Category Archives: history

Amendment 1 

Posted on by
Reply

Missouri is one of eight states without state park admission fees. Amendment 1 maintains that distinction.

We might think Amendment One would be a no-brainer.  It extends a popular, small, sales tax for ten more years.  But those disposed to vote “No” on everything in August might add a touch of uncertainty to this issue.

Voting “no” on everything is irresponsible.  So is voting “yes.”  Government, even something so small as one-tenth of a cent, requires responsible thought.

This one-tenth of a cent sales tax is earmarked for financing state parks and programs retarding soil erosion. When it was initially approved, Missourians weren’t so sure it was a good idea.  It was a 50.1-49.9 approval, about 1700 votes..  But it was renewed with a 69% favorable vote in 1988,  renewed again eight years later with two-thirds of the vote, with a 71% majority in 2006 and most recently almost 80% in 2016.  It has won with an average of about 71.5%.

Renewal should easy. But in 1984 it was on the ballot with  a Kansas City proposal to let the city issue bonds without voter approval if two-thirds of the property owners in a special benefit district wanted them. Fifty-nine percent of the voters said “no” on that one.

The third issue seemed benign—renaming the Department of Consumer Affairs, Regulation, and Licensing (CARL) the Department of Economic Development. It passed 61-39 percent, so we know voters were discriminating in casting their ballots.

DNR observes, “Since 1984, Missouri farmers have implemented more than 295,000 structural and management conservation practices on cropland, hayland, pastureland and woodlands. Through these conservation efforts, Missouri has stopped more than 194 million tons of soil from eroding, enough to fill the lanes of I-70 from St. Louis to Kansas City over 52 feet high. These practices were supported by over $975 million from the Parks, Soils and Water Sales Tax since 1984.

And what do our state parks get?  “Free admission to all state parks and historic sites,” and these other bullet points—

  • Enriches visitor experiences with improvements, such as the new Spirit Trail and playground at Knob Noster State Park, a new visitor center at Deutscheim State Historic Site and upgraded playgrounds at Bothwell Lodge, and Bennett Spring state parks.
  • Offers a variety of overnight accommodations from walk-in campsites to full service cabins and modern lodges.
  • Enhances campground amenities such as upgraded electric, showerhouses and restrooms.
  • Improves accessibility, including track chairs, 360-degree virtual tours and tram tours for senior citizens.
  • Provides ongoing maintenance and repair of more than 2,000 structures, 3,000 campsites and 1,000 miles of trail.

We are proud of our state parks.  We like not to see soil erosion providing a problem for our streams.  It’s only a tenth of one percent. We’ve gotten our money’s worth from this little tax and we should keep getting it.

The Seven Deadly (Social) Sins 

Posted on by
Reply

I love discussion groups.  Sitting around and exploring issues, thoughts, events.  I recently came across something that could make for an interesting evening.

Or interesting any time, really.

Although usually credited to Mahatma Ghandi, this list apparently began with English Anglican Priest Frederick Lewis Donaldson (1860-1953).  He made his list public when he was the Canon, or Administrator, of Westminster Abbey and delivered them as part a speech on April 1, 1925.

We find his list of the Seven Deadly (social) Sins useful as we discuss political leadership at all levels in our country today:

  1. Wealth without work
  2. Pleasure without conscience
  3. Knowledge without character
  4. Commerce without morality
  5. Science without humanity
  6. Religion without sacrifice
  7.  Politics without principle.

He sent them to India to Mahatma Ghandi, who put them in his weekly newspaper, Young India, six months later.

Several books have been written that use these statements as their basis. The internet also is full of interpretations of them.  We like the summary at exploringyourmind.com.

(I gave the list to my minister who wrote about them in our weekly church newsletter.  He added an eighth one: unity without humility, commenting, “Too often people demand unity when what they really want is conformity. They want silence instead of conversation. Agreement instead of relationship. Control instead of community…Unity honors the dignity and humanity of others even when we disagree. It listens before speaking. It seeks understanding before judgment. It makes room at the table.”)

In his article a century ago, Ghandi wrote:

A Fair friend sends me “Crisp Sayings” by Dan Griffiths on crime and wants me to find room for them in these pages. Here are some extracts which a Satyagraphi  (a person who practices nonviolent resistance) can readily subscribe to:

“State law is not necessarily moral. Crime is not necessarily immoral.”

“There is a world of difference between illegality and immorality.”

“Not all illegalities are immoral and not all immoralities are illegal.”

Who can say that whilst not to crawl on one’s belly at the dictation of an officer might be an illegality it is also an immorality? Rather is it not true that refusal to crawl on one’s belly may be illegal but it would be in the highest degree moral? Another illuminating passage is the following; “Modern society is in itself a crime factory. The militarist is a relative of the murderer and the burglar is the complement of the stock jobber.” The third excerpt runs as follows;

“The thief in law is merely the person who satisfied his acquisitive in ways not sanctioned by the community. The real thief is the person who takes more out of society than he puts into it.” But “Society punishes those who annoy it,—the retail and not the wholesale offenders.”

