Category Archives: events

Premonition

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Your faithful chronicler was invited to speak to a group of freshman, sophomore, and junior State Representatives last week. It turned out they all were Republicans, including some Republican candidates for the House.

If Democrats want to hear the nonpartisan speech, I’d be glad to do it for them.

In fact, the words of a Democrat had a prominent role in the early part of the speech.  I had recited some facts about being raised in a Republican family. But I came of age in the Camelot era, a pedigree that I hope is somewhat behind my efforts as a reporter to harass both parties equally.

As I was researching some of the material for the speech, I came across the speech President Kennedy would have delivered at the Texas Trade Mart. As history records, the world ended for him ten minutes or so before he was to arrive there. The conclusion of the speech reaches across the generations since that day in Dallas.  Here’s the part of that speech that made it into part of my remarks last week:

“In this time of division and hostility, of narrowness and demagoguery often fueled by fear of the different instead of the opportunities presented by the things we have in common, it might be good to reflect on some of President Kennedy’s words again.  The other day I came across some words he would have spoken at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, a day I remember vividly as a young reporter.

Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

But today other voices are heard in the land – voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,…doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness…

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will “talk sense to the American people.” But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense…

We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

It has been too long since we heard that kind of uplifting challenge. And it’s time for leaders with courage to speak that way again.”

The crowd provided a standing ovation at the end of the talk, which was nice. I hope that means they didn’t think they were listening to nonsense.  And that they won’t go out and deliver it.

A Reason to Still Like Ike

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Here’s a piece of trivia for you that we learned years ago while touring the boyhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas:

He was born David Dwight Eisenhower.  His father’s name was David, too, so his mother reversed the first two names to avoid having two Davids in the family.

At the end of World War II, President Truman told him, “General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”  Eisenhower called the idea “an astounding proposition”   that he treated as a “splendid joke, which I hoped it was.”  He laughed it off and told Truman that he would not run for president in ’48.

The incident is recounted in Eisenhower’s 1948 book, Crusade in Europe, his view of the European War.  You might find his last few paragraphs something to reflect on in our current times:

Volumes have been, and more volumes will be, written on the collapse of world co-operation and the true significance of the events that accompanied the tragedy.  For us, all their words will amplify one simple truth.  Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession—to defend it against every thrust from within or without.

Eisenhower warned against any signs of military weakness (as Churchill did in Fulton in 1946) but he felt “Military preparedness alone is an inadequate answer to the problem.” And nationalism isn’t either.  In a time long before Russian hacking, Eisenhower wrote:

Communism inspires and enables its militant preachers to exploit injustices and inequity among men. This ideology appeals, not to the Italian or Frenchman or South Americans as such, but to men as human beings who become desperate in the attempt to satisfy common human needs. Therein it possesses a profound power for expansion. Wherever popular discontent is founded on group oppression or mass poverty or the hunger of children, there Communism may stage an offensive that arms cannot counter.  Discontent can be fanned into revolution, and revolution into social chaos. The sequel is dictatorial rule. Against such tactics exclusive reliance on military might is vain.

The areas in which freedom flourishes will continue to shrink unless the supporters of democracy match Communist fanaticism with clear and common understanding that the freedom of men is at stake; meet Communist-regimented unity with the voluntary unity of common purpose, even though this may mean a sacrifice of some measure of nationalistic pretensions; and above all, annul Communist appeals to the hungry, the poor, the oppressed, with practical measures untiringly prosecuted for the elimination of social and economic evils that set men against men.

As a world force, democracy is supported by nations that too much and too often act alone, each for itself alone. Nowhere perfect, in many regions democracy is pitifully weak because the separation of national sovereignty uselessly prevents the logical pooling of resources, which would produce greater material prosperity within and multiplied strength for defense..

The democracies must learn that the world is too small for the rigid concepts of national sovereignty that developed in a time when the nations were self-sufficient and self-dependent for their own well-being and safety. None of them today can stand alone. No radical surrender of national sovereignty is required—only a firm agreement that in disputes between nations a central and joint agency, after examination of the facts, shall decide the justice of the case by majority decision. This is a slight restriction indeed on nationalism and a small price to pay if thereby the people who stand for human liberty are better fitted to settle dissension with their own ranks or to meeting attack from within.

We believe individual liberty, rooted in human dignity, is man’s greatest treasure. We believe that men, given free expression of their will, prefer freedom and self-dependence to dictatorship and collectivism.  From the evidence, it would appear that the Communistic leaders also believe this; else why do they attack and attempt to destroy the practice of these concepts…

If the men and women of America face this issue as squarely and bravely as their soldiers faced the terrors of battle in World War II, we would have no fear of the outcome. If they will unite themselves as firmly as they did when they provided, with their Allies in Europe, the mightiest fighting force of all time, there is no temporal power that can dare challenge them.  If they can retain the moral integrity, the clarity of comprehension, and the readiness to sacrifice that finally crushed the Axis, then the free world will live and prosper, and all peoples, eventually, will reach a level of culture, contentment, and security that has never before been achieved.

It might seem to some that Eisenhower’s seventy-year old message today would be “Make the WORLD great again.”

