Category Archives: newspapers

Keep Them Ignorant and Pay the Cost

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I was in Romania a little more than a year after the Iron Curtain fell and the people of Romania revolted against one of the most oppressive regimes that had been behind it. The Romanian Revolution was part of a historic period when unrest boiled over in several former Iron Curtain Countries that were still controlled by dictators—-it was the same year of the Tiananmen Square Protests in China that did not turn out as well.

In December of 1989, a church leader’s speech against the government triggered huge protests in Timisoara, which led to a military crackdown under Premier Nicolai Ceausescu (Chow-chess-kew).  He made a speech from his palace, which wasn’t too far from the hotel where I later stayed, and from the Hall of the People where I lectured and interacted with young journalists wanting to learn how to be free journalists.

The crowd at Ceausescu’s speech began booing and chanting “Timisoara!”

The military turned on him. Ceausescu and his wife, who also was the Deputy Prime Minister were driven out of the palace and captured by some of the angry citizens. They were take into some woods near Bucharest and shot to death on Christmas.

A new government took over. The death penalty was abolished. An election was held the next May and the new government was overwhelmingly approved and quickly moved to enact democratic reforms.

While I was there, Moldova declared its independence from the Soviet Union. I remember seeing people sitting in their cars listening to reports of what was happening in their neighboring Soviet satellite, now a free country.  It was of particular interest because many of the people in Moldova are of Romanian ancestry.

Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007.

I have thought often of the people of Romania—and of Poland, where I did seminars in Warsaw after traveling from Bucharest—as I have watched Ukraine hold on against Vladimir Putin’s major effort to reassemble the USSR and I know from those long-ago days that the people of Romania and Poland are living with uncertainty, knowing that if Putin wins in Ukraine, Moldova and Romania and Poland might be next.

All of this is the long way around another impression I had in Bucharest, where my hotel, still displaying bullet marks in its stone walls, once was a nice hotel in the pre-Communist times but now was reminiscent of a 1950s hotel that had never been updated.  My room had a big square television set, black and white, and there were only two or three channels, all former government-run stations, none of which told viewers much about the outside world or even about Romania.

Were it not for a small Radio Shack shortwave radio I had brought with me to listen to the Voice of America, I would have been ignorant of what was happening in Romania and Poland, in Europe, and in the word. The Iron Curtain was down. But the window of open information was still being opened.

You will understand, then, why I watch the Trump administration’s increasing efforts to choke off the free flow of information and discussion in this country whether it is by threatening broadcast licenses or the recent despicable action by the Secretary of Defense (Sorry, Donald, I’m not going to use your word for the department any more than I am going to call the Gulf of Mexico by the name  you demand it be called).

A few days ago, somebody posted this sign in the correspondents’ corridor near the Pentagon press room.  

“Journalism is not a crime.”  To Pete Hegseth and his boss, Donald Trump, it would be, complete with prison sentences, if they could get away with it.  And it would not surprise me if Trump someday accuses a particularly persistent reporter doing the job reporters must do in a free society with treason or some other crime.

Trump heartily endorses Hegseth’s ban on reporters doing stories questioning what he says and does, and banning those who do not agree to be just a mouthpiece for Hegseth’s part of the administration. “I think he finds the press to be very disruptive in terms of world peace,” said the man who calls people such as me “enemies of the people.”   He went on, “The press is very dishonest.”

Only one news organization is now accredited by the Pentagon, The One America News Network, an organization that wants to curry a lot of favor with Trump.  Even other networks that lean more to the right  such as FOX, the Washington Post, and NewsMax  have refused to abide by Hegseth’s rules to limit the flow of information to only that which is politically favorable.

It’s another effort to keep the people at large ignorant not just of what is happening but who is making it happen, often for their own great benefit.

The thing about trying to repress journalism in this country is that it just makes journalists work harder. But if Trump/Hegseth think they can control the flow of information to the public in this country, they are mistaken. We will learn of their increased militarism at home and abroad no matter how many press room doors are closed in however many places.

