Category Archives: events

Blaming Grandpa

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We live in a time when we have “friends” throughout the world but we don’t know our next door neighbor. 

 We wave at our neighbors but we don’t talk to them very much and certainly not about anything significant. But we’ll text people in other cities. We’ll link in with them or we’ll book our faces with them or we send them an Instagram.  Some still twitter to share things with people we’ve never met.  But we just wave at our neighbors—-and what was their name again?

My grandfather didn’t invent the internet but he might have set in motion the sorry state of affairs outlined by Media writer Eric Burns almost thirty years ago when he wrote, “Every improvement in the technology of communications during the last century has led to greater isolation among people. It is a remarkable paradox, as if every improvement in the technology of hygiene had led to greater illness, every improvement in the technology of transportation had led to greater distance.” 

 If you need proof, put your cell phone away when you’re walking along a busy street and watch the crowd and see how many people are walking while they’re talking on the phone or texting or checking emails, never looking at the people around them, not even talking with friends or associates walking with them.   

“It began with Rural Free Delivery that brought the mail to the person,” wrote Burns.  

One of my grandfathers was a rural mail carrier in Mitchell County, Kansas in the 1920s and 1930s, delivering mail to people such as my other grandfather, a farmer. 

“Before RFD, the person had to come to the mail, which was deposited for him at a centralized place.  Usually the place was a general store; usually the person was a farmer who would kill two birds with one stone, picking up his mail at the same time he shopped for groceries and supplies,” wrote Burns, who noted the farmer also would “socialize, visit with the other farmers and their families who were at the general store for the same reason.  And this was one of the few chances such people had to pass time with their neighbors; their farms were many miles apart and their days too busy with chores to allow for casual dropping in.  It was a lonely life. Ironically, the inefficiency of the postal system made it less so.”

But, he says, when people like my one grandfather started delivering the mail to farmers like my other grandfather, the farmers had more time to farm and the general store as a social institution died.  He cites one of this writer’s favorite historians, Daniel Boorstin, who wrote, “From every farmer’s doorstep there now ran a highway to the world. But at the price of dissolving the old face-to-face communities.”  

Then along came radio to make things worse.  It brought entertainment and information into the home.  It wasn’t necessary to go to town for those things.  And it killed the Chautauqua movement and eliminated more face-to-face interaction.

The telephone system had improved to the point where—as NYU Professor Neil Postman put it–
“a strange world of acoustic space in which disembodied voices exchange information intimately and in specially developed personas” developed.  The telephone did not require face-to-face communication.  Then television. Then home video. Then computers.  And e-mail.  Burns quoted Henry David Thoreau: “Lot! Men have become the tools of their tools.”

The progression suggested by Burns in 1988 was continued in 2012 by Dr. James Emery White, the former President of the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts and senior pastor of the Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.  He wrote of “hyper-connectivity” in his blog, saying analysts are split on this “bane of the so-called millennials, the generation born from 1981-2000.” 

 “Some feel it will make millennials ‘nimble analysts and decision makers.’ Others feel it will mean an inability to retain information, a tendency to be easily distracted, and a lack of ‘deep thinking capabilities’ and ‘face-to-face social skills.’”  White leaned toward the latter and cites a UCLA study in 2007 that showed “the internet is weakening our comprehension and transforming us into shallow thinkers.” 

He, too, quotes Boorstin: “The greatest menace to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge,” which leads him to compare the words “hyper” and “hypo.”   HYPER means “above,” or “over,” he says.  HYPO means “below” or “under.” 

He concludes, “So while it is an age of hyper-connectivity, perhaps we should also acknowledge the inevitable result.  Hypo-intellectualism.”  

Other analysts can cite other reasons for our contradicting lifestyles that isolate us from those next door to us but bring us influences from far away.  This observer, for instance, thinks the window screen, not the rural mail carrier, is a major factor in this social, and therefore political, decline in thought.   And the contradicting effects of the debilitating involvement in Vietnam and the glorious success of the Apollo space program changed out national outlook to inward thinking.  But screened windows, a war, and a space program are discussions for another time. 

Why go through this pondering?

Because something has to explain why this nation is in the political mess it is in, particularly at our state and our national levels. Self-absorption is one thing.  But self-absorption about our self-absorption can only make the situation worse because studying our navels only drives us further inward and farther away from the general store and the Chautauqua.  

Even this entry is an example.  We could be having this discussion around a table at the general store if such a thing existed. Or in more contemporary times, the coffee shop (free Wi-fi available).  But instead, we are connecting hyperly.  

I think that today, when I see my neighbor, I will cross the street and talk to him, not wave. 

Statistics

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The end of a legislative session gives us, the voters, a chance to evaluate what we hath wrought for ourselves through those we have chosen to represent us.   Sometimes what we hath wrought is writ in numbers that are Practical (as opposed to theoretical) Political Science 101.  Lend ear and eye to today’s lesson that begins with statistics.

The Senate Information Office gives out a summary of the legislative session minutes after adjournment each May, a series of numbers that probably wouldn’t mean much to Mr. or Mrs. Joe Missouri if they got these numbers in their mailboxes.  However, let’s spend some time thinking about those numbers and what they might tell us.  The numbers are only part of the story of about seventy days of a legislative session, of course.

What passed and what didn’t pass is the real measure of a session and the motivations of its participants.  Senator Emory Melton once told your observer that passing legislation is only part of the job.  Defeating legislation is as important. Capitol Press Corps members exhaust themselves each year telling that part of the story.  They have to believe that readers, listeners, and viewers care enough to pay attention to their stories. There are times when fatigue is so heavy that only that belief keeps them going.

Two-thousand-forty bills were introduced this year (1,457 of them in the House).  The Senate passed 113 of its 583 bills.  Twenty-five of them were consent bills, non-controversial measures.  That leaves 88 bills that faced confrontational debate, that faced efforts to amend them, and passed with recorded votes of the Senators.  Those 88 bills represent only fifteen percent of all bill introduced in the Senate. Of those eighty-eight, only 57 were approved by the House and sent to the Governor for signature or veto.

The Senate received 254 of the 1,457 House bills.  Of that 254, sixteen were appropriations bills.  Passing a state budget is one of only two responsibilities the legislature has each year.  Actually, its responsibility is even less than that.  It is charged with paying the state’s debts and setting aside money for public schools.  But the legislature could have gone home after providing the money to keep state services flowing to Missourians.  Eighty-one of the 254 surviving House bills were approved by the Senate and sent to the Governor.

Of the 2,040 bills introduced, only 138 made it all the way through the session.  That’s only 6.8 percent.

But there’s more.

Twenty-eight proposed constitutional amendments were introduced in the Senate, 59 more in the House.  Of those 87 proposed changes to the state constitution, only one got final approval.

So, as we interpret the Senate Information Office scoresheet, 139 of 2,127 measures introduced were able to get majority votes in both chambers, 6.5%.

The raw figures are a little deceiving because (a) several bills were identical and (b) several bills passed were combinations of several different bills.  But still, the number of issues that got overall legislative approval is quite small.

Some will look at that final number and think the legislature has wasted a lot of time and money.  While there might be a certain amount of truth in that suggestion (why the House and the Senate each have their own information offices AND partisan information staffs for each party always struck us as an extravagance), the numbers speak of the legislative process.

Sometimes the title of a final version of a bill is an indication of the difficult path legislation follows.  Here’s a pretty extreme example:  CCR#2 SS/SCS/HS/HCS/HBs 3021, 2979, and 3054 with SA1, SA2, SA5, SA6.

Theoretical House Bill 3021 went through a committee hearing.  Other bills had identical wording and also were heard. Several amendments were offered, leading the committee to combine the amendments and the identical bills into a new House Committee Substitute for 3021 and the other two proposals.  During floor debate, several more amendments were added so the sponsor introduced a new substitute on the House floor incorporating all of the amendments to make the bill a cleaner proposal for the Senate to consider.  A similar process happened in the Senate, where a committee combined several committee amendments into a Senate Committee substitute bill that picked up more amendments during debate, leading the floor handler to incorporate the changes into a single clean Senate Substitute that was approved with even more amendments, at least four of the six (actually there had been eight) that were offered being adopted.

