(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.”
It’s 2020. What vision will we have for our state and country in this Year of the Eye Doctor? We’ll have a serious commentary at the end of this entry from a St. Louis theologian who worries, as we enter this campaign year, about who is telling or will tell the truth. But first, a couple of things to unburden our chest.
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Thing one: Your ever-alert observer has noted some instances in which people have referred to 2019 as the end of a decade. We suppose it is, if you consider the decade to have started in 2000. And if you count to ten and think 9 is the last number.
We’re a little peevish about this sort of thing. It isn’t the end of a decade unless you count a year ending in zero as the first year of a decade. We realize some of you will quickly take umbrage at that observation but we need look no farther than our own birthdays.
Let’s assume you were born on May 5 in the year 0.
By explanation— if we go from 1BCE to 1CE —archaeologists use the phrases “before common era” and “common era” to avoid conflicts with various religious calenders—and since BCE counts backwards (King Tut served from about 1342 to 1325 BCE), time works backwards from one to zero and time then moves forward a like amount to year 1, the first anniversary of the switchover from BCE to just CE.
When were you be one year old in you were born on May 5, 0?
Right. Year 1. You have completed one year since your birth. On May 5 in year nine you celebrated the NINTH anniversary of your birth, not the tenth. You celebrated your tenth anniversary on May 5 in year 10, the end of your first decade. Therefore the decade begins with one and ends with zero, or as we would say in our time—2011-2020. (Incidentally, I think it is Kurt Vonnegut who has suggested we have only one birth day. All succeeding observances are anniversaries of our birth day.)
To put it less obtrusively, when Count von Count on Sesame Street counts, what does he start with?
When a boxing referee counts a fighter out at the count of ten, what number does he start with? If he started with zero he’d be giving the fighter eleven seconds to get up.
When we count out the number of pennies in a dime, how many are there? 10. If we stated out with the first penny at zero, we’d have 11 when we got to ten cents, which doesn’t seem to make much, uh, sense.
So the decade has another year to go.
Of course, in the cosmic sense, decades are immaterial. And we can consider a decade anything we darn well want to consider it. A person born in 1994 would celebrate a decade of life in 2005. Since time is an abstract concept invented by the human mind, a decade can be anything the human mind wants it to be whenever it’s convenient.
So what the heck are we arguing about? Let’s move on.
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Thing two: If you can’t do anything else, get the name right (that was one of the first rules of journalism I learned). As long as we’re chest-unloading, let’s again see if anybody thinks it’s disrespectful to mispronounce the name of another. We heard a reporter on one of our mid-Missouri television stations report something a few nights ago that was going to happen at Jefferson City’s Bynder Park. It’s not pronounced “Bine,” it’s “Bin.” Frederich Heinrich Binder was born in Hanover, Niedersachsen, Germany in 1845. He came to Jefferson City in 1866 and until his death in 1911 he was a major leader of our city and a builder. It’s Binder, not Bynder.
One of the grocery stores where we stock up is Gerbes East Supermarket. It’s bad enough that regular folks on the street refer to it as “Gerbs,” but it’s just plan inexcusable that the store’s public-address system that tells you what wonderful bargains there are today says the same thing. Frank Gerbes (Gur’-bus) was running a Kroger store in Tipton when he started his own business in 1934. In coming years he established Gurbus stores in several mid-Missouri towns. In 1986, he merged his company with Dillon’s which two years later became part of the Kroger chain. Frank had been dead eleven years by then, long enough—we guess—for the people who are now Kroger employees (and the company, apparently) to forget how to pronounce the name of a small town merchant who built a little grocery store empire in mid-Missouri named Frank GURBUS.
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Okay, now it’s time to start the new year on a more thoughtful although more volatile topic: truth. A friend of ours passed along something from an internet site called Theologycorner, a contribution that worries about what has happened to truth and what will become of it—and of us—if we are not afraid of discovering it from people we don’t want to listen to. This is from a theology professor here in our state:
The Death of Truth: “Both Sides” don’t deserve our consideration
Ruben Rosario Rodriguez December 30, 2019 Idioglosalalia
As a university professor of Theological Studies I have always engaged current events, and have always done so with a high degree of objectivity. By the same token, as a theologian, ethicist, and practicing Christian, I have always asserted that the church ought to stand outside partisan politics while working across party lines for the common good, remaining free to offer a prophetic critique whenever the state overreaches or neglects its duty. In other words, I have taken the apostle Peter’s advice as my guiding mantra for navigating church and state: “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29, NRSV).
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that in the context of serious class discussions I have been critical of the Trump administration’s policies separating children from their families and creating border detention centers. Just as I am critical of Trump’s immigration policies now, I was critical of Obama’s use of drones and W’s use of torture then. However, unlike previous students, my most recent batch of first-year undergraduates is unable to grasp that I am not being partisan when making a serious theological critique of politicians.
Though I have explained to them how I leveled equally harsh—yet justified—criticisms at previous administrations regardless of party affiliation, for these kids so much of this is ancient history. Even though I argued cogently and fairly that Congress was justified in initiating impeachment proceedings against both, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019, all they see is the now—and since Trump is currently in office, it leads to comments like this in my course evaluations:
“Sometimes I felt uncomfortable when the professor would share some harsh political views that I didn’t fully agree with. I’m always interested in learning about the point of view of others, [but] I just felt that as a teacher it’s important to share both sides of an issue even if you have a bias towards one.”
One of the things I like to model in my class is a fair and balanced presentation of opposing viewpoints, so these words really cut to the quick. A colleague argues these students’ inability to transcend their point of view stems from the widespread perspectival approach to morality and ethics. In other words, “You may believe it to be true, but that doesn’t make it true for another.” To which I respond, “Yes, but as a teacher it is my responsibility to challenge these students to move beyond mere opinion and offer clear, defensible reasons why they believe one thing and not another.”