Trump knows his policies have turned many of his supporters away from him. Newsweek reported last week that every swing state—-the ones he constantly interrupts his speeches to brag about carrying in ’24—is now against him. He’s -8 in Wisconsin, underwater by five points in Michigan, down by three in Nevada and North Carolina. He’s minus-2 in Pennsylvania and Arizona and minus-1 in Georgia.

You might not like to listen to or see CNN or MSNBC or any of the three over the air major networks and I’m not saying you should like them. But this nation was great long before the MAGA crowd came along and decided greatness should be determined not by the people but by one person. And he seems determined every day to burnish his future credentials as the worst president in American history. Taking abusive steps to shut off any reporter questioning his administration’s actions or his personal statements will not go well.

It is never good to poke a Tiger with a stick.

The swing states are sending a message that Trump can bluster about and lie about his own magnificent popularity. But a lot of people aren’t buying his garbage anymore.

We aren’t going to see an Army revolt and military overthrow of our government, as has happened in many countries but we have to ask how far he can push our military without the first blowup.

He’s not going to be taken to the woods, Ceausescu-style.  But the people are stirring; many are up-to-here with this man and his cronies.  The “No Kings” movement is growing. His polls are tanking. He is deathly afraid that a measure of political justice will be brought down upon him after next year’s elections, which might bring a measure of political justice down on a political party that, like Ceausescu’s loyalists, pays the price for blindly following and defending him.

He will do anything to keep journalists from their rounds, from questioning his policies, his actions, his intimidations, his lies, his business dealings as President, his character–

He will fail.  Dictators always fail. I saw the past, the present, and got a glimpse of the future in those days in Romania and in Poland. It is in my mind as I watch our president’s grasp for absolute power and the people’s growing disgust of it.

Our system provides for a peaceful overthrow of a tyrant. History shows the people will use whatever means their system gives them to do just that.

Carl Sandburg:

The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it….

Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

…In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”

The poem is called “The People, Yes.”   We must find strength in one another to resist the worst that he can do.  He wants us to forget that long ago this country placed its faith in the concept that government flows from the consent of the governed.

But in this darkness with our great bundle of grief, we know and more are coming to know and the people are starting to march, for we are “the people so peculiar in renewal and comeback.”

That is the spirit behind the “No Kings” protests.

And neither National Guard troops invading other states nor goons from ICE snatching people from our streets can stop that march.

It has become, to borrow a phrase from another purpose and another time, “too big to fail.”

 

The Repetition of History

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Philosopher George Santayana’s most famous quotation, taken from his Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress came to mind the other day while I was doing some research about former Jefferson City Mayor C.W. Thomas, who suggested 100 years ago this year that Jefferson City build a convention center.

But he died before that could happen. A few months later the stock market collapsed and the Great Depression gripped our country until World War II created the economy that got us out of it. By he time the Greatest Generation had led us to a country that was a positive example to the rest of the world, Cecil Thomas and his vision had been forgotten.

Our mayor badly wants to see a convention center built. And many of us are watching with dismay as our greatness is being destroyed, not returned.

Santayana wrote more than a century ago:

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I came across this editorial published March 19, 1920 in The Central Missourian, a Democrat newspaper published in the nearby town of Russellville that raises important questions that seem quite contemporary.

A Party Without Conviction

The Republican party has always been a party of expediency, for all its great claim to consequential policies and principles. Its affairs have usually been governed by men of rather lax convictions, who would trade anything for power. In former years, when the tariff fetish was set in the central altar of all apostles of political buncombe, nothing counted save an opportunity to promote the tariff policies demanded by the masters of Republicanism, Men and measures went by the board in the continuous and unremitting fight for prohibitive schedules and restrictive customs laws. Various bugaboos were used at different times to frighten the people, but there was always the tariff behind the whole Republican program.

Anything served to win with, if the manufacturers might control the tariff. But there came a time when the tariff schedules, mounting higher with every revision, fell of their own weight, and the progressive movement in the Republican party began, with great promise, at first, under sincere leadership. Then arose the greatest opportunist of them all, with all due respect, Colonel Roosevelt. He was more flexible of mind than the stand-pat leaders. He believed in the tariff, but he wanted four years more in the Presidency, and was willing to turn free trader, if need be, to win.

