Category Archives: history

Slouching into adjournment

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Jacques reflects on life in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

 All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

They’re gone.  They’re done.  The chambers are dark and cool.  The hearing rooms are empty and quiet.  The unpopulated rotunda echoes with the sounds of a few footsteps.

The players have departed, some to return but others now of no further use, their importance immediately extinguished because they can no longer do things for people who want things done.

Some of those who have served will never be seen again in these hallways.  Their offices soon will be occupied by some other temporary presence who will come to this time, too.

And what have they left behind? What lasting benefit was there of their service?

The fact that they served, that they sought the responsibilities and the obligations of office, can be enough.

Some—those who will never again do anything as consequential as vote on some pages of words that establish allowable behaviors for six million people—might have time now to ponder their legacies.  Did they benefit all Missourians or just a few?  Did they protect the many or place a few ahead of them?  Will their time in the Capitol matter in the arc of history.

Or does it make any difference?

We have found ourself wondering during this session what some departing members will consider their legacy. When the last newspaper article is written about them, will one of their distinguished accomplishments be that they shut down the Senate for half of the session, for purely partisan and sometimes personal reasons?

For those who won’t be back in either the House or the Senate, will they be remembered because they almost were part of the least productive legislative session in modern history?  If the House had not approved twenty Senate-passed bills on Friday, the day after the Senate quit a day early, this session would have approved only 23 non-budget bills. The record low number in modern times is 31 in 2020, when the pandemic scrambled everything.  What scrambled everything this year was the conservative caucus in the Senate that believed its seven members should tell 17 other Republican Senators and ten Democrats how to run the place.

Our friend Rudi Keller says the average number of bills passed since 1981 was 155.

Senator Emory Melton, who served 28 years from Cassville, once opined that “it is not the bills that pass sometimes; it’s the bills that DON’T pass.”  A lot of bills didn’t pass this year, good ones and bad ones that were sentenced to death, early, by seven of 197 legislators who thought the congressional redistricting map should be about partisan politics rather than about public representation in Government.

We wonder if anyone considers whether a law they sponsored will still be on the books twenty-five years from now.

Will two legislators who talked to each other during debate almost every stay in touch even one year after leaving the capitol?

All glory is fleeting, said Patton.  All glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever, said Napoleon. How many years will elapse before one of their townsfolk is surprised to learn they once served in the Missouri General Assembly?

What’s done is done. The session will be recalled for the stalemate that froze the Senate for half the session.  It will be recalled because one chamber threw in the towel a day early and the other gave up before the statutory deadline on the last day.  Well after any memories of individual accomplishments, this session will be recalled for those things.

Grantland Rice, the dean of sportswriters in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s—–the man who described the Notre Dame backfield as “The Four Horsemen”—wrote a poem titled, The Record:

When the game is done and the players creep

One by one to the League of Sleep,

Deep in the night they may not know

The way of the fight, the fate of the foe.

The cheer that passed, the applauding hands,

Are stilled at last — but the Record stands.

 

The errors made, and the base hits wrought;

Here the race was run! There the fight was fought.

Yet the game is done when the sun sinks low

and one by one from the field they go;

Their day has passed through the Twilight Gates,

But the Scroll is cast — and the Record waits.

 

So take, my lad, what the Great Game gives,

For all men die — but the Record lives.

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading List

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This is the last week of the legislative session.  Time is even more precious now and the risk that some worthwhile things will be talked to death is greatest.

This session already will be remembered as the year the Missouri Senate became a reading club.  A lousy one.

Not only were the choices of reading material poor, the reading of the material was fingernails-on-the-blackboard irritating.

Not only was their choice of material and their delivery of it lifeless, spiritless, colorless, arid, tedious (we could go on—we found a listing of 50 synonyms for “boring”), it set a low bar for being educational.

If unrecoverable hours of members’ lives will be taken from them, they at least should have the opportunity to turn the torturous time into a learning experience.

To solve this problem, we suggest that the Senate set aside funds to hire temporary personnel who have professional reading skills and employ them as part-time reading clerks—overnight reading hours would demand heftier salaries but it would be a small price to pay for making the Senate a more enlightened chamber.  Accompanying this recommendation is a suggested rule change that any group fomenting a filibuster must commit to staying in the chamber for the duration of the readings, thus guaranteeing that SOMEBODY will learn something.

Herewith, then, we offer a reading list for filibusters in hopes that consumption of those hours will provide participants and listeners alike some value.  We regret that we cannot guarantee that the readers can do a better job than they did this year.