Ghandi published the “Seven Deadly Sins” after that with the comment, “Naturally, the friend does not want the reader to know these things merely through the intellect but to know them through the heart to avoid them.”

The entire issue of Young India  can be found at: Full page photo.  The last page, under the title “Practical Vendata” offers an interesting view of Hindu philosophy (Vendata) compared to the teachings of Jesus.

We have wandered a bit because, as usual, one thing has led to another. Getting back to the beginning: Where are we as a people and as a nation on this list of deadly social sins—-and how do we move closer to becoming repentant sinners?

From the Wonderful Folks Who Want to Hijack Our History

Posted on by
Reply

The hijacking of our nation’s 250th birthday party by Donald Trump continues, a man who seems motivated to make sure he has a big place in American history.

His place seems assured—potentially as this country’s worst President.

The latest shameful step is his demand that National Park Service employees buy and wear—or the NPS buys and gives employees to wear==Trump’s Freedom 250 pins instead of the decorations from the Congressionally-established America 250 Committee. Mother Jones reports any worker refusing the do so could face disciplinary action.

It means that NPS employees working on the National Mall for the “Trump rally” better be wearing pins from which the President will make a profit—or else.

Trump already has turned the National Park Service into his history propaganda machine. His removal of signs, exhibits, films, and other portrayals of our history and replaced them (if he replaced them at all) with Trump-politically correct versions of history. Court filings indicate at least 37 NPS sites have been affected.

A federal judge had ordered the restoration of the items to their original places by July 3. An NPS spokesman says the agency is not sure that’s enough time to get it all done.

The arrogance of Trump’s Ozymandic quest was put on huge public display a few days ago when a giant poster was unfurled on the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building showing TR’s face and a quotation attributed to him: “Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.”

The problem is that Co-Director Michael Patrick Cullinane of the Theodore Roosevelt Center told Huff Post, “What I can say for certain is that the quote did not originate with Theodore Roosevelt.”

The Washington Post did an article about it, which prompted a representative of the Office of Personnel Management, that occupies the building, to say the quotation “is commonly attributed to Roosevelt and captures the spirit of the federal workforce.”

(or at least what is left of it after the Trump-Musk eviscerating of numerous federal agencies.)

The comment from OPM’s Laurine Pinover is reminiscent of a quote attributed to President Warren Harding: “I love Paul Revere, whether he rode or not.”  (Paul Revere was one of two riders who rode to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British Army was advancing in that direction.  Revere was captured early in the event, questioned, and freed after being questions.  William Dawes was the one who spread the alarm but who is forgotten because his last name does not rhyme with “Listen my children and you shall hear…”)

Pinover dismissed the article: “As excited as we are about America 250, it’s surprising the Washington Post has taken such an interest in our small agency’s building banners.”

The newspaper notes that there’s another banner alongside Roosevelt’s image that promotes Trump’s Freedom 250 efforts to rewrite history in general.

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library gives us a far better statement that he really did make—to the Iowa State Teachers’ Association in November, 1910:

“Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. No kind of life is worth leading if it is always an easy life. . . . I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

It’s not something Donald Trump—who has had an easy life but has made the lives of millions of people difficult—would understand. But this one is true, something else Donald Trump doesn’t understand, either.

Art and Not Art

Posted on by
1

As we recover from the weekend $60 million Trump birthday party cage match at the White House that symbolized the character of the current occupant, an event held within hours of the removal of his name from the Kennedy Cener, we recalled a couple of things President Kennedy said that emphasize the differences between grace and crudeness, between raising hope and getting revenge, between Bernstein and Dorati and Topuria and Gaethje.

There is perhaps no more stark difference between the two men than part of President Kennedy’s speech at Amherst College a month before his death:

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 American which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. 

The first performance in the Kennedy Center was the premier of Leonard Bertstein’s Mass at the opening gala in the Opera House on September 5, 1971. The Concert Hall opened the next day with a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Antal Dorati, one of our country’s most celebrated conductors.

Ilia “El Matador” Topuria and Justin “The Highlight” Gaethje are wrestlers who performed in their own way Sunday night.  One of the fighters, after his event, threw a slur at Michelle Obama, referring to her as “a man.’  CNN reported that Trump quietly smiled.

As for the Kennedy Center, Trump is interested in it only if he has his name on it above Kennedy’s name.

Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into “NEVER NEVER LAND, Therefore, based on the fact that the Radical Left Democrats care more about opposing your favorite President, ME, than saving a dying Performing Arts Center, almost all of which lose large amounts of money throughout the Country, we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.

The 80-year old petulant child takes his ball and goes home because everybody else won’t play his rules.