He capitalized the dissatisfaction of the Republican masses, and espoused the progressive tendencies of the times, sweeping aside the men whose earnest fights in Congress had built up the movement against the reactionaries. The Colonel could not rule, so he wrecked. For the first time in history the stand-pat forces had refused to compromise, in order that the party might win. In 1916, the Republican party had no issue, it had no leader save Roosevelt, and he was both feared and hated by the inner circle. So it invaded the United States Supreme Court and drafted Justice Hughes, concerning whom neither the country nor the leaders knew overly much.

The West deserted the camp, for the West had taken seriously the progressive movement, and, with native shrewdness, the West discerned the wolves of stand-pattism behind the Hughes mask., The expedientists lost their most important battle. The same situation is developing in 1920. The Republican party has no program. no policy, no leadership. And there are even disputes among the chief manipulators as to what considerations of expediency may dictate.

Meanwhile, candidacies of no special distinction, and without a particle of evidence of popular enthusiasm in any direction. are developing and delegates are being chosen. What will the Republican party stand for? No man can tell. What will the candidate represent? Nothing, except the desire of the Republican party to get into power and run the government, which it regards as its vested right. The candidate is likely to be merely a stuffed shirt, the platform a set of innocuous and meaningless phrases.

The Republican party must think the American people are a lot of weak-minded children, petulant, irritable and altogether foolish.

*****

“A tariff as a weapon for defense is wanted,” declared General Wood in his St. Louis speech. There is something too vague about this declaration to warrant much discussion, like nearly all of the utterances of the General, when he gets away from military matters. Does the General know that almost all of our commercial treaties with foreign countries forbid discriminatory duties, and provide that our tariffs shall be levied equally against the products of all nations? How then, could the tariff be used as a weapon of defense, or offense, either, so far as that goes? Then the General says we should have a tariff to “protect American industries that are essential to America, not a tariff to protect industries which are artificial and whose protection adds to the living cost of our people.” The General is on dangerous ground and might give away the whole Republican argument if this suggestion should be carried to its logical conclusion.

Will George be proven correct more than a century after this observation?  Perhaps the answer is whether, in 2025, WE are the weak-minded children, petulant, irritable and altogether foolish or whether we recognize that we are led by someone who is.

The Theory

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Moderator: I was looking at one of Wylie Miller’s “Non Sequitur” comics the other day it inspired me. Look at this:

So we’re going to play a game called Conspiracy Theory.  Let’s make one up, right here.  All five of us around this table.  Each of us contributes one “fact” with the next person building on that “fact” until we have a theory we can float out there.

Person One: How about this? Donald Trump isn’t the real President.

Person Two:  He did win the office in an election, but—

Person Three: He’s just a figurehead!

Moderator: Wait a minute.  Figurehead?

Person Four: I think I agree. Yeah, he’s just the guy out front but somebody else is really pulling his strings.  Think of all the times he has said, “I don’t know” when he’s been asked questions by the press. And just recently when somebody asked him who stopped arms shipments to Ukraine, he said, “I don’t know. You tell me.”  We need to point a finger at someone we can pass off as the string-puller.

Person One:  Hmmm.  Why don’t we “suggest” it’s Stephen Miller?

Moderator: Wow!  That’s an interesting road to go down. How can we cook up something to explain that?

Person Two: Well, what about we say that Miller is dreaming up all of this deportation business.  I mean, he recently tried to explain how much better the country would be if we got rid of all of the immigrants. Like, “You would be able to see a doctor in an emergency room right away.” He was talking about how Los Angeles would be better but aren’t there emergency rooms all over the country that would be better off if we didn’t have immigrants falling off of roofs or burning themselves in a Mexican restaurant kitchen, or having a heart attack while picking lettuce on a 110-degree day? Stuff like that.

Person Three: Y’know, he also talked about schools. He said, “Your kids would go to a public school that had more money than they know what to do with.”