The changed bill went back to the House where the sponsor wasn’t sure of the acceptability of the Senate changes so he asked for the formation of a conference committee made up of four members of the House and four members of the Senate to consider the changes and recommend a final version it thought would be acceptable to both chambers. In this case, the first conference committee report faced enough uncertainty that it was sent back for another review and a second report indicated the amended Senate substitute was, indeed, acceptable.  Since the bill originated in the House, it had to be approved there first before the final version was approved by the Senate and sent to the Governor for his consideration.

Not all bills go through that gauntlet but creating the laws that will govern six-plus million people in Missouri every second of every day can be a painstaking process.  Yes, there are times when even more pains need to be taken to get it right, but most of the time the process works.  And yes, sometimes the process works better for some Missourians than for others and, yes, more could be done if less time was spent on fighting over issues that pander to one voting bloc or another.   But it is all part of a process that gives elected humanity equal opportunities to display its worst nature as well as its best. And in the end, voters have a chance to display their worst and best natures and their decisions are reflected in the way the process functions.

In a competition of ideas, ideals, agendas, and ideologies, the gauntlet bills must run is exacting and highly competitive.  We’ve commented from time to time that it is a miracle that anything is accomplished.

Watching that process or being part of that process is an absorbing thing that draws you in and won’t let you go.  And then the gavel falls at 6 p.m. on a Friday evening and the numbers are added up and the pressure goes away and the process has more or less worked again.

C’mon, Bob, Lighten Up!

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We’ve been much too serious in observing the world from our lofty perch recently and some circumstances have reminded us that life shouldn’t be lived by frowning at others.  At least not all the time.  So we thought we’d share something that began with a recent telephone call.

We heard from somebody we didn’t know a few days ago who, for some reason or another, started doing some genealogical research on our family.  It’s okay, we guess. Everybody needs a hobby and if they’re a genealogist and they’ve tracked their own families back to the people who drew horses on cave walls in France, they need to find somebody else’s family to occupy their time.  Not that this was the case with this person, but my family for some reason had become an attractive matter for study and by using various genealogical sites on the internet, this person had gone back several generations—-although (and this happens sometimes with internet genealogy where bunches of people contribute to what they think are their family lines) the chart being developed was traveling down some wrong tracks.

As it happened, one of our own family members had set out on the same voyage some years ago and seemed to be headed in the right direction.  Until she ran into a circumstance where the family lines started to resemble the famous Cawker City World’s Largest Ball of Twine.  Following the threads became almost impossible.  We recall Aunt Mavis telling about it one day.  She had heard it from her Aunt Florence when she was younger. Aunt Mavis was well up in years when she told it to us and was talking about a few generations back when one line of the family lived in Pennsylvania, probably a little bit after the Civil War.  As near as we can recall—because we’re up in years now ourself—this is what she said, or something like it.

“You have to remember this was back in the days and in a part of the country where some people got started young in the family-making business. But not Uncle Irv.  He was about thirty, I guess, and for some reason had never gotten married when he met this widow lady named Bessie.  Bessie probably was pushing forty.  She’d gotten married when she was fourteen or so and she popped out a kid not too long after that, just before her husband died in a coal mining accident, you know, so the daughter wasn’t much younger than Uncle Irv.  But Irv had eyes only for Bessie, not June, and they got married and started a family of their own.   

“Now, Uncle Irv’s daddy, Martin, was still alive and he was only a little older than Bessie and when Irv and Bessie started sparkin’, Martin started looking at June, who was in her twenties by now, and they started to hit it off and the next thing you know, Martin married June!  Martin had a pretty successful general store, so he offered his younger bride some financial security, which was important because June, she was kinda plain anyway and didn’t want to be a spinster, so she decided she better jump the first broom that came her way and Martin was the first guy who offered her a broom.

“And this is why you’re having so much trouble trying to put together your family tree—because all of this meant that Martin had become his own son’s son-in-law by marrying his son’s daughter-by-marriage.   But that also meant that Irv’s father’s wife had become Irv’s mother, also by marriage!  In other words, Irv’s daughter was now his mother because she married his father. 

“You realize, of course, that there’s a lot of “steps” in that arrangement.  Step-mother, Step-father, step-daughter, but it’s easier to explain this mess if we don’t get all tangled up in the “step” stuff or in the “by marriage” stuff.

“Well, as nature ran its course, Irv and Bessie had a boy they named Charles (and with this, she paused for a few minutes while she made sure she had all the information straight in her own mind).  And that made Charles–let me make sure I have this right–Martin’s brother-in-law and also Irv’s uncle in addition to being his son.  

“Now, that also made Charles a brother of June, who was the daughter of Bessie, who was Irv’s mother because she was the mother of Irv’s father’s wife. 

“Now it gets a little complicated (she said this with a bit of a smile) because June and Martin had their own son, Lemuel—we called him Lem. And that boy therefore became Irv’s grandson because he was the son of Irv’s daughter, June. 

“Okay, now let me work this out.  Bessie, who was Irv’s wife, became the mother of Irv’s mother who was the wife of Irv’s father which made Bessie Irv’s grandmother. But as the husband of his grandmother, he therefore also was his own grandfather!

“And it was all legal.

“But that’s where the family tree turns into a swamp Cypress.”

—-

Now comes the time when we have to tell you, as they say in the movies, this story was “inspired by some actual events.”  That’s Hollywood-ese for saying, “One or two things in this story might be related to something that might actually have happened but most of what you see is made up.”

Someone did call the other day about researching the family tree and she was off on some wrong tracks. And we are familiar with the Cawker City ball of twine—my father was unable to keep the A&P Store open there during the days of the Dust Bowl and the Depression many years before Frank Stoeber started forming leftover baling twine into a ball, and we’ve visited the ball a few times.  I did have an Aunt Mavis but the rest of the folks were part of the “inspired by” thing.

The story of Irv, Bessie, Charles, June, Martin, and Lem is an old one that goes back at least as far as a London newspaper in the 1820s.  We were inspired to relate it because we were listening to the “Radio Classics” satellite channel the other day and heard Phil Harris sing one of his hit songs from the 1940s, “He’s his own Grandpa.”   It was a cover recording of a Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe country song recorded for the first time by Lonzo and Oscar, the country music duo of Lloyd George and Rollin Sullivan, in 1947.  The song, “I’m my own Grandpa,” remains a staple of country music.  Even Willie Nelson has recorded it.

Here’s Lonzo and Oscar on the Grand Ole Opry performing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgpsGmGyG0Q&nohtml5=F

 

And here are the lyrics to Phil Harris’ version (from an internet site of Phil Harris lyrics):

I met a guy today I knew years ago, when he was 23, And he was married to a widow who was as pretty as could be. Now this widow had a grown-up daughter who had beautiful hair of red, And this guy’s father fell in love with her and soon the two were wed.

Now this made the guy’s dad his son-in-law and changed his very life For his daughter was his mother because she was his father’s wife. Now to complicate the matter even though it brought him joy, He soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.

Now his little baby then became a brother-in-law to his dad, And so became his uncle and though that made him very sad, For if the baby was his uncle then that also made him brother, Of the widow’s grown-up daughter who was of course his step-mother

[chorus] (He’s his own grandpa) Now you’re catching on. (He’s his own grandpa) Well naturally! It sounds funny I know, but really its so. (He’s his own grandpa) Well wait a minute, get a load of this!

Now his father’s wife had a son who kept them on the run, So he became his grandchild for he was his daughter’s son. His wife is now his mother’s mother and of course that makes him blue Because although she’s his wife she’s his grandmother too!

(He’s his own grandpa) Fun in the living room (He’s his own grandpa) Absolutely! It sounds funny i know, but really it’s so. (He’s his own grandpa) Yea, but look, get the payoff.

Now his wife is his grandmother, then he is her grandchild. And every time the guy thinks of it, it nearly drives him wild! For now he has become the strangest case you ever saw, As husband of his grandmother, he’s his own grandpa!

(He’s his own grandpa) And loving every minute! (He’s his own grandpa) Oh tell me more! It sounds funny I know, but really it’s so, He’s his own grandpa. He’s his own grandpa!