Truth has been devalued to such a degree that those who cannot recall a time before the post-truth era find it increasingly difficult telling fact from fiction. Thankfully, we have been here before, and can learn from the past. During the rise of fascism in the 1930s, journalist and novelist George Orwell observed that useful lies were preferred to harmful truths, and truth had been replaced by propaganda. Consequently, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” In such times, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
In the aftermath of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, President Trump vacillated. Instead of immediately repudiating the heinous acts of white nationalism that led to the death of Heather Heyer, a peaceful counter-protester, and the beating of DeAndre Harris, an African American counter-protester brutally beaten by six white men, the President claimed there were “very fine people on both sides,” and that the mob chanting hateful racist propaganda included, “a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.”
Ostensibly a protest against the removal of a Confederate monument to Robert E. Lee, the rally was also a calculated move to draw national media attention to the various factions comprising the Alt-Right in an effort to move from the Internet fringes of U.S. politics into the Trump-era mainstream. Protesters included white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and various, heavily armed, militia groups. Amidst the chants of “white lives matter,”“Jews will not replace us,” “Whose streets? Our streets!” (co-opting a Black Lives Matter slogan used during the Ferguson protests), and the Nazi slogan, “Blood and soil,” marchers carried signs with anti-Semitic slurs, brandished Nazi swastikas and waved Confederate flags, while also carrying “Trump/Pence” signs.
This is not respectful conversation; when one’s interlocutor brandishes symbols of hatred and genocide—and even calls for violence against others—there is no duty to present “both sides.” However, as a Christian, I have a moral duty to condemn hatred and violence, and I recognize there are times when remaining silent is a morally reprehensible act. This we learn from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred in a Nazi concentration camp for resisting Nazi racial policies: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Anti-Semitic attacks worldwide rose 13 percent in 2018 from the previous year, most notably in the US and Western Europe. While it would be dishonest and slanderous to link the rise of anti-Semitism to the election of Donald Trump, it is fair game to critique his administration’s lukewarm condemnation of anti-Semitism. Five years ago such acts were deemed intolerable and the public outcry from pastors and elected officials would have dominated media coverage. Today there is too much silence from Christian leaders and elected officials in light of this increase. It started with vandalizing Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, then mass shootings in synagogues, and most recently a weeklong series of vicious attacks in NYC targeting Jews during Hanukkah.
In seminary, my first ever theology professor was the late James H. Cone. To this day I carry with me the words he shared the first day of class at Union Theological Seminary in New York: “The task of theology is saying ‘Yes’ to some things and ‘No’ to others.” Theology is an inherently political undertaking—not partisan but political—and as such Christians cannot remain neutral in matters of truth, justice, and ethics. We can respectfully disagree on matters of policy—i.e., on how to address the problem of hunger and food insecurity in our public schools—but we cannot ignore the reality of poverty. We can propose different solutions to the problems created by undocumented immigration, but that does not give us license to discriminate, marginalize, or in any way mistreat undocumented immigrants.
Consequently, students in my classes will continue to be exposed to “harsh political views” they might not necessarily agree with. I don’t expect my students to agree with me on matters of politics. I do expect them to present evidence for why they believe one thing and not another. Most of all, I expect them to see beyond political posturing and demagoguery in order to evaluate all politicians (and their words and actions) from the perspective of Christian truth. And I will not tolerate Pilate’s evasive response, “What is truth?” (John 18:38, NRSV), in my classroom.
Dr. Ruben Rosario Rodriguez is a Professor of Systematic Theology at St. Louis University. He describes himself:
“I am a constructive theologian and ethicist who stands within the Reformed Protestant traditions (Calvin, Barth) yet is steeped in liberation theology (Gutierrez, Ruether, Cone). The first theological text I read (at age 15) was Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology (3 volumes-in-one University of Chicago hardbound edition). James H. Cone was my first theology professor, and I once met Iggy Pop in lower Manhattan back in the early 1990s. I strive to be a theological pastor and a pastoral theologian, and here I am guided by the words of Prof Cone: “If I couldn’t preach it, I wouldn’t write it.”
—–Something to think about, particularly in this era and in this campaign year of 2020. We hope it turns out to be a happy new year.
(Dr. Frank Crane, a Methodist minister and newspaper columnist who died in 1928, compiled his weekly columns into a ten-volume series of small books a century ago. We have found his thoughts still valuable in today’s world and have decided to start each week with one of them. As the time approaches for the return of the Missouri General Assembly, we offer these thoughts.):
FUNDAMENTALS IN DEMOCRACY
These are axioms of democracy. Think on these things.
The whole people is wiser than any group of men in it. Its judgment is sounder, surer. As Lincoln put it, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
Democracy is not a scheme of voting, a plan for securing rules; it is a spirit.
Remember what Mazzzini* said, that some day a man would arise to whom democracy would be a religion. He would be the Great Man (I quote from memory, and may be inexact.)
Democracy is run for the benefit of the people in it; autocracy for the benefit of the people upon it.
Autocracy is most concerned about efficiency; democracy about welfare. Autocracy is eager to build the house; Democracy, that the builders be happy.
Autocracy is a White Passion; Democracy is a Red Passion.
Autocracy thinks of the State; Democracy of the people that compose the State.
Autocracy is abstract; Democracy concrete. The former exults impersonal aims; the latter aims constantly at men.
Autocracy’s efficiency is quick, specious, and temporary; Democracy’s efficiency is cumulative; every success means another.
Democracy is natural; Autocracy is artificial.
Democracy is its own remedy. The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. It carries within itself its own recuperation. Autocracy prepares its own ruin.