Person Four: And he also said “Classrooms would be half the size. Students who have special needs would get all the attention that they needed.” Of course, all of this was being said about the same time the administration was withholding tons of money for summer programs and other school things.

Person Two: Do you think his immigration talk was just a smokescreen to distract attention from the school forecasting?

Person Four: Interesting suggestion.

Moderator:  All of the claims are provable nonsense, of course. And here in Missouri, a lot of school funding is based on attendance numbers so that might mean LESS money for Missouri schools if there are fewer students.

Person One: And don’t forget: “There would be no fentanyl, there would be no drug deaths.”

Person Three: None?

Person One: That’s what he said.

Moderator: Thanks for mentioning that. It sure sounds like the kind of stuff Trump actually has said.  It’s also not true, but truth and conspiracy theories are incompatible. So, we need to make sure we say this thing about Miller often enough that people will think, “If they keep saying it, it has to be right.”

Person Two:  Those things do sound like stuff he might cook up to feed Trump to say during one of his cabinet meetings or maybe during a graduation speech somewhere.  Trump does like to be given a fact that he can blow up into a major talking point even if he doesn’t know what the fact is all about—-and then keep repeating it during his interminable public speeches.

Person Three: Speaking of feeding Trump things.  D’you think he really reads the executive orders he signs?  I don’t. Somebody announces what the thing is about and then gives it to Trump who signs the document, holds it up for the photo ops, then waits for somebody to tell him what’s in the next one. Somebody else clearly writes the things—the spelling and capitalization are all properly done and I haven’t heard yet that any of them end with MAGA!

Person One: And there are so many of them!  You can’t tell me that he personally signs all of them. We just see the ones he does on television. Why don’t we suggest the Trump autopen is in Miller’s office?

Person Four:  Good point. I’ve got another one. His speeches. He reads his prepared remarks as if he hasn’t seen them before and then goes off-script with some whoppers in his usual style for several minutes and then might drift back to the prepared remarks.  It must drive people like Miller crazy when he goes off the reservation like that. But we can make the case that he doesn’t sound like he knows what he’s talking about when he’s on-script because he’s just mouthing words provided by Miller until he thinks he can make the point better if he mixes it in with ad-libbed revenge language or something.

Person One: You’re right. The prepared stuff sounds too rational to be Trump’s real words and when he reads it off the teleprompter it sounds as if he’s never seen it before. It’s not until he goes off on a tangent that we get the real Trump and that makes people forget what somebody prepared for him. I think that makes our theory stronger.

Person Two: Hold on a minute. We’re kind of drifting away from creating a well-rounded theory here.  Let me suggest this: Stephen Miller actually runs Donald Trump.

Person Four: Could we suggest he’s a shape shifter and he actually IS Donald Trump?

Person One: That’s over the edge, I think—although people who dress up as Wookies might believe it.

Person Three: Getting back to our point. Maybe we can suggest it’s the kind of stuff that Trump will embellish to even more outlandish dimensions in his speeches or cabinet meetings, which will let the media think he’s the one most loudly pushing this stuff.

Person Four:  But we say he’s not, that the main thing he’s interested in is becoming wealthier so he lets Miller run the presidency and create quotes while Trump cooks up new ways to make more money

Person Two: And playing golf.

Person Four: And playing golf.  AND getting a gift airplane he can repaint to look like Air Force One and take it home as a souvenir when he leaves office.

Moderator: We’re drifting off topic again, folks. Let’s get back to the Trump-as-front-man for Miller theory.

Person Two: What else do we have?

Person Three: Well, there’s Jeffrey Epstein and Vladimir Putin.

Moderator: That’s an interesting pairing. But I think that’s going to take some work before we put it out there.  Remember, Trump has been accusing Ukraine of starting that war and he browbeat Zelinsky during that Oval Office embarrassment and now Trump has figured out that Putin doesn’t care what he says.  We need to spend some time figuring out how Miller can be behind that.

Person Three: How about Epstein?