And THAT, my friend, is a real example of the badly-abused phrase “traditional family values.”

A mell of a hess

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Your correspondent has paid a couple of visits to the University of Missouri’s Columbia campus within the last few days.  Believe it or not, all of the columns on Francis Quadrangle are still standing.  The lighted dome of Jesse Hall still shines brightly against the night sky.  White campus has not crumbled.  Red campus still stands.  Peace Park is still peaceful.  The lions at the journalism school arch that are supposed to roar when a virgin walks by remain silent.

One would think otherwise, of course, after reading the seemingly constant flow of headlines emanating from that campus.  The inspection trip to Columbia became necessary after a fellow UMC graduate sent a note saying, “This is depressing” after reading Tony Messenger’s recent column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch headlined “Somebody needs to drive University of Missouri out of ditch. Now.”

Tony, who was a terrific reporter at the state capitol before being demoted to editorial page editor, has recounted the seeming continued deterioration of the university system.  We say “system” although most of the collapse is centered in Columbia. And since the university system is so Columbia-centric, the screaming and the shouting (“when in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”) seems to mean in the public mind that the whole darned thing is in one mell of a hess, as Grandpa Motes used to say.

Well, it is.  It is because the focus is on Columbia but the ripples include the campuses in Rolla, Kansas City, and St. Louis in several ways.  Columbia’s the one with the football recruiting class that is 53rd in the nation, with a basketball team at the bottom of the conference that is hoping its self-flagellation over a significant recruiting violation under a different coach and a different athletic director will spare it significant additional flagellation from the NCAA, and with an apparently previously well-accepted communications professor who made an egregious emotional mistake during last fall’s demonstrations becoming the poster-child in a heated disagreement involving academic freedom, constitutional rights, personal responsibility, and competing political agendas.   It is a system in which one-third of its governing board has quit for one reason or another (one curator leaving even before the Senate confirmed Governor Nixon’s nomination of her), where a former system president who was praised for his graceful forced exit last year has now attacked the system’s governance and management, where Standard and Poor’s has lowered the institutional bond rating because of financial uncertainty caused by decreased enrollment and political games at the capitol, where interim leaders are struggling for stability while the unenviable task of finding a new president is underway, where—as Tony says—“black students and faculty feel disenfranchised,” and where one of the town’s newspapers recently reported that foreign students—who have been aggressively recruited because their much-higher tuitions provide minor help in offsetting legislative parsimony in financial support for education (at all levels)—don’t know who to go to if they feel harassed or threatened.

And we’re sure we’ve left some things out.   Oh, yes—a governor who has convinced the university to freeze tuitions so he can recommend the aforementioned parsimonious legislature give it a sadly-inadequate increase in general funding because the whole goal of government is to convince Missourians they can get more of the services they need and demand if they pay less for them.  It’s the same government that seems to think the most important things in higher education today are making sure nobody who even knows where Columbia, Missouri is can perform an abortion there while making sure all students can carry guns.

And the leader of the Senate says the university’s governing board will stay crippled for at least a year—until a new governor takes office because the senate will not confirm any nominees by the sitting governor.  That’s real helpful, isn’t it?

So, politically, the University of Missouri has been driven into a ditch.  But a lot of hands have been on the wheel.   If we listen to the Missouri Department of Transportation, ditches might be the best-maintained part of our road system today.  So getting the University out of the ditch will still leave it on the same uncertain road full of political potholes that it’s been on for some time.

But friends, there is hope.  And it is not on the road of potholes.

It is in the classrooms.  And the view behind the headlines is markedly different.

While all of the people who THINK they are important are playing their games, the serious work of educating another generation is quietly being carried out in thousands of classrooms, laboratories, studios, clinics, and offices on the four campuses by people who ARE important.  Walk through the Columbia campus and you’ll be walking with the young people WE were, young people busy being in their teens and early 20s and going about the business of becoming.  They’re talking and laughing, not spitting and shouting epithets.  They’re thinking and working.  Their teachers are shaping, not threatening, them.  (Well, except that the threat of a poor grade still hangs over the head of every student.)

In dormitory rooms and apartment rooms, at the Heidelberg or at Shakespeare’s Pizza’s temporary location, or in the part of the Brady Commons that commemorates The Shack, the students are doing what WE did.  They’re studying or playing cards or sleeping or—-.  Fill in the blank from your own memories.  Most of them do not feel harmed by the oh-so-serious power struggles among the people who THINK they’re the important ones, although in various ways they are being harmed because the struggles for political power are limiting their opportunities.  The REAL important ones are the ones with backpacks over their shoulders and hope in their eyes as they and their teachers lay the groundwork for lives they hope will be well-lived.

They are the university.  Their headlines are in years to come.  Walk among them and be hopeful.

The terrorists are winning

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Just a few years ago, we recall, President Bush was saying this country would not do various things because if we did, “The terrorists would win.”

They’re winning.

Some of Missouri’s politicians are demanding Governor Nixon, in effect, seal the state’s borders to protect us from Syrians.   The Paris attacks this year and particularly in the last few weeks are giving ample opportunity to some to fan the flame of fear.  Fanning the flame of fear is good for those who want to be seen as protectors from evil.  Or, evil-doers to borrow again from the Busch II years.  And with elections coming up, it never hurts to carry the image as a protector.

Terrorists want to scare governments and people into changing their behaviors.  Their ultimate goal is much larger, of course.  But first they have to create a climate that is ever more restrictive of thinking, of movement, of hope.  Sealing borders tells us they are winning.

And what is all of this fuss about?

President Obama has said he will allow four times as many Syrian refugees to come into this country as have been admitted in the last four years.   And Secretary of State John Kerry has announced this country will lift the lid on the number of refugees admitted to this country from the present 70,000 to 100,000 in 2017.  Many of those new slots will go to Syrians fleeting terrorists.

Are Obama and Kerry going to flood this country with terrorists?   Are we all in peril if we go to a play, to a restaurant, to a sports stadium if a flood of Syrians comes in?  The answer is a simple one: to maintain public safety, we have to keep Syrians from flooding into our state.

There is no flood in Missouri.  There won’t be a flood in Missouri.

The New York Times on November 16 reported that only 1,854 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the United States since 2012.  The nine volunteer agencies working with them have scattered them among 130 communities.   The newspaper says Boise, Idaho has more Syrian refugees than New York and Los Angeles combined.  Worcester, Massachuesetts has more than Boston.  Should the people of Boise quit going to restaurants?  Should the people of Worcester fear attending a concert or a movie?

Missouri has a few Syrians in the St. Louis area.  Overland Park, Kansas has a few.  The International Institute of St. Louis, which has been working with immigrants for 96 years, reports eight percent of the population of St. Louis City and St. Louis County is foreign-born.  7,500 people from 75 countries.

The Post-Dispatch reported in September that 28 Syrians had arrived in St. Louis this year and twenty more were expected by the end of the year.

When we close our borders to Syrian refugees, can we draw the border so it keeps St. Louis on the outside because that city already endangers the safety of our state because almost fifty more of those dreaded Syrians will be there at the end of the year?

The Times says Syrian refugees made up only two percent of the 70,000 refugees admitted to this country last year.   Germany in that same four-year period has admitted 92,991 Syrian refugees.  President Obama says this country will admit 10,000 this year.  The Census Bureau says we already have 150,000 Syrians living in this country of 300-million people.

Syria ranks seventh in the list of countries whose immigrants have been allowed into this country in the most recent federal fiscal year.  Myanmar has sent almost 20,000.  Iraq has sent about 12,000.  Somalia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bhutan have sent more than 5,000 each.  Iran has sent far more than Syria.

But it’s Syrians who have a bunch of Missouri politicians in a froth.  Well, how easy is it for those scary people to get here?  They have to apply to the United Nations first.  If the UN says they can come, they have to be examined by the FBI.  They have to be run through terrorism databases run by the Defense Department and by other government agencies.

The UN has recommended 18,000 Syrians for scrutiny by the United States.  The State Department says more than half of them are children.