I urge you to take seven minutes to look at the video of part of a fund raising event held on November 29, 1962 for development of a National Cultural Center, now again known as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I hope many of you find yourselves uplifted a little bit by a better man and a better president.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=John+Kennedy+onthe+arts&view=detail&mid=2D79B9FC6F6A8F45EA082D79B9FC6F6A8F4

John F. Kennedy’s name is on numerous institutions, buildings, and institutes because other people believed what he said when he spoke of what we can be as a better, more optimistic nation. So far, Donald Trump’s name is on buildings only because he puts it there or demands them to be put there, or else.

The contrast between the Kennedy Center and the giant claw that was erected for cage fight could not be a starker illustration of the difference between Kennedy’s dream and Trump’s reality.

This is why old people are valuable.  We can tell you during this time that many believe is a national nightmare about a time when a President encouraged us to dream of a country known for its civilization as well as its strength.

Notes From a Quiet Hill (data intensive version)

Posted on by
Reply

(“Notes” is a series of irregularly published miscellaneous comments that didn’t quite reach the level of full blogitude*.)

Drove past a yard sign the other day saying “Garage Sale.”   Not for the first time, I thought, “There’s only one letter difference between “garage” and “garbage.”

-0-0-0-0-0-0-

One of the great artists of the American West, and a favorite of mine, was St. Louis-born Charles M. Russell. We give much praise to the discoveries of Lewis and Clark on their trip to the Pacific but Russell offered a different perspective on them and their discoveries.

You see, the Native Americans already knew all the things Lewis and Clark “discovered.”  The big thing for Native Americans was the discovery of Lewis and Clark—the title of Russell’s painting.

And that brings us back to a frequently contested idea that this country was founded as a Christian Nation. It already was a nation of numerous religions or interpretations of creation and principles for living in harmony. Christianity was only an addition to the spiritual traditions that existed here already.

As in Russell’s painting, the First Nations people discovered the Christians, who became just added another spiritual tradition here. Christianity is just another interpretation of universal truths that have existed far longer than the New Testament.

Here in Missouri, some missionaries opened Harmony Mission in the western part of the state, an effort to “civilize” the savages.  It closed after several years with nary a convert.  The story is told of one of the missionaries telling the natives the story of Jonah and the Whale, after which one of the leaders of the group wrapped himself in his blanket, told the minister, “We know the White Man lies, but that is the biggest lie we have ever heard,” and stalked away.

Followers of our Euro-Christian traditions, as those who followed after Lewis and Clark, might consider toning down their conceit and remember they were not founders but instead were late-comers to nation of religious traditions, some many years older than theirs.

-0-0-0-

Anybody care to guess how much Ashli Babbit’s family could have gotten from the Trump slush fund that was going to pay the peaceful tourists of January 6?  Ten figures?  More?

-0-0-0-0-0-

We don’t know what to think about data centers.  But there’s so many things these days that we don’t know what to think about. Data centers are one of the biggest topics now and their use of water seems to be a big issue.  I guess they process so much data that they have to water-cool their computers.

This sounds like a great diversification opportunity for Ameren, our electric company. It runs the state’s only commercial nuclear power plant, in Callaway County.  Maybe Ameren should add data centers to their properties, even buy more land if needed.  Ameren uses a lot of Missouri River water in its cooling tower.  Why not recycle that water through some nearby data centers before dumping it back into the river as it does now?

This is an example of knowing what we think but not thinking we know anything about an issue, which probably makes us a typical citizen in these confusing times.

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

If the Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress in November, when will they have time to work on a budget and other issues because they likely will be too busy doing house-cleaning impeachments?

They probably will be emboldened because the House Speaker will be a D, and the Speaker is third in the line of succession. For reference, The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 lists: Vice President, Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Secretary of Homeland Security—all of whom probably would be gone quickly if the D’s decide the top two in line need to hit the road.

0-0-0-0

The President’s plan to turn the nation’s 250th birthday into a celebration of himself has become a struggle for him. We frankly prefer that he show as much interest in being part of the event as he showed about attending his son’s wedding.

-0-

*”blogitude” is a phrase not found in any dictionary known to man except in this writer’s personal lexicon.

-0-

CBS

Posted on by
Reply

President Trump and his toadies have turned CBS into broadcasting’s Gaza.

CBS News Radio is dead. The CBS Evening News has been abandoned by thousands of viewers. Sixty Minutes has become an ideological battleground that has left the program severely, if not mortally, wounded. Reports that Editor-in Chief Bari Weiss has ordered some stories rewritten to be more favorable to President Trump presaged last week’s blow up that led to the immediate firing of longtime correspondent Scott Pelley because he dared speak truth to power by accusing Editor in Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” Sixty Minutes.

North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, a conservative nationalist and flaming bigot who served thirty years in the U. S. Senate, once wished he could own what he called “The Communist Broadcasting System” so he could “be Dan Rather’s boss.” Wherever he is now (he died in 2008), he must be rubbing his hands with glee at what Donald Trump and his allies/enablers have done to CBS.

Helms would be right at home in today’s Washington.. Helms was an unalterable opponent of civil rights of all stripes, the National Endowment for the Arts, affirmative action, feminism, and abortion access. Some strongly loved him. Some strongly hated him.