Person Two: Oh, Lord, I’m not sure we can add anything to that mess. Let’s leave that to Glenn Beck. He has five theories and we don’t want to crowd the field. He’s creative enough to handle that himself and we should let nature take its course on that one. If there are a half-dozen conspiracy theories around, things will be confused enough that MAGA people can take their picks.

Sooner or later that drawing of the woman is going to leak out, if there really is one. However, even without that, we do know that Trump has used his magic marker to draw things for auctions as well as for things other than signing executive orders and re-drawing weather maps. So he and his marker are certainly capable of a lot of things. But we need to talk more about that.

Moderator: Listen, we shouldn’t get too complicated with our theory.  The best conspiracy theory is a simple one that susceptible minds—the gullible idiots—can easily latch onto. We don’t want to get over the heads of those people.

Person One: That’s a good point. Why don’t we just go out there with the “Trump is just a front man” theory. The mainline media will pummel that possum flat and the Trumpers will deny it. But a few of them might think, “Maybe there’s something there.” We use this as our first theory to weaken the obsessive support Trump has from a lot of people and then we flesh out some of the other things we’ve kicked around or that might come up.

Person Two: We could do a lot with swollen ankles, you know.

Person Three:  Oooh, great idea.  Maybe we can suggest that problems with blood flow to his legs can be an indication of problems with blood flow to the brain.

Person Four: What makes you think that would work?  The medical profession probably wouldn’t support it?

Person One: I think it COULD work. With RFK Jr., running the country’s health agency, a lot of the public might buy the brain vein idea and probably some other theory we can develop—like Trump wearing a catheter. That could be a good one, too.

Person Two: What could we do with his bald spot?

Moderator (ignoring Peron Two): Okay, I think we need to stop before we go farther off the deep end. We’ve come up with some great ideas. Let’s get together in the next few days and polish our first one before we send it to MSNBC where Rachel and Chris can spend a week or more developing it for us.  We probably should make sure FOX hears about it, too, so they can interview Trump whose denials and threats will only add credence to our theory.

Person Four: Don’t forget to give it to One America and Newsmax. They won’t be able to ignore it and we’ll get even more exposure when they call it a hoax.

Moderator: Now, listen.  You raised the issue of threats. We have to be careful so that nobody knows where this came from. We don’t want to get sued by Trump. Of course, we don’t have nearly enough money to make it worth his while but that doesn’t stop him.  We’re just innocent private citizens having a little fun at his expense.

Person Two: You know, of course, that we wouldn’t have to worry about such things if Trump had a sense of humor.

Moderator: Yeah.  Well…….

(Non Sequitur by Wylie Miller is distributed by Andrews McMeal syndicate.)

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The King of the World

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The big black limousine pulls to the curb and out steps a man in a pin-stripe suit, his shiny dark hair slicked back, a bulge on the left side of his coat indicating there’s something behind the handkerchief poking up from the pocket.

He looks around, warily, the toothpick shifting to the other side of his mouth, as he swaggers inside.

His cold, piercing eyes underline his words:

“Nice little university you got here.  Be unfortunate if something happened to it.”  (The implication is clear that it better toe the organization line or something, perhaps several hundred million dollars worth of business, will disappear.)

Or:

“Nice little museum you got here.  We’d like you to change it for us.” (There is a “or else’’ understood in his request.”)

“Nice little law firm you got here.  You crossed the boss one too many times. We’re gonna shut you down.” (No reason for the boss to be subtle about it.)

With some strokes of his pen that produce an unreadable signature, the boss assumes powers to extort tribute from numerous targets, the congress, the law, and the courts be damned.

One of his biggest a few days ago asserts the power to cut off funding for the Smithsonian Institution if it continues exhibits that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

And who decides what those programs are?  Who decides what policies degrade shared American values—values apparently established by one man?

Does this mean closing the Museum of the American Indian? The African-American Museum?  The Holocaust Museum?  And the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art with all of its meaningless modernist stuff?

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, the third African American elected to a governorship in
our country calls the effort “disrespectful” and told an interviewer this weekend, “Loving your country does not mean dismantling those who have helped to make this country so powerful and make America so unique in world history in the first place.” Moore is the third black governor in American history, the first in Maryland.