Not all Syrians are suicide bombers, you know.  And when it comes to killing bunches of people, we are pretty good about doing that ourselves.  A check of a couple of websites that list mass shootings and finds that since March of 2005, this nation has had thirty-three incidents in which 270 people have been killed and 254 have been wounded. One of those incidents was in Kirkwood in February, 2008.  Six dead, one wounded.  Another incident began in Illinois and ended in Festus.  Eight dead.  Four of the incidents happened in Wisconsin. Four more were in California. We don’t think we say any Syrian names on those lists of killers.  But we did see people from Wisconsin and California.  Perhaps we should block people from those states from coming to Missouri.  Those people clearly are dangerous.

(http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-ramp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers_(Americas)

We checked a list of German mass killings since March, 2005 and came across one incident where a German student killed 12 other students and three other people before killing himself in 2009.  We checked Germany because it has been a landing place for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East for more than a decade.

But let’s be afraid anyway.  Because some of our leaders find it advantageous to tell us we should be afraid. Of Syrians.

Cultivating a climate of fear among the electorate is convenient.  It keeps the electorate from raising embarrassing questions about things like school funding, mental health services, crumbling roads and creaking bridges, lack of funding for cigarette-related health issues,  services to veterans—-add your own priority here.  Then forget about it because you are supposed to be living in fear of a Syrian.

Edward R. Murrow, the great CBS newsman, observed on his See it Now broadcast of March 7, 1954, when he said, “No one can terrorize a whole nation unless we are his accomplices.”

When Murrow began a series of programs called This I Believe in 1951, he noted:

“We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all—now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog—there is an enveloping cloud of fear.

“There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottom of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt—doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging.

“It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.”

If you want to hear the entire broadcast or read the entire script, go to http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16844/

And finally, from another See it Now broadcast, this one from 1954:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another.  We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”

The problem with sealing the borders is not necessarily the people we seal out.  It’s the kind of people we seal inside with us who made us fearful to begin with. And the action does nothing to end the terror that drives people to our borders.  In terms of our national character, could it be that those who tell us we should live in fear are more dangerous than children from Syria?

Perspective

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The Capitol time capsule thing this year has led to a lot of thinking about time and reflections on those who discover messages from the past.   Perhaps historians are more conscious of things like that than other people—I don’t really know.  But this one, who has spent more than forty years writing the first draft of history, as the role of journalists has sometimes been described, has been intrigued by the whole thing.

One of the things in the new time capsule being put in the Capitol cornerstone is the book co-authored with Jeff Ball about the art of the capitol.  Tucked into the back cover is a letter from us to those who we hope will open the capsule in 2115.  Part of the letter is an excerpt from President Kennedy’s speech at Amherst, Massachusetts less than a month before his death in which he expressed a dream for America.

The nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.” I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future. I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

A few days later, as I was discussing the time capsule with a friend, it occurred to me that many of us remember John Kennedy, who died 52 years ago this month.  If that message is discovered in 2115, those who read that quote will be reading it from the perspective of people who are 152 years removed from the time when Kennedy gave that speech.

And I wonder if they will see those words with the same kind of perspective that we see some cherished words that were spoken by another president 152 years in our past, this month, about his dream of a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

One-hundred-fifty-two years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.  One-hundred-fifty-two years after John Kennedy’s Amherst Address on October 26, 1963, Americans we cannot imagine will read his of his dream for his country.

Abraham Lincoln was still vivid as a living person in the memories of many who were alive when the original capitol cornerstone was sealed in 1915 just as John F. Kennedy is still vivid as a living person in the memories of many in 2015.

Time.  It plays with your mind.

One of the most intriguing pieces your correspondent ever read about the encapsulation of time was written by Herbert Winlock, the director of the New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1930s.  He wrote in a museum publication about the model boats, statuettes and other things depicting life in his time found in the Egyptian tomb of a man named Meketra who died about 1950 BCE.

The beam of light shot in to a little world of four thousand years ago, and I was gazing down into the midst of brightly painted little men going this way and that.  A tall, slender girl gazed across at me perfectly composed; a gang of little men with sticks in their upraised hands drove spotted oxen; rowers tugged at their oars on a fleet of boats, while one ship seemed floundering right in front of me with its bow balanced precariously in the air. And all of this busy going and coming was in uncanny silence, as though the distance back over forty centuries I looked across was too great for even an echo to reach my ears.

Four thousand years is an eternity.  Just saying it over and over again gives no conception of the ages that have gone by since this funeral.  Stop and think of how far off William the Conqueror seems. That takes you only a quarter of the way back.  Julius Caesar takes you halfway back.  With Saul and David you are three-fourths of the way.  But there remains yet another thousand years to bridge with your imagination.  Yet in that dry, still, dark little chamber those boats and statues had stood indifferent to all that went on in the outer world, as ancient in the days of Caesar as Caesar is to us, but so little changed that even the fingerprints of the men who put them there were still fresh upon them.  Not only fingerprints, but even flyspecks, cobwebs, and dead spiders remained from the time when those models were stored in some empty room in the noble’s house waiting for his day of death and burial.  I even suspect that some of his grandchildren had sneaked in and played with them while they were at that house in ancient Thebes. 

One century.  Forty centuries.  The past often waits quietly to speak in the future and then touches those who find it and gives them a personal perspective on what was.  And is.

(Winlock’s story of Meketra’s tomb was related by Thomas Hoving, then the head of the MMA, in his book Tutankhamun: The untold Story, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978.)

What in the world ?

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Two people are standing at the railing of an ocean liner gazing at the miles of Pacific Ocean all around them.  Nothing is out there but water.  All the way to the horizon.  All the way around them.

“Sure is a lot of water,” one observes.

“Yeah,” says the other.  “And that’s just the top of it.”

This observer has been getting emails from friends as far away as Vancouver and Los Angeles who have been watching, hearing, and reading about things happening at the University of Missouri for the last several days.  In various ways they have asked, “What in the world is going on at the University of Missouri?”  What follows will be long and does not pretend to be an analysis that will preclude other thoughts or actions that disagree or contribute to consensus.

The reporting of the way events have spiraled and spread has been most comparable to that first observer on the ocean liner: “Sure is a lot of water.”   That is not a criticism of the reporting.  Those who have been on the ground as journalists in situations such as this and—more prominently, in Ferguson last year—know that when you are being swept along by the tide there isn’t much time to think about how the coral was formed ten feet below you.  The same often is true for those who are drawn into participation in those events.  Thinking about the deeper issues that are involved or the deeper consequences that might result becomes secondary.   Passing judgment on participants, whether demonstrators, administrators, reporters, observers—the list could be longer if we try to think of more categories—is easily done from a distance and the situation becomes more complicated when others with other agendas try to capitalize on it.

So, to answer the friends and neighbors who have asked, “What in the world is going on…?” we offer some observations.  They are made from a short geographical distance and they are made by someone who is no longer in the business of being in the middle of the events or in a newsroom.

VIOLENCE

This is an important thing to remember.  No buildings were set on fire.  No roving gangs of demonstrators were going up and down Ninth Street throwing bricks through windows and looting businesses.  As far as we know, guns were not part of the demonstration(s) and nobody was hurt.  Some headlines were generated when a reporter and a cameraman were pushed around in a regrettable incident but the students who advocated a non-violent protest achieved that goal.  While some of their actions might be properly questioned, let us not lose sight of the fact that this is one incident that did not turn violent.

But their activities have created image problems or feared image problems for the university, for some of its schools, and the athletic department.  Andrew Kloster, a legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation, has written of what he calls “mob rule…in higher education.”  He writes about recent disturbances at Yale and the disturbances in Columbia, “Both situations involve student activists disrupting education, allegedly on behalf of education…At Mizzou, activists claimed that failing to deal with ‘structural racism’ was harming their education.  Both groups listed not specific harms, but rather vague interest in feeling good at their university.”

That kind of reaction, nationally circulated, is not what the protestors want to hear or want to hear said about them.   What can it teach them?  What can be learned from these experiences?  Is the result as simple as Kloster suggests?

Nobody was hurt in these protests.  At least not physically.  That’s important to remember.

