Category Archives: events

We’ve Seen This Before 

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It’s called the tyranny of the minority.

Watching Congressman Kevin McCarthy trying to appease an unwilling minority in his party so he could realize his dream of becoming Speaker of the House was agonizing last week.  But for those of us who follow Missouri politics it as not an unfamiliar experience.

Remember the 2021 legislative session when an ultra-conservative segment of Senate Republicans held the entire chamber hostage when they couldn’t get their way on a congressional redistricting map?  Day after day they refused to let any other business be done until they could get their way. On a few occasions the remaining Republicans got some support from minority Democrats to move something—a relationship that really steamed the tyrannical minority.

In Washington last week we watched Kevin McCarthy come about as close to making the Speakership a figurehead position in his effort to get enough of his hard right party members to let him have the job.

As the process wore on, we wondered if it occurred to McCarthy that he had to protect the Speakership, not just his own personal ambitions. Neutering the Speakership sews the seeds of anarchy in the House.

We saw in the Missouri Senate last year the dangers of deadlock caused by those who replaced public service with political power.  To see the same scenario played out on a national scale is disastrous for those who have some faith in our system.

McCarthy was finally picked on the 15th ballot when Congressman Matt Gaetz, who had proclaimed himself a never-Kevin vote switched to “present.”

So now the House of Representative can get down to business.  But the narrowness of the Republican majority and the divisions within the party are likely to prove hazardous to McCarthy’s House leadership.

And don’t forget that a favorite punching bag of the Republicans, President Biden, holds a veto pen and there appears to be zero chance that the House can get a two-thirds vote to override a presidential veto, assuming it can get its legislation through the Senate and to the president’s desk..

The spectacle has not ended with McCarthy’s selection as Speaker.

Politics is an imperfect science but we never have seen such a time as when good will seems so unachievable.  Did any of us elect any of them to think that there is nothing more important than who sits in what office in one building in Washington, D.C.?

Today we mourn the (temporary, we hope) passing of the ideal of majority rule. A tyrannical minority can be put in its place if the two major factions would recognize they must create the majority—and in the creation of a bipartisan majority, return sanity to our system.

We still have the hope that somebody will be unafraid to scale the wall separating the parties and produce enough unity to overcome the tail that thinks it can wag the congressional dog.

The Speakership is more important than any individual that aspires for it. If protecting the office and its responsibility and its power means reaching across the partisan wall, let the reaching begin.  We need to know that the tyrannical minority is not in charge.

But frankly, we’re not sure it won’t be.

Do you know how to tell—

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—if a politician is lying?

His lips are moving.

This old and cynical joke that cavalierly diminishes all of those who seek to serve honorably has found new circulation thanks to a New York congressional candidate who told lie after lie during his campaign, got elected, has grudgingly admitted to some of his lies, but is unrepentant and as of the writing of this entry plans to take the oath of office.

George Santos is a Republican and (so far) the leadership of his party has been pretty silent about his admissions and the additional lies uncovered by reporters. About the only thing that seems to be true about him is that he’s a Republican. For now, anyway.  If his clay feet, which have crumbled at least ankle-high, continue to crumble, he might be most appropriationly listed as (P-NY), for “Pariah” from New York.

“I am not a criminal,” he told The New York Post. “This will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.”

Whether he is not a criminal is open to some question. Did his claims constitute fraud?  Did he lie to obtain campaign donations, thus defrauding donors?  Did his lies result in financial gain?  Did he lie on his campaign financial disclosure forms, a potential criminal act? And those are starter questions..

He claimed to be the grandchild of Ukrainian natives who escaped the holocaust by going to Belgium and then to Brazil. Investigators say he is not.  He’s a native Brazilian and there are shadows over his life there.

He claimed to be Jewish. He released a position paper during his campaign saying he was “a proud American Jew.”  That was then. Now he says he never claimed to be a Jew and that he’s Catholic who is “Jew-ish,” a comment that the word “outlandish” is inadequate to describe. He says his grandmother told him stories about being Jewish before she converted to Catholicism. His grandparents were born in Brazil.  The Democrat he beat in November says Santos’ lies about his Jewish background are more than offensive—“It’s sick and obscene,” he says.

In the campaign he claimed that he had been openly gay for more than a decade and is married to another man.  But another news organization has learned he was married to a woman that he divorced in 2019 and has found no record of his marriage to the man Santos says is his husband.

He claimed to have worked with two of the biggest names in the financial industry—Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, neither of which says his name ever appeared on their employee rolls. He says he probably could have used “a better choice of words” in making that claim.

He claimed to have attended New York University and to have graduated from Baruch College. Now he confesses, “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.” He says he is “embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume.” But he excused himself by commenting, “A lot of people overstate in their resumes or twist a little bit.”

Embellished his resume?  And it’s okay because “a lot of people” do it “a little bit?”

What he has done is more than “a little bit.”  He lied and now he’s lying about lying. In fact, he has created a waterfall of lies including how much property he does or does now own, and how many dogs his nonprofit dog rescue group rescued.

The silence of his party’s leadership, particularly his future colleagues in the United States House of Representatives is tragic in this time when distrust of those who seek public service or those who win positions of public service is so strong.  Santos tars all of them with his irresponsible campaign and his petulant responses to those who have exposed him for what he is—a man who was incapable of truth during his campaign and seems incapable of admitting the depth of his lies after his election.

Unfortunately, the public doesn’t see him as the exception to the rule. Unfortunately, the public has come to believe his kind IS the rule.