Trump’s says, “Museums in our nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn instead of being “subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history”

That’s Boss Trump’s job.

He also wants to influence what we can read. He has ordered the Institution of Museum and Library Services to be eliminated. That organization provides support for libraries and museums in Missouri and the other 49 states. Can’t have “divisive” things in our libraries that serve diverse audiences.

He has set up the Federal Communications Commission to become a censor of news and entertainment programs.  One of the first targets is Disney and its ABC News unit and their diversity and inclusion practices.  Chairman Brendan Carr says he wants to make sure ABC “ends any and all discriminatory initiatives in substance, not just name,” and that he wants to make sure ABC has “complied at all times with applicable FCC regulations.”  And what about FOX and OAN, One America Network, that is known for its fawning over all things Trump while FOX has had the temerity from time to time to challenge him?  Don’t look for Trump’s FCC to censor OAN, but FOX is no longer above suspicion.

ABC has become just another target in his war on the diversity of voices available to Americans. And he has shut down the Voice of America, greatest international representation of American values, especially in countries under dictatorial governments.

We should be very frightened of his belief he can censor or shut down news organizations that don’t buy his lies.

He has taken over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts so that the only acts it can host are those that fit his definition of “American values.”

He wants to rewrite our history, especially eliminating references to times that non-whites have achieved breakthroughs in a white male-dominated society.

His rabid dog-like attacks on DEI has intimidated NASA into dropping its commitment to flying  the first person of color and the first woman on the moon, had led the Defense Department to eliminate postings about Jackie Robinson’s service during WWII, Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Pima Indian Ira Hayes, who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima.

The fact-checking website SNOPES got an email from Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot proclaiming, As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the service’s core warfighting mission. The code-talkers website was later restored to the Pentagon website, as were the stories of Major General Charles Calvin Rogers, 1970 black Medal of Honor recipient and Ira Hayes, who was at Iwo Jima.

And don’t forget the silliness of the removal from the internet of the Enola Gay, the first plane to drop an atomic bomb on Japan===because the word “gay” was used in the plane’s name.

And now he thinks he can order European countries to follow this blatantly discriminatory cleansing of our history. He has sent a letter to some large European companies that supply services to our government threatening them unless they adopt his DEI strategy, says The Financial Times.

Like Jack Dawson standing against the railing on the bow of the Titanic and shouting, “I’m King of the World!” the Don, not content with being the Despot of the United States, is dedicated to running the world.

Give me a major segment of your economy to pay off what I consider loans, he has told Ukraine, and I will make peace—a demand and a boast that must include a willing third partner who is proclaimed as a good friend but who has no interest in a peace.

“Pay economic blackmail,” says the Don, not realizing countries don’t pay tariffs but his own citizens will, “and I will let you do business in this country,” while the other countries are beginning to grow closer together and are beginning to plan for themselves instead of bowing to his demands.

He wants Canada and he wants Greenland, the feelings of the people living there notwithstanding in his quest for domination.

However, the people of Greenland should be breathing easier now that “Little Me” Vance has told them the Don will not use the military, his national muscle, to take over their island. He has urged them to embrace “self determination,” apparently failing to understand the Greenlanders long ago determined for themselves that they want to be aligned with Denmark and they don’t want to be under the Don’s “protection,” when all he really cares about are the country’s mineral deposits. “We think we’re going to be able to cut a deal, Donald-Trump style, to ensure the security of this territory,” said Vance to people who think Denmark has done a pretty good job of protecting them from—-China? And Russia, which is far more interested in restoring the Soviet Union and absorbing all of Europe eventually with little apparent interests in little Greenland?

So there he is, the Don standing on the prow of our Ship of State proclaiming himself King of the World.

We know what happened to Jack Dawson and the ship that was once thought to be unsinkable.

Kind of like our Ship of State.

Others in the world can see the rip in the side of the hull caused by Executive Order icebergs.  Others in the world are seeing our great Ship of State going down by the bow.

Some Republicans are starting to wonder if there are lifeboats enough for them.