Morbid Bracketology

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A lot of office employees have filled out basketball tournament brackets this year but I’ll bet you’ve never seen one such as the staff at the Missouri State Archives has each year.

Instead of “March Madness,” these folks have a “tournament” called Morbid Madness. It started six years ago when staffers were talking about some of the “weird, interesting or amusing causes of death while researching, processing or indexing records,” as archivist Christina Miller explained it to me a few days ago. “We come across death certificates, mortality schedules (1850-1880), probate records, coroners inquests and court records during the course of our work,” although the brackets are not limited to those years. Since it was about March when this came up, the staff decided to create a bracket to determine a “winning” unusual cause of death. Before long, people from other divisions of the archives joined in and before long the bracket became a “team building” activity.

One example from a previous bracket was a death certificate that listed “drowned while washing car.” That set the staff off on a search of newspaper accounts which showd the car apparently was partiallyi driven into a lake for washing (strange enough right there!) and the driver got his foot stuck under water and drowned.

These are folks that are keying thousands of old records into databases that the public can access. Among those records are death certificates and the supporting documents, usually coroner’s inquest reports.  These folks discover all kinds of funny (in a grisly sort of way) causes of death.

Here is this year’s Morbid Madness Bracket;

Some of these are pretty prosaic—smoking in bed, for example.  Others are just—–Well, we don’t know that to say they are.

We don’t have room to include coroner’s reports but the case of the death of William Nabe who died of a knife wound in an argument about pies at the Coker School House in Cape Girardeau County, 1916—which reached the final round—happened this way:

A deposition from witness Louis Schatte recalled there was an “entertainment” at the school that featured a pie sale. One Jim Thompson bid to buy all of the pies, prompting Nabe to ask in a friendly way, “What are you going to do with all those pies?”  To which Thompson replied, “It’s none of your damn business.”   A short time later, Nabe told Thompson he’d be better off saving his money because the next day he wish he hadn’t spent all of it and had let the other guys a chance and “if he was going to invite the boys to eat pie with him.”  Schatte said, “All Nabe’s remarks were seemingly in fun and Thompson replied in a very short plain manner that it was none of his God Damn business.” (The involvement of the Deity indicates things are much more serious now.)

In a follow-up conversation, Nabe said he wasn’t looking for a fight inside the school but if Thompson was looking for trouble “to come outside and he would get it.”  Outside, Thompson was ready to go but Nabe didn’t want to fight on school property. There were some other words exchanged and the two wound up wrestling in the road in the process of which Thompson stabbed Nabe while Nabe was on top of him.  We don’t know what happened to Thompson or to all the pies he bought.

“Died during a fight over pies” prevailed over such causes as dragging dead hogs, burned by a kettle of ketchup or by really hot hotcakes, being shot “slyly,” and just plain old smoking in bed, or in a drunken brawl.

Reaching the championship round on the other side was the death of William Diez (as nearly as we can decipher the old handwriting) from “Drinking Almond Oil”  in February, 1848.  It seems a man named Magnus Gross (perhaps) was making a liquer called Maraschino, the recipe for which called for the oil of bitter almonds. Diez argued with Gross about the properties of the oil. Although Gross said it was among the most dangerous of poisons, Diez disagreed and said that while he was a student in Europe he drank the stuff after a night’s spree. The dispute continued until Diez suddenly grabbed the glass containing the oil and chugged it down.  Not long afterward he complained of feeling ill, vomited material strongly smelling of almonds, and lost consciousness. He died within a half-hour.

A doctor later testified that eight drops of the oil would often kill a man.

Drinking almond oil defeated whiskey of questionable quality, thought bug killer was wine, a watermelon seed in the lungs, drowned in a keg, and used a railroad tie as a pillow.

Drinking the oil of bitter almonds was this year’s Morbid Madness champion.

Last year these jolly archivists had an all-star bracket that featured winners of past brackets. The winner in 2018 was suicide with booze and women as the contributing cause. In 2019 it was about a man hit by a cow on a public highway. In 2020 it was a guy whowas attached to a chain on his wife’s car—which was ruled a justifiable homicide.

The winner of last year’s All Star contest was the winner from the 2017 bracket—a guy more than fifty years ago who tried to throw a beer can to a neighboring house. There was a little more to the incident than that, though:

Moral of the stories for 2022: If you’re going to have a pie fight, throw them and in the other case sometimes (I can hear Shirley Bassey singing this) “Almonds are forever.”

The Hypocrisy of Term Limits

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Sometimes we write stuff here that won’t move the public needle but we do it to get something off our chest and into whatever public discussion flows from these pieces.  Truth be told, these columns have limited readership and since I don’t mess with Facebook or other social media platforms (I have a life and it is not lived between my thumbs), this wisdom reaches only a few feet from the mountaintop from which it is dispensed.

But today, we need to expose term limits for the hypocritical entity that they are. And the hypocrisy that voters showed in approving them thirty years ago this year.

We related some of the problems a few days ago.  There are two major points today, one that can be made in just a few words and the second one that will take a little more. The point, however, is the same—term limits are voter apathy and voter hypocrisy at their worst:

The first point is one we’ve made before—that voters gave up their right to vote for the people who represent them in the legislative chambers when they adopted a law saying they did not want the right to vote their state representative a fifth term or their state senator a third term.