Democracy has in it the seed of evolution; Autocracy has in it the seed of revolution.
The strength of democracy is education; the strength of autocracy is obedience.
The God of democracy is the same God the individual has; the God of autocracy has a different moral code from that of the individual. The Kaiser’s God, for instance, approved of the rape of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania.**
The method of democracy is light; of autocracy, darkness. Democracy created the free press; Autocracy the censor.
It is complained of democracy that it debates too much, but only by free debate can the right be winnowed out.
Democracy “washes its dirty linen in public.” True, but it gets it clean.
Democracy is dangerous. And there is no progress without danger.
Democracy is called vulgar, common, cheap. The real truth is that Autocracy is more so, only its defects are concealed and fester, while democracy’s are open and are healed.
Democracy is capable of a more perfect organization and unity than autocracy.
Autocracy is built upon caste; Democracy upon humanity.
“The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,” is only possible in a world of democratic nations. So long as there are kings, emperors, and dynasties there can be no world unity.
Militarism is a function of autocracy; democracy functions in law.
Art, science, and literature will do better under democracy than under any protection and patronage they may get from autocracy, just as plants and people grow better in the air and sunshine than in a closed room.
*Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) was an Italian politician and writer who was influential in the Italian Revolutionary Movement that argued for a unified Italy
**This column appeared during World War I and was published in one of his books in 1919.
We’re going to start something today and see how it goes.
In prowling through old newspapers seeking out tidbits of Missouri Capitol history I have frequently run across columns called “Four Minute Essays” by Dr. Frank Crane, a long-time Methodist minister who died in 1928. He was a believer in positive thinking long before native Missourian Dale Carnegie started writing about How to Win Friends and Influence People.
One hundred years ago he compiled many of his columns into ten small volumes. Although there will be instances where some of the syntax is antiquated, his thoughts seem worthy of being put back into circulation in our times. We’re going to try to offer one of his essays each Monday with our regular entries later in the week. Here’s the first one.
PRINCIPLES
Principles are the deep laws underlying life.
Just as gravitation runs through every particle of matter from sun to sand grain, just as electricity pervades all things, and chemical affinity works always and everywhere, so there are certain laws that eternally operate in events and in men’s minds.
That honesty is the best policy, that courage is power, that practice brings efficiency, and that truth eventually prevails over error, are just as evergreen and exceptionless as the forces in dead stones and planets.
The first business of one who would succeed is to find out these principles, his second business is to believe in them, and his final business is to entrust his whole career in them.
A fool believes in a principle when he sees it works for his good. A man of sense believes in principle when he cannot see. The very essence of faith-power is that it works in the dark.
The real man believes most of all in honesty when it is plain that to lie would profit him; believes most of all in cleanliness when the allurements of uncleanliness make their strongest appeal; believes most of all in the power of good to overcome evil when men most clamor for the false remedy of cruel retaliation.
The man of principle steers his course by the north star; in storm and fog he goes straight on; he is an ocean-goer. The man of shrewdness and expediency is a coaster and explores the deeps at his peril.
One gets the good out of a principle only when he is convinced that it is invariable. Behind it is the eternal will of the university, which cannot be fooled, tricked, or dodged.
Rooted in principles life grows stronger and more majestic every day; the years harden it; failures fructify it; the windy blasts toughen it; Junes fill it with flowers and Octobers load it with fruit.
Take stock of yourself. Are there some big things you utterly believe in, and by them govern your days? Out of those things shall grow your happiness and your usefulness at the last.
Do you think everything has exceptions? Are you straight or crooked as occasion dictates? Do you say, “It all depends?” Are you an opportunist? Do you simply act as your judgment decides in each case? Do you think the end justifies the means; that is, that your little mind is clearer than the omniscient mind?
So you do that which is EXPEDIENT or do you do which is RIGHT?
If you have no principles you are but the chaff which the wind driveth away.
Think the “me too” movement is new? Consider this report from the Union Franklin County Tribune of December 12, 1913:
“Because Mike Kincannon of Joplin, a patrolman on the police force, told the wife of a prominent railroad man to ‘go home and get some clothes on’ when he saw her on the street wearing a slit skirt, his resignation was demanded by Chief of Police J. H. Myers. Complaint of the patrolman’s orders to the woman were filed by the woman’s husband.”
(Isn’t that a little intriguing? Some creative writer could take that story and structure various narratives stemming from at least two questions: Why was the woman (especially a married woman) wearing a “slit skirt” on the street in those days? Why did the husband complain? And what happened to Kincannon after that? What did HIS wife tell him after hearing of the comment? This, my friends, is a potential short story on the hoof.)
000
By now we all should have learned to consider March with suspicion. December was a plunge into the darkness and cold of winter. January was the depths but that faint light in the distance was February which, while still not pleasant, at least raise hopes with the realization that it was a short month and by the end of it men would be playing baseball and racing cars again. Then comes March and we inevitably expect more of it than it deserves. Even the spring solstice on March 21 does not bring lasting relief. Although April is considered the “cruelest month,” it nonetheless brings us greening grass and budding trees and the promise of May. Let us be patient and tolerant of March. It cannot help itself.
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We were talking to a friend the other day who has heard confident predictions that President Trump could be elected for four more years in 2020. “The chances are good that he’ll get the nomination as long as political parties have ‘Winner Take All’ or ‘Winner Take Most’ primaries in which someone with thirty percent of the vote gets one-hundred percent of the delegates,” she said. “If political parties had proportional primaries, conventions might be worth paying attention to again. The 2016 Republican convention sure would have been if the primaries had been proportional in awarding delegates.”
I didn’t ask her when she’d start wearing a MCGA hat—Make Conventions Great Again.