There aren’t.

And the water is growing colder.

Cartoon Man/Man as Cartoon

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Editorial cartoonists occupy a unique position in American journalism.  They can comfort. They can interpret. They can inform. They can provoke.

They can capture a moment in our national existence in a way that is memorable. They can show in their work things we mortals grasp for words to express.  Steve Burns, a Pulitzer-Prize winning children’s book author, works for the San Diego Union Tribune.

A few days ago, he captured an image of the American economy that is not what our president promised in his campaign it would be. “Stocks Down,” he called it.

It’s the most creative illustration I have seen of our president and the times he has brought down upon us.

Burns’ cartoons are syndicated nationally by Creators Syndicate.

We hope he can do another portrait someday of our president that reverses the lines, not because we want him to succeed but because we want our nation to prosper no matter what he eventually does to it.

Hats off to Steve Burns who uniquely captures this moment for our nation.

(Image credit: Creators Syndicate March 14, 2025)

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Clifton and Ambrose 

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Clifton Fadiman, an author, critic, editor, and radio and television personality, wrote an essay on Ambrose Bierce a long time ago.  I read it the other evening.  A forgotten literary critic writing about a forgotten social critic.

Bierce was a short story writer, a poet, a Civil War veteran best known for his short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and whose book The Devil’s Dictionary, is considered one of the greatest literary masterpieces in American history.

–“Politics: a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

–“Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”  

–“Corporations: an ingenious device for obtaining profit without responsibility.”

—Ambrose Bierce

Clifton Fadiman, who died at the age of 95 in 1999, was the Chief Editor for the publishing house of Simon and Schuster. For eleven years he was the book editor of New Yorker magazine.  From 1938 into 1948 he hosted the radio program “Information Please.”  He was the host of several shows in the early days of television. For many years he was one of those who picked the selections for the Book of the Month Club.

–“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before, you see more in you than there was before.”

–“There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.” 

–“My son is 7 years old. I am 54.  It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community. I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is.  I don’t want to be a pal, I want to be a father.”

—Clifton Fadiman

Fadiman called Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913 when he was about 71 years old, a misanthrope (somebody who dislikes humankind and avoids human society, says one definition). He was a drummer boy at the start of the Civil War and was a Lieutenant, brevet (temporary) Major, at the end. He got into newspapering in San Francisco, spent a few years in London, and became known for what Fadiman calls “slashing journalism.”  Friends and critics alike sometimes referred to him as “Bitter Bierce.”

Fadiman’s essay on Bierce includes this appraisal of literature in our country:

The dominating tendency of American literature and social thought, from Benjamin Franklin to Sinclair Lewis, has been optimistic.  It has believed in man, it has believed in American man.  It has at times been satirical and even bitter—but not negative.  It gave the world the positive statements of the Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, Emerson, Whitman, William James, Henry George, John Dewey.  This has been the stronger current. But along with it there has coursed a narrower current, the shadowed stream of pessimism. Perhaps its obscure source lies in the southern philosophers of slavery or in the bleak hell-fire morality of early puritan divines like Michael Wigglesworth and Jonathan Edwards. It flows hesitantly in Hawthorne, with fury in Moby Dick and Pierre, with many a subtle meander in the dark symbolisms of Poe.  It may appear in part of a writer (the Mark Twain of “The mysterious Stranger” and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.”) and not in the whole of him.  You may trace it in an out-of-the-main-stream philosopher such as Thorstein Veblen. You will find it in the thoughts of H. L. Mencken and the stories of Ring Lardner.  And you will see it plain, naked, naïve, and powerful in the strange fables of Ambrose Bierce.

Thorstein Veblen, by the way, taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia for a while.

We found ourselves wondering as we read Fadiman’s assessment of literature and his portrait of Bierce what both would think today about literature and the world.  Even in the middle of the last century when Fadiman wrote his essay, he felt Bierce would look at the tragedies and atrocities of that time and would have been “afforded…a satisfaction deeper and more bitter than that which he drew from the relatively paltry horrors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…The current scene would have filled him with so pure a pleasure.”

