Category Archives: ethics

Just the facts, ma’am*

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Well, we’ve endured two more political conventions, their tiresome tirades, their excessive exaggerations, their profound puffery, their ferocious flag-waving, their multiple misstatements, and sometimes their litany of lies.

We want to think those we root for in their pursuits of public office are pure in thought, word, and deed.  But we know better.  And we would be better if we were unafraid to challenge them, even those we support, when they mislead us.

One of the greatest responsibilities we have as citizens is to demand truth from those who seek our votes and our money. But experience shows we citizens fail to meet those responsibilities time after time.

It would be nice to say our candidates owe us their integrity.  But politics doesn’t work that way. Integrity often must be forced by those who are picking the men and women who will lead them.

So our conventions are finished. Dancing With the Candidates is down to the finals. Now it’s not Dancing with the Candidates.  It’s a World Wrestling Federation match. In the mud.

No, it isn’t.  It’s more real.

It’s a street fight until November 3. A sweaty, nasty, bloody, anything-goes brawl.

It’s too bad that we who want to be led will too much expect too little of those who want to lead.

One thing is abundantly clear after the conventions.  The busiest people in the country for the next few weeks will be:

Fact-checkers.

We should pay attention to them. We should know when the people who want to be (presumably) the most powerful person in the world aren’t shooting straight with us.  We should notice those who spout conspiracy theories—-and they seem to be more outlandish every day.  Watch out for those who say, “I have heard…” and those who, when challenged to prove their statements say, “I’ll let you know later.”

More than ever, this is a time to tell our candidates, “Prove it,” or because we’re Missourians, “Show me the proof.”

Conservative organizations are going to be especially watchful of liberal candidates. Liberal organizations are going to be especially watchful of conservative candidates.  We should pay attention to both of them.  We should pay attention to those doing their analysis from the middle. And in the end we should think for ourselves despite the plentitude of loud voices on our airwaves telling us they can think for us.  No, they can’t—unless we let them. Have enough citizen responsibility to think for yourself.

There will be carloads of commercials that wave at truth from a distance. Don’t believe them.

There already have been manipulated videos on our social media. Question them.  Better yet, turn off the social media except for person-to-person communication with people you know.

We’ll get all kinds of flyers in the mail that are not worth the postage that sent them.  Recognize them for what they are. Fill up your recycling bins with them.

It will be easy to throw up our hands, abandon our responsibilities to ourselves and to our neighbors, and just mark a ballot so we can say we voted.

Congratulations.  You just trashed your country. Or your state. Or your city.  You just put it in a big blue plastic container and rolled it out to the curb.

CARE, dammit!  Find the truth.  Demand the truth.

After two weeks of political conventions, it should be clear to all of us that we have a responsibility to reach beyond ourselves and understand who is most trustworthy in a time when truth too often takes a back seat to bombast, accusation, misrepresentation and conspiracies.

We won’t find absolute truth from either candidate at the top of our tickets or from some of their supporters. But we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our neighbors from coast to coast and border to border not to elect the biggest liar.  That’s an awful thing to say, isn’t it?  But it’s also the

Truth.

And we have to be honest with ourselves, for ourselves, to determine who that is. Sometimes that means traditional party loyalties have to give way to loyalties to something bigger. Increasingly, it means we have to get our noses away from the social media screens.

Keep up with the legitimate, established fact-checkers.  These campaigns will keep them up all night in pursuit of truths we haven’t heard from our candidates during the day.

Just the facts.  That’s all we should ask for. It’s all we should demand. There are reliable sources that will provide them because our candidates and their surrogates might not.

In a later entry we’ll try to recommend some fact-checking resources.

*Los Angeles Police Detective Joe Friday, badge number 714, the main figure in hundreds of police investigations dramatized on radio and television for decades, never said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  Snopes.com, one of the longest-running reliable fact checking websites, says that the character typically said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” or “All we know are the facts, ma’am.”

Today is what we have

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(By the end of the week our political conventions will have finished, each positively assuring us that the names at the top of the ballot will make us great or build us better, each speaking as if those candidates alone can do these things—as if there are not two other branches of government that could or must  have a say.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests that candidates and their parties and their promises are less important to us the we are to ourselves, not just today but—-)

EVERY DAY

Every day!

In those two words lies the secret of all attainment.

It’s not what we do once, with all our hearts, and with every splendid ounce of strength, that counts so much as the things we’ve been doing every day, whether we felt like it or not.

