Category Archives: people

Just the facts, ma’am*

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Well, we’ve endured two more political conventions, their tiresome tirades, their excessive exaggerations, their profound puffery, their ferocious flag-waving, their multiple misstatements, and sometimes their litany of lies.

We want to think those we root for in their pursuits of public office are pure in thought, word, and deed.  But we know better.  And we would be better if we were unafraid to challenge them, even those we support, when they mislead us.

One of the greatest responsibilities we have as citizens is to demand truth from those who seek our votes and our money. But experience shows we citizens fail to meet those responsibilities time after time.

It would be nice to say our candidates owe us their integrity.  But politics doesn’t work that way. Integrity often must be forced by those who are picking the men and women who will lead them.

So our conventions are finished. Dancing With the Candidates is down to the finals. Now it’s not Dancing with the Candidates.  It’s a World Wrestling Federation match. In the mud.

No, it isn’t.  It’s more real.

It’s a street fight until November 3. A sweaty, nasty, bloody, anything-goes brawl.

It’s too bad that we who want to be led will too much expect too little of those who want to lead.

One thing is abundantly clear after the conventions.  The busiest people in the country for the next few weeks will be:

Fact-checkers.

We should pay attention to them. We should know when the people who want to be (presumably) the most powerful person in the world aren’t shooting straight with us.  We should notice those who spout conspiracy theories—-and they seem to be more outlandish every day.  Watch out for those who say, “I have heard…” and those who, when challenged to prove their statements say, “I’ll let you know later.”

More than ever, this is a time to tell our candidates, “Prove it,” or because we’re Missourians, “Show me the proof.”

Conservative organizations are going to be especially watchful of liberal candidates. Liberal organizations are going to be especially watchful of conservative candidates.  We should pay attention to both of them.  We should pay attention to those doing their analysis from the middle. And in the end we should think for ourselves despite the plentitude of loud voices on our airwaves telling us they can think for us.  No, they can’t—unless we let them. Have enough citizen responsibility to think for yourself.

There will be carloads of commercials that wave at truth from a distance. Don’t believe them.

There already have been manipulated videos on our social media. Question them.  Better yet, turn off the social media except for person-to-person communication with people you know.

We’ll get all kinds of flyers in the mail that are not worth the postage that sent them.  Recognize them for what they are. Fill up your recycling bins with them.

It will be easy to throw up our hands, abandon our responsibilities to ourselves and to our neighbors, and just mark a ballot so we can say we voted.

Congratulations.  You just trashed your country. Or your state. Or your city.  You just put it in a big blue plastic container and rolled it out to the curb.

CARE, dammit!  Find the truth.  Demand the truth.

After two weeks of political conventions, it should be clear to all of us that we have a responsibility to reach beyond ourselves and understand who is most trustworthy in a time when truth too often takes a back seat to bombast, accusation, misrepresentation and conspiracies.

We won’t find absolute truth from either candidate at the top of our tickets or from some of their supporters. But we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our neighbors from coast to coast and border to border not to elect the biggest liar.  That’s an awful thing to say, isn’t it?  But it’s also the

Truth.

And we have to be honest with ourselves, for ourselves, to determine who that is. Sometimes that means traditional party loyalties have to give way to loyalties to something bigger. Increasingly, it means we have to get our noses away from the social media screens.

Keep up with the legitimate, established fact-checkers.  These campaigns will keep them up all night in pursuit of truths we haven’t heard from our candidates during the day.

Just the facts.  That’s all we should ask for. It’s all we should demand. There are reliable sources that will provide them because our candidates and their surrogates might not.

In a later entry we’ll try to recommend some fact-checking resources.

*Los Angeles Police Detective Joe Friday, badge number 714, the main figure in hundreds of police investigations dramatized on radio and television for decades, never said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  Snopes.com, one of the longest-running reliable fact checking websites, says that the character typically said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” or “All we know are the facts, ma’am.”

Today is what we have

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(By the end of the week our political conventions will have finished, each positively assuring us that the names at the top of the ballot will make us great or build us better, each speaking as if those candidates alone can do these things—as if there are not two other branches of government that could or must  have a say.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests that candidates and their parties and their promises are less important to us the we are to ourselves, not just today but—-)

EVERY DAY

Every day!

In those two words lies the secret of all attainment.

It’s not what we do once, with all our hearts, and with every splendid ounce of strength, that counts so much as the things we’ve been doing every day, whether we felt like it or not.