But I know from years of front-row coverage of politics and politicians that people of his kind are the rotten apple that spoils the barrel.

The Santoses of the political world damn the saints of the political world. It is up to those who will take office for the first time in 2023 to be the kind of people who eventually leave public life having uplifted public opinion about those who go from being “one of us” on election day to being “one of them.”  It will be a heavy lift.  Honor is a great weight.

Failure of his party, particularly those who will be leaders of his party colleagues in Washington, to censure—even expel—him will deepen mistrust in all of those in either party, further damaging our republic and furthering the aims of those who seek to capitalize on distrust in it to strengthen their hopes for control.

“Disgrace” is spelled S-A-N-T-O-S.

Notes from a quiet  street  (Happy New Year edition) 

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For the rare and cherished few who expect to find something new on this site a couple of times a week, we must explain that it is not because we had run out of pithiness. It is because a company that calls us a “valued customer” apparently doesn’t value our customership very much at all.

On September 29, Mediacom laid a cable on top of our street to restore our internet service after the Socket folks ripped up the buried line while digging to install their fiber optic cable.  A couple of weeks later I suggested to the folks at the local Mediacom office that it would be good to bury that cable before the first big snow brought out a snowplow that would collect it—and who knows how many above-ground connector boxes and private mail boxes that the cable pulls down as the snowplow proceeds down the street.

That line was still lying on the street until the afternoon of December 22.  It snowed and as I had told the foretold in the Mediacom office and the first snowplow did yank out the.  I saw several feet of orange cable in the yard of a neighbor up the street. On the 20th, I had visited the local office for a second time and a friendly lady behind the desk said repairs are usually made within 24 hours. I told a nice Mediacom lady from Iowa who answered the company trouble line that I expected this problem to be solved regardless of the temperature (which was below zero, you might remember) within 24 hours. The company sent us a notice that it would be a week before anything was done, that repairs would be made on the 28th and required us to be at home between 10 a.m. and noon.

On the afternoon of the 27th, Mediacom—without ever calling us or ringing our doorbell—stretched a new line across the top of the street. The line was only partly covered so vehicles going over it did not damage it. The next day, the Mediacom tech person who was supposed to respond rang our door bell. We had a nice discussion in which he told me, among other things, that we would lose our internet service as many times as the snowplows came out this winter.  Too bad. But that’s Mediacom Life.

I sent a letter to the editor of the News-Tribune, who published it yesterday. Several folks at church or at the noontime restaurants we checked out told me they agreed with it. They’re apparently valued customers, too.

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I made a big mistake the week before Christmas.

I bought a new computer because my old hard drive was dying.

For the price I paid for the computer, I could have bought about eight of Donald Trump’s superhero cards.

Buyer’s remorse has not yet set in, though.

If you bought any of them, would you let me know if any of them show him as a Capitol policeman on January 6, 2021 or as a Ukrainian freedom fighter?

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There’s this old and somewhat indelicate saying, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s too late to drain the swamp.”  The release of the January 6 Committee report has called that observation to mind in reference to someone who once promised to drain a certain swamp.

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One of the fun things about researching history is prowling through the millions of pages of old newspapers at the State Historical Society.  And reading the old advertisements is often fun.  I made a copy of a headline for one and it’s magneted to our refrigerator.

It says “Ice Cream is Real Food.”

Now that’s real truth in advertising.

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State Conservation Department Director Sara Pauley Parker wrote in her Missouri Conservationist  “Up Front” column in December of 2021 that she’s a dog person. She wrote, “I especially appreciate dogs that will look you in the eye, know their role in life, and want to serve honorably.”

I’m hoping the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate will be kennels, starting Wednesday.

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It’s hard to beat honey by itself and honey-butter on a hot roll is an unacknowledged delicacy.  A old newspaper ad I came across recently urges people to “Get that quick relief that brings back the normal ‘pep’ and energy. Don’t suffer a minute longer than you actually have to.” The cure?  Dr. Bell’s Pine Tar Honey for Coughs and Colds.

If Dr. Bell’s cure isn’t tasty enough, you might try a spoonful of a variation made by the Certified Hospital Products Company: Pine Tar Honey and Eucalyptus (Mentholated).

Menthol.  That will do the trick.

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Retired Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel has been inducted into the National Football Foundation College Football Hall of Fame, something he could not have imagined after his teams had gone 10-14 in his first two years in Columbia.  In fact, he admits he started wondering if he’d made a mistake going to Missouri and if he would last much longer.

In his first four years the Tigers were 22-25.   But Missouri kept him.

The Tigers played their 34th bowl game a few days before Christmas. (Their 35th bowl game was Covided out a couple of years ago).  Their fourth bowl loss in a row left Eliah Drinkwitz’s record at 17-19.

The fourth year will be a critical one for him, as it was for his predecessor, Barry Odom.  Odom was sacked when his Tigers were 25-25.  But Gary Pinkel was only 22-25 after four years and Missouri kept him.

How have other Mizzou coaches done after four years? Larry Smith was 18-27.  Bob Stull was 12-31-1 before he left the field and became an athletic director at another school.  Woody Widenhofer was 12-31-1 and Al Onofrio was 22-24.

Incidentally, Don Faurot, whose name is on the field on which Drinkwitz’s players perform, was 0-4 in bowl games.

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Enheduanna’s descendants

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About twenty descendants of Enheduanna met at the Missouri River Regional Library yesterday afternoon.  I might have been the only one, certainly one of the few, who knows about this relationship.