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Governor Parson knows that we can’t keep letting our roads and bridges turn to rust and rubble. That’s why he’s out banging the drum for his bond issue proposal. He really doesn’t have much of a choice, given voter resistance to any kind of a fuel tax increase that might keep a school bus or two from winding up in a creek. But there’s a cost that does with issuing bonds.
All of us who ever borrowed money—whether it was to buy a car, a house, a daughter’s wedding, or to pay some backed-up bills—knows that we’ll have to pay off those loans. And making payments on loans reduces the amount of money in our general bank account, limiting our choices in buying food, taking vacations, buying some nice things from time to time.
Because we as citizens refuse to pay for it now, we’ll pay for it later. A long time later.
But somebody has to do something to keep school buses out of creeks.
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The city council in Jefferson City passed a resolution Monday night urging every citizen of the town who comes in contact with members of the legislature to tell them how much it would mean to the city to build a national steamboat museum here. Legislative employees, landlords who rent space to lawmakers, businesses that serve them food and libations, stores that sell them clothes or tires—anybody who sees a legislator needs to get in their ears about passing the bills financing this museum project, says the resolution in so many words.
Yes, I instigated it. Not sure how the Missouri Ethics Commission will handle registering an entire city as a lobbyist but if it does figure it out, I’ll pay the ten dollar registration fee.
Missouri has a new law that allows some people convicted of some crimes to regain voting rights by having their criminal record expunged. A bill passed by the legislature in 2016 went into effect January 1 allowing people convicted of non-Class A felonies to go to court and ask that their slates be wiped clean. There are limits. Only one felony and two misdemeanor criminal records can be expunged. A person cannot file for expungement for three years after completion of a misdemeanor sentence. A convicted felon has to wait seven years. The law is more complicated than this explanation but that’s the general idea. It applies only to state crimes.
At the heart of this new law is an important question: How long must a person face punishment AFTER that person has “paid his/her debt to society?” The new law does not grant this mercy to people involved in violent offenses, sex crimes, and other more serious crimes. They cannot regain their civil rights, ever. But the new law offers new opportunities for many.
We want to focus on one person today, a circumstance brought about by a recent podcast we did for the Missouri Bar about this new law and a conversation we recently had with a fellow lobbyist about a former major political figure who was convicted in federal, not state, court.
Many folks can forgive others for some crimes eventually. But when a public official violates the public trust, there often is no sympathy shown long after they have completed their prison term. Their crime probably did not result in physical harm to anyone. No blood was spilled. No violence occurred except the breaching of public trust. But the breaching of public trust is so abhorrent in our society that it seems to be unforgivable, a violation that wipes out memory or acknowledgement of long years of accomplishments.
Case in point: Bob F. Griffin, the man who was Speaker of the House for fifteen years, far longer than anyone else before and far longer than we will ever see as long as term limits exist.
We bring this up because we’re nearing the end of writing the next book about the history of our Capitol, and we are struggling with how to describe one of the most historical figures in the history of the Missouri legislature. He resigned before his final term as Speaker expired and three years later was sent to federal prison for mail fraud and bribery, offenses connected to his role as Speaker of the House. President Clinton commuted his sentence in 2001. Griffin is 83 now. It soon will be twenty years after his release from prison. We have not spoken directly to him for a long time but friends say he maintains he pleaded guilty only to keep other friends from being punished as harshly as he was.
At the State Historical Society in Columbia we have dozens, hundreds, or oral history interviews, many of them with former legislators.
One of them, a Democrat as was Griffin, recalled: “Bob Griffin did a lot for the State of Missouri and I always thought he was fair. Now I’m sure there are others who will tell you that — but that kind of works both ways. I thought he did a good job. Good political person. He had a way about himself of communicating with you. He was never intimidating or belligerent…He never once asked me to pass a bill out of committee.”
Another, also a Democrat, said, “I think that he brought progress to the Missouri House. I think that he is a responsible, through his leadership, for the passage — through his chairman or through other legislators — for very progressive legislation and laws.”
A former Republican floor leader remembered, “I became good friends with Bob Griffin after that, because of working together with him…I think that Bob did a very good job. Bob was fair. He was fair to all concerned, and he was not “blind in the right eye” where he would [not] recognize Republicans.” Republicans, in the minority then, occupied only a few rows of the House to the right of the Speaker’s dais.
But Griffin did have his contemporary critics. One Republican commented, “Bob was as big a crook as there was in the country. He got caught and he got by with this for a long, long time, but that was the way we—that philosophy is why the Republicans got control.”
And a fellow Democrat: “I had trouble with Bob Griffin. I was too independent for him. Bob was a very strong leader. An effective leader. I remember him calling me into his office when I was a freshman to vote for something. And I told him I wouldn’t do it. You know, there was a price I paid for that. I didn’t get a chairmanship as early as other people in my class.”
It was Griffin who broke up a large appropriations committee into five smaller appropriations committees focusing on specific issues that forwarded their recommendations to the House Budget Committee that drafted the final House version of the budget—a system that remained in one form or another until 2017 when a single 35-member appropriations committee was created with members serving on smaller subcommittees. Some women representatives interviewed recalled Griffin elevated women’s role in the house leadership. Certainly, his home town of Cameron profited from his term in the speakership. It got two new state prisons.
Griffin’s lasting legacy in the capitol—other than the House Budget Committees—is the Hall of Famous Missourians. After a group of legislative wives raised money to install the first four busts, the project languished until Griffin began holding fund-raising golf tournaments to place more busts there. Speakers since have honored other Missourians but no speaker has honored more than Bob Griffin.