WHO IS AND WHO IS NOT GONE

University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe is gone.  Columbia Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin is gone.  This observer met both of them during a meeting a few months ago and found both of them personally likable.  Wolfe was candid in our discussions and represented the university well.  Perhaps ironically, one of the products of our meeting was a resolution of some communications problems between the group I was with and the university.  Loftin, I thought, was approachable and willing to discuss the issues we brought to the table.  That’s a personal impression drawn from a single hour-long meeting.  I was not left with any perspective on relations between the people in University Hall and the people who were on the campus.  But clearly, those who saw things on a daily basis had distinctly different impressions.

Who’s still there?  A guy in the pickup truck.  A drunk white guy who went where he wasn’t wanted at the Legion of Black Collegians meeting.  The person who scrawled the feces swastika in a bathroom.  A spirit of intolerance that bubbles under all of society, occasionally seeping to the surface.  And intolerance knows no sides.  They’re still there.

THE EVENTS

Critics on the campus felt the school administration was detached and unresponsive.  On Monday, the day Wolfe resigned and Loftin announced he would be stepping down, the deans of nine of the university’s colleges asked that the Board of Curators to fire Loftin.  They cited a “multitude of crises” on the Columbia campus.  They said they had met with Wolfe and Loftin as well as Provost Garnett Stokes twice in October but had seen the issues they talked about continue to deteriorate.

A day earlier the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures notified curators that 28 of the department’s thirty faculty members had expressed no confidence in Loftin. The other two faculty members abstained.  A few days earlier, the English Department faculty had voted 26-0 for a no-confidence motion targeting Loftin.  Two faculty members abstained.

Loftin also was the center of other controversies including the elimination of health insurance for graduate assistants who teach many of the school’s classes.  The insurance was later reinstated. He also was unpopular because of the dismissal of the Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences.

He also was in the middle of a partisan political criticism about a doctor with some privileges at University Hospital doing abortions at the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Columbia.  As usual lately, anything to do with Planned Parenthood became an issue of political capital that transcended rational discussion. The situation has reached the absurd stage that one state senator wanting to firm up pro-life support in a statewide candidacy has demanded the university tell a graduate student to stop studying whether a 72-hour waiting period for an abortion really accomplishes anything.

One side claims it was absolutely right and the university is absolutely wrong. And when the absolutely right side is the one that controls the university’s budget, academic freedom can become expendable—or at least a perception can arise that it is.  The university revoked the doctor’s privileges at the hospital.  Planned Parenthood and its supporters charged the university over-reacted.  As far as we know, the graduate student is still researching.

Student demonstrators aimed their biggest complaints at Wolfe.  An incident early in the school year in which someone in a pickup truck shouted “Nigger” at the student body president Payton Head appears to have begun the unrest. Several days later, a white man, described as drunk, interrupted a meeting of the Legion of Black Collegians and complained, “These niggers are getting aggressive with me” when the group showed him he was not welcome.

An incident during the homecoming parade last month, though, is what seems to have really gotten things rolling.   A group of black students stopped in front of the car carrying Wolfe and started talking about the school’s history of racial incidents since its founding in 1839.  Wolfe did not react and the driver of the car tried to move around the group and bumped a couple of the students.

About then, graduate student Jonathan Butler said he wouldn’t eat until Wolfe quit. Four days later, November 6, Wolfe issued a statement and an apology that seemed weak to the students in the homecoming parade event, and to the students whose resentment about administration detachment from campus concerns continued to simmer.  Wolfe admitted that the situation might not have deteriorated if he had gotten out of his car during the parade and talked with the students.

Or would such an action only have compounded the disturbance that day?  It’s easy to second-guess on that issue.  Many will argue the students were out of line by stopping Wolfe’s car at all, let alone for several minutes before the blockade was ended.

This writer recalls an incident in the Missouri Senate a couple of years ago when a group led by a number of ministers entered the gallery of the senate and stopped floor action with songs, prayers, and statements urging expansion of the Medicaid program.  Several were arrested and charged.  Their cases have yet to come to trial.  One of their arguments would be familiar to the students: they were frustrated by inaction on the part of those who could do something to deal with the problems they perceived.

And so a fair question has to be asked.  What is left when you think the powers-that-be are not responsive to perceived serous issues you have raised?

The organizers of the demonstrations, Concerned Student 1-9-5-0, (1950 was the year the university admitted its first black student) issued eight demands including an apology from Wolfe in which he would “acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfill (the organization’s) demands”.  The group demanded Wolfe’s removal and a presidential selection process involving faculty, staff, and students of diverse backgrounds.  The group wants a  mandatory “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum in all departments,” increased percentages of black faculty and staff, more money for the university counseling center that will allow hiring of mental health professionals as well as increases in funding for social justice centers.

The demands and the rhetoric that appeared to some people as overcooked took the situation beyond discussion. By now, too, various political figures were weighing in with veiled suggestions that time was running out for Wolfe.

Then several members of the football team announced they supported the student group.

THE TEAM

The announced “strike” by several football players pushed the issue into national headlines.  International headlines in fact.  Suddenly the confrontation was on the BBC.  Suddenly it was on the national networks.   And it put the coaching staff in a difficult position in what already has been a difficult year.  They’ve already dealt with some unfortunate situations within the team this year apart from the win-loss record.  It was important that the team understand that it IS a team and this episode threatened to pit involved members against those who didn’t feel touched by the controversy.  Coach Gary Pinkel knew that however this event turned out, this incident had the potential to turn the locker room into at least two camps.  So the word went out that the whole team supported Jonathan Butler and was concerned about his health.  Pinkel has admitted, however, that some players were not enthusiastic about the “team” support of Butler.  And in a press conference after the resignations, he didn’t take a position on the departures of Wolfe and Loftin.

The upcoming game with Brigham Young was endangered.  The university could lose a million dollars and that was only a beginning.

There were doubtless some who immediately started thinking the football program was trying to run the university.  Some undoubtedly felt cancellation of the game, the season, the players’ scholarships would be appropriate because the players were getting outside their roles.   After all, the university is about education, not sports and—they might argue—the sports program was getting out of line.

Others could argue that athletes are also people and they do not give up being people just because they play sports.  In fact, some might argue on their behalf that the players’ actions were a recognition that some things are far more important than collegiate sports.   After all, these young men sit in classrooms with many of those who had pitched their tents on Carnahan Quadrangle.  They are not apart from them just because they play football.

The university basketball players also were talking about taking action, which coach Kim Anderson says he would have supported, when Wolfe resigned.

It is easy to dismiss the action of the football players and the backing they got from their coach and the school’s athletic director as the athletic department throwing its weight around.  But was it, really?  Or was it people who were students first creating by their actions a situation the athletic department had to deal with at a time when it had been only an observer that was focused on fulfilling its special role in the university?

Regardless, SEC coaches in their weekly teleconference praised Pinkel’s integrity in supporting his team.

The entrance of the football team into the picture made the news story, for whatever reason, one that could not be contained in Columbia. It went global. And nobody knew how much worse it could become if something didn’t happen at University Hall.

THE CHOICE

We don’t know and maybe will never know what kind of conversations were going on between the university administration and the curators.  We don’t know when or if somebody finally said, “Tim, the only way to end this situation is for you to leave.”   Or maybe he’s the one who told the curators that he realized there was no way the situation could be resolved as long as he stayed.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has reported the curators continued to support Wolfe, who left without any kind of a severance package.  The newspaper says that’s an indication he was not forced out.  But Loftin was a different case. The curators voted to assign him to a new job.  The newspaper says Loftin “made enemies out of deans, faculty and graduate students” and “frequently blindsided the curators with his decision making, stirring up controversies, then having to backtrack.”

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/missteps-not-student-revolt-led-to-mizzou-chancellor-s-demise/article_f955e9cf-6fc8-5fb0-b2cc-1b798d53fccc.html

The student group wasted no time issuing new demands for an “immediate” meeting with the university system faculty council, curators, and with Governor Nixon “to discuss shared governance and create a system of holistic inclusion for all constituents,” as one of the group members, Marshall Allen, put it, saying the demands have to me met “in totality.”

The resignations create some breathing space.  There comes a time when heated rhetoric (“in totality,” for example) needs to be tempered so productive steps can be taken to produce change.   Shared governance?  That term as well as “a system of holistic inclusion” is good for pumping up a crowd.  Creating realistic definitions is harder.  The students are not going to run the University of Missouri.  Or the faculty.  But the point has to be acknowledged that the administration cannot be apart from the campus and the issues that personally touch those on it.