Every day! Therein is mastery.  The marvelous, velvet, utterly exquisite beauty of such piano-playing of Paderewski’s, or such violin performances as Maud Powell’s—it looks spontaneous but it is the result of many a hateful day’s laborious routine.

Every day! That is the road to perfection.  The speaker who can hold and charm an audience, the debater quick and ready and not to be confused, the baseball player, the woman always socially at ease—everybody, in fact, that can do anything well owes that poise and finish to the slow efforts of every day.

No matter how gifted an actor, how naturally endowed, he cannot be a master without infinite practice.

Young people do not realize the tremendous cumulative power that lies in time.  Take ten years. Say you are twenty. By the time you are thirty what enormous efficiency you might build up if you would only use every day a certain amount of time.

Almost everybody wastes enough hours in ten years to get a doctor’s degree in any university.

In ten years you might be speaking and reading fluently in Spanish or French or Japanese, you might be an authority upon geology, botany, chemistry, English literature, history, or whatever fits your ambition, if you would only be faithful every day.

Every day!  The universe is constructed on routine. The sun rises every day, the stars revolve, the seasons come and go by schedule, your heart beats and your lungs fill and empty as regularly as the clock ticks, every generation of men or of animals is the result of numberless preceding generations, over and over again Nature tries her hand and her matchless perfection is only the stored-up treasure of endless practice.

And in character every day means even more than anywhere else. The most honest man is the man who has been honest every day; the most virtuous woman is she who has behind her present virtue the inertia of a whole life full of virtuous thought and deed; the happiest person is the one who has long practiced being happy, and that soul is coolest and surest in a crisis who every day has schooled himself in self-mastery.

No force is so great in any man as the stored-up power of what he has been doing every day.

(Ignace Paderewski (pronounced Pad-er-efski’) was a Polish statesman, pianist, and composer who, as his country’s new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister signed the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. He was a spokesman for Polish independence who, during a concert tour of the United States, encouraged President Wilson to support an independent Poland as part of the Fourteen Points discussions that led to the treaty. He was 81 when he died in 1941, about two years after Hitler ended Poland’s freedom.

Maud Powell was the first American woman to achieve worldwide notoriety as a violinist. She was among the first instrumentalists to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s red seal records, which later became the classical label for RCA Victor’s recordings. Her recordings are still considered a standard for violin performance. She died in 1920, at 52.)

 

 

You’ve got to be carefully taught

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(The newest tell-all book about President Trump paints a distressing picture of family dysfunction. Dr. Frank Crane wrote a century ago about this kind of family culture, or—)

POISONING THE CHILD MIND

One of the recent discoveries in the art of healing is the therapeutic value of suggestion. That is to say, the physician, by suggesting to the patient, particularly the patient suffering from nervous disorder, sane and helpful thoughts about himself, can work a cure better oftentimes than by the use of drugs.

The force of mental suggestion is so great that many fads, and even new religions, have arisen which are based upon it.

If the influence of good suggestion be so great, the influence of bad suggestion is even greater.

I wish to call attention to one form of character poisoning of which parents are frequently guilty.

Perhaps the worst misfortune that can happen to a person is to be infested with the germs of fear, to lack decision and self-confidence, to be a pretty to the terrors of morbidity and doubt of self. Who can tell the mortal pain, shame, and self-torture of the innumerable victims of chronic fear?

Frequently, parents are responsible for this. A boy, for instance, develops some in-born trait of waywardness; he is untruthful, will not apply himself, is careless, disobedient, or persists in keeping bad company; the parent naturally tells him of his fault, and, as it seems to do no good, drops into a constant practice of scolding. Over and over the boy is reminded that he is “bad,” that he will never amount to anything, and so on. This finally filters in the child’s sub consciousness, and then the irretrievable damage; for when he comes to believe in his sub-mind that he is bad, he is bad.

Why not try to find the CAUSE of your child’s defects and remove it? When you KNOW that blame and reproof do no good, why go on?

We do not realize that it is a CRIME to say to any child under any circumstances, that he is bad, weak, or vicious. When you do that you are planting a seed of damage in his mind. Many a woman has been wrecked because her life was poisoned when she was a child by unceasing mental suggestions from her mother that she was naughty, wicked, unreliable, or untruthful.

Many a man is a weak failure in the struggles of mature life, simply because the cult of failure was carefully instilled into his childish mind by his thoughtless parents.