And that brings us to this: While Griffin was speaker, some of his friends—we are told—raised money to have a bust made of Griffin. But that bust has never been placed in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There are some people enshrined there who are not 100% pure and at least one who is hardly a Missourian. But it’s unlikely we will see the bust of Missouri’s longest-serving Speaker of the House in the Hall of Famous Missourians. A suggestion has been made that it be installed in a corner of a side gallery in the House, near the photographs of previous speakers (Griffin’s picture is on the wall with the others), or perhaps put in the Speaker’s office. But Griffin was a Democrat who, in the end, brought disgrace to the office of Speaker, and it is the end rather than the years preceding it that make the bust such a problem. Republicans are firmly in control of the legislature now, making public honoring of a Democratic politician a stretch. And a Republican Speaker surely would face severe questions from his caucus about honoring a Democrat, particularly one who, in the end, cast a lingering shadow on the office.
Expunging the record is far easier than expunging political memory. Maybe someday the bust will find a home—maybe in the Cameron City Library, a city where Bob Griffin Road runs under Highway 36.
Bob Griffin was no saint. But, on balance, was he such a sinner that nothing else matters? Or is breaking the public trust one of the ultimate crimes for which there can be no expungement, no forgiveness? Ever.
Perhaps he is proof of the truth of Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Or should the words of American writer and historian James Truslow Adams prevail:
“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”
I don’t think I have violated any laws, present or proposed. I’ve been out of the legislature for four years (actually I was never a legislator but I was inside the doors for four decades as a watchful presence at the press table or in the press gallery), which is beyond most legislator-lobbyist regulation proposals. It’s rare that reporters put on this hat although there have been a few who’ve done some special work for short periods of time.
For most of January some people, most notably the remaining members of the press corps from my days among them, have tried to figure out what I was up to. But now that the steamboat museum bill has been introduced, that mystery has been cleared up.
I have become one of “them.”
No pay is involved. This is a matter of passion and a desire to see something great happen to my city, the city where most of the important lobbyists live and have their work.
The public perception of lobbyists is that they are the manipulative shadows behind government, twisting the will of elected officials for their own purposes, sometimes lubricating the process with booze, broads, and secretly-given big bucks.
I think I always have recognized the persuasive power of good lobbyists; the rest of the negative stereotypes I don’t know about. I have been too busy reporting on the actions of the lobbied and have had no time to look into the ways the lobbying is done.
Long ago, in the old Missourinet blog, I wrote that lobbyists don’t represent some malevolent power so much as they represent you and me. Just about every organization you and I belong to, any business that we patronize—even our insurance policies, our barbers and hairdressers, whatever, are represented in the halls of government. Old person? AARP has someone. Concerned about justice for yourself and others? The ACLU is there. Want good education in Missouri? Teachers’ organizations, superintendents’ organizations, higher education institutions all have lobbyists. Roads gone bad; bridges caving in? Transportation interests have lobbyists.
Against something? There are lobbyists for that, too.
They represent the competition of ideas. Some are good at it. Some, like me, are just going around doing what seems to be the right thing to do to get one thing accomplished and we’re doing it without sophistication and political muscle. There is room in the hallway for the little guy. It’s kind of intimidating to be one. But on the other hand, I’m having a good time back in that world, albeit on the other side of the chamber doors, meeting and talking to people, chatting with folks I remember before my 2014 retirement.
I’ve worn my coat and tie more in the last month, I think, than I have in the last four years. And it has taken no time at all to begin to chafe at the idea that once again I am living by someone else’s clock. It’s also getting in the way of doing the final edit on the new Capitol history book that I want to get to the publishers before the first spring training baseball game.
But getting this steamboat museum funding bill passed is important enough to make me do this.
I have wondered about the ethics of lobbying. ARE THERE ethics in lobbying? Well, of course there are. The National Conference of State Legislatures published an article in its magazine in May, 2013.
It turns out there is an American League of Lobbyists. And as with every professional organization of which I have been a part, the ALL has its ethics code, published in the magazine.
A lobbyist shall:
Conduct lobbying activities with honesty and integrity.
Comply fully with all laws, regulations and rules applicable to the lobbyist.
Conduct lobbying activities in a fair and professional manner.
Avoid all representations that may create conflicts of interest.
Vigorously and diligently advance the client’s or employer’s interests.
Have a written agreement with the client regarding terms and conditions of services.
Maintain appropriate confidentiality of client or employer information.
Ensure better public understanding and appreciation of the nature, legitimacy and necessity of lobbying in our democratic governmental process.
Fulfill duties and responsibilities to the client or employer.
Exhibit proper respect for the governmental institutions before which the lobbyists represent and advocate clients’ interest.
As with many professional ethics codes, enforcement is difficult. Lobbying, after all, is strongly aligned with the First Amendment. And that is why efforts to restrict legislators from becoming lobbyists is problematic. Freedom of speech is protected. The right of people to peacefully assemble is protected. Petitioning government for a redress of grievances is protected. The protection of the free exercise of religion applies to lobbyists for the Missouri Baptist Convention, the Missouri Catholic Conference and other faith-based operations. Maybe this is why legislation limiting legislators from becoming lobbyists carries no penalties.
I’m not sure what the ethics are when a lobbying firm has clients with differing viewpoints on an issue. I don’t recall (but my brain is not as elastic as it was years ago) ever seeing the same lobbyist testify both for and against a bill because his or her clients differ. I don’t even know if a lobbyist has an ethical obligation to notify clients with opposing views. Maybe one of the folks I now share the hallways with will educate me.
Not that it matters to me, really. I don’t have multiple clients, I have only one interest. I do know that I sometimes wonder if I am a David among a bunch of Goliaths.