They just threw away their votes.

Voters said we must have term limits to get new, fresh blood into our governments—-and then immediately contradicted themselves.

The same voters who approved limiting Missouri House members to only four two-year terms voted in the same election to return 53 members to the House of Representatives for a fifth term.

Of that 53, four were returned for their ninth term, one for a tenth term, two for their eleventh term and one for his SEVENTEENTH term.

Two years later, Missourians voted for 36 of these same people for still another term and gave fourteen others a fifth term or more.

And in 1996 voters sent 22 of them back again! And they gave 13 representatives fifth terms.

The last person affected by term limits to serve in the House of Representatives, as far as we have been able to determine, was Chris Kelly of Columbia, who was elected to his ninth and last term in 2012 after having been away from the House for several years.  He could have run for a tenth term but did not.

In all, Missouri voters who think term limits are good public policy have voted 263 times to elect state representatives to a fifth term (one was elected to a 19th during this time).

The Missouri Senate, a much smaller body, has seen voters send its members back for more than two terms 32 times.

That’s almost 300 times for both chambers of our legislature. .

And what does that say?

It says that if voters have a chance to vote for someone they like, they’ll do it.  But those voters of 1992 decided you and I won’t have that opportunity.

The second point is that term limits miss the target.  The real issue is POWER.  Instead, term limits cripples SERVICE.  The most dangerous people in our political system are the people in power.  They set the agendas.  They decide what legislation will be heard in committees or debated on the floors of the House and the Senate. They are in positions that attract financial support that hey might wish to share with a favored few.

Terms limits can be, should be, applied to those who can manipulate the system.  Speakers and Presidents Pro Tem have the power. The Governor and the Treasurer have policy and financial power in state government and limiting that power is a safeguard as would be limiting the years a person can lead a legislative body.

There is no doubt that incumbency has its advantages at campaign times.  But the answer to that advantage is not in taking away the right to vote for that person again instead of for an opponent. It is in making challengers more equal in presenting their cases.  Reforming the way campaigns are financed is an answer. The challenge is in finding a constitutional way to do it.

One way to start is to change term limits laws to apply to those in power and to restore the citizens’ right to pick their public servants.

Will voters reclaim their right?  In today’s political climate, it’s extremely doubtful regardless of how much we owe it to ourselves as voters and our system to do it.

There are people who are dying today to keep their version of democracy alive.  We smug Americans who too readily wrap ourselves in our flag and use it to justify all kinds of dubious remarks and actions cannot fully appreciate  how desperately millions of others want to hang on to something we regard so casually and irresponsibly and are willing to give away with so little thought.

But term limits are what we have and that’s what we are thirty years after Missourians gave away their right to vote for those speaking for them in the chambers where our laws are made.

The Obit

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We’re all going to have one, eventually.  Some help write theirs, or write the whole thing (see the New York Times recent obituary for former Secrtary of State Madeline Albright).

I had to remind Missourinet reporters from time to time that people die.

They do not, I told them, enter into rest, make the transition, cross to the other side, pass away, or any of the myriad euphemism that we use to escape saying someone died.

Years ago, one of my journalism school professors said “passing away” refers to a quarterback who throws a pass that goes over the hands of a leaping receiver, clears the goal post, flies out of the stadium, and is last seen disappearing into the distance.  “THAT,” he said, “is passing away.”

While at the Missourinet, I kept a file of those euphemisms.  I was astonished at its length.

Published obituaries often come from the families of the dead rather than from the pen of a newspaper writer, which is okay as part of the grieving process.  Few newspapers have reporters on the obit beat, but an obituary written by one of those people is considered a form of literary art.  The Albright obit in  The New York Times is an example of the obituary as literary art. Some of its previous write-ups are in book form.

One of our favorite obituaries is one that pulled no punches.  Accuracy was more important than tribute in this obit published by the London Telegraph, April 21, 2005: (To get full enjoyment, we suggest you put on your best English accent and read it aloud)

—

The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, whose death aged 66 was confirmed yesterday, demonstrated the dangers of the possession of inherited wealth coupled with a weakness for women and Champagne.

Shaftesbury, who disappeared last November prompting an international police investigation, was tall, debonair, affable and rather shy.  He tried after his own fashion to be true to the liberal philanthropic family traditions of his ancestors, notably the first Earl (1621-83), founder of the Whig party in Parliament, and the 7th Earl (1801-85), the great 19th century evangelical social reformer.

He served as president of the Shaftesbury Society, which the 7th Earl had founded, and—as a keen music fan—was chairman of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1966 to 1980.

He was also respected as a conservationist.  On his 9,000-acre estate at Wimborne St. Giles, Dorset, he planted more than a million trees and, in 1992, was joint winner of the Royal Forestry Society’s national Duke of Cornwall’s Award for Forestry and Conservation. He also served as president of the Hawk and Owl Trust and as vice-president of the British Butterfly Conservation Society.