Dwell upon and encourage the good that is in your child. Ignore his defects as far as possible Learn how to shut your eyes. Above all, do not tell him he is wicked. Show him his faults, but never in public, but in sacred intimacy. Show him the consequences of wrongdoing; but enlist his aid in opposing his bad traits. Persistently suggest to him that he is good, brave, strong, and truthful. In after-life this belief of yours in him will tone up his self-respect and give him strength in his hours of crisis.

If one of your ancestors owned slaves—

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—should their name be erased from your family tree?

Should Jefferson City and Jefferson County change their names because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves?

Should towns named for the Five Civilized Tribes or their leaders change their names because the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War?

We began thinking of these questions a few days ago when we saw a Kansas City Star comment suggesting a fountain and a parkway named for J. C. Nichols be renamed because he was a racist whose real estate developments defined Kansas City’s history of racism that lingers in the minds of many citizens today, and upon hearing of a petition circulated by a University of Missouri student to remove a statue of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson from Francis Quadrangle (where the columns are in Columbia) and after seeing a news account that protestors in North Portland, Oregon had pulled down a statue of Jefferson at a high school named for him.

New to the discussion is that military bases should no longer be named for Confederate officers such as Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, Henry Benning Robert E. Lee, and others.

These are troubling issues and troubling questions in troubling times. Today, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson. The military bases will wait for a later posting.

Correcting the historical narrative is better than trying to erase it, for we learn nothing from erased history and we can learn everything from placing history’s people and events in context. Hasty action in emotional days might rob those in the future of needed guidance in shaping their eras.

University of Missouri Curators correctly decided to leave the Jefferson statue on Francis Quadrangle although the petitions had more than two-thousand signatures. University System President Mun Choi said, “We learn from history. We contextualize historical figures with complex legacies. We don’t remove history.”

To remove the statue of Jefferson because he owned slaves would also remove the statue of someone who was the main author of the Declaration of Independence, the creator of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the founder of the University of Virginia (three things he wanted on his original tombstone that also is at the University of Missouri-Columbia), and the president whose administration added most of the land west of the Mississippi River that made us a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Dr. Choi and the curators had it right.

Here’s a more intimate dimension to this issue:

Several years ago when I was a guest lecturer at Kent State University, I met a sharp, earnest African-American student, Shannon Lanier, and this then-girlfriend (now his wife, Chandra, and mother of their three children). He told me he was the sixth-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, whom some identify as the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. Martha Jefferson died at the age of 33 in 1782. Shannon already had co-authored a book about Jefferson’s black descendants. DNA studies indicate Tom and Sally had six children, four of them surviving to adulthood. Many white Jefferson descendants accept the Hemings descendants as part of the Jefferson heritage.

I wonder how those African-American Jefferson descendants would feel if they knew a proposal had been made at the University of Missouri to remove a statue of their most famous ancestor. Would the removal place them in the position of being branded as products of some kind of unforgivable Original Sin? Is their existence the result of some kind of unforgiveable disobedience of widely-accepted contemporary codes against sexual relations between different races (a code often ignored in plantation America, including here in Missouri)?

The censuring of Jefferson as a slave-owner could be seen as a disparagement of hundreds of his descendants, a continuation of the idea that any child born out of wedlock—let alone also born of an interracial relationship—should bear a mark of historic illegitimacy.

And what difference does it make in the long run? The importance of a life is not how it begins but how it is lived. That is why a rush to judgment in emotionally-charged times can be perilous.

As Shannon put it on CBS This Morning, on February 14, 2019, “Sometimes, I’m proud of his accomplishments and sometimes I hate him for not doing more…We can’t necessarily judge history with contemporary eyes but we can learn from history and the mistakes that our past leaders have made.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTC_UFAhrvA)

The PBS Newshour ran an extended piece that featured other descendants of Sally and Tom commenting on a Monticello exhibit about Sally. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gm3HtijrMQ)

The New York Times ran a Farah Stockman’s story on June 16, 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/jefferson-sally-hemings-descendants.html) about the feelings of Hemings descendants about the exhibit. One of those descendants, former employee of the National Archives in Washington, D. C., Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, took pride in his slave ancestors: “They were there at the beginning of the country. When you are of African descent, you are told that we had nothing to do with that. I’ve realized that members of my family had a lot to do with that. The contributions that the slave community did at this one plantation afforded Thomas Jefferson the leisure to be the genius that he became.”