So, anyway, I have become a lobbyist. Didn’t want to. But in light of recent court decisions and the climate created by the adoption of the Clean Missouri proposition last November, I decided I needed to register so I could go around and talk to people about the steamboat museum.
I have to file my first monthly expenditure report. Zero.
But I’m in trouble. I can’t remember my password that will let me fill out the form that tells the Missouri Ethics Commission I haven’t bought a darned thing, let along bought a legislator.
Bob Priddy, Lobbyist. Never in my wildest dreams…..
Almost 200 men and women you and I have chosen to represent us in writing the laws that govern our lives begin their work today at the Capitol. Some are rookies with high ideals and others are weather-beaten veterans facing the last of their eight or sixteen years making those decisions.
Governor John S. Phelps speaking to the General Assembly on February 8, 1877, said: “I trust we are assembled, not as partisans, but as patriots, with a sincere determination to support the right and to condemn the wrong. We are assembled not to carry out our own wishes, but to respect and speak the voice of the people, restrained within constitutional limits. For a time the destinies of the people of this State have been confided in us, and it is to be hoped our deliberations will be characterized by wisdom, patriotism and justice.”
It would be interesting for this year’s rookies to write down their goals and ambitions, their ethical standards that they hope to carry into their service, and their thoughts about who they represent and seal them into an envelope that will not be opened for, say, twenty years.
Then, as they start their final year in the capitol—whether it be their eighth or their sixteenth—they write their accomplishments, the ethical standards they have at the end and the challengers to them they have faced and the alterations in them they are brave enough to acknowledge, and who they really represented in the end. Those statements should be sealed in an envelope and not opened until they open the first envelope, enough time having passed that they have a perspective on their years in office that they might have lacked when they closed that second envelope.
We have a lot of documents at the State Historical Society of Missouri. It would be interesting for future generations of Missourians wanting to study Missouri’s political system to read the contents of those two envelopes.
A year ago a young State Representative facing his last year in the House and with no plans to try to move to the Senate did something like that and what he wrote, published in his constituent newsletter is worth saving. And it’s worth reading every two years by rookies.
Ten years ago, a former State Senator who was seen as a rising star in his party wrote of how his political ambition cost him a career.
We offer these two reflections for consideration by those who begin the 100th session of the General Assembly of the state of Missouri.
Representative Jay Barnes of Jefferson City will be most remembered as the chairman of the committee that investigated the machinations of Governor Eric Greitens and his earlier investigation of the Mamtech scandal in Moberly. In his newsletter of January 5, 2018, he wrote, in part:
There have been great moments of satisfaction from feeling of a job well done – and moments of gloom from failure. Such is life. Sometimes when I think of the things I’ve learned over these eight years, I think of Bob Seger – “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
As I reflect on my eight years, I noticed something on the House website that puts things in perspective – this week we are beginning the second regular session of the 99th General Assembly. It is the 198th time in our state’s history that this has happened. For those nearly 200 years, our statehouse has been filled with men and women of goodwill – and also a fair share of opportunists, con men, and people whose ambition you could see through a brick wall.
…Governments are inherently prone to corruption — both the criminal kind and the softer corruption that settles in over time. Soft corruption happens when a legislator sponsors a piece of legislation just because a lobbyist asked, without knowing anything about the subject or asking any questions. It happens when a legislator grows lazy and makes decisions about votes without reading the actual bill or considering what it does, but just asking who’s for it and against it.
It also happens when their heart or head tells them a vote is wrong, but they do it anyway because of pressure, inertia, an unwillingness to stick their neck out, or for some favor to be traded later. Instead of doing what is right, the path of convenience and personal advantage is taken instead. Of course, it’s human nature to avoid confrontation and to have ambition. The question is not whether it will happen, but how often and whether it will happen on votes that have serious impact on the lives of people beyond the Capitol’s marble halls.
A colleague once explained the “favor to be named later” idea to me when he tried to flip my vote on a bill. “I disagree with your no vote, but even you can’t say this is a huge deal,” he said. “And, you know, you may have a bill that comes along where someone else might be on the fence, and you’re gonna need their vote. Why don’t you just throw a vote here, and then when your bill comes up, the favor will get returned?”
This is legislative utilitarianism: the idea that good ends justify bad means to get there. It may help clear a legislator’s conscience if they don’t think too hard about it, but it’s just as flawed as utilitarianism anywhere else. Doing something you believe to be wrong (even if it’s just a little wrong) under the belief that it will have a good result on an unrelated issue can justify nearly anything so long as you are an optimist about that potential good result in the future. And it’s addictive. Once you do it once, it’s all the more difficult to resist the logic the next time around. I feel that I have resisted the temptation more than most, but I speak from experience: these trades are not worth it. Not even the little ones. They whittle away at your soul, and, as Jesus said in Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”
There’s no legislative cure for human nature. So, what is to be done? I think the answer for the individual legislator is no different from the answer in the real world: when delusions of grandeur tempt, where ambition or fear of political consequences threaten, it’s time to take a step back and consider the larger picture. Individually, we are insignificant. Legislators do not have legacies. (Nor do governors for that matter.) As a general rule, people do not remember politicians other than the president. The realization of one’s own insignificance and the humility that emanates is a better antidote to corruption than any law ever passed. Instead of serving oneself and ambition, better to serve the Lord, our families, and our communities.
In my eight years, I’ve seen the worst and the best aspects of human nature: greed, pride, vanity, laziness, and vindictiveness are here every day. And so are diligence, humility, sacrifice, charity, and compassion. The Missouri state legislature, is a place where, in spite of our human weaknesses, when things go right — paraphrasing Gov. Nixon —people of goodwill can work together in service to make great differences in the lives of people who will never meet, who will never know our name, and who will never know we ever did anything to help them.