Donald Trump is everything Jesse Helms wishes he could have been.  But Helms was just a Senator while Trump is the President and has salted the ground of government with allies that can carry out the dreams of Helms magnified by Trump.

President Trump and his buddies have succeeded in killing CBS News and they’d like to do it with all other media companies that speak out against their abuses.  Thankfully, so far, Disney/ABC has resisted after mistakenly thinking appeasement would work with Trump. Although Jimmy Fallon has been targeted in the overnight rave-fest from the White House, NBC seems to be a smaller target.

Trump set a new record in May with 861 posts on his social media site, which continues to lose tens of millions of dollars each month.  White House spokesperson Olivia Wales thinks Trump’s overnight behavior is just wonderful, telling the Daily Beast, “Trump offers his unfiltered and direct thoughts to the American people, without the biased media taking him out of context. The American people have never had a president as transparent as President Trump, who shares his thoughts with them in real time.”

It’s hard to argue with that.  The problem is that Wales and her like seem to think that calling all of his lies and biases is bias.

The threat to our republic is that his is the only voice he wants to allow and he’s taking steps to make it so. The firehose of lies that he gushes every night—and throughout the day—cannot go unchallenged in a free country. It is the responsibility of the press in all of its iterations to  challenge, to expose, even if he is provoked into greater personal outrage.

In my long career that included years of leadership with a national organization for broadcast journalists, I met a lot of CBS news people, including the founders of Sixty Minutes Don Hewitt, Morley Safer, Andy Rooney, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, Harry Reasoner, Dan Rather, not to mention Walter Cronkite and others. Scott Pelley spoke at one our conventions several years ago.  It was a good speech.

I met them. I talked to them. Don’t think any of them would know me if we had met on the street. They wouldn’t.  But I knew them as fellow professionals and I can tell you that they all had more integrity in their little finger than Donald Trump has in his entire administration and cadre of sycophants.

Edward R. Murrow is the patron saint of broadcast journalism.  No, I didn’t meet him (but I did meet his widow).  In 1958 Murrow spoke to our convention—long before I was involved with the group.

In his concluding remarks, he warned against networks that considered still-young television only as mindless entertainment medium. He wanted them to be more, and more responsible.

“This nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination, and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We’re engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation.”

Murrow was speaking of the external threat to this country of Communism.” Today, he might be speaking of the internal threat from our own leaders.

The signature words of the speech: “This instrument can teach; it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.” Today, Donald Trump wants television to be useful in keeping the American public ignorant, intolerant, and indifferent to his actions.

Murrow concluded, “Stonewall Jackson, who is generally believed to have known something about weapons, is reported to have said, ‘When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.’ The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.”  That was 1958. In 2026, Trump prefers that outlets such as CBS and Sixty Minutes throw away the sword and carry the rusty scabbard.

That becomes more obvious with every day, with every collision between Trump lackeys and people such as Scott Pelley and many others who used to be part of a once highly-respected program and its network.

Trump must not be allowed to win.  Ignorance, Intolerance, and indifference must not survive. Jesse Helms must stay buried. Unfortunately, his ideas remain too much alive and in much more powerful hands.

Elections are nearing. We hope voters take their figurative swords to their polling places.

Laws for the Presidency

Posted on by
1

CNN polling discussed last weekend shows the overwhelming number of Americans are tired of President Trump lionizing himself, especially by sticking his name on  buildings while he remains in office. The data was called “clear as glass” by CNN’s Chief Data Analyst, Harry Enten.

The Survey found one in five Americans think it’s okay to name buildings after Trump—but only after has left office (and, we add, after time and more open evaluation of his behavior is possible).

Only NINE PERCENT say it’s okay for him to stick his name on government buildings while he’s still in office.

How strong is that feeling.  Enten looked at some other ridiculous ideas for comparison.  Nine percent is even lower than the 12 percent of Americans who think the moon landing was a fake.

It is even one point lower than the number of Americans who think the Earth if flat—ten percent.

Enten said, “On this issue, the rock core, that core Republican base that Trump has relied upon, that stick with him through thick and thin, even on this issue, though, just 17 percent, just 17 percent of Republicans say that, yes, it is. Three percent, not really so surprising, of Democrats say the same thing. So, you get rare bipartisan unity on this issue.

But is he fixated on himself, as if we need to ask? He plans to the celebration of our nation’s 250th birthday in Washington into a celebration of himself, which should remove any doubt, underlining the sentiment of only 29% of Americans in the CNN survey who think he is focused enough on issues that really matter.  More than two-thirds (68 percent) say he is not.

As we have noted in a previous blog, the polarization of America this man is causing is staggering in its scope.  In this issue—focus—only THREE PERCENT of respondents seemed to have no opinion.

Because our current occupant of the White House has so clearly violated or ignored all previous written and unwritten standards for the office, it is time for Congress put serious limits on the presidency, written standards with severe penalties for their violations. Some of these standards must be applied also to those who enact them.