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While most of us have read the Declaration or have heard it read, this book is a highly-informative explanation of the care that went into each paragraph and sometimes each word of our nation’s foundational document and how the elements of the Declaration fit together and constitute the legal framework that led to the writing of the United States Constitution.

America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By, by Akil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale College and Yale Law School. Amar is considered “one of America’s pre-eminent legal scholars” who explains why the Constitution does not set forth all of the rights, principles, and procedures that govern our nation. He maintains that the Constitution cannot be understood in textual isolation from a changing world and the laws that change with it.

The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, a former psychology professor at Missouri State University who now leads the Public Religion Research Institute, that examines what is happening because our nation is no longer an evangelical majority white Christian nation and the political and cultural effects of that change. The book explores that change, its implications for the future, and why those who fear the future should instead understand how the positive values of white Christian America will survive.

New World, Inc., by John Butman and Simon Targett. The authors explain that it was commerce, not religious freedom, that was the motivating factor for the earliest explorations and settlements of our nation.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. Ms. Vowell is greatly entertaining in explaining who the Puritans on which so much of our standard history is based really were as human beings—and they were pips and not necessarily pure..

Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, by Joseph Kelly, takes us to the dangerous, desperate times overlooked in our usual histories. We do not often consider that those who came to this side of the Atlantic placed themselves in a hostile world for which most were unsuited to settle with no guarantees that new supplies to sustain them would arrive later  It also explores the papal-approved concept that if a land was not populated by Christians, it was proper—a duty, in fact—for Christians to take that land regardless of the cost to those who inhabited it.

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, by Carrie Gibson.  Long before the Pilgrims and the Puritans arrived on this side of the pond, the Spanish were here as conquerors, settlers, enslavers, missionaries, and adventurers.  But most of our history is based on, as poet Walt Whitman put it, the idea that this nation was founded as a second England.

There are several others that could broaden understanding of who laid the foundation for our country and the opportunities and the missed opportunities to recognize them that shape our attitudes today, and not always in a positive way.

If the Senate, or a small part of it, wants to kill time and possibly beneficial legislation (for somebody) in the process, it should at least contribute to improving the general knowledge of our nation, at least for the Senator who should fill his mind while killing everybody else’s time, and for those who might stick around if there’s something worthwhile to listen to.  And with these books, there is.

We offer these suggestions with no hope that they will amount to anything.

But that doesn’t keep individual members of the legislature—and the public—from becoming better citizens by broadening their understanding of our nation’s roots.

 

 

Premonition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theatre of the Inane

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Elon Musk, insanely wealthy and looking to fend off boredom, has decided he wants to buy Twitter. He says he’ll pay $43 Billion.  Twitter doesn’t want to be bought and thinks it has a poison pill that will keep it Muskless.  He has suggested these are just the opening rounds of what can become an increasingly nasty fight.

We don’t twitt. We don’t Facebook. Both refusals probably are to our disadvantage when it comes to sharing this twice-a-week wisdom. But, frankly, we have a life and it’s not spent focusing on what’s between our thumbs.

When Twitter first came along, the Missourinet news staff was told it was going to have to start using it because it was the coming thing in communication.  The example given of its usefulness was a narrative series (forgive me, friends, I abhor the word “tweets”) of a friend of ours who was going somewhere and reported at various times that he had arrived at the airport, had been checked in, was waiting to board, was boarding, and was sitting on the airplane that was spending too much time packing in the passengers..

The Missourinet staff was unimpressed beyond description.

A few days later, your observer, the now-retired Missourinet news director saw a message from a friend who told the world that she was going to have to stop on her way home from work to get a new sump pump.

The news director quickly dubbed Twitter “the theatre of the inane.”

While Twitter has proven to be useful in distributing news in real time (as well as lies, conspiracies, accusations, and general trash), it still is awash in inanities.

Representative Harry Yates of St. Joseph would not have liked Twitter if it had existed in his day. He introduced a bill in the 1925 legislative session making gossip and scandal-mongering a criminal offense.   He proposed fines of ten to one-hundred dollars or a ten-to-fifty day jail sentence for anyone “maliciously repeating or communicating any false rumor or slander detrimental or harmful to another person.”

Yates would, of course, be apoplectic about Facebook.

His bill never made it into the statute books. It had some obviously serious First Amendment problems. And worse yet, if people couldn’t gossip or be mongers of scandals, there would be little to talk about, especially at the Missouri Capitol.  The place is a hothouse for gossip of varying degress of veracity.