The second document is from another young lawmaker who entered office with high ideals but who found his career far shorter than he thought it would be—-because he failed his own principles. The Post-Dispatch ran an op-ed piece on September 8, 2009 from former State Senator Jeff Smith under the headline “I was stupid and wrong.” It complements Jay Barnes’ reflection. And it’s from someone who buckled to political utilitarianism.
I once held a position of public trust. I write today as a felon, having broken that trust, and I don’t want anyone to make the terrible mistakes I made.
I thought I could get away with it. If anyone learned of what happened, it would be my word and the word of my friends and staffers against that of a loner with a shady past.
It was easy to think this way. I had arrived on the political scene.
When I decided to run for Congress in 2004, I was a nobody. It was a familiar role. As a boy I was the smallest kid on the court, scrappy and hypercompetitive, and I tried to overcome my political weaknesses with the same drive. Eventually I went from a non-entity to a contender.
As Election Day drew near, I authorized a close friend and two aides to help an outside consultant send out a mailer about my opponent but without disclosing my campaign’s connection.
Fiercely competitive, I was seeking any advantage I could get. I knew that hiding my campaign’s involvement was against the law. I was raised better than that, but I thought the ends justified the means. I was stupid and wrong.
When my opponent filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against me, I wanted to preserve my political future and concealed the misconduct. Instead of taking the hit, I stonewalled, assuming the FEC would not connect the dots.
I was elected to the Missouri Senate in 2006 and was honored to serve my constituents. My dream was fulfilled, and I had a platform to effect social change and fight for the city I love.
In 2007, the FEC cleared my campaign of wrongdoing. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened to me.
Because the lesson I took wasn’t that “I got lucky. What I did was reckless, illegal, and wrong. I won’t break the law again.” My takeaway was, “Whew. I’m home free.”
Wrong again.
In 2009, the FBI obtained new information indicating a cover-up of the original misconduct. They approached me, and I stuck with my earlier account. It was easier for me to lie than to face the scrutiny and embarrassment that would come with accepting responsibility.
I was terrified of admitting anything. My nightmare was for all this to come out: my betrayal of what I thought I stood for and wanted to achieve; my betrayal of supporters and constituents; my parents’ embarrassment reading about my actions in the newspaper, and their shame as friends and neighbors searched for what to say to them and how to say it.
Well, it all came out, and it is worse than I had feared.
I’ve lost what I loved most: serving my district and teaching political science. I have lost the respect of others I cherished and my self-respect — even the ability to look strangers in the eye. And I haven’t even been sentenced yet.
I apologize to my constituents, my Senate colleagues, my family and friends and to anyone who has lost faith in government because of my actions. Telling the truth is the basis of public trust: the minimum I owed my constituents, my family and myself. I am a reminder of the obligation to always be truthful, particularly for those honored to serve the public.
(Jeff Smith resigned from the Missouri Senate effective August 25, 2009 and was sentenced to one year and a day of prison. He also was fined $50,000. Smith was sent to the federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky. He was released early in November, 2010.
Since his release, he’s written a couple of books, lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York, and co-founded Confluence Academies, an organization of charter schools in the St. Louis area. And he’s done a lot of other stuff.
Jay Barnes has been promoted to private citizenship (as Harry Truman once said after his presidency) and is a lawyer in Jefferson City. He said in last weekend’s Jefferson City newspaper that he has no interest in returning to politics.
It might be useful every now and then for those who will sit behind the century-old desks the lawmakers first sat behind in January, 1919 to re-read these two reflections, especially toward the session’s end when the challenges are greatest—and think about how the four-and-a-half months they are starting today will have changed them.
A week from today is elections day. We look forward to elections days for the wrong reasons. Instead of being excited about taking part in the voting process we are excited because it’s the end of that interminable period when our intelligence is assaulted 30 seconds at a time—all the time, it seems, on the television.
—and when our mailboxes are stuffed with mailers of questionable veracity usually provided by people without the courtesy or the courage to admit they paid for the appropriately-named junk mail.
Interestingly, at the end of the day, a lot of people will transfer from being the kind of people they campaigned against to being those people. And what will they do to correct the impressions their voters have about government?
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We have been interested in some of the reasons various groups don’t want us to vote for a new system of drawing legislative districts after the 2020 census. One side says it would be a mistake to let the state demographer (a person who spends his or her life analyzing population and population trends) draw new districts because they’ll just use statistics and will come up with districts that are more gerrymandered that some districts from the last go-around. Others worry that letting the demographer draw the districts will weaken the political power of this or that group. We must have been mistaken all these years because we thought reapportionment dealt with representation rather than power. Silly us.
Could it be that the state demographer won’t care if two legislative incumbents wind up in the same district instead of benefitting from a process that is suspected of protecting incumbents or at least their party majorities? As far as the demographer coming up with screwball districts, surely that person couldn’t do worse than the creation of the present Fifth Congressional District that I dubbed the “dead lizard” district after the last congressional redistricting (it looks like a dead lizard lying on its back with its feet in the air) that has a former Mayor of Kansas City representing a rural area as far east as Marshall.
What the heck. We can always change the constitution back to the present system if the legislative districts after the 2020 census are as bad as some interest groups forecast they will be, can’t we?
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Elections almost always have issues created by petition campaigns. It’s an important freedom we have as citizens to propose laws or to ask for a statewide vote on something the legislature did that raises questions in the minds of enough people that they want citizens to have the final say. But that freedom can carry with it unintended consequences because petitions don’t go through the refining process of legislative committee hearings, debates, votes, and compromises where possible. Of course the legislature sometimes fumbles an issue and in both cases ballot issues can be issues financially backed by a special interest if not an individual.