It was a gathering of mis-Missouri authors, all of whom had their books for sale.  I sold five in two and half hours but I had some lively conversations with with some of the other descendants.

Enhe—who?

I am a member of the Archaeological Institute of America and a former member of the National Geographic Society.  Do not be impressed.  That only means that I subscribe or subscribed to a magazine.

In my latest edition of the AIA’s Archaeology magazine is the story of Enheduanna, a poet and a composer of hymns to the temples of the Akkadian Empire.  She was a priestess and a princess, the daughter of Sargon the Great who founded the world’s first great empire by uniting northern and southern Mesopotamia,  and his spouse, Nanna.

Enheduanna, whose name translated means “Ornament of Heaven,” was the high priestess at the temple to Nana-Suen, the moon god, in the ancient city of Ur, once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates River on the Persian Gulf in what is now southern Iraq.  Time has caused the coastline to shift and the site of Ur is on the south bank of the river, about ten miles from Nasiriya, a city not far from the Gulf.

There is a portrait of her—sort of a portrait—found on a 4,000 year old disk excavated in 1927.

She is shown in the long dress, two male servants behind her and another in front of her, prayerfully working on one of her poems or hymns.  The disk dates from about 2250 BCE.*

She is important in today’s observation because she is the world’s first author.

Or at least the earliest person whose writings have survived with an author’s name attached.

Kate Ravilious, in her magazine article, quotes Assyriologist Anette Zgoll: “The rituals that Enheduanna performed were instrumental in creating the new power structure by reconciling the city states and the wider realm.”

One of her hymns is Temple Hymn 26: To the Zabalam Temple of Inanna:

O house wrapped in beams of light
wearing shining stone jewels wakening great awe
sanctuary of pure Inanna
(where) divine powers the true me spread wide
Zabalam
shrine of the shining mountain
shrine that welcomes the morning light
she makes resound with desire
the Holy Woman grounds your hallowed chamber
with desire
your queen Inanna of the sheepfold
that singular woman
the unique one
who speaks hateful words to the wicked
who moves among the bright shining things
who goes against rebel lands
and at twilight makes the firmament beautiful
all on her own
great daughter of Suen
pure Inanna
O house of Zabalam
has built this house on your radiant site
and placed her seat upon your dais

She wrote in cuneiform and her works are preserved in 4,000-year old clay tablets.

Perhaps you have been moved to write a poem (beyond your elementary school English classes where a teacher might have had you write one as an assignment), or a published or unpublished book.

Or maybe you blog.  Or perhaps your literary tastes are confined to Facebook or some other social media platform.

Those who write are literary descendants of a woman who lived for that four millennia ago and whose words are preserved on clay tablets.  Some of us also write on tablets but our works probably won’t be found by archaeologists thousands of years from now.

Enheduanna would be considered the patron saint of authors, probably, except she probably is considered a heathen by those who confer official sainthood.

A lot of people, perhaps most people, have an urge to write. Something.  Some make a living doing it. But only a minuscule percentage of writers are in that category.

I don’t think any of the people at the tables in that library room make a living from writing, but mot would agree that writing makes living better.

You can be the Enheduanna of your household.  Publication is secondary to the reward of just writing, whether is poetry, a memoir, a family history, or an attempt at the great American novel.

Don’t worry about where to begin. Just start.  The beginning point and the ending point will come later.  But write.

Enheduanna has had a lot of descendants.  Be one more.

*BCE is an archaeological term for “Before the Common Era,” which provides a process of dating that does not favor a particular religion.

(photo credit: wikicommons)

The last man

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We have enjoyed some of the images sent back to earth from the Artemis spacecraft and its crew of three mannequins as it made its first rehearsal for a trip to the Moon.

We suspect an 87-year old man in Albuquerque, New Mexico has noticed them, too.

Harrison Schmidt not only saw the Moon from that perspective; he walked on the moon.

He is one of four surviving Moonwalkers. He is the only survivor of the last manned landing. Harrison Schmitt, Gene Cernan, and Ronald Evans were crewmates on Apollo 17 which lifted off from Cape Kennedy at 12:33 a.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Cernan, the mission commander, climbed back into the Challenger moon lander after Schmitt went up.  He signed a piece of artwork for me shortly before he died five years ago.  The third member of the crew, Ronald Evans, stayed in the command module while Cernan and Schmitt explored the surface.

Schmitt is the only scientist to have walked on the moon. He was a geologist who made one of the more startling discoveries in the Taurus-Littrow region where they landed. On their second excursion outside the Challenger, Schmitt excitedly proclaimed, “There is orange soil!” Cernan assured listeners back on earth, “He’s not going out of his wits. It really is.”

Fifty years ago, in the early morning hours of today, I watched the Saturn V rocket begin taking these three men to the moon.  To say that it “lifted off” is a gross   misunderstanding of what those of us at the press site witnessed that night. It was, simply, the most awesome thing I have ever seen.  Or heard.  Or felt.

The press site was three miles away from Launch Pad 39A. The flames from the rocket were so bright that the camera’s exposure setting barely captured the rocket as it broke ground.  The colors have faded but the memory remains vivid.

We were three miles away but I still was about 100 yards closer than Walter Cronkite and the other broadcasters describing the event.

Imagine a rocket so tall that if it was on the railroad tracks below the capitol would be as high as the statue of Ceres on the dome.  It had to carry so many tons of fuel that the flames and the smoke seemed to boil about it for several seconds as the engines built up the thrust to push all of that weight toward the sky.