It was said, after his mysterious disappearance from a Cannes nightclub, that the 10th Earl, like Gladstone, had been devoting himself to helping vulnerable young girls working in nightspots on the French Riviera to start new lives. But as the mystery deepened, it seemed that his interest was more than merely philanthropic.

Indeed, Lord Shaftesbury had always exhibited a weakness for exotic women. At Eton he had famously penned an article for the college magazine in which he described English debutantes as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne.”  His subsequent amorous career was notable for his avoidance of the species.

He met his Italian-born first wife, Bianca Le Vien, the ex-wife of an American film producer and 12 years his senior, during a skiing holiday. They married in 1966 but divorced owing to his adultery with an unnamed woman, in 1976. The same year he married Swedish-born divorcee, Christina Casella, the daughter of a diplomat, with whom he had two sons.

That marriage, too, ended acrimoniously, in 2000, and he embarked on a long string of short-lived and expensive love affairs with younger women distinguished by their exotic looks and equally colourful past histories.

He became a familiar figure in some of the loucher nightspots on the French Riviera, where he cut a curious figure in his leather trousers, pink shirts, and large red-and-black spectacles; he was notable for his habit of flashing his money around as he bought drinks for a succession of nubile female companions.

In 1999 he had begun a relationship with Nathalie Lions, a pneumatic 29-year old whom he had met in a lingerie shop in Geneva, where she was working as a model. They became engaged, and he paraded her around London, Barbados and the south of France, maintaining that she was a member of the Italian royal house of Savoy. He admitted to lavishing some £1 million on her in cheques and expensive gifts, including a £100,000 Rolex watch and an Audi TT sports car.

But their relationship came to an end in 2002 after it was revealed that she was, in fact, a French nude model and former Penthouse “Pet” with silicone-enhanced breasts.

Later that year, he married Jamila M’Barek, a Tunisian divorcee with two children, whom he had met in a Paris bar where she was working as a hostess. She separated from him in April 2004, claiming that he had become an alcoholic and “sex addict,” regularly overdosing on Viagra and having testosterone injections. Among several bizarre stories, she alleged that, on one occasion, she had returned unexpectedly to their flat in Cannes to find her husband in the company of a large Arab gangster and two Arab women who were rifling through the wardrobes. Her husband was on a stool singing and dancing; the women left with a car-load of her belongings.

In August 2004 Shaftesbury was reported as having taken up with a 33-year old Moroccan hostess known as Nadia. He installed her and her two children in their own flat and, a month later, asked her to become the fourth Countess of Shaftesbury.

On the evening of November 5, 2004, Shaftesbury left the Noga Hilton Hotel in Cannes and, as was his regular habit by this time, entered a basement hostess-bar nearby. Within 24 hours he had vanished, setting off an international criminal investigation.

The saga of “Le Lord disparu” send the French media into a frenzy, and spawned a multitude of theories. In February his estranged wife, Jamila M’Barek was arrested by French police and allegedly admitted that she was present when the Earl was killed in her home; but she insisted that she was only a witness to a fight involving her husband and his killer. She and her brother Mohammed have both been placed under investigation for murder which is a step short of formal charges under French law.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper was born on May 22, 1938, the elder son of Major Lord Ashley, elder son of the 9th Earl of Shaftesbury KP, PC, GCVO, CBE. Lord Ashley, who died in 1947 before he could inherit the earldom, had shocked London society by marrying the model and chorus girl Sylvia Hawkes.  After their divorce she went on to marry Douglas Fairbanks Sr., followed by Clark Gable. Anthony was the son of his father’s French-born second wife, Françoise Soulier.

He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, and as a young man was a keen climber and skier. He succeeded to the earldom at aged 22 on his grandfather’s death in 1961.

The 9th Earl had, by prudent financial planning, arranged matters so that his heirs would avoid death duties.  The young earl therefore came into an estate which included the family’s 17th century home and large estate in Dorset, several other properties and a collection of art and other valuables.  By the 1990s his wealth was said to be in the “low millions.”

It was another ancestor, the 3rd Earl, who had bequeathed to his wayward descendant the wisest counsel: “The extending of a single passion too far or the continuance of it too long,” he observed, “is able to bring irrecoverable ruin and misery.”

Shaftesbury’s body was found in the south of France on April 5; yesterday it was announced that DNA tests had confirmed his identity.

By his second marriage, Lord Shaftesbury had two sons, the eldest of whom, Anthony Nils Christian, Lord Ashley, born in 1977, succeeds to the earldom.

—

Now, THAT’S an obituary!

Sports Page: Cardinals/Royals–MU Coach, and Racing

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(MLB)—Missouri’s Major League Baseball teams are off to a 3-0 start after the first weekend of games in Florida and Arizona.  The Cardinals posted wins over the Astros and the Mets. Dylan Carlson and Paul Goldschmidt homered in Sunday’s win over the Mets. The Royals beat Arizona 11-10 in a game indicating, as the old saying says, hitters are ahead of pitchers at the start of spring training. Emanuel Rivera, Michael Taylor, and Salvador Perez homered. The Royals won it with six runs in the last three innings.