Voters have an often-overlooked responsibility to get out the spy glass and read all the fine print in the election legal notices. We haven’t talked to very many folks who have done that. So we get what we get and the courts often have to figure out what we got regardless of what we thought we were getting.
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The best part of election day is that all of the junk mail campaign propaganda that goes straight to our waste baskets will be replaced by Christmas catalogues. We prefer Christmas catalogs for several reasons. They don’t forecast national or international catastrophes if we buy something offered by another catalog. They usually are honest about their products (the pictures usually are more accurate than the pictures of the hamburgers at fast foot joints). We have never gotten an L. L. Bean catalogue that suggests the products in a Land’s End catalogue are dangerous to our well-being because of who wears them or because of who the wearers hang out with.
And they don’t proclaim exclusive knowledge of what our “values” are. The Vermont Country Store is filled with traditional values—soap on a rope, Adams Clove chewing gum, old-fashioned popcorn makers or hand-cranked ice-cream makers, or dresses whose styles are timeless. Coldwater Creek is for people whose values tend toward the stylish with a little “bling” thrown in. We have yet to see the Vermont Country Store catalogue that says the Coldwater Creek catalogue is too liberal to be good for us.
In short, the catalogues have a lot more things that we will buy than most of the campaign junk mail that winds up in landfills instead of recycle bins.
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Jefferson City is building a new fire station, replacing an older one in the east end of town (the building will be for sale, by the way, in case you want a unique home, assuming you can get a zoning change). News of the planned sale of the old fire house brings to mind our old friend Derry Brownfield, who used to occasionally remind us why fire engines are red:
“Because they have eight wheels and four people on them, and four plus eight is 12, and there are 12 inches in a foot, and one foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship, and the ship sailed the seas, and in the seas are fish, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are red, and fire trucks are always ‘russian’ around.”
Uh-huh.
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Go vote next Tuesday. Do yourself and your state a favor and spend the next seven days with your reading glass studying all that fine print.
There’s a new sheriff in town. But the shadow of the old one lingers.
Mike Parson is in the governor’s office. The circumstances of the leadership change and the character of the new governor are reminiscent of events of forty-four years ago in Washington when Gerald Ford replaced the resigned Richard Nixon. And the tone of new governor’s early remarks is familiar to those who remember or who have read Ford’s remarks upon taking the oath of office. “Just a little straight talk among friends,” said Ford, not an inaugural address.
Thomas Jefferson said the people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. And down the years, Abraham Lincoln renewed this American article of faith asking, “Is there any better way or equal hope in the world?”
I intend, on Monday next, to request of the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate the privilege of appearing before the Congress to share with my former colleagues and with you, the American people, my views on the priority business of the Nation and to solicit your views and their views…
…I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.
In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.
The leaders of the legislature already have invited Governor Parson to speak to a joint meeting of lawmakers gathered for the special session called to consider disciplinary action against Governor Greitens who with his family has been moved by Two Men and a Truck to their home at Innsbruck. We wonder if the neighbors brought covered dishes and other welcome symbols to the Greitens house or whether they are waiting to see how the Greitens emerge once everything is unpacked.
They have left behind in Jefferson City the wreckage of the Greitens administration and the special House committee appointed to investigate whether impeachment articles should have been filed against him. A special prosecutor is watching from Kansas City.
Should the committee continue to work? Yes.
Should its subpoenas for Greitens documents be honored? Yes.
Should the special prosecutor keep investigating? Yes.
The Speaker of the House might need to revise his order establishing the committee to authorize it to continue accumulating information about the way the Greitens administration functioned. The issue now might become the governorship itself. And in examining how the governorship of Missouri should be managed, it is important to understand how the responsibilities of office were administered and what controls should be expected or placed on the administration of that office. The task, therefore, might become more complicated and might require the committee to broaden its move toward conclusions, most of which might be based on what it learns about the way Eric Greitens administered the governorship.
After all, the work of the committee is the kind of thing Eric Greitens once said was important to the people of Missouri. A year before he took office, he told St. Louis Public Radio there would be no secrets about the sources of his funding.
“The most important thing is that there is transparency around the money. We’ve already seen other candidates set up these secretive super PACs where they don’t take any responsibility for what they’re funding … because that’s how the game has always been played. I’ve been very proud to tell people, ‘I’m stepping forward, and you can see every single one of our donors.’”
We now know that he spoke with a forked tongue. But he also repeatedly referred to himself as “the people’s governor.” And the people deserve to know what he said they should know—about him, particularly. He did not step forward and let people see “every single one of our donors.” The committee, to the best of its ability, should keep his promise for him.
On the day of Greitens’ resignation, information came out that the use of Confide, the app that destroys e-mails as soon as they are read, was far more extensive than Greitens had admitted or that Attorney General Hawley had uncovered.
Does the use of that app and the late revelation of the extensive use of it constitute obstruction of justice? Lawyers can fight over that issue but the committee’s investigation of the matter is clearly warranted as an extension of the exploration of possible abuses in office by Eric Greitens, whether the destruction of Confide emails violated state records retention requirements, and whether those requirements should be amended.
The record of the administration of “the people’s governor” must be presented to the people he promised to fight for (to use another phrase he was fond of using). The historical record of the seventeen-month administration of Eric Greitens must not be incomplete.
What the legislature has been doing since the revelations of the governor’s extramarital affair and the escalation of actions on both sides is a lesson that can guide future legislatures and future governors—and governor candidates—for decades to come. Someday a long time from now, we hope, another legislature will look back for guidance at what the House and its committee have done and are doing. Let the record for our posterity be as complete as possible.
Resignation accomplishes several things. Two things it should not accomplish, however, are to shield someone from history and to restrict the value of lessons from our time that may guide future generations.