These proposals are based on the proposition that the higher people rise in our political system, the more they must reveal of themselves as a matter public honesty with those who elevate them to those positions.

In short, the higher you rise, the less private your life becomes and the more you “belong” to the public because you are entrusted by that public with increasing levels of power that must be exercised with responsibility beyond personal interest.

To begin with the current example, these laws of the powerful should require:

—The name of no President shall be affixed to any government building, park, military equipment or other federal holding while in office. Such naming shall remain the province of the Congress and its usual process for such designations which shall not be made until the president has been out of office for one election cycle.

—No image, signature or other representation of a sitting or living former President shall appear on any United States currency or coinage used in general public circulation.

—Within two weeks of an individual achieving a nomination for President, or achieving the office through succession, the Internal Revenue Service shall make public the tax returns of the individual for the previous five years and shall release them for each year the individual is in office.

—The same standards shall apply to appointees to the United States Supreme Court, to cabinet positions, and to members of Congress upon their elections. .

—The President and incoming Vice-President, not later than two weeks  prior to inauguration, shall transfer all assets, including but not limited to personal financial holdings and property to an independent blind trust established by the Congress to manage those assets during the time they are in office. No transfer of assets within the families of the President and the Vice-President during the two years before the inauguration date shall be recognized as legal and such assets shall be seized and placed into the trust if so made.

—Failure to place assets into such a trust will delay the inauguration until such time as the obligation is met.  The sitting president shall serve as a President Pro Tempore until such requirements are met.  If the sitting president is incapable of serving under provisions of the 25th amendment or chooses not to continue service, the sitting president shall be replaced according to the line of succession established in the Constitution and that person will continue serving until all trust requirements are met. Impeachment shall be mandatory if it is determined later that these standards have not been met intentionally.

—Within two weeks of all annual physical examinations, the detailed results including (for lack of a better term) “beyond basic” tests of cognition, shall be released.

—No President shall order the unprovoked attack of or invasion of another independent nation without the approval of Congress.

—No President can claim, annex, or purchase any independent nation or territory of an independent nation without approval by Congress and a proven willingness by the inhabitants of such lands to become part of the United States..  “Proven willingness” shall mean a positive vote by the general population of the area proposed.

—No President unilaterally can withdraw this country from international bodies dedicated to the health, safety, welfare, financial stability, and peaceful coexistence with others without approval by Congress.

—No President may interfere with the orderly elections of the states nor with the standards of institutional of higher learning within those states.

—All revenue outside of campaign donations that would personally benefit a sitting President shall be applied against the national debt (ending the pay for play philosophy that seems so prominent in today’s presidential dealings).

—All campaign donations to presidential and congressional candidates shall be listed according to the name of the individuals making them.  Organizations aggregating campaign funds must identify the individuals contributing to such aggregated donations.

—No president shall establish independent political action committees to influence elections at the state level during the term of the presidency.

Nothing in these suggestions prohibits a president from making recommendations nor do any of them limit the president’s constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and expression nor his ability to associate with others who might advocate a cause on his behalf. But they will go far to prevent future presidents from taking the powers of the people from them.

Expecting Congress to enact any of these protections for the nation’s general welfare seems to be quite a reach. But we should know by now that failure to do so only invites something worse, if it is possible to envision something worse, than the inattentive but self-absorbed figure we have now.

Recall that on September 18, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention. Elizabeth Willing Powell, a Philadelphia social leader we today would call “an influencer,” asked delegate Benjamin Franklin as he emerged from the final meeting, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  Franklin’s answer is well known: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

These recommendations are designed to keep our republic and have been created to respond to the excesses of the current holder of the presidency.  You might have modifications to these ideas or additional limits that Congress could and should impose.  Feel free to share them in the “comments’ section at the end of this posting. No snark please. This is too important for that.

In this campaign year, those seeking federal office should be asked by the media and the voters if they would support limits such as these on the most powerful single person in our government and for those seeking high federal positions. If yes, why?  If not, why not?

We citizens have obligations to ourselves and to our families as well as to our neighbors—known and unknown—to protect ourselves and to protect our nation.  Some might argue that the Constitution already protects us enough.  Your correspondent does not believe that it does, and we have seen demonstration after demonstration of that inadequacy, especially with President Trump.

These issues need to be part of the national dialogue in this election year. If you would like to begin this discussion with others by distributing these ideas, feel free to do so. If you have a chance to speak of these things with your congressional candidates, do not miss it.

A republic is a terrible thing to be wasted.

-0-

 

Some Reflections on Memorial Day, Part Four:

Posted on by
Reply

Hundreds of people were at the Speedway as I drove out of town last Monday morning. A few were at the start-finish line—Felix Rosenqvist, his owners and crew for the annual victor’s picture taking. The rest, armed with brooms, shovels, and other equipment, were cleaning up the 500 tons or so of trash left behind by Sunday’s huge crowds. The speedway pays volunteer groups $125 per person to do the cleanup work.