For several seconds, night became day for miles up and down that part of the Atlantic coast.

The roar drowned out my voice as I tried to record what I was seeing and what I was seeing was beyond my powers of description.  The ground shook so much that an alligator in the swampy area between us and the Launchpad was startled and crawled up on the shore, causing some of the reporters to scatter.

If you have ever been close to a cannon going off, you probably have felt a concussion against your chest from the explosion of the shot. Imagine feeling that same concussion constantly, powerfully, during that slow climb that soon took the great rocket past the tower and into the darkness of that early December morning. And the roar could still be heard minutes later as the fire of the engines merged into a single distant dot.

My God!

Three men were on top of that thing!  And

They

Were

Going

To

The

Moon.

We knew they were the last, for now.  We had no idea it would be fifty years before another spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the Moon would do it again.

They were 28,000 miles out when one of the astronauts—history has lost which one—turned a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera back toward where they had started.

It’s called “The Blue Marble” photograph.  It, and Apollo 8’s “Earthrise,” are two of the most widely produced images in photographic history.

No human eyes have seen us this way since Cernan, Schmitt, and Evans saw us a half-century ago.

The Artemis spacecraft is headed back to earth now. It’s to splashdown on Sunday. It will be two or three years yet before another Artemis capsule carries people back to the Moon.

I wonder if any of the twelve men who walked on the moon will be around to greet the next people to go there.

Schmitt is 87.  Buzz Aldrin, the second man to leave footprints there, will be 93 next month. Apollo 15’s Dave Scott, the seventh man to do it, is 90. Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke, the tenth man and the youngest Moonwalker, is 87. Schmitt, the 12th man to touch the moon—although Cernan was the last man to be on the Moon—is the second-youngest.

Only six others who saw the moon up close but never landed are still with us. Frank Borman, who commanded the stirring Christmas visit to the Moon on Apollo 8, is 94.

One of his crewmates, Jim Lovell, who later commanded the most successful failure of the space program on Apollo 13, is the same age. Bill Anders, the third member of that crew, is 89.  Apollo 10’s Tom Stafford is 92.  Apollo 13’s Fred Haise is 89, and Ken Mattingly from Apollo 16 is 86.

My brother-in-law, Curt Carley, who went with me on that trip and who shot the launch image with my camera while I was off trying to verbalize the impossible, and I went to our motel, finally, had a good morning’s sleep, then headed back to his home in San Antonio.  It took a couple of days.  We stopped in Houston at the Johnson Space Center and watched television screens showing us that the men of Apollo 17 were seeing.  In the time it took us to drive to Houston, they had reached the Moon.

There were supposed to be three more Apollo missions but they were cancelled because of shrinking budgets and shrinking public interest.  Short-attention span Americans and their “been there, done that” nature, had other things to do.

It was a time when nothing seemed impossible.

Fifty years have passed.  And I can still feel the pounding against my chest and see with my mind’s eye the moments when night became day at 12:33 a.m., December 7, 1972.

 

Tomorrow is Utopian Community Day

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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. Many of us will simulate a day in Plymouth Colony more than four centuries ago although the way we do it will be a far cry from what really happened.  Often not acknowledged by those who cling to that idea is that the colony we celebrate today was an experiment in socialism and that experiment was repeated several times in Missouri.

Plymouth is an early example of the human search for Utopia, a place defined by British social philosopher Sir Thomas More a century earlier as a place of a perfect social and political system. California historian Robert V. Hine defined such a community as “a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large…”

Plymouth began as a socialist utopia not by the wishes of the religious group seeking to escape the oppression of the Church of England but by the demands of the businessmen who allowed them aboard the Mayflower.

The Council of New England created a contract that was signed by the church separatists we now call Pilgrims in the summer of 1620. The new colony would be jointly owned for seven years. But the separatists, not having funds to invest in the colony, would have to work off their debt. Profits would go into one pot with expenses paid from that fund. After seven years the profits would be divided according to the number of shares that each settler held.  Land and houses would be jointly owned and the separatists were required to work seven days a week. When several of the group dropped out, the organizers of the expedition recruited other adventurers to take their place.

So the Pilgrims became, in effect, indentured servants in a socialist colony.  Their debt was not fully paid off for 28 years. By then the Puritans, who had first arrived in 1629, far overshadowed the Plymouth Colony. John Butman and Simon Targett in New World, Inc., record that Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay merged along with the islands of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to become the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

By then, the leaders of the socialist colony of Plymouth had realized communal ownership and communal sharing was not working.  Colony leader William Bradford and his supporters decided to allow private ownership of the land. Each family was given a parcel. “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them,” he wrote.

The search for a utopian community in America did not end with Bradford’s pilgrims giving up on communal living. And in some places, it still goes on.

Roger Grant wrote in the Missouri Historical Review in 1971, “Missouri’s Utopian movement, which became one of the largest in the country in terms of number of colonies established, followed the national pattern of having communities that were both religious and secular, communistic and cooperative.”

The first group of utopians to come to Missouri, he says, were Joseph Smith’s Mormons in 1831 who arrived in Jackson County, planning to establish a “New Jerusalem,” a communistic religious community, near Independence.  But Missourians felt Freedom of Religion did not include Mormons—much as the Puritans of New England felt that those who did not follow their strict Puritan policies had to be expelled—thus leading Baptists Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to found Rhode Island.