But then again, imagine how nice would be the Silence of the Thumbs, at least in some places, if Representative Yates had succeeded.

 

A Reason to Still Like Ike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morbid Bracketology

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

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

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

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

Here is this year’s Morbid Madness Bracket;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hypocrisy of Term Limits

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

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

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

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

They just threw away their votes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what does that say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Obit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Now, THAT’S an obituary!

Two Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there is a way to improve this system?

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

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

 

The Whirlwind

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This year is the thirtieth anniversary of two major decisions made by Missouri voters.  One has proven itself to be a disaster for Missouri’s political system and the other has led to proof of the fallibility of the first.

Missouri voters hypocritically approved legislative term limits with a 75 percent favorable vote on November 3, 1992.

On the same day, Missourians went 62 percent in favor of what was then called “riverboat gambling.”

These two events have become a toxic political brew in our system of government.

In today’s discussion we are going to look at term limits.  Later we will discuss casino gambling.

The Old Testament minor prophet Hosea, a contemporary of more important prophets Isaiah and Micah, warned metaphorically of the downfall of Israel for its various sins—lying, murder, idolatry, and covetousness, along with spiritual and physical adultery, these latter two characteristics personally experienced by Hosea and his wife Gomer.  Gomer carried on with another man.  The faithful Hosea accused Israel of spiritual adultery.

He warned that Israel and Judah would fall:

“They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour.”

Term limits was the wind.  We are reaping the whirlwind in the Missouri General Assembly—most particularly in the Missouri Senate.  But the term limits whirlwind is not just blowing in the Senate which heads towards its spring break at the end of this week with only one bill approved in weeks of division, derision and disrespect. It is felt less in the House where its impact is less visible because it is more controlled.

It rages in the Senate where unlimited debate among the 34 members is still considered a virtue—as it should be if members respected it more than they abuse it.  The House has rules that are necessary in a chamber of 163 members to limit the time a member may speak on an issue.

The public, which has little interest in the more subtle or arcane factors of lawmaking, bought the idea that politicians should be limited to a maximum of eight years in the House and eight in the Senate because politicians are basically—

Crooked.

—Except for their own representative or senator.  While voting to limit House members to four terms and Senate members to two terms, many of those 1992 voters were electing their Representatives and Senators to terms five or three in many districts.

The voters voted to restrict their own right to vote when they for term limits.  This year, voters in will be prohibited from considering whether five of their Senators deserve a third term. In most of those cases, those Senators will never again have the privilege of representing their citizens on the floors of the House or the Senate.  Voters in 1992, most of whom do not live in those senatorial districts, decided these five are no longer fit to serve regardless of how distinguished their work might have been.

But terms limits is more dangerous than that.

Those of us who voted in that election were warned that term limits would destroy the institutional memory that is vital to lawmaking. Senior lawmakers who knew the value of respecting the other side of the aisle, of knowing that today’s enemy is tomorrow’s friend, who understood that collegiality benefitted the people of Missouri more than hostility, disappeared.  With no one to teach newcomers the importance of legislative control of the lawmaking process, that control passed to outsiders.

I watched the first crumbling of the legislative process.  The first piece fell the first time I heard the sponsor of a bill ask a colleague offering an amendment, “Have you run this past so-and-so in the hall?,”  clearly an indication that a blessing from a lobbyist (lobbyists are not allowed within the floor of the chambers during debate) was necessary for acceptance of the amendment.

Later as cell phones became more ubiquitous, I watched debaters with their cellphone in their hands checking for text messages that influenced the debate.  Technology has put the lobbyists in the chambers.

There also have been other indications that much of the power of lawmaking has shifted from the bests interests of constituents being argued on the floors of the House and Senate to the best interests of those in the hallways being transmitted into the discussion from outside.

I watched the disappearance of lawmakers capable of amendments written by hand during the debate, replaced by pauses in debate so a legislative staff member could write what he or she was asked to write—the origin of the amendment sometimes in a text message from outside.

In the entire first half of this legislative session, only one bill has been approved by both chambers and sent to the governor. Just one.

The wind the voters sowed in 1992 is the whirlwind of 2022 and in the splintered and often dedlocked Missouri Senate, at least, (and in the Congress as well) “The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour.”

And legislative bodies—Congress and state assemblies alike—seem unwilling to prove they serve above the low regard the public has for them.