Additionally, how, if we are to follow the wishes of those advocating removing monuments of racists and slave-holders, should we treat the thirty-nine men who signed the United States Constitution in 1787? Or the 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence? Some of them were slave-holders yet they gave us the Declaration that declared we were a nation on equal standing with other nations and asserted the immortal line we are fond of quoting today despite the times in which it originated—All men are created equal—and then produced a Constitution that, with its Bill of Rights, defines our country as the republic that it is.

There is danger in applying a moral standard of our time to punish our ancestors for the values they held in morally different societies. To brand them for being part of an acceptable culture that would not be acceptable today runs the risk of diminishing our opportunities to learn from them. Failing to remember our past with its disgraceful as well as its noble moments is to risk an ignorance that could produce regrettable repetitions.

Thomas Jefferson, J. C. Nichols and all of those in our pasts whose flaws we recognize because of our contemporary values give us important context as we correct today’s shortcomings.

Tomorrow is more important than yesterday. But knowing about yesterday is vitally important in helping us shape that tomorrow. Ignorance of history is more dangerous than knowledge of it. Historic events and historical figures are products of their times. Placing people and events within the standards of their eras gives them a reality that we cannot ignore as we consider who we are today and who we will seem to be when we join them as history.

Our presence in these times is a history lesson for tomorrow whether we like it or not or whether those who come after like us or not.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham a few days ago on MSNBC discussed how he evaluates historical figures:

Was the person or the institution being memorialized ultimately devoted to the pursuit of a more perfect union or were they for ending the constitutional experiment altogether. And by that test, even the most flawed white Americans—Andrew Jackson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, could be memorialized and understood as imperfect people who nevertheless were about defending a system that ultimately gave us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that ultimately gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Woman Suffrage. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, the story of the country has been one of all-too-gradual liberation and we should build our monuments; we should focus our collective commemorative memory around those moments.

Taken as a whole, was Jefferson’s life a quest for that “more perfect union?” Yes, it was and is the reason his statues should remain in Columbia and elsewhere, a representation of a man who—as is true of all of us—is greater than his shortcomings.

Dr. Crane on Crisis

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(How many crises can we have at once? It seems as if the Four Horsemen are galloping through our land—Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. The economy has driven thousands to our food banks. A pandemic continues to spread in our world. There is disorder, death, and destruction in our streets. The headlines of yesterday’s crisis are pushed aside by the one of today. Dr. Frank Crane wrote of how each of us might deal with crisis in the January, 1920 issue of Hearst’s: A Magazine with a Mission. In a time of crisis, he said, it is Principles that will be to us—-)

AS ANCHOR TO THE SHIP

It is not what you can do ordinarily, but what you can do in a crisis, that counts. The crisis is the swift fire that tries men, as gold is tried, revealing the fine metal and the dross. You never know what is in a soul until you see it pass through a supreme moment.

That unmasks the hero, uncovers the god. He may have seemed a tramp, a shiftless loafer, a ne’er-do-well, but when the factory takes fire and all are paralyzed with fear, it is he that plunges into the burning building and rescues the boy at the cost of his own life.

She may have been a most drab and commonplace woman, ignorant and low, but when her hour strikes she moves towards it with the majesty of a queen, and cares for those stricken with the pest in fine carelessness for her own life.

The question is, what will you do in a pinch? Will you measure up? Or will you muff?

The fierce rays of responsibility all focused into one white hot moment have a curious effect on souls. One person will be melted to panic. Another will be steeled to unusual strength.

The merciless searchlight of danger moves over the city, lighting upon this one and that.

How will you act when it rests upon you?

What reserves of power have you? What hidden store of resources? Your final efficiency will depend upon this.

Does danger, responsibility, the sense of the fatefulness of the moment, key you up, cheer your brain to think quickly and accurately, and steady your hand to its highest skill?

All your life you are preparing for the crisis. When it comes you will see your naked soul as it is—clean and strong, or cringing and deformed. It is your Day of Judgment.

When it comes, a lot of things will not matter: your money, for one thing, and your station in life, for another. All that will matter will be, whether you are a man or a mouse.

In the crisis you suddenly become aware of the vital importance of principles. For it is these, the great, deep, subconscious convictions, the sleepers under the house of life, that decide whether you are to stand the storm or be swept away.

Your opinions may be upset, your power to think may be unloosed; but if your principles hold, you shall not fall.

Principles are to the soul what the great tap-root is to the tree, what the anchor and the cable arc to the ship, what the gold reserve is to the bank. Have you any?

Are there some things you believe in and will risk your life upon, things that lie too firmly imbedded in you for argument, too fundamental even to be taken up and examined?