Every day! Therein is mastery.  The marvelous, velvet, utterly exquisite beauty of such piano-playing of Paderewski’s, or such violin performances as Maud Powell’s—it looks spontaneous but it is the result of many a hateful day’s laborious routine.

Every day! That is the road to perfection.  The speaker who can hold and charm an audience, the debater quick and ready and not to be confused, the baseball player, the woman always socially at ease—everybody, in fact, that can do anything well owes that poise and finish to the slow efforts of every day.

No matter how gifted an actor, how naturally endowed, he cannot be a master without infinite practice.

Young people do not realize the tremendous cumulative power that lies in time.  Take ten years. Say you are twenty. By the time you are thirty what enormous efficiency you might build up if you would only use every day a certain amount of time.

Almost everybody wastes enough hours in ten years to get a doctor’s degree in any university.

In ten years you might be speaking and reading fluently in Spanish or French or Japanese, you might be an authority upon geology, botany, chemistry, English literature, history, or whatever fits your ambition, if you would only be faithful every day.

Every day!  The universe is constructed on routine. The sun rises every day, the stars revolve, the seasons come and go by schedule, your heart beats and your lungs fill and empty as regularly as the clock ticks, every generation of men or of animals is the result of numberless preceding generations, over and over again Nature tries her hand and her matchless perfection is only the stored-up treasure of endless practice.

And in character every day means even more than anywhere else. The most honest man is the man who has been honest every day; the most virtuous woman is she who has behind her present virtue the inertia of a whole life full of virtuous thought and deed; the happiest person is the one who has long practiced being happy, and that soul is coolest and surest in a crisis who every day has schooled himself in self-mastery.

No force is so great in any man as the stored-up power of what he has been doing every day.

(Ignace Paderewski (pronounced Pad-er-efski’) was a Polish statesman, pianist, and composer who, as his country’s new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister signed the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. He was a spokesman for Polish independence who, during a concert tour of the United States, encouraged President Wilson to support an independent Poland as part of the Fourteen Points discussions that led to the treaty. He was 81 when he died in 1941, about two years after Hitler ended Poland’s freedom.

Maud Powell was the first American woman to achieve worldwide notoriety as a violinist. She was among the first instrumentalists to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s red seal records, which later became the classical label for RCA Victor’s recordings. Her recordings are still considered a standard for violin performance. She died in 1920, at 52.)

 

 

Ode DeJoy

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(Not to be confused with Schiller’s poem and Beethoven’s composition setting it to music.)

I have a friend who delivered tons of mail in his forty-year career who has a simple answer to what’s going on with the Trump administration and the United States Postal Service: “It’s all Trump and Jeff Bezos.”  Bezos is the owner of Amazon. The President thinks the USPS should charge Amazon a lot more than it does to deliver Amazon’s packages. Bezos also owns the Washington Post which maintains one of the nation’s biggest and best-known fact-checking systems. It reported on July 13 that President Trump had given out more than 20,000 lies and misstatements since taking office. Our president does not like it when someone differs with him.

The Post doesn’t just target our president and it doesn’t just target Republicans. It recently jumped on Amy McGrath’s claim that Mitch McConnell made millions of dollars from China. McGrath is McConnell’s Democratic challenger for his U. S. Senate seat.

I have a friend who remembers when mailmen used to deliver census forms and then take the completed ones to the post office where they were kept until local census workers came in later in the process and determined which four percent of the residents had not replied—and then went out and started knocking on doors.

I have a friend who receives the Catholic Missourian, the weekly newspaper of the Jefferson City Diocese—although in the summer it comes out every two weeks, I understand. He usually receives it on Friday. But recently it arrived a day late. When he checked with the local post office he learned the newspapers had been brought in on Thursday for Friday delivery but the carriers had been told to wait until Saturday—part of the slowdown in service we’ve been hearing about.

For 250 years or so we have been spoiled by the service of postal carriers such as this fellow from about 1910, who have lived by a creed adapted from the writings of Herodotus in 430 B. C.:

It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.

We don’t expect much from our postal service.

—Bring us our mail faithfully.

—If we mail something on time, deliver it on time.

Easier said than done especially when there’s too much snow in our driveway for us to drive out.  But we nonetheless expect to find mail in our mailbox when we struggle through the snow on foot to get there.