(TIGERS BASKETBALL)—University of Missouri curators reportedly will meet today and are considered likely to approve the hiring of Dennis Gates as the latest Tiger basketball coach.  Gates has led Cleveland State for the last three years with a 50-40 record but in his last two seasons the team has gone 39-19 with one trip to the NCAA tournament and one to the NIT.

RACING NUMBERS: 600, 5 FOR 5, AND 1-2

(INDYCAR)—Roger Penske called it a career as a sports car driver in 1965 to concentrate on his car dealership in Philadelphia.  He backed a car in the Daytona 24 Hours the next year, beginning a career that last weekend gave him his 600th victory across several racing platforms.

Josef Newgarden passed Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin on the outside of the last turn to win a thriller at Texas Motor Speedway by less than seven one-hundredths of a second.  McLaughlin was going for his second straight win to open the INDYCAR season and had led 186 laps in the 248-lap race.

Penske (shown here in one of his less-buttoned down moments after kissing the bricks at Indianapolis in 2018 after Will Power gave Team Penske it’s seventeenth 500 win and a year before Simon Pagenaud provided Penske’s 19th Indianapolis 500 victory) met Newgarden in victory circle with a bonus—six $100 bills, a bonus for winning the Penske’s 600th race. Newgarden called the win “unbelieveable.”  His drivers have won both races this year. Last year, Penske drivers had only three victories for the entire season.

Marcus Ericsson had his best finish in an INDYCAR oval race, at third, just 1.35 seconds back. Third Penske driver Will Power was fourth with Scott Dixon, the six-time series champion, crossing the line fifth.

Sixth was seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmy Johnson, who as running his first INDYCAR oval race after spending last season running only ovals.  Johnson used his extensive stock car experience at Texas to move from his 18th starting position to sixth, by far his best finish in open-wheel racing.  He said he became more comfortable as the race progressed. “Once we hit the halfway point of the race, I really could sense and feel the car,” he said. “It became second nature, and off I went. We knew going oval racing would help and today got us into the competitive mix.”

(NASCAR)—William Byron has become the fifth winner in the first five races of the year in NASCAR’s top series.  In a wild race at the re-designed Atlanta Motor Speedway that saw 46 lead changes involving twenty drivers and eleven caution flags, Byron pounced with ten laps to go and got past Bubba Wallace, then held off Ross Chastain at the finish by .145 seconds.

The win is Byron’s third in his five-year, 149-race career. All five winners this year have yet to see their 30th birthday.  Austin Cindric, the Daytona 500 winner, is 23. Kyle Larson, the defending series champion, is 29. Alex Bowman is 28 and Chase Briscoe is 27.  All five might be in the ten-race playoff at the end of the season.  But there are still 21 races to go and eleven places to fill in that field. If more than 16 drivers win a race this year, the ones with the most standings points will make the playoffs.  A driver also must finish in the top thirty in points.

At the end, 28 of the 37 starting cars had been involved in crashes during the race.

It was another “close” finish for Chastain, his second straight runner-up and his third time in three races he’s been in the top three.  He came back from two laps down after a blown tire sent him into the wall on the 95th lap of the 325 laps in the race and he was penalized for improper refueling.

Third place went to Kurt Busch, who also recovered from an on-track incident. Chastain teammate Daniel Suarez finished fourth, giving NASCAR’s newest team—Trackhouse Racing—two cars in the top four. Corey Lajoie picked up his first top-five career finish as he escaped being involved in a three-car crash at the finish line that left Wallace finishing ninth.

(FORMULA 1)—Ferrari has posted its first 1-2 finish since the 2019 Singapore Grand Prix, with Clarles LeClerc driving for the scuderia’s first victory in 46 races.  Carlos Sainz finished second with Lewis Hamilton and new teammate George Russell fourth.

The race was a disaster for defending F1 champion Max Verstappen and the Red Bull team.  Verstappen dropped out with steering a fuel system issue.  Teammate Sergio Perez, running second, spun out on the last lap. He also was battling fuel system problems.

The last time neither Red Bull car finished a race was the Austrian Grand Prix in 2020.

 

Two Worlds

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The General Assembly is spending this week on its annual spring break, a few days to relax, unwind and reload. And to do a little campaigning or campaign planning perhaps.

They’re back in the real world this week.  For those who haven’t seen their other world, the differences are hard to understand.

When a member of the Missouri General Assembly steps through an entrance of the Missouri Capitol, that person is stepping into a small, confined, hot world with little respite that tends to consume even the best of people for most of the first five months of the year before it spits them back out into the world from which they came.

And they’re glad to come back seven months later to step out of their comfortable home world through those doors and back into the collision of wills, the competition of ideas, and the fight over the words yes and no.

They move from a world of service to others into a world of demands from others. And the demands are unrelenting, sometimes with consequences implied if the demands are not met.

They might be active at home on issues of poverty, food shortages, spouse and child abuse, veterans needs, church work, homelessness, and other social issues that can’t afford high-powered influence in the hot little world that is the Missouri Capitol. And as they deal in the capitol with pressures from those that can afford to apply them, it might be hard to think of their gentler work at home.

Imagine lives lived in fifteen-minute segments, each segment featuring someone who wants something, or a world of one or two-hour meetings to listen to proposals pleasing to those in the Capitol hallways, and days of increasingly long sessions arguing about the propriety of answering demands and which ones to answer.