THE PROFS AND THE GREEK LADY

The Dean of the School of Journalism, David Kurpius, quickly put out a statement when a video went viral showing Professor Melissa Click helped block reporters from covering the post-resignation reactions of students in their encampment on the Carnahan Quadrangle.  The video showed Click calling for some “muscle” to help remove student Mark Schierbecker who was shooting video of a confrontation between freelance photographer Tim Tai and Janna Basler, the assistant director of Greek Life and Leadership.  Tai was shooting for ESPN News.

The video shows Basler telling Tai, “You need to back off.  Back off, go!”  When he asks her if she is with the Office of Greek Life, she responds, “No, my name is Concerned Student 1-9-5-0.”

Tai is heard saying that his First Amendment rights to be there are equal with the First Amendment rights of the students who have been demonstrating.

And a third person, identified as Professor Richard Callahan, the Chairman of Religious Studies, is shown with the protestors throwing up his hands to block the view Tai could get with his camera.

The J-School dean wanted to make it clear that Click is a member of the Department of Communications, which is part of the School of Arts and Sciences, not a member of the School of Journalism faculty.  The J-School also released a statement discussing how it had used the events of the last several days as teaching opportunities for future journalists.

The national reaction on social media and in mainline media to the actions of those faculty members has been generally severe.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says Click locked herself in the office all day Tuesday and at times could be heard sobbing.  At the end of the day she issued written apology for her actions, and said she had personally apologized to the journalists involved.  She resigned her tenuous tie to the Journalism School.  She had a “courtesy title” that let her serve on a graduate committee.  Although Tai says he has accepted Click’s apology, Schierbecker has told the Washington Post he has not.  “She made no acknowledgement that what she did was assault,” he told the newspaper.

Callahan is Click’s husband.  Thai has told the Post that he also has apologized “for getting in my face and yelling about it.” We’ve heard no word about whether his behavior also is being scrutinized.

Basler has been put on administrative leave and relieved of her duties as the Director of Greek Life while the investigation of her activities continues.  Tai says he’s had a personal meeting with Basler and has accepted her apologies.

There have been calls for the three to be fired.  Washington Post blogger Erik Wemple, for example, has written “These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead they stood up for coercion and darkness.”

Who’s right and who’s wrong in all of this?  From this reporter’s perspective (once a journalist, always a journalist), the students and the teachers were wrong.  The young journalists were legitimately trying to cover a story, to help listeners, viewers, and readers gain some kind of insight into the situation.  But this incident, as is the case with the larger activities, is not so black and white.   KBIA, the University’s public radio station that relies heavily on journalism students in its newsroom—and has done outstanding work in covering these events—published this story on its webpage:

http://kbia.org/post/rights-activists-and-media-no-clear-answer

And KBIA News Director Ryan Famuliner, a former Missourinet reporter, added some context to help people see “below the surface of it.”

http://kbia.org/post/4-things-you-might-have-wrong-about-mizzou-story

Tuesday, the day after the confrontations, protestors decided reporters were welcome at their encampment.  They took down signs telling the media to stay out and they passed out pages urging protestors to cooperate with the media.  The headline on the flyers said “Teachable Moment.”

OKAY, SO—–

We talked to a distressed former member of the Board of Curators the other day who fears these events have set a “horrible precedent.”   Some of those we have talked to who also have watched things from a distance suggest the university is in for an extremely difficult time finding someone to step into the president’s job.  “Who in his right mind would want it?” one person asked.

What has been accomplished by all of this shouting and pushing and demanding is that impediments the protesting students, graduate students, and faculty members saw to communications between the folks on campus and the folks in University Hall have been removed.  They’ve gotten the university’s attention.

Now, it appears, talking instead of shouting, discussing instead of demanding can start.

THE TEAM 2.0

No, the athletic department does not run the university.  It is, however, the most publicly prominent entity that represents it.  It would be nice if the public found the teaching of English, Journalism, Agriculture, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, and so forth to be something it would buy tickets to watch.  But the fact is the public is more likely to cheer for an All-American football or basketball player than it is to cheer for a Nobel Prize winner.  Another fact is that the university would continue to do its work educating students even if another fan never walks into Memorial Stadium.

However, the virtues of “the team” or as some of the players said, “the family,” should not dissipate as time passes and, in fact, might be good to keep in mind as the university re-shapes its administration.   Teams work when they share a common goal.  They fail when they break into factions.  Factionalism breeds resentment.  Resentment brings conflict.  And conflict destroys the family, the team.

Take a look at this effort to help us see below “the top of it.”

http://kbia.org/post/mizzou-football-sets-precedent-student-athlete-activism

One of the jobs of a coach is to hold the team together.  It would be fair to include questions to presidential candidates about how good a coach a new president and chancellor might need to be.

THE TEACHABLE MOMENT

One reason Click, Callahan, and Basler are in trouble is because they forgot that teachers remain teachers outside as well as inside the classroom. Whether the teachable moments represented by their apologies reverse the negative teachable moments of the confrontation with Tai and with Schierbecker is hard to determine.  Perhaps the changed attitude of the protestors the next day, when they removed the signs and welcomed reporters, indicates some learning has taken place.

Did the change of attitude represent a learning moment resulting from the teachable moment?  One would hope so, for students and teachers alike.

The events have created numerous teachable moments and they have provided learning moments as well.  And those moments go beyond the teaching and learning that might happen in the new diversity and social respect programs the university is moving toward.

POLITICS

Events such as these are potential minefields for politicians—witness the no-win situations Governor Nixon found himself in, or put himself in, last year in Ferguson.  These events also can be opportunities to say and advocate things that appeal to the public gut and gain some points for candidates and office-holders.  Before Wolfe’s resignation, various office-holders put out fence-riding statements that tried to sound, well for lack of a better word, leaderly without running the risk of antagonizing potential voters, protestors, and those who thought Wolfe and Loftin were just fine. “This is serious stuff,” the statements generally said, “and I am sure the right things will be done.”   Afterwards the same people who had not publicly come out specifically in favor of Wolfe’s departure courageously said he had done the right thing and they were glad he did.

But there’s another political matter that is hinted at in a part of the scenario that has been overshadowed by the events on the Carnahan Quadrangle.  One of the graduate students who sent a letter “For my dear friends outside of Missouri campus” alluded to it when she wrote, “for many of us, it was clear we were just expected to pay ever-increasing fees (mine are currently about $1000 per semester above and beyond tuition), ½ tuition waivers for some grad students (where prior had been full waivers, which drastically impacts recruiting and retention efforts), an insurance debacle…and ongoing racial discrimination.”

Students are going deeper in debt.  Some graduate students are paying increased fees.  Insurance coverage for them was dropped, then restored when they made enough noise.   And state support for higher education in Missouri is a fraction of what it was a decade ago.  Data compiled earlier this year by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association says funding per full-time student has dropped almost 28 percent in the last five years while college enrollment has increased by twenty percent.

Your reporter was in a meeting yesterday with a former legislator who recalled that when he started in the General Assembly a few decades ago, state funding for higher education paid about half the costs of educating a student. Now, he said, it’s only about ten percent.  There might be more accurate figures but the trend is accurate.

A seminar at Truman State University last March was called “Crisis in Missouri: The decline of state funding for higher education.”   The announcement of the meeting that listed discussion points said, “For decades, public support for higher education in the state of Missouri has declined precipitously.  The impact of this underfunding has been widespread and deeply felt: An increased financial burden on Missouri’s student population; An inability to recruit top teachers and scholars; a deterioration of the quality of education at our state institutions; A weakening of morale for the vast majority of those who work at those institutions; A culture on our campuses of frustration with the present and fear for the future instead of a culture of innovation.”

Fear.  Frustration.  It’s top to bottom in Missouri’s higher education system.  The definitions of those words differ according to position within that system but all strata have them.  Not to give the university administration a pass, but funding issues are a huge issue and at the highest levels are one of the primary ones.  The President of the University of Missouri is seen by many as a manager and a fund-raiser.  The chancellors are the on-campus managers.