Our postal service has become a political football or maybe a pawn in a campaign chess match.  Our president thinks mail-in balloting will be bad for him—-although Republicans can mail in their ballots as well as Democrats.  He’s balking at additional funding for the USPS that would pay for extensive use of mail-in ballots.  He has appointed a Postmaster General whose main qualifications for the job seem to be that he has given a lot of money to the Trump campaign.  Postmaster General Lous DeJoy started removing machines that sort 30-40,000 pieces of mail per hour, presumably to be replaced by machines that can sort 30,000 pieces of mail per MINUTE although we have yet to see any accounts of the new machines being on site and ready to install when the present machines are yanked.  The Kansas City Star says four machines have been taken out in Kansas City and two more in Springfield.

He also banned overtime and late trips by mail carriers, meaning mail not delivered during normal working hours will sit in the post office until the next day, at least—including prescription medications, checks, and other time-sensitive materials.

With those policies and changes, the Postal Service expressed doubts it could handle the volume of mail ballots it will get this year. The volume is expected to jump because an increased number of voters want to vote by mail instead of going to a polling place and increasing possible exposure to the Coronavirus. The announced changes came at an important time in our democratic process and have led to suspicions that our president is using them to limit the number of mail-in ballots that are not expected to go his way.

Suggestions that the postal service is incapable of handling the volume of mail-in ballots that will go into the system increase suspicions the system is being manipulated to affect the outcome of the November election. Under normal circumstances, there should be little doubt the USPS is capable of doing that job.  After all, these are the people who year after year process a Christmas mail load that is likely to be much heavier than the load of mail ballots.  My former mailman friend, who hauled a lot of Christmas presents in his time, finds the election concerns or allegations insulting.

Just as we were about to post this entry, DeJoy announced he was going to “suspend” several proposals that had been moving ahead until after the election.  His quick turn-around came only after twenty states announced they would sue him if he continued with his plans. Yesterday afternoon he said no more changes would be made until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of impact on election mail.”  He went on, “We will deliver the nation’s election mail on time.”

The states drawing up lawsuits are nonetheless wary. Forbes reported yesterday they still plan to file their lawsuits. It would be nice if we could tell you Missouri is one of the twenty states but, alas, we cannot.  In fact, it was not until the Kansas City Star contacted Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and reported last Friday that he had received a letter from the USPS dated July 31 saying the service might not be able to deliver mailed absentee ballots in time for them to be counted because of DeJoy’s policies. The newspaper reported Ashcroft’s office did not appear to have told local election authorities about the letter.

If DeJoy thinks he has defused the controversy with his announcement yesterday, he is likely to be disabused of that notion Friday when he explains himself to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Although the committee is led by Republicans, he won’t be able to avoid anticipated sharp questions from Democrats. As we file these observations, the White House has not blocked his appearance.

Our president, who has supported DeJoy’s plans, has made a completely unproven case that mail-in voting will result in massive voter fraud if he loses. Unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations are a familiar theme to him. Four years ago he appointed former Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach to lead an investigation of massive voting fraud (mostly by illegal immigrants, as we recall) in the Northeast. Kobach couldn’t get a whiff of voter fraud.

“Voter fraud” has been a theme of the president’s party for several years.  It was voiced with great passion by supporters of Voter Photo ID legislation enacted in Missouri. Four years ago in this space, we reported looking at every statewide election from the August Primary of 2008 through the November, 2014 general election.  We compiled these statistics when we referred to Voter Photo ID legislation as a “solution in search of a problem.”  We found 18 prosecutions for voter fraud (17 of them in registrations) out of 36-million opportunities in Missouri, less than one for every two-million opportunities. We have heard of NO prosecutions by our Secretary of State for voter fraud since that post in May, 2016.

With a slight bow to fairness when it comes to Voter Photo ID in Missouri we observe that critics argued, as they argue now in the mail-in voting controversy, that the real reason these things are being advocated is to suppress voting by certain demographics that do not endorse the policies of the party in power.  Those critics have been pretty quiet since photo ID went into effect.  We have yet to see any trustworthy studies showing fears of voter suppression have come true because of Photo ID.