Imagine all of this far from the comfort of home, family, friends, and co-workers with whom they share their streets, or coffee, or church pews.

It is hard to remember in those eighteen weeks or so who is more important—the people they meet on the street back home or the people they meet in the hallways of the State Capitol.

Seldom is there time or opportunity to think about things in depth, to study issues in depth, to look for pitfalls in legislation in depth. The pressure to take what they are given, often not knowing all that is within the proposition, is enormous. Sometimes the pressure squeezes out reason, leads to action counter to what is best to those back home, and demands action without burden of thought.

This is the world of unrelenting movement, of unrelenting asks and demands, a world far detached from the freedoms enjoyed where they live.

Furthermore, it’s more than consuming. It’s addictive.

Plaques on the office wall from those whose bidding they have done. Checks in the campaign account to encourage or reward a vote.  Intense seeming friendships today that disappear when the last vote is cast that can benefit a person, a group, a cause.

This is the other world of the people we send to represent us in Jefferson City. As individuals, they return home the same people.  As a group, however, in the capitol they become “government,” an enemy to many.

Is there is a way to improve this system?

Ideally, yes.  Sometimes it’s a matter of those sent to Jefferson City to show courage in the face of pressures, to question more closely the things asked of them. But sometimes it’s the case of those who vote to send others to represent them in this small stone world we call the Missouri Capitol meeting a citizen’s responsibility to pay attention to issues that are not always “my backyard” issues.

Government does not take place only in the Capitols of our country.  Its roots are in the home towns of those who are sent forth. And the folks at home need to care, to pay attention, and to hold accountable those who are to speak for them in that hot little world.

 

I Mourn for the Missouri Senate

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I was talking to one of our state senators a few days ago in one of the side galleries when he said, “I think I’m witnessing the death of the senate.”

If so, it has been a long and agonizing death.

If this is what the Missouri Senate is to be, he’s correct. And it hasn’t been just a death. It’s been a slow suicide. The life-blood of the body has slowly seeped away, leaving a once-deliberative and respectful lawmaking chamber splintered and dominated by a self-centered, small but power-hungry, group that has brought the place to near anarchy.

Make no mistake: the senate has been the scene of some fierce battles, even wars perhaps. But respect for its customs, traditions, and its famous unwritten rules has imposed an inner discipline that has served it well.

The increasingly painful decline and drift away from those characteristics seem to have two points of origin.

The sacrifice of public responsibility represented by the adoption of term limits is one of the points.  The rise of those I call Gingrich Republicans is the other.

Term limits is the disaster its opponents warned us it would be. Voters willingly but hypocritically gave up their rights to vote for someone who had earned their confidence and in doing so laid the groundwork for the sad spectacle we have seen in the senate for the past three weeks, a situation that is a tyranny imposed by a minority.

A small group of senators demanding a new congressional district map that serves the purpose of political power more than it serves the purpose of fair political representation has stopped almost everything else from moving with actions that disrespect the very thing in which they are engaged—the filibuster.

The filibuster historically has been a tool that forces two disagreeing sides eventually to find some acceptable middle ground, assuming the two sides have a modicum of good will. Sometimes no agreement is possible.  The losing side, while not getting some or any of its wishes, nonetheless recognizes that it has at least aired its grievances and allows the process to move ahead despite the differences so the process can serve the people’s needs on other issues.

That has not been the case in the senate this year. A small group has decided it must have a map drawn its way to expand the power of one party or the people at large who are expecting the makers of law to take actions that protect and serve them are out of luck.

The attitude has irritated colleagues of both parties, has aggravated a bipartisan group of women senators, and has gotten on the nerves of the senate leadership.  When one of the contentious crowd violated one of the unwritten decorum rules by wearing bib overalls on the floor (even with a coat and tie) and was called on it by the President Pro Tem, he instead of quickly leaving and returning properly dressed argued about it.  For elevating what should have been a small issue into a larger public one, he was penalized with the loss of most of his committee assignments—which led to another extended period of reading from a book instead of publicly apologizing to the Senate.

Parents sometimes have to deal with a defiant child by taking away some privileges. The same holds true in a public body of government.

How does term limits fit this situation?

A deliberative body such as the Senate must have within its being a deep traditional sense of respect for the chamber, the processes, and the members. The saying, “Everybody is a Senator” is more than a statement recognizing an elected title.  It is a proclamation that all participants in the senate process are equal and will be respected as equals, that the title is greater than the individual. Respect for the title and the mutual recognition of shared courtesies required for progress are essential and those who disregard those responsibilities and therefore disrupt the work of the senate for their own purposes are subject to discipline.

These are qualities of service in the Senate that once were taught to new members by those who had served for years, perhaps decades, and knew from life experience that respect for individuals and the system were the keys to responsible lawmaking.

But term limits have robbed our legislative bodies of that valuable institutional knowledge and have left them liable for disruptive actions that undermine responsible lawmaking. And the situation has deteriorated so badly that some wonder if the Senate can ever recover enough of those values to be the effective body it once was.