German mystic William Keil created the towns of Bethel and Nineveh in northeast Missouri after becoming dissatisfied with the Methodist Church. As he was forming his movement, some dissatisfied followers of “Father” George Rapp joined up, bringing with them Rapp’s communistic ideas but not bringing with them his ideas about celibacy. But he became worried that the outside world was encroaching on his kingdom, so he took his followers to Oregon, where the movement died when he died.  Bethel still exists as a community.

Others tried to form utopian communities as years went by. Andreas Dietsch founded New Helvetia in Osage County. He believed agriculture was the key to a good life, that all property had to be community property because, as Grant wrote, such an arrangement would prevent “man’s greed from destroying the good life.” But he died before his community could be established.

Cheltenham, a secular community, was founded in 1856 by French communist Etienne Cabet, floundered early and his flock moved to Nauvoo, Illinois after the Mormons abandoned it for Salt Lake City. This movement also died when its founder died. Cheltenham is now a neighborhood in St. Louis.

Alcander Longley created several communal colonies, beginning with Reunion, in Jasper County in 1868, Friendship in Dallas County in 1872 and another Friendship Community in Bollinger County in 1879, Principia in Polk County in 1881, Jefferson County’s Altruistic Society in 1886 and others in other years in other places, and Altro in 1898.  Lack of Capital doomed all of these places within a short time.

Agnostic George H. Walser founded Liberal, in Barton County, as a town that restricted religious buildings and saloons and tried to replace religion with intellectual organizations.  He built a fence to keep churches out but Christians moved inside the fence and held services over Walser’s objection. Liberal survives but not as the isolated intellectual utopia Walser hoped for.

So tomorrow, we celebrate socialism in Plymouth, throughout this country, and in Missouri.  And we celebrate the triumph of capitalism over socialism, as happened in so many utopian communities in our nation’s and our state’s histories.

“Socialism” has lost its meaning as an effort for all to share equally in the bounty of our nation and has become a political epithet spoken largely from one side of the political aisle.

Perhaps there’s room to give thanks tomorrow for the things that have been branded as “socialism” in our history— “every advance the people have made,” as our own Harry Truman put it. “Socialism is what they called public power…social security, bank deposit insurance…free and independent labor organizations…anything that helps all the people.”

The Pilgrims, and people such as Walser, Longley, Kiel, Cabet, Dietsch, and others here and elsewhere show us how Socialism does not work.  But when a farmer is able to turn on an electric light, when the retired person gets a social security check, when our money is safe if the bank is not, a little socialism sure is nice.

The Pilgrims never found the utopia they came here to enjoy.  All these years later, we’re still looking for it, too.

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Electing Time Travelers

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Some of the people we elected yesterday will decide how we travel through time.

This weekend we fell back from daylight savings time to standard time. Officially the change comes at 2 a.m. yesterday. There always are some folks who don’t get the message or forget the message and find themselves arriving at the end of church services instead of at the beginning, or an hour late for tee time if they worship the putter instead.

There are a lot of folks who think we should have daylight savings time year-around.  Going back to standard time will give us more daylight in the mornings but we’ll be in the dark an hour earlier in the evening. The Hill reported last week about the efforts in Congress to keep daylight time year around. It cites a poll that says, “Most Americans want to abandon the time change we endure twice a year, with polls showing as much as 63 to 75 percent of Americans supporting an end to the practice. But, even if the country does do away with the time change, the question still remains whether the U.S. should permanently adapt to Daylight Saving Time (DST) or Standard Time (ST).”

Most of the country is on daylight time eight months of the year and switches to standard time for four months. There are always some contrarians, of course. Hawaii and Arizona stay on standard time all year.  Hawaii decided the Uniform Time Act of 1967 meant nothing to a state that is so close to the equator that sunrise and sunset are about the same time all year.

Arizona has a different reason.  It doesn’t want to lose an hour of morning time when it’s cool enough for people to go outdoors in the summer.

Residents of or visitors to Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands and American Somoa don’t tinker with their clocks twice a year either.

And there’s the rub, as Hamlet says in his soliloquy.  Some folks like permanent standard time because it’s more in line with our circadian rhythms and hels stave off disease. But in March, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would make DST permanent—the Sunshine Protection Act (who thinks up these insipid names for bills?)—because of its economic benefits because more Americans would go shopping if it remains lighter in the early evening hours.

The movement to protect the sunshine has been led by Senator Marco Rubio of the Sunshine State of Florida. He says the change would reduce the risk of seasonal depression.  That strikes us as a little silly and reminds us of the time when Missouri decided to adopt DST in 1970 when some of the ladies who were regular listeners of “Missouri Party Line” on the local radio station where I worked were vitally concerned that their flowers would not get enough sunlight if we tried to “save” daylight.

The Senate has passed the bill, as we have noted. Final approval is iffy because the Lame Duck Congress has only seventeen working days left before it becomes history.  But if the House approves it, permanent DST would go into effect a year from now.

—Except in states that now operate on Standard Time. They won’t have to switch.  We recall the days before DST became more common when we had to change our watches when we crossed certain state lines.  Our annual trips from Central DST Missouri to Eastern ST Indiana in May always left us uncertain about whether to change our watches until we stopped some place with a clock and learned that CDST was the same as EST.

At least, I think that’s how it went.

Polling has found no consensus on which time should be the permanent time.

If we eliminate switching back and forth, we could be endangering our safety.  Various safety officials tell us that we should replace the batteries in our smoke and carbon monoxide detectors when we change our clocks.  To keep some battery life from being wasted, it is suggested that they be changed either when clocks are adjusted for DST or when they’re adjusted for plain ST.  That assumes the battery-changer remembers which time is the time to switch. We know of no one who marks their calendars for such events.