Policy and cleverness, alertness and shiftiness arc very useful in everyday weather, but the man that has these only, and no fixed principles, “shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and smote upon that house.

“And it fell! And great was the fall thereof.”

Dr. Crane on hate and science

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(A combination of two issues that seem to be part of today’s national dialogue—plus a recent comment from the Texas Lieutenant Governor suggesting old people should be prepared to die so the economy could be reopened—attracted us to this reflection by Dr. Frank Crane, who wrote these thoughts during World War I and just before Adolf Hitler emerged to lift Aryan perfection as a prelude to a greater war and a holocaust. Keep in mind, however, when this was written. Some attitudes that seem prescient in that time might not be fair today. On the other hand, his basic point at the end remains valid.)

HALF SCIENCE

There is a kind of bastard science which is very dangerous.

It gets a glimpse of the great law of “The Survival of the Fittest.” It explains many things. And the apprentice mind in its enthusiasm imagines it explains everything.

It does not. The Survival of the Fittest, the Struggle for Existence, and the whole law that the physically weak are exterminated and the physically strong survive, all this is true only up to a certain point.

It is true of tigers and tomcats; it is not true of human beings.

When Man first appeared in the history of evolution, he brought another element into the arena, the Moral element.

Not to reckon with this Moral power is not to be a scientist, but a half-scientist.

The German mind is half-scientific. That is what ails it. It conceives that the final triumph will rest with “the big blond beast.” With the men of muscle and ferocity, with those who thrust aside all motives of pity and gentleness and concentrate on material force.

The saying that “God is on the side of the strongest battalions,” is a sample of this half-reasoning.

God is on the side of truth, honor, humaneness, and love; and in the end these gentle powers shall overcome. That is what Jesus meant when He said that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” And that is what the half-baked mind sneers at, neither indeed can believe.

But just the same, Civilization means the superiority of the Moral forces and the eventual subjugation of all Brute force.

…Civilization is not a working out of materialistic laws; it is the mastery and direction of those laws by a spiritual, non-material something called Man.

Dr. Crane prays for doctors, and for us

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(If the forecasts are true, doctors are going to be coming under incredible pressure. And so will the rest of us, healthy or sick. Although Dr. Frank Crane wrote this prayer for doctors, the medical kind, it seems adaptable to a lot of other people these days, with only a few changes.)

THE PRAYER OF THE PHYSICIAN

O God, I pray that I may have absolute intellectual honesty. Let others fumble, shuffle, and evade, but let me, the physician, cleave to the clean truth, assume no knowledge I have not and claim no skill I do not possess.

Cleanse me from all credulities, all fatuous enthusiasms, all stubbornness, vanities, egotism, prejudices, and whatever else may clog the sound process of my mind. These be dirt; make my personality as aseptic as my instruments.

Give me heart, but let my feelings be such as shall come over me as an investment of power, to make my thoughts clear and cold as stars, and my hand skillful—strong as steel.

Deliver me from professionalism, so that I may be always human, and thus minister to sickly minds as well as to ailing bodies.

Give me a constant realization of my responsibility. People believe in me. Into my hands they lay their lives. Let me, of all men, be sober and walk in the far of eternal justice. Let no culpable ignorance of mine, no neglect nor love of ease, spoil the worth of my high calling.

Make my discretion strong as religion, that the necessary secrets of souls confided in me may be as it told to the priests.

Give me the joy of healing. I know how far short I am of being a good man; but make me a good doctor.

Give me that love and eagerness and pride in my work without which the practice of my profession will be fatal to me and to them under my care.

Give me a due and decent self-esteem, that I may regard no man’s occupation higher than mine, envying not the king upon his throne so long as I am prime minister to the suffering.

Deliver me from playing at precedence, from the hankering for praise and prominence, from sensitiveness, and all like forms of toxic selfishness.

Give me money; not so little that I cannot have the leisure I need to put quality into my service; not so much that I shall grow fat in head and leaden in heart, and sell my sense of ministry for the flesh-pots of indulgence.

Give me courage, but hold me back from over-confidence.

Let me so discharge the duties of my office that I shall not be ashamed to look any man or woman in the face, and that when at death I lay down my task I shall go to what judgment awaits me strong in the consciousness that I have done something toward alleviating the incurable tragedy of life.

Amen.

 

Dr. Crane of truth and lying

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We thought we had posted this entry last week but we must have been more befuddled than usual.

(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. After decades of watching our political processes, your observer likes 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.”

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 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.