But the buck has to stop somewhere.  And ultimately, Wolfe felt the whole package of bucks rose to his level and the best alternative was to leave so that healing could begin on a campus he loved.

But don’t expect the people in Jefferson City to do anything financially that would ease the concerns that dog all of our campuses.  Advocates of smaller government are more concerned with shrinking the state’s capability to pay its bills and obligations than they are in easing financial pressures on higher education and those it serves.   Or other services to the general public.

“You can’t cure a problem by throwing money at it,” some like to say.  That might be true.  But you certainly can’t solve many problems by financially starving them.  In 2013, then-auditor Tom Schweich released a study showing Missouri tax collections are about four-BILLION dollars below the amount allowed by the Hancock Amendment adopted in 1980 as a way to control over-taxation and over-spending.   But the legislature only wants to widen that gap.  So the concerns and frustrations of some of those who called for the departures of Wolfe and Loftin will go unanswered.

WINNERS?

It’s easy to pronounce winners and losers in these situations.  But that’s a mistake because many participants are both. Victory has a cost.  Loss has an opportunity.

Well, Wolfe is gone and so is Loftin.  An African-American temporary president who was the first black graduate of the law school has been installed.  An African-American law professor and associate dean has become an interim vice-chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equality. Curators have promised to restore “a culture of respect,” to hire more minorities, step up recruitment, and offer support to students who feel aggrieved.

Beyond that——-

Three people have been arrested for turning social media into anti-social media by making threats on the internet.  The threats, especially in a time when mass shootings are not so uncommon anymore, honestly frightened some people on the campus.

Someone painted out the word “Black” on the sign in front of the University’s Black Cultural Center; the paint has since been removed.  (Someday, maybe, there will be some discussions about whether cultural centers for various ethnic groups are long-term counter-productive to advancement toward a color-blind multicultural society many of these groups seek.  Someday. Perhaps not this day, though, when emotions that would detract from the kind of discussion that needs to be held are likely to rise.)

The person or persons so consumed by—whatever—that he or she put a piece of human excrement into their hand and drew a swastika on the wall of a co-ed dormitory bathroom and left feces on the floor is still unknown.  The student protests about racism overshadowed concerns by those to whom a swastika has a special significance.

Hate, ignorance, and downright idiocy are inescapable parts of our existence, whether on our campuses or elsewhere in our world.  The events in Columbia have a double edge—protests against wrongs perceived by one segment of society while a hate message that hurts another segment of society stays in the background.

Those of us who were in college in the days when one of the popular songs was “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” a time when demonstrators thought they could help stop wars by putting flowers down the barrels of the guns held by National Guardsmen trying to control demonstrations, still hope for peace and love and harmony.

Each generation has to confront that issue and each generation learns that there are those who think the flower children and their idealistic descendants (and forebears) are fools and troublemakers.  But a generation without ideals offers little to the future.

Comedian Pat Paulsen, whose satiric presidential candidacy in the days of the flower generation, put together a campaign book in 1968.  He wrote, “This book is dedicated to the time when all of us spicks, niggers, white trash, hunkies, wops, kikes, mackerel snappers, micks, gooks, chinks, red necks, beans and hippies get together as Americans.”

Columbia in the past week reminded us we still have a ways to go.

Perhaps this long, long reflection helps answer the questions from friends in Vancouver and in Los Angeles and gives some insight into the coral beneath the surface.

Three things

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On this third day after the saddest day of the year, the end of the baseball season, it is time to consider three days that always bring a special light to our existence.

On this third day of pondering the rapidly-approaching time when NASCAR quits racing and the football season ends (unless a favored team is in a bowl or the NFL playoffs) and Sunday afternoons truly become nap times because all that’s left on the telly is the NBA, hockey, poker tournaments, and ultimate fighting, it is comforting to know that there will be time to ponder the beauty, inspiration, and self-reflection that comes from those three days.

They don’t seem to have gotten the publicity in 2015 that they have gotten in previous years although it’s possible it was missed. But in a world where the news is normally all about this candidate, that politico, or another faction or nation shouting with all seriousness, “It’s all about me,’ these three events remind us that life need not be so self-serious, not so demanding, and not so somber.

The three days each year are these:

  1.  The day Beloit College in Wisconsin tells us what the year’s incoming freshman class knows and doesn’t know.
  2. The day Lake Superior State College in Michigan tells us what buzz words from the previous twelve months deserve to be stricken from the English language.
  3. The day San Jose State University announces the winners of its Bulwer-Lytton fiction writing contest.

Beloit College’s list is good because it reminds us that our world changes so quickly that our children (and grandchildren) have no idea what we’re talking about.  More seriously, it seems to this recorder of the passing scene, it is a reminder that the teaching of history cannot be allowed to be pushed aside by the rush to make sure our children and grandchildren emerge from high school knowing about the STEM subjects.  STEM without social context  plants the seeds of an ignorant and therefore shallow society that will be short on humanity.

Let’s step off that soapbox, though, and consider some of the things Beloit College says about this year’s new college students (the class of 2019, their parents hope).  The study says the students born in 1997 never knew Princess Diana, Notorious B.I.G, Jacques Cousteau, and Mother Teresa as living people but Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione have always been part of their lives. Hybrid cars have always been in mass production; Google has always existed; postage stamps have always been peel-and-stick (no licking), “four foul-mouthed kids have always been playing in South Park; it is not important to them (but it might still be to their parents) that someone is the “first woman” to do something; television has always been hi-def; and “Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith have always been Men in Black, not their next-door neighbors.”

The entire list is at https://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2019/.

Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan releases its List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness in January each year.  One of the top words (phrases also are allowed) this year came from this observer of the verbal scene—Polar Vortex.  The list cited two of us:

Kenneth Ross of Glastonbury, Conn., and Bob Priddy of Jefferson City, Mo., were among many who saw this storming in last January. “Less than a week into the new year and it’s the most overused, meaningless word in the media,” said Ross. Priddy noted that it quickly jumped from the weather forecast to other areas, as he said he knew it would:  “Today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorializes about a ‘political vortex.'”

Others that the school says must be banished from popular speech include BAE (for “before anyone else” or “before anything else”) whether referring to a favorite friend or a favorite food for example; “hack” (instead of saying “tip” or “advice”) such as, as one commentator noted, “life hacks, home improvement hacks, car hacks, furniture hacks, painting hacks, work hacks and pretty much any other hack you can think of;” skill set (a phrase that was just a word—skills—until some bureaucrat got hold of it); foodie (one observer called it a ridiculous word. “Do we call people who like wine ‘winies’ or beer lovers ‘beeries’?”

There are several other words on the 2015 list. It’s always fun to check the list each year at http://www.lssu.edu/banished/.  And a review of the lists from previous years is an interesting exploration of how slang sometimes becomes common language although it irritates the devil out of people when it is first used.  It’s also an interesting commentary on the times.

The Bulwer-Lytton fiction writing contest is named in honor of English author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose nineteenth-century novels gave us such commonly-used phrases as “the mighty dollar,” and “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and “the great unwashed.”  What made EGB-W special in literary history, however, is the opening sentence of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Should you wish to read the rest of the volume, you can go to http://www.readbookonline.net/read/20417/57414.

This winner of this year’s 33rd Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Award, chosen by English professor Scott Rice and a panel of “distinguished judges” that sometimes includes past winners is Joel Phillips, a New Jersey music teacher.  We missed the news coverage in August that Phillips was recognized for writing something 180 degrees from anything that won a Pulitzer Prize this year:

Seeing how the victim’s body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer ‘Dirk’ Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase ‘sandwiched’ to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt.

 If you’d like to see the runners-up, dishonorable mentions, and other examples of the best of bad writing in this contest, check http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/.  And in these dark and stormy days ahead before baseball season resumes, perhaps you will find a creative spark that could propel you to national notoriety as a Bulwer-Lytton winner.

 

What were they thinking?

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The answer is: They weren’t.  And it leaves thousands of people wondering if there is any limit to stupidity.  Or ignorance.  Or bad manners.  Or lack of consideration.  Or…….

Sometimes you just can’t find the words.