The article in The Hill’s series “Changing America” delves into the pros and the cons:

Sleep experts say the health benefits that could come from a permanent ST are crucial for a chronically sleep-deprived nation. In response to darkness, the body naturally produces melatonin, a hormone that helps promote sleep but is suppressed by light. Thus, having too much sunlight in the evening can actually work against a good night’s sleep. 

The status quo leads to circadian misalignment, or “social jetlag,” says Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt sleep division. Malow also authored the Sleep Research Society’s position statement advocating for a permanent ST. 

Under DST, our work and school schedules dictate our actions; while in an ideal scenario, environmental changes like lighter mornings and darker evenings would regulate sleep patterns, Malow explained in an interview with Changing America. 

“There’s a disconnect when we have to wake up early for work or school and it’s still dark outside and we want to sleep,” she said.

Light in the morning wakes humans up, provides us with energy, and sets our mood for the day. “It actually aligns us so that our body clocks are in sync with what’s going on in our environment,” Malow said.

Having more energy in the morning can also make it easier to fall asleep at night when it’s darker outside. 

Overall, ST “maximizes our morning light and minimizes light too late at night,” Malow said. 

When the body doesn’t get enough sleep, risks of developing heart disease, diabetes, and weight gain all increase.  Insufficient sleep is also linked to some forms of cancer.

Polls show younger individuals are less likely to support abolishing the clock change, largely because they’re more flexible than their older counterparts who support nixing the practice. 

But teenagers and young adults are at a higher risk of negative impacts from permanent DST, partially because they’re already primed for sleep deprivation.

“What happens when you go through puberty and you become a teenager is…your natural melatonin levels shift by about two hours, so it takes you longer to fall asleep,” said Malow. “[Teenagers] end up going to bed or being tired at 11 o’clock at night, even midnight sometimes, but they have to wake up early for school.” 

Students who wake up in darker mornings and drive to school could be at a greater risk of car accidents. The same is true for workers with early commutes and individuals in the north or on western edges of time zones who tend to experience more darkness overall.

“Sleep is really, really important to our health. And right now, what we’re doing is imposing mandatory social jetlag for eight months out of the year,” Malow said. “And we’d like to—rather than going to mandatory social jetlag for 12 months out of the year—to stop the clock and go back to Standard Time which is much more natural.” 

Despite the myriad of health benefits that come from adopting ST year-round, having more sunlight in the evenings if DST were permanently adopted is a tempting prospect for many Americans, especially those who work or attend school indoors all day.

Who got us into this mess?  The Washington Post says we can blame two guys. George Hudson, from New Zealand, wanted more daylight time in the late afternoon to collect bugs.  Britisher William Willett wanted more time to play golf late in the day.

Their idea didn’t catch on until World War I when Germany, bogged down in trench warfare with the French and the British, adopted it to save coal. England soon followed suit. It didn’t catch on in this country until 1917 when stockbrokers and industries lobbied for it. The Post says they overcame opposition from railroads that feared the time change would confuse people and led to some bad crashes.  And farmers opposed it because their day already was regulated by the sun and they saw no reasons to fiddle with the clocks.  David Prerau, who wrote Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Savings Time, told the Post dairy farmers didn’t want it because they’d have to start their milking in the dark if they wanted to ship their product out on the trains. “Plus, the sun, besides giving light, gives heat, and it drives off the dew on a lot of things that have to be harvested. And you can’t harvest things when they’re wet.”  Getting up an hour early didn’t solve that problem.

This country adopted DST in 1918 with the Standard Time Act. DST was repealed the next year and wasn’t seen again until FDR reinstated it during WWII for the same reason it was instituted in The Great War—to save fuel.

In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Law. In the 1970s we got permanent DST for a while, also an energy-saving issue because we were in the midst of an energy crisis caused by the Middle East Oil Embargo. That situation caused major inflation issues including in energy prices—at the gasoline pumps and in home heating and electric bills—to skyrocket. The great minds in Congress decided we needed permanent DST to reduce excess utility costs.  But the public didn’t like it and the experiment ended after ten months.

Then George W. Bush got the Uniform Time Act amended to change the sates when clocks were to spring ahead from April to March and we’ve had our present system since then.

Does it really work or is it just something to politicians to fiddle around with from time to time?

A 2008 Department of Energy report said the Bush change cut the national use of electricity by one-half of one percent a day.  Ten years or so later, someone analyzed more than forty papers assessing the impact of the change found that electricity use declined by about one-third of a percent because of the 2007 change.

More contemporary studies show similar small changes in behavior when DST kicks in.

One study supporting the economic advantage of permanent DST was done by JP Moran Chase six years ago.  The study looked at credit card purchases in the month after the start of DST in Los Angeles and found it increased by 9/10th of a percent.  It dropped 3.5% when DST ended.  That was good enough to recommend fulltime DST.

Another report showed robberies dropped by 7% during DST daytimes. And in the hour that gained additional sunlight, there was a 27% drop in that extra evening hour. That’s in Los Angeles.

Rubio maintains that having more daylight in the evening could mean kids would be more inclined to get their noses out of their cell phones, tablets, and computers and go outside and run around playing sports.

Maybe they could take up golf.  Or looking for bugs that proliferate in the twilight. Imagine a parent suggesting those ideas for their nimble-thumbed children.