Some other thoughts from Bierce:

—History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

—If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it. 

—Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.

And a few more from Fadiman:

—A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull. It may be naive. It may be oversophisticated, yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality. 

—There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning’s books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

—If you want to feel at home, stay at home.

—We are all citizens of history. 

—There are two kinds of writers, the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones who can only give you themselves.

And how would they have assessed today’s American optimism/pessimism and the events of our world?

—“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography”

—Bierce

And Fadiman:

–“A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.”

–“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

We close with an observation from Bierce, wondering how much more acidic he would be with a certain device today:

–“Telephone, n: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.” 

Creating News Deserts 

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A Facebook comment from Moberly noted last week: “The Moberly Monitor-Index (once a daily, now a weekly) made a brief reference to the situation on its Facebook account today as well, but I didn’t see anything on its website. Aside from any TV coverage from Columbia, that’s going to be the only local news outlet henceforth.”

The comment was about Alpha Media’s layoffs of all on-air employees at radio stations in Moberly, turning the station into just another satellite-provided bunch of programs with no local relevance.

The comment points to another alarming trend—the death of the local newspaper.

Small and medium-market newspapers have been swallowed up by Gatehouse (or as a friend of mine from one of those newspapers calls it, “Guthouse”) Media, including the Gannett chain.  Gatehouse now uses that name—Gannett, and other newspaper conglomerates.

The practice has been to buy small or medium market newspapers, hollow out the staffs, turn dailies into weeklies and weeklies into digital products as much as possible, again to the detriment of the local markets but to the great financial benefit of the corporation.

With gutted local newspapers and gutted local radio stations, we are seeing more and more news deserts being created.

At a time when we as a nation and we as a state desperately need more eyes on newsmakers and more diverse voices in our social dialogue—and more attention to local issues—we are getting less and what we are getting shows no industrial responsibility to giving consumers diverse viewpoints.

The corporate monopolization of our mass media is one of the greatest threats our country faces but one that gets little public attention.

More than a century ago this nation was crippled by the power of trusts, whether it was steel or petroleum or transportation trusts (even baking powder, which triggered Missouri’s biggest political scandal early in the last century) that limited competition  and put acquisition of corporate wealth above public interest, convenience, and necessity in so many parts of American life.

We are there again and media control is one of the most dangerous of all of those trusts.  Dwindling sources of information and increasing control of the remaining sources increases our national weakness.

An ignorant nation cannot be a free nation. And Alpha and Gannett/Gatehouse and their ilk are among the corporations that are controlling more and more of our information sources and reducing local service, replacing it with national voices that probably could not point to a map and show you where Festus, Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon or Bethany Missouri are.

Some degree of re-regulation of broadcasting is warranted requiring meeting a certain level of local responsibility. Some degree of trust-busting to provide an opportunity for more independence of opinion in our media is increasingly necessary.

While government can play a role—a carefully modulated role—in these ares is not beyond consideration, the ultimate responsibility for demanding greater diversity in media voces lies with the listeners, readers, and viewers of our electronic communications.

Letters to the FCC and to congressional delegations from places like these communities can carry some weight in Washington.  Boycotts from local advertisers, many of whom already rely on direct-mail or independent internet messaging, can carry weight with corporate broadcasting owners.

Newspaper corporations have one important thing that broadcasters do not have—the First Amendment. Government control of newspapers, as the FCC exerts licensing control over broadcasters, cannot exist and should not exist.

How anti-trust laws could be applied to newspaper conglomerates will be a difficult conversation, even more difficult than the conversations about internet abuses, although similar when the First Amendment enters the discussion.

Nonetheless, all of us are victims of those who control increasing percentages of our media outlets and see no responsibility for diversity of thought and opinion or of local involvement. We are victims only so long as we allow ourselves to be victims, only so long as we refuse to seek out challenges to our own ideas.

Why should we fear that?  Why should we let others tell us what to think and regard those who think differently as enemies?

The trusts were broken when they became so oppressive that the public forced governments to act.

We have reached that point now in our information industry. And we should not accept it.