 

Several years ago, I narrated Aaron Copeland’s A LINCOLN PORTRAIT with the Jefferson City Symphony and some of the words began to come back to me as I drove through the rich, flat prairies of the two states.  “He was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and grew up in Illinois….” 

The way to Indianapolis on I-70 takes people through Vandalia, once the state capital of Illinois.  The old capitol still stands, and the House of Representatives where Lincoln began his political career has been recreated.

I wanted to go on a northern route home that would take me through Springfield, where Lincoln lived and owned the only house he would ever own, where he prospered as a railroad lawyer, and from which he left to become President.  This trip, however, was to take me to the little village to the west where he grew up.

New Salem.

Lincoln struck out on his own after his brief stay in the Decatur area and spent several years in this little village as a laborer, and as an unsuccessful store owner.  It was in New Salem that he began the study of the law and began to practice as a lawyer.  It was in New Salem that Ann Rutledge entered his life and departed from it, a relationship romanticized by many through the decades.

Abe Lincoln was a quiet man; Lincoln was a quiet and a melancholy man.

However deep the Lincoln/Rutledge relationship was, it has been recorded that her death left Lincoln deeply depressed, depression being a condition he dealt with throughout his life.

One of the recreated buildings in the little village is the Rutledge Tavern where Lincoln stayed—a “tavern” being a place offering room and board for visitors and travelers (Missouri’s first official state historic site is the Arrow Rock Tavern, if you want to see what a tavern was in the early 19th Century).

The park was closed the day I stopped on the way home, “closed” meaning the visitors center, restrooms, and the village buildings were unoccupied by staff and reenactors.  But visitors could take a quiet walk among the businesses and homes, the mill and the gardens and the stores.  And I did.

Copeland’s narration and his music went with me.  The composition was created in 1942 but its passages from Lincoln’s speeches seemed appropriate that day as I walked where he had walked. I remembered pieces of the narration and when I got home I pulled the script from that performance with the symphony.

The first segment:

Fellow Citizens, we cannot escape history.  That is what he said. That is what Abraham Lincoln said.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…. We — even we here– hold the power, and bear the responsibility.

The second:

He was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and grew up in Illinois. And this is what he said. This is what Abe Lincoln said:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.  

Both were from his 1862 message to Congress, what we call the State of the Union today.  The third segment:

When standing erect, he was six feet four inches tall. And this is what he said:

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Lincoln said that during his last debate with Stephen A. Douglas, in Alton, Illinois in 1858. Lincoln lost the race for the U. S. Senate that year but his debates with Douglas brought him national attention.

Segment four:

Abe Lincoln was a quiet man; Lincoln was a quiet and a melancholy man. But when he spoke of Democracy, this is what he said. He said:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Again, from 1858.

And the concluding segment:

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of these United States, is everlasting in the memory of this country.  For on the battleground at Gettysburg, this is what he said:

From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“That cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” he said—-referring not to the war but to the re-commitment to the document that created the Union, that created a government “by the people, for the people,” the Declaration of Independence.

I have had a front row seat to the operation of the people’s government for many decades and as I walked the quiet streets where Abraham Lincoln walked I was reminded that the people’s government requires a people’s responsibility whenever there is a “stormy present…piled high with difficulty.’

“We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country,” Abe Lincoln said.

Today, it seems, we are locked in “the eternal struggle of these two principles—right and wrong…The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings.”

“Disenthrall:” —to free ourselves of the present condition, “and then we shall save our country.”

This, again, is what Abe Lincoln said to us in 1862:

The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…. We — even we here– hold the power, and bear the responsibility.

Tens of thousands of ours have died creating this country, creating and defending a nation that can celebrate its holidays with great noise, great drama, and frivolity while pausing for a few minutes to be grateful for their sacrifices and recommit to keep their faith—–

From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

After about an hour or maybe an hour and a half, I resumed my drive home. I crossed the Mississippi River with my dashboard telling me I had seventeen miles worth of gas left in the tank. A hundred yards from the bridge at Louisiana Missouri, I put 15.6 gallons of cheaper Missouri gas into a tank that’s supposed to hold 15.5 gallons.

And then I came home.  I had decorated no graves on Memorial Day but I was glad that I lived in a country that those in their graves protected for us, a united nation despite our differences that  pauses for a  gaudy celebration of its existence even in a “stormy present,” knowing that we have the power to restore our nation to one that is of the people, by the people, and has the ability to be made better—-

—-for the people.

(Various prominent people are on YouTube narrating A Lincoln Portrait. I suggest you look at one, or some, of them.)

(Picture credits: City of Vandalia; Bob Priddy)

 

 

Reflections on Memorial Day, Part three  (5/30/26)

Posted on by
Reply

Sunday, things got very serious.

And incredibly intense.

And scary.

The 350,000 fans who would watch the Indianapolis 500 (or just have a big party) had started arriving days earlier, many setting up their tents and mobile homes in the numerous parking lots around the track, some spending the night before the race in their cars on 16th Street.