The second factor that has led to the present debacle was the advent of the Gingrich Republicans in the early 1990s.  The take-no-prisoners style of politics was almost immediately disruptive of the deliberative process that was the culture of the Senate.  The early small and disruptive  element increased as years went by. Increasingly, filibusters increased and a small dissident group learned how it could hold the floor for hours and passed along that knowledge so that the filibuster became less of a tool of compromise and more of a sledgehammer of force.

Distressingly, what we are seeing in Missouri is not uncommon in other states and is on flagrant display in our national politics.  Some have suggested term limits are needed for Congress.

Congressional disarray is already frightening enough.  What has been happening in Missouri should be a warning of the danger to democracy that term limits in Washington would bring.

Where we are in the state senate has been a long time coming.  Those who have watched the  deterioration of the chamber and who cannot see an end to this distressing set of events wonder if deliberative and respectful government can be returned to our capitol—and to our nation.

You and I, dear readers, are the ones who hold that future in our hands.

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The sphere of her usefulness

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We were reading Tessa Weinberg’s Missouri Independent article a few weeks ago about the eleven women members of the Missouri Senate who have put together a children’s book that tells the stories of the 36 women who have served and are serving in the Senate.  We thought, “I need get some copies of that book for my granddaughters.”

And then I’m going around office-to-office and have the authors sign them.  .

I have known all 36 of those women senators which says (a) I’m an old guy, or (b) women were late in arriving in the Senate. Actually, there is no “or” about it.  Both observations are true.

A few days ago, while looking for something else, I came across this article from the St. Louis Daily Evening Herald Newspaper and Commercial Advertiser of June 10, 1836.

EMIGRATION OF THE RIGHT SORT

The predominance of the female over the male sex, in the ancient commonwealth of Massachusetts, is very great. In some towns, according to the last census, the proportion is more than two to one, and the excess in the whole state is more than 14,000. Of course, there must of necessity be 14,000 old maids in Massachusetts, over and above the number that goes to offset the old bachelors, (the fools) which may perhaps account for half as many more. Twenty thousand old maids in the single commonwealth of Massachusetts! Now although we have no antipathy to an old maid (we have to an old bachelor though) having always found that much abused class sensible, good-natured, and conversible, yet it must be admitted that in this position, the woman can never manifest the higher qualities of her nature. It is as a wife, a mother, at the head of a family, presiding over the destinies of an infant and miniature commonwealth, that the woman shines forth in all the loveliness of those moral excellences of which she is capable.

Without this, the sphere of her usefulness is greatly circumscribed, and although we may confidently expect that she will not do much harm, neither can she do much good.  We are therefore glad to learn that a company of “industrious, capable and intelligent” young women are about to start from Northampton, Mass., for the valley of the West.  They are needed as school teachers, to fulfill the various mechanical employments which are the province of their sex, and above all, they are needed as the sweeteners of the toil and hardships of our young men who now, in great numbers, are laboring in unblessed loneliness over the vast domains of the west. These young women come out under the protection of a gentleman, and we do not hesitate, in the name of all that is pure and lovely, to promise them a hearty welcome from all classes of our fellow citizens.

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There are a lot of things to read into this article. Dismissing it as “quaint” might not be fair, though.  It’s part of our history, an understanding of the role of women in society—which was largely and quietly accepted on both sides of the gender line—an appreciation of a sort of the contribution women even in those un-emancipated times played in the home and the community—a comment on the loneliness of life on the frontier (1836 was the year that the Platte Purchase added the northwest corner to our state), and other issues.

It also is a commentary on the Missouri pioneer editor, a more colorful purveyor of that profession than we seem to have today.  I think many of these guys just had more fun in those days, whether it was in the gentle writing of this story or the more partisan pronouncements that were not uncommon in the columns of the time.

A little less than ninety years later, a woman’s place was in the House (of Representatives) in Missouri, and fifty years after that the Senate became a woman’s place, too.

These eleven senators did something important in putting together this book that the menfolk in the Senate might want to learn from.  These eleven women recognized they could do something good by forgetting about party politics, getting together over food and drink, and accomplishing something useful not for themselves but for those whose futures are far from determined.

Would that more people could do that in these times when fighting seems more important than accomplishing, when concerns about power supplant commitments to service. .

We hope that not too many years in the future a woman—perhaps one of these eleven or a young woman who reads their book—manifests “the higher qualities of her nature” by occupying the governor’s office.

As the title of the book says, “You can, too.”

YAKYAKYAKYAKYAK

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It is Valentine’s Day.  And there’s not much love in the Missouri Senate.

I recently listened to the killing filibuster in the Senate on the confirmation of the state health director’s appointment. Afterwards I spent a couple of more rewarding hours watching some paint dry.

That was nothing, however, compared to the long-running tantrum that was started last week by a minority of the majority party who objected to a proposed congressional district map. It is still ongoing as this new week begins.

I am afraid that by the time it ends, three species will have gone extinct and become fossils.

I was reminded of an article in the Boonville Missouri Register of July 16, 1840 about a speech given in Jefferson City by A. G. Minor, a Whig—the newspaper leaned Democratic:

“He opened his speech with a flowery declamation…He then went on for quantity…It was one of those stereotyped editions of Whig oratory you may hear any time and place where a number of Whigs are congregated together…Thus he trudged along through a two hours and a half speech, and left us as wise as we were when we commenced.”