So what’s better—having kids standing in the dark waiting for the morning school bus or riding the school bus into the darkening evening and arriving at home where the lights are all on?

The people we elected yesterday are likely to make this decision sooner or later. Let us hope they’re up to it.

 

Giving Up Hope

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Tomorrow is the first of November.  Next weekend is the end of Daylight Savings Time for the year.

We’ve been getting cold leaf-dropping rains.

We call this season “fall” because that‘s what the leaves do.  And moods.

The baseball season will end this week.

The last NASCAR race of the year is coming up  next weekend.

It is always hard to admit—always—-that summer is gone. But when Thanksgiving is only about three weeks away and Christmas is less than 60 days in the future, the reality I have been ignoring wraps its cold arms around me and I must at last abandon hope that I will be warm for about five long, dark months.

Every year, I go around in short-sleeved shirts and feel cold because I am reluctant to admit it’s time to start wearing long-sleeved shirts and jackets.

The lightweight sweatshirt I wear to the YMCA three days a week is enough for now and the cold air against my uncovered legs makes me grateful for heated seats and a heated steering wheel in the car, both of which are operating by the time the car and I get to the stop sign up the street.

Nancy has gotten me some nice wool shirts. They’re hanging next to each other at the end of a rack in my closet.  The polo shirts are still at the front.

Not for long.  My resistance to wool shirts is weakening.  Soon, I will promote the long-sleeves to the front and the short sleeves to the back.  Soon I will remove the shorts (remember when they were called “Bermuda Shorts?” You have to be of a certain age, I think.) from the hook in the closet, and when they’ve been through the washing machine put them in a drawer—-but maybe there will be one more day to wear them. All day.

Nancy was raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Yep, I married a “Yooper.”  She likes these crisp, chill days.

Opposites attract, you know.

When people complain of the heat, I tell them, “I waited all winter for days like these.”

In a previous life, I was an indoor cat who always looked for the sun spots.

Baseball is gone. But there’s football and the Tigers have figured out how to win a game or two and the Chiefs are on a roll.  And soon there will be college basketball—a game played by people in shorts.

But then come the fallow days when our basketball team has lost its last (tournament, we hope) game. When the Super Bowl is over.  And all that is left is golf (Leon Wilson’s 1905 book was the first to call it “a good walk spoiled.”) and the NBA and the NHL, both of which—in this house—generate no heat.

The Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers play the first game in the Cactus League on February 25 in Surprise, Arizona. The Grapefruit League, in Florida, begins the next day in Jupiter, with the Cardinals against the Washington Nationals.

116 days from today is the first true sign of spring.  The voice of Rooney will be heard in the land once again. And hope will be restored.

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Banned Book Week

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I have a pin that I wear on rare occasions that says, “I Read Banned Books.”

And I do.

I’ve read Huckleberry Finn.  The Bible (well, parts of it), Grapes of Wrath, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (not just the good parts), In Cold Blood, The Naked and the Dead—–

Probably more.

And as consumers of these columns know, I am clearly corrupted, probably an abuser of something or other, and have read a forbidden word or two that most second-graders already know.

This is the fortieth anniversary of Banned Books Week, It was started at a time when there was a sharp rise in actions to take books out of schools, libraries and even out of bookstores. It was created by Pittsburgh librarian Judith F. Krug who became the director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Later she joined the Freedom to Read Foundation and after Time magazine did an article in 1981, “The Growing Battle of the Books,” founded Banned Books Week.

One of the biggest promoter is a century-old (founded in 1922) organization called PEN America, which says it “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.” Originally the acronym stood for “Poets, Essayists, Novelists.”  But the group has broadened its tent to include playwrights and editors and even more people. So “PEN” is no longer an acronym for anything but the organization is for free exposure to ideas.

Not long ago the organization calculated about 140 school districts spread throughout 32 states had issued more than 2,500 book bans, efforts that it says affect almost four=million students in more than five-thousand individual school buildings. It has identified at least fifty groups with at least 300 local chapters advocating for book bans.  It says most of those groups have formed in the last year.

PEN America keeps an annual index of schoolbook bans.  That list for the school year ending June 30, 2022 lists 2,535 instances of banning 1,648 titles.  The organization says 674 of the banned titles address LGBTQ+ themes or have characters who are in that category. Another 659 titles featured characters of color and another 338 addressed issues of race and racism.

Political pressure or legislation designed to “restrict teaching and learning” (PEN”s phrase) were involved in at least forty percent of the bans.  Texas had 801 bans in 22 districts. Florida had 566 in 21 districts. Pennsylvania had 457 in 11 districts.

The organization says the movement is speeding up resulting in “more and more students losing access to literature that equips them to meet the challenges and complexities of democratic citizenship.” It says, “Ready access to ideas and information is a necessary predicate to the right to exercise freedom of meaningful speech, press, or political freedom.”  It cites this except from a 1978 decision in a Federal Court case in Massachusetts:

“The library is ‘a mighty resource in the marketplace of ideas’ … There a student can literally explore the unknown and discover areas of interest and thought not covered by the prescribed curriculum. The student who discovers the magic of the library is on the way to a life-long experience of self-education and enrichment. That student learns that a library is a place to test or expand upon ideas presented to him, in or out of the classroom… The most effective antidote to the poison of mindless orthodoxy is ready access to a broad sweep of ideas and philosophies. There is no danger in such exposure. The danger is in mind control.”

Sixteen instances of book banning are on the new PEN index.  Six are from Nixa. Four are from Wentzville.