They began surging through the gates when they opened at 6 a.m., many wearing shirts for their favorite drivers, shirts for cars’ sponsors, and shirts commemorating the event about to unfold before them. The souvenir facilities quickly were swarming with people wanting to buy memories of what they were about to witness.

The grandstands were filling by the time the Borg-Warner trophy was moved to the start-finish line for the race about 9 a.m.

The cars were rolled to their starting spots at 10:30, drivers soon to follow, passing through a few thousand reporters, guests, sponsor representatives and car crews.

Pulses start to quicken with each step of the opening ceremonies saluting veterans and first responders with the presentation of colors, a prayer by Indianapolis Archbishop Charles Thompson, a fourteen-gun salute and taps. Indiana composer, singer, and band leader Emphraim Owens did “America,” and Grammy Nominee Jordin Sparks performed the Start Spangled banner ending with a flyby over the main straightaway by F-16s from the South Dakota National guard.

And then comes the goosebumps moment for thousands—Jim Carnelison’s annual performance of the state song, “Back Home Again in Indiana,” punctuated by a return, east to west by one of the F-16s.

And at last, Roger Penske’s order, “Drivers, Start Your Engines.”

Should you want to share the entire opening ceremonies:

2026 Indy 500 Opening Ceremony | INDYCAR

Weather forecasters for several days had warned that rain could interrupt or even shorten the 110th running of the Indianapolis 500.  The race would become official after 101 of the 200 laps. The pressure was on from the drop of the green flag for drivers to get everything them could get before the rain ended the race. The rain generally stayed away although enough drops fell to pause the race for a few minutes before the intense race against rain resumes.

More than one-fourth of the race was run under caution, the cars circulating at 90-95 mph while crash debris and car remnants were removed from the track. The green flag was out for 149 laps.  The intensity of the competition is reflected in these statistics:

There were seventy lead changes, a record.  Even more telling is this:

One-hundred and thirty seven of the 149 full-throttle laps produced a margin between first and second place of less than one second.  Cars lapped at better than 220 miles an hour, weaving in and out of lines, passing and re-passing.  Thirty-three started; 24 were still challenging one another at the end of the race. Eighteen were on the leader’s lap, the top four within four-tenths of a second of each other.

If you have the endurance, here is the entire race as seen from Rosenqvist’s car—and hear his spotter and his conversations with his crew chief (be prepared to be seated for more than three hours):

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=rosenqvist+cockpit+video&view=detail&mid=3BB33C474F5056FF64F83BB33C474F5056FF64F8&

Marcus Amstrong took the lead at the start of the last lap with contenders  David Malukas and  teammates Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist and David Malukas tightly behind racing at speeds forty miles an hour faster than the takeoff speed of my son’s Southwest Airlines 737.

The race evolved into a 23-second duel between Malukas and Rosenqvist. Want to take a white-knuckle ride with Rosenqvist on that last lap?

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=felix+onboard+for+the+last+lap+of+the+500&refig=6a18ca50d02f4504805071

Malukas led out of the fourth turn but Rosenqvist had the momentum.

Rosenqvist by 0.0223 second, the smallest victory margin in Speedway history.

The win was worth $4.3 million of the record $30 million purse.  By the time Rosenqvist took the ceremonial last lap around the track, in the back of a pickup truck, so the crowd could appreciate what he had done, and he and his crew knelt at the start/finish line for the traditional kissing of the bricks, a light rain was falling.

The finish was bitter for Malukas, who wept when he stepped out of his car. He had finished second to Alex Palou last year by 1.142 seconds, meaning he has been separated from two straight wins in the Indianapolis 500 by a combined 1.7 seconds. But he wasn’t the only one disappointed.

 

Santino Ferrucci, whose uniform reflected the nation’s patriotic 250th anniversary theme of the day, finished in the top ten for the eighth straight year. Pato O’Ward, racked up his fifth straight top five including two runner ups.  O’Ward was only 0.4271 seconds behind Scott McLaughlin, finishing fourth. Ferrucci was 8th, 1.571 behind.

Will their time come for Malukas, Fdrrucci, and O’Ward?  Or will they join the long list of men who year after year were within reach of being immortalized on the trophy but never made it.

They’re all yet young and God willing, there will be more chances for their faces to join those of Rosenqvist and 76 others on the big trophy.

Shortly after the 500 ended, the longest race of the NASCAR season was helping Charlotte, North Carolina, observe Memorial Day.  In a few weeks, those cars will roar around the first race track in the world to use the word “Speedway” to describe itself. The cars will be bigger and one-third slower but the fans will be as devoted to them as IndyCar fans are devoted to their cars and drivers, and the competition for a prestigious Brickyard 400 victory at the greatest race track in the world will be equally fierce.

The great track is silent now. But in a few weeks a new roar of engines will be heard as the great track once again knows he heat of racing cars being driven by people doing heroic things.