Been there.  Know that, from many hours listening to filibusters in the State Senate. I always started legislative sessions with a new Filibuster Book, something to read while somebody exhausted themselves saying nothing worth remembering for hours on end—-which is okay as a tactic but makes one desperate for a newly-painted wall for sanity maintenance.  Unless the one enduring the display has a good book.  One way or another, I was determined to survive these events MORE than as wise as I was at the start.

Old-time speech-making was often colorful—and lengthy.  Two-hour speeches from the stump were not rare.  Two-hour sermons weren’t either. We have become significantly more sophisticated now.  Our televangelists can take only about 18 minutes to convince us we’re all going to Hell although we might face better alternatives if we help them for their next executive jet.

We have examples of those sometimes more eloquent expositions because newspapers sometimes printed speeches in their entirety or printed lengthy excerpts. Representative John E. Pitt of Platte County introduced legislation in January1859 to print 100 handbills announcing the celebration of the Battle of New Orleans on January 8.  He told his colleagues:

Gentlemen keep continually talking about economy. I, myself, do not believe in tying the public purse with cobweb strings, but when retrenchment comes in contact with patriotism, it assumes the form of “smallness.”

Such economy is like that of an old skinflint, who had a pair of boots made for his little boy, without soles, that they might last longer. (Laughter.)

I reverence “the day we celebrate.” It is fraught with reminiscences the most cheering; it brings to mind one of the grandest events ever recorded in letters of living fire upon the walls of the temple of time by the god of war!

On such occasions we should rise above party lines and political distinctions.

 I never fought under the banner of “old Hickory,” but, “by the eternal” I wish I had. (Laughter and applause.) If the old war-horse was here now he would not know his own children from the side of Joseph’s coat of many colors—Whigs, Know-Nothings, Democrats, hard, soft, boiled, scrambled and fried Lincolnites, Douglasites, and blather-skites!

I belong to no party; I am free, unbridled, in the political pasture. Like a bob-tailed bull in fly time, I charge around in the high grass and fight my own flies. (Great laughter.)

Gentlemen, let us show our liberality on patriotic occasions. Why, some men have no more patriotism than you could stuff through the eye of a knitting needle. Let us not squeeze five cents till the eagle on it squeals like a locomotive or an old maid. Let us print the bills and inform the public that we are as full of patriotism as are the Illinois swamps of tad poles.

I don’t believe in doing things by halves. Permit me, Mr. Speaker, to make a poetical quotation from one of our noblest authors. “I love to see the grass among the red May roses, I love to see an old gray horse, for when he goes, he goeses.” (Convulsive laughter.)

The comments were reported in the Weekly California News, published in Moniteau County, on January 29, 1859.

John Brooks Henderson, seeking to be a state representative in his first try for public office, remarked at a July 4th event in Pike County in 1847:

Though all former governments have fallen and yielded to the corroding influences of time, and shared the fate of all other human concerns, yet there are principles, firm as the unchangeable rocks of Adamant, upon which the fabric of government will stand, until human affairs shall have ceased and Heaven’s Messiah shall fill the throne of peace. These principles are founded upon the equality of mankind, upon truth, reason and justice; and the government whose foundations rest upon these, and whose strength is dependent upon the free will of a virtuous people, will only fail when time shall grow hoary with age, and nature herself shall decay.

In the days long before audio and video recordings, the only way people could learn what was said in those patriotic speeches was to read them in newspapers such as the Democratic Banner, published in the Pike County seat of Louisiana, in this case, on August 16, 1847.

Henderson, by the way, became a Union Army officer whose troops “conquered” Callaway County early in the Civil War. Later, as a U.S. Senator, he was one of those who voted against impeaching President Andrew Johnson, a courageous step that cost him his senatorship.

One more example of rhetoric of the 19th century that puts speakers of today to shame.  Walter B. Stevens, in his Centennial History of Missouri (The Center State), published in 1921, tells of an Ozarks preacher of the early 1800s who might have offered this prayer over a young man bitten by a rattlesnake:

We thank Thee, Almighty God, for Thy watchful care over us and for Thy goodness and tender mercy, and especially we thank Thee for rattlesnakes. Thou hast sent one to bite John Weaver. We pray Thee to send one to bite Jim, one to bite Henry, one to bite Sam, one to bite Bill; and we pray Thee to send the biggest kind of a rattlesnake to bite the old man, for nothing but rattlesnakes will ever bring the Weaver family to repentance. There are others in Missouri just as bad as the Weavers. We pray Thee to stir up Missouri, and, if nothing else will bring the people to repentance, we pray Thee to shower down more rattlesnakes. Amen!

We say “might have offered” because the story might be apocryphal.  But it’s too good a story to go untold to future generations.

This prayer offers something to all of us who are tired of the obviating, posturing, and prevaricating in our political discourse.  For those who do not consider being inspiring, humorous, and uplifting while they fill the air, instead, with boring verbosity, “we pray thee to shower down more rattlesnakes.”