two dollars for each admission on their proposed riverboats. Our first two casinos opened for business in the spring of ’94 and they paid the two dollars, no problem.

Our casinos have paid the two dollars in each fiscal year since. They are obeying the law.

But there’s this thing called inflation.

In the second fiscal year of casino gambling in Missouri, the inflated value of two dollars was $2.05 and the purchasing power of two dollars dropped to $1.95. In the fiscal year after that the equivalent value of two 1993 dollars was $2.11; purchasing power was down to $1.90. (Our numbers come from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

We get into some higher mathematics now. Our casinos paid the state in fiscal 1994-95 a total of $25,216,862, a very healthy increase in state general revenue. But if they had paid the state the inflated value of the two dollars, they would have paid the state an additional $702,172.

Whose money was the $702,172? The 1993 law does not say anything about casinos being able to keep what we refer to as “windfall profits.”   In fairness, the law does not prohibit casinos from keeping that money, either.

We were around then, covering the legislature, and don’t recall any concerns that the day would come when two dollars wouldn’t be worth two dollars. Trying to determine legislative intent at this great distance could be difficult although there are a lot of people still around who were serving in 1993 and voted on that bill who might recall what it was.

Fast forward to fiscal year 2018-19 that ended last June 30. Our thirteen casinos paid the state $75,000,634. But the inflationary value of the 1993 two dollars had risen to $3.48 (and it’s $3.53 for this fiscal year). Had the casinos paid the state in contemporary equivalent dollars, they would have paid the state about $55.6 million more than they did. Instead, they kept the money. The total windfall profits after twenty-six years of unadjusted two-dollar payments had reached $888.5 million as of June 30.

Whose money is it?   And whose money SHOULD it be?

Neither side seems to be protected by that 1993 law.

Compounding this question is the continued decline in purchasing power of the two dollars our casinos pay the state. It was down to $1.15 in the most recent fiscal year. The total loss of purchasing power since our casinos opened had reached $944.2 million.

The combined total of dollars the casino industry has kept because of windfall profits and the loss of purchasing power of the two dollars the industry did pay represented an economic deficit to the state during those twenty-six years since the two-dollar fee was established of almost $1.833 Billion as of June 30.

Now the question becomes even more acute: Once again, Whose. Money. Is. It?

There are some other questions, too. Why wasn’t anybody paying attention, either at the gaming commission or in the legislature? The casino industry probably was because it was reaping the benefits but should the industry have stepped forward and said, “Hey, legislature, this two-dollar fee thing is making us a lot richer while the programs intended to be funded by the two dollars are getting poorer and poorer?”

It was under no legal obligation to do so.

Now, with the accumulated negative economic impact after more than a quarter-century of casino gambling nearing Two Billion Dollars, shouldn’t somebody start trying to determine whose money this really is?   Should these windfall funds have been set aside in some kind of an escrow account until somebody decided who is entitled to them? Nothing in the law requires that.

A complicating factor is that the customers of casinos do not pay the fee. It comes out of casino revenues, the money casinos win from the customers. When the law was passed in 1993, it was still assumed there would be boats on the rivers making two hour cruises for which customers paid two dollars. They would get off the boat at the end of two hours and a new group would get aboard (and those wishing for another two hours on the boat would get back on board), each paying two dollars. But when the present system of boats in moats ended any thoughts of customers paying to enter the casino, the decision was made for casinos to pay the state two dollars per person with a new count being made every two hours. That’s how casinos wound up with 37.5 million admissions last year in a state of only six million people, most of whom don’t go to casinos. No customer pays anything.

That means the two dollars is not a pass-through from customers to the state, in effect a user fee. It is now a fee charged to the casinos and it is paid out of their money. (Their adjusted gross receipts in the last fiscal year were more than $1.735 Billion.)

If it is the casino industry’s money, is it the industry’s responsibility to make sure the two dollars going to the state are worth two dollars to the programs and entities that the fee was intended to pay for? If the two dollars are worth only $1.15 to the receiving entity, are they really the “two dollars” promised them by the statute?

The law says two dollars. Period. No inflationary adjustments are mentioned. And the casinos have done what most of us would have done (and what we might have done in certain circumstances)—if there’s money left on the table and nobody else claims it and if it’s MY table, it’s my money.

It is time to answer the questions. Here are the main reasons why.

The two dollar admission fee is split with one of the dollars going to the host city of the casino and the other dollar going to the state gaming commission which takes its budget out of those funds and then divides the remainder among a handful of worthy causes. The biggest worthy cause is the Missouri Veterans Commission Capital Improvements Trust Fund that provides money for nursing homes and cemeteries for our veterans.

Last fiscal year, each of those dollars had the purchasing power of 57.5 cents. The value is down another penny this year. Five years ago, the figure was 61 cents. At this rate, it won’t be long before the casinos are making more money from the two-dollar admission fee that was intended to offset the additional costs to host cities of a casino’s presence and to fund the gaming commission and its worthy causes benefiting veterans, college students, and programs for people who get in trouble because they gamble.

Nothing in the law says they can’t.

Nothing in the law says they can.

Whose. Money. Is. it? And—

Whose. Money. SHOULD. It. Be?

Who can answer the question? The state auditor? The attorney general? The legislature?

No matter what happens with our steamboat museum idea, isn’t it time to find an answer for our veterans, our college students getting scholarships under a program funded by admission fees, problem gamblers looking for help from a program financed by these fees, and our casino host cities?

Here are some additional figures that seem to bold-face the need to address this situation. It has been a long time since our high school bookkeeping class so we hope there is not a flaw in this reasoning. But here it is.

The state received $75,000,634 in admission fees in the last fiscal year. But because of the lack of inflationary adjustment in the two-dollar fee, it did NOT receive $55,600,438 more. That was the windfall profits that the casinos kept. The inflation-caused loss of buying power meant the $75 million the state did get was worth only $42,375,358, a loss of $32,625,276. Here is what it all adds up to:

If we add the amount of money that the casinos kept to the amount of lost purchasing power in the money the state got, the total is $88,225,744.

That means the state of Missouri and the home dock communities in the last fiscal year saw an economic DEFICIT of $13,225,110. Our analysis shows the unadjusted admission fees have produced annual economic losses to the state for the past five years totaling almost forty-eight million dollars.

That economic deficit is on track to almost DOUBLE in the current fiscal year.

In the first six months of this fiscal year (July-December) the economic loss was $$12,201,732—almost as much as all of last fiscal year. Why? Although admissions are down four percent from last year, the value of the two-dollars in contemporary money is more and the purchasing power of the money the state has received is less. The windfall profit so far this year is $28,285,835. The purchasing power loss for those six months is $20,890,844, a combined total of $49,176,680. The two-dollar fee has produced a payment of only $36,974,948.

At least, that’s how it appears from our calculator. And that’s why it is time for the General Assembly to take corrective action, despite this being a campaign year in which the well-financed casino industry can exert great pressure to keep millions flowing into its accounts while the programs the admission fee was created to pay for are victims of a rapidly rising negative economic impact. As long as that $2 fee is not adjusted, the casinos get richer and the programs and entities the fee was intended to finance get poorer.

The casinos want the legislature to let them take bets on sporting events, a new type of wagering that some expert testimony in last autumn’s committee hearings say could increase their revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Why should it be unrealistic to think the admission fee problem should be solved before these thirteen businesses are allowed to haul in even more dollars through sports wagering?

The casino industry probably would prefer this boat not be rocked, this sleeping dog not be awakened, this pot not be stirred. Its reasons are understandable. But for the others, isn’t it time somebody rocked the boat, awakened the dog, and got busy stirring?