For me, it was time for a long, quiet ride home, hoping I could make it back to Missouri before having to buy more of that awfully expensive Illinois gas. I found myself thinking of the era that gave us this holiday. After all, I was going to spend the day in the land of the man who was the central figure in it all.

Join me in that ride, if you wish, on Monday.

(picture credits—Bob Priddy and Rick Gevers; Borg-Warner; Finish—The Guardian)

-0-

 

Some Reflections on Memorial Day, Part One 

Posted on by
1

This was a Memorial Day that has taken some time for us to process.  The holiday’s origins are easily overlooked each year by the rush of noisy celebrations that seem far removed from the original intent of the day.  I was awash in those contrasting “celebrations” that have overshadowed the “observance” and “commemoration” originally intended. But I found toward the end in a closed state park a quiet reminder of why Memorial Day is and should be recalled for its origins—and why this contemporary noisy version of Memorial Day anticipates the next great holiday that this year will challenge our honesty about who we have become.

This might be written more for my benefit more than for yours and I hope you will excuse me for these ruminations.  I didn’t plan on them stretching into four chapters but a lot was going on, not the least of which was “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”

We’ll talk about the race but this series is not all about racing for the race is only part of the story.

The weekend had been spent in a city that observes/commemorates Memorial Day throughout the entire month of May. I know of no other city that rivals Indianapolis’s Memorial…..Month.

Indianapolis is a prototype that diminishing cities might use to reinvent themselves.s  through the course of several decades and several setbacks, Indianapolis has emerged as a dynamic, livable place of major league proportions in spirit and enterprise. And each year it throws one big party in May.

Reconciling the big party in that prototype city with the solemnity the holiday was originally created for, reconciling what men and women in the military died for in the war that created Memorial Day dwith what we are and what that the city is provided the ingredients for a lot of thinking on the long drive back to Jefferson City on Monday that took me through a lot of American history and some of my own.

I was born in Decatur Illinois, a town where Abraham Lincoln’s family briefly lived after moving from Indiana. I was raised in two small central Illinois towns, Mt. Pulaski (population about 1,500) and then Sullivan (a bigger place of about 3,300 when we moved there in fourth grade). Abraham Lincoln practiced law in both places as a circuit-riding attorney.

Lincoln scholars point to 1843 as the first time Lincoln and a couple of friends first quoted the phrase from three of the Gospels that “a house divided against itself can not stand” as they helped organize the Illinois Whig Party.

Fifteen years later, he spoke them again in accepting the nomination to run against incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. . . .A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”  He lost that election but it paved the way to the presidency two years later and the great test that followed that determined the correctness of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and by 1858 Abraham Lincoln.

A civil war that tested that assertion took Lincoln to Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, where more than seven-thousand soldiers from both sides had been killed and more than forty thousand had been wounded. He paid tribute to those who died defending the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that our nation had been “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

He called upon the nation that day to complete what he called the “unfinished work”  and “the great task remaining before us,” not referring to the war but to the words of the Declaration. He called for the people to recommit themselves to that cause so the nation should have a “new birth of freedom” flowing from, by, and for the people—a united people, a house NOT divided.

A 1904 newspaper article reported that in October 1864, almost a year after Gettysburg and about six months before the Civil War ended, three women in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania decorated the graves of Union soldiers.  Boalsburg, an unincorporated area of 4,600 today, makes the disputed claim that the event was the earliest documented observance of a memorial day.

On May 1, 1865, just three weeks after Lee’s surrender and two weeks after Lincoln’s death, as many at 10,000 people in deeply Confederate Charleston, South Carolina dedicated the graves of Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate Prison. Reports tell us many in the audience were Black.

Waterloo, NY claims to have held the first FORMAL annual observance of a memorial day on May 5, 1866. Local druggist Henry Welles is credited with thinking of the event.

The first national observance was on May 30, 1868 when former Illinois white supremacist John A. Logan, who had become became strong Lincoln supporter at the start of the war and abandoned his racist sentiments after fighting alongside black troops, issued a national proclamation calling for “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country. ” Logan, a wartime Union General, was the Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization for Union Army veterans such as my great grandfather. The day originally known as “Decoration Day” was expanded after World War I to honor all of our country’s military dead. It officially became Memorial Day in 1971 when it became a national Monday holiday that now is most often considered the unofficial beginning of summer.

Logan County, where Mt. Pulaski is, was named after Logan’s father. My great grandfather enlisted in the Union Army in Moultrie County, where Sullivan is.

My journey Monday, the now designated Memorial Day, took me back through that area of Lincoln and Logan, and Private Robert T. Priddy—who served under General Sherman at Vicksburg—where Logan was with another Union Army unit.  I had been thinking a lot about the cacophony that the holiday weekend had become as the miles of pavement disappeared beneath my car, I found myself in a quiet place that helped me put the day, the weekend, into a context.  I’ll take you from the cacophony to the quiet in succeeding chapters.

-0-