(3 actions)  Alison Bechdel, Fun House, A Family Tragicomic, banned in classrooms, Nixa May 2022; Banned pending investigation, North Kansas City and Wentzville (October, 2021)

Echo Bryan, Black Girl Unlimited, the Remarkable Story, banned in library, Nixa,  February 2022

Jano Dawson, This Book is Gay, banned in libraries, Lindbergh School District, October 2021

Jonathan Evison, Lawn Boy, banned pending investigation, Wentzville School District, October, 2021

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, banned in libraries, Nixa, May, 2022

Lisa Jewell, Invisible Girl, a Novel, banned pending investigation, Wentzville School District October 2021

(Two actions) George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue, banned in libraries and classrooms, Nixa School District, May, 2022; banned pending investigation, North Kansas City School District,  October, 2021

Kiese Laymon, Heavy, an American Memoir, banned pending investigation, Wentzville School District, October, 2021.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, banned in libraries of the Nixa School District  February, 2022.

Logan Myracle, l8r g8tr, banned in libraries and classrooms, St. Francis Howell School District,  October, 2021

Elizabeth Scott, Living Dead Girl, banned pending investigation, Rockwood School District, March, 2022

Nic Stone, Dear Martin, banned in classes, Monett R-1 School District, December 2021

Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle, banned pending investigation, Nixa February, 2022

I am a writer, a journalist, an author, a longtime supporter of my local and regional libraries. I do not have much patience with those who want to dictate to me what I might read, how I might speak, or what I might think.

Perhaps I am the kind of person those who want to dictate those things fear.  Fear is a lousy reason for running a society or a nation.  People who are different will not go away and keeping someone from reading about them won’t drive them away.

So for the rest of this week, be a good American.

Read a banned book.  There’s a list of them above.

 

 

 

 

Why Hasn’t Ukraine Lost?

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Ukraine’s counterattack against Russian invaders appears to have stunned a lot of Russian soldiers and their commanders—and a growing number of influential people in Moscow who are starting to openly criticize Vladimir Putin for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Putin expected a quick conquest.  Why didn’t he get it?  And why is he, as of this writing, getting his butt kicked by a supposedly smaller, inferior, force?

You might find it interesting to explore a book that explains why.  It’s the same reason Hitler didn’t conquer England, why the United States fled from Vietnam, and probably why the Taliban controls Afghanistan.

The book is Malcom Gladwell’s David and Goliath, a study of why bigger is not always best, why stronger does not always prevail, and why—believe it or not—the underdog wins so often.

While most analyses of military actions focus on military capabilities and/or failures, Gladwell focuses on people and what happens when their country is attacked by a seemingly overwhelming force.

He writes that the British government was worried as Europe sank into World War II that there was no way to stop a German air offensive against the country. The country’s leading military theorists feared devastating attacks on London would 600,000 dead, 1.2-million people wounded and mass panic among the survivors, leaving the Army unable to fight invaders because it would be trying to keep order among the civilians.

The eight-month blitzkrieg began in the latter part of 1940 and included fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing.

But the people did not panic.  Military leaders were surprised to see courage and almost indifference.  The reaction puzzled them as well as psychiatric workers expecting the worst.

And they discovered the same things were happening in other countries under attack.

What was going on?

Gladwell writes that a Canadian psychiatrist, J. T.MacCurdy, determined that the bombings divided the populace into three categories: the people killed, the people who were considered near misses—the people who survived the bombs, and the remote misses—people not in the bombed areas.  MacCurdy said the people in the third category developed “a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.”

While the toll in the London bombings was, indeed, great (40,000 dead and 46,000 injured), those casualties were small in a community of eight-million people, leaving hundreds of thousands of “emboldened” near misses, people that MacCurdy said became “afraid of being afraid,” a feeling that produced exhilaration and led them to conquering fear and developing self-confidence “that is the very father and mother of courage.”

Hitler, like the British military command, had assumed that a populace that had never been bombed before would be terrified. It wasn’t. Instead, it was emboldened.

“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the touch times start,” writes Gladwell. “Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.”   He maintains that the German expectations that the bombings would terrorize the people and destroyed their courage was a “catastrophic error” because it produced the opposite result. He concludes the Germans “would have been better off not bombing London at all.”

Gladwell explores the “catastrophic error” this country made in Viet Nam when its political and military leaders believed they could bomb the Viet Cong into submission.  Thousands of pages of interviews of Viet Cong prisoners indicated the result instead was that the bombings made people “hate you so much that they never stop fighting.”

Many of the prisoners maintained no thoughts of winning but they didn’t think the Americans would win either.  Nor did they think they would lose. “An enemy indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all,” Gladwell writes, and leads to a shift in advantage and power to the underdog.

His thoughts might help us understand why, after 30 years, the Gulf War has failed to install democracy in that area and instead has left Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan far from what we dreamed they would become.

We hope the ideas are not tested on Taiwan.

Those who go to war expecting to win through might and power alone are Goliaths. And, as Gladwell sees it, all they’re doing is creating a lot of Davids.  And—although Russia’s invasion is not mentioned—in Ukraine, the shepherds with slings are swarming.

(The book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, New York, Little Brown and Company, 2013 (with a revised paperback edition by Back Bay Books, 2015. His thought-challenging musings also cover such topics as class size, prestigious colleges, art, dyslexia, and crime.  If you want a sample of his perceptive interpretation of how underdogs so often prevail, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGD7vQOwl8 and if you want more on other topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RGB78oREhM)

(Photo credit: youtube Ted Talk)