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We’ve been contacted by a number of people during the last few days asking if we’ve seen this picture.  Yes, we have, several times now. Your faithful scribe does not do Facebook or Linked In and twitters, twits, tweets—whatever the heck it is—only for limited professional reasons because I have better things to do with my time.  I do not disparage those who do spend considerable time each day being involved with a large network of people they do and don’t know. Call me a curmudgeon.  I wear the hat proudly.

Anyway, yes, I’ve seen it.  Somebody asked for my reaction.  It was instant.

This is inexcusable behavior by someone I otherwise would have assumed to have a certain level of intelligence and common sense.  These people are displaying behavior that one might expect from an ignorant third-grader and are endangering one of the greatest works of one of America’s foremost 20th century artists and showing disrespect for the greatest work of art in our Capitol.  They might also be placing themselves in some legal jeopardy, depending on whether there is any damage to public property.  There are tables in the House Lounge where they could have done their writing. Thoughtlessness is not in itself a punishable offense.  But these two people should at the very least publicly apologize for their unthinking behavior. 

Bob Priddy, author of ONLY THREE RIVERS ARE PEACEFUL:THE MISSOURI MURAL OF THOMAS HART BENTON and THE ART OF THE MISSOURI CAPITOL: HISTORY IN BRONZE, CANVAS, AND STONE.

Dave Marner, the Owensville newspaper publisher who took the picture, called me during the weekend and we talked at some length about this incident.  His photograph has gone viral and has generated worldwide scorn.  We know who the woman is: Valinda Freed of Randolph County, the vice chairwoman of the Missouri Republican Party, who was in the House Lounge for a rally urging the legislature to overturn Governor Nixon’s Right to Work bill veto.  As another friend of mine has written, “I don’t know the jackass joining in alongside her.”

Another friend who has worked in and around the capitol for a long, long time, sent me a note that said, “It also made me think of the definition of a word you don’t hear much anymore, “philistine”

The incident and the photographic record of it have stirred up a fecal hurricane.  Ms. Freed, after a couple of days in the eye of the hurricane, issued an apology to the Kansas City Star.  “I offer my sincere apologies for my completely unplanned and thoughtless act.  The Thomas Hart Benton mural, and all the magnificent artwork in the Capitol are state and national treasures,” she wrote.  She didn’t elaborate and as far as we know hasn’t done any interviews.

The “jackass” next to her in the picture hasn’t revealed himself or issued any statement regretting his action.  In addition to being a “philistine,” he does not appear to be much of a gentleman because he continues to let Ms. Freed take the fall.

It is also worth noting that this incident is not nearly so sad as the ongoing neglect of the other “state and national treasures” in our capitol.  No other state capitol can match the quantity and the quality of art that we find in Missouri’s Capitol.  Decades of deterioration of the structure and its art are far more egregious than what Ms. Freed and her friend have done. The state is spending forty-million dollars to fix a major foundation leakage problem under the main stairway on the south front of the building, a project so big that it might have an impact on the staging of the inauguration of new state officials in January, 2017.  Those who love the Capitol hope governors-to be and legislatures yet to come will find as much enthusiasm about investing in the capitol as they seem to find in granting favors to interests of economic capital.

It is also fair to note that they were not writing on the painting. They were leaning against it, putting their hands on it, writing on business cards or something.  Their “thoughtless act” did have a positive element to it.

It triggered an outrage on behalf of art and culture.  We are living in a political time when there appears to be little room for appreciation of the arts and the values they bring to society.  The loud insistence from many that their definition of “family values” be the rigid foundation of society seems to leave little room for the liberal freedoms that the arts should communicate.

We do not think, as we view Ms. Freed’s actions, that they are symbolic of that attitude.  We do not believe that she intended her thoughtless action to be a commentary on the arts, certainly not Thomas Hart Benton’s use of the arts to celebrate the efforts of independent citizens to build a diverse, serious, sometimes corrupt but always dynamic state.

While her apology strikes some as inadequate, this viewer wonders what more she could say.  Clearly the photograph has been a gigantic embarrassment to her and for some time to come she will be known to some folks as “that woman who….”   So let’s let her statement stand.  She need not immolate herself on the town square to express her remorse. We do, however, wish that her friend showed at least some class and also apologized instead of letting her get the full load from the hurricane.

Those in Missouri as well as outside the state who have generated that hurricane would do well to retain their indignation and use it to evaluate people, parties, and causes to whom art and culture are on the periphery—at best—of their vision

My shoes smelled

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But  the smell got better

It was a musty, earthy smell of long-damp ground that had not seen daylight for a century, ground that was wet enough to stick in the treads of my shoes but was not yet wet enough to be mud.  It was dry enough that I tracked it from place to place.

I checked those shoes later. The soil was gone, wiped off in the grass or the snow or maybe it had just dried and fallen out as I walked down the street.  Maybe the shoes didn’t really smell anymore.  Maybe it was just olfactory memory insinuating itself.  I didn’t want to wear those shoes to other places for a while.  Would other people smell that smell?

Maybe they’d have been bold enough to ask, “What is that smell?  Where have you been?   What did youstep in that you are tracking in here?”   They probably wouldn’t have said those things because it would not have been the courteous thing to do.  Besides, it’s not as if I had stepped in something some irresponsible dog owner left behind.  Or worse, a cat.

I was not alone with this problem.  Several other people were on the same little trip that day into the seldom-visited recesses of the Capitol basement. There was something incongruous about those in our group who were in suits and ties, especially the big guy who was the center of attention.  Governor Nixon had agreed to take the brief photo-op tour with some members of the legislature and the media before announcing he would support some responsible bond-issue spending to make some repairs to endangered parts of the Capitol.

The Governor gets beaten up a lot for his travels hither and yon to talk about jobs and schools and other momentarily hot topics.  But those trips aren’t a whole lot different from his look at what is underneath the great stairway on the south front of the Capitol, or his look from below at the unsafe condition of the closed-to-vehicles roadway that goes through the tunnel under those stairs.  There is value in going to communities to make people feel good about good things happening there or rallying local support against something he thinks is bad for that community and for the state as a whole.

Yeah, sure, politics are involved in a lot of these visits and Jay Nixon is nothing if not a political animal.  But visits by Governors mean something to those who do not deal with him every day—including legislators and reporters.  It’s special when the Governor pays attention to something locally.  The presence of the Governor is important.

His visit was important in that moldy, damp, musty-soil area in the basement of the Capitol.  For those of us who love that building and all that it should represent, that little visit meant the big guy cares.  It’s not important now that many of us have been talking and writing about the Capitol’s serious need of repair and restoration for years.  What’s was important was that the Governor was there signaling that he is significantly engaged now in ending decades of neglect of our greatest state symbol.

He wasn’t talking about ADA accessibility or restoring the paintings and sculpture or recovering the original decorations that have been lost under layer after layer of bland institutional paint.  Right then he was talking about supporting repairs that will stop deterioration of the structure itself.  First things first.

Your scribe had told some members of the legislature that the manuscript for the next Capitol book, the one about the construction of the building, was sitting in a computer in his house on the quiet street of retirement. It’s been in that computer for several years waiting for the final chapter to be written.  What happened during the legislative session determined whether the book has a positive ending that says the building is moving through its centennial era with efforts to repair it and restore it as the great temple of democracy that its builders hoped it would be or whether it is moving through its centennial era as a symbol of statewide responsibilities that are unmet, statewide obligations that are ignored, and a continued willingness to cover over problems and ignore them.

The Governor and the lawmakers on the tour took a step toward the positive the other day. And by the end of the legislative session, $40 million had been approved for repairs to that area.  And at the cornerstone centennial celebration July 3rd, he told the audience the investment is “a great beginning.”   The he continued, “I challenge not only our current government leaders—including me—to build on this commitment and initial investment, but also challenge those who will be in the Governor’s office and the General Assembly in the years to come to carry forward this gret edifice to our state and our way of life.”

In a few minutes after posting this entry, work will continue on writing the final chapter in the next Capitol book.  They will be, at the least, positive hopeful words—although not conclusively positive because there is so much to be done yet.

So it’s okay if my shoes smelled a little.  It turned out to be a good smell because it represented some good steps.  But there is still a lot of walking to do in our Capitol.