Regardless of whether you buy into our president’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in mail-in ballots or into suspicions that our postal system is a campaign pawn, we citizens deserve a postal system that does the two simple things mentioned earlier. We citizens deserve and the people who bring us our mail every day deserve to be treated better than we are being treated by those in charge of our country.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back from its August recess to pass a bill providing the funding needed to make sure the Postal Service can handle the election mail crush. We will suggest in our next entry that the roots of this mess were created fourteen years ago and  it would be good also for her chamber—and the Senate—to clean it up.

Before we go, we anticipate in a few days the first trickle of direct mail political crap arriving in our mail box.  It’s called junk mail because it is junk and it treats the people receiving it as junk. We offer this suggestion to the USPS:  Deliver the newspaper on time to our Catholic friends and delay the political junk mail.

November 4 would be a good day to deliver it.

(About the dedicated mail carrier whose photograph you saw above: We don’t know for sure but we suspect it is a staged picture taken on his first day of work about 1910. Robert Milton Priddy, Sr.,–friends knew him by his middle name—was a rural mail carrier in the Beloit, Kansas area for more than 25 years. He died at the age of 57, three years before his grandson was born.)

Swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath

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(The Kingston Trio, the folk singing group of the 60s, had a song called “The Merry Minuet” that seemed to capture our times.  Some of the lyrics go:

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much!!

I refer to this condition euphemistically as “being in a state of high urinary agitation.” Everybody seems to be in that state these days and social media is a prime purveyor.  We know we’re going to become increasingly agitated as November 3 nears.  This seems like a good time to see what Dr. Frank Crane thinks about—-)

ANGER

There is no use telling you, son, not to get angry; nu use telling you any red-blooded man that.

Indignation is a natural flame that spurts up in the mind, upon certain occasions, as surely as gasoline explodes at a lighted match.

All I say is—Wait!

Don’t do anything till your heat is gone. Don’t say words, nor pass judgments, until your brain has cooled down.

For most anger is the irritation of offended vanity.

We think a lot of our opinion, and when one sneers at it, it is as if he threw mud on our white duck trousers.

We have a high notion of the respect due us, and when it is intimated that we are nobody we want to smash something to show we are somebody.

We are never angry, save when our pride is hurt.

Anger is self-esteem on fire.

So, flare up, if you must, swear and break the furniture; it may do you good. But go up to your room to indulge in this relief, lock the door, and stay there until the stork blows over.

Never write a letter while you are angry. Lay it aside. In a few days you can come back at your offender much more effectively.

Don’t transact business in heat.  When you are “mad clean through” it is your sore egotism that is operating, and acts prompted by egotism are usually ridiculous. Hang up the matter for a few days, and come to it again when your intelligence is not upset by your feelings.

One of the bet things to say is nothing. When you answer a man he gets your measure; when you keep still you have him guessing.

The cool man, who has himself under control, always has the advantage offer the hot man.

Even if you have to lick a man you can do much better if your head is clear of anger fumes. Wrath may lend a little extra punch to your blows, but self-control will plant them to better effect.

Anger dulls your efficiency. What you do goes wild. You have a lot of energy, but no accuracy.

Anger dims your eye. You see vividly, but what you see is not so.

Anger makes chaos in your thoughts. You are a crazy man. What you think in the egotism of anger you will pay for in the humiliation of saner moments.

Few good deeds have been done in anger, while all manner of crimes are due to the intemperance of wrath, such as blows, murders, and war, “the sum of all villainies.”

The first and greatest lesson for you to learn, son, is to control your temper and if your nature is touchy, to resolve to take no action until the blood is cooled.

Us vs. It—Part XI, Reasons to Act

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I bought something from the internet the other day—a photograph from a company that sells archived news photos from decades ago.  No sales tax was charged by the company, which is in a nearby state.

The purchase is a reminder.

If the state needs money—and it surely does—

There is no better time to finally approve collecting a sales tax on purchases made through the internet.

The Missouri General Assembly has gone to great lengths to avoid enacting such a requirement for a decade or more. It has refused to create a collection policy of our own and it has rejected suggestions Missouri join a multi-state compact that collects sales taxes.

Past efforts have been attacked by those who use a faulty argument to avoid the responsibility needed to enact the bill.  “It’s a tax increase,” opponents claim.

Dishwater!

The state sales tax is not—let me emphasize that, NOT—being increased. If the law requiring the state sales tax be paid on purchases on the internet were to pass, the state tax you and I pay when we buy from an internet vendor would be the same as the tax charged when we buy from a hometown business. I should be able to duck a citizen responsibility to contribute to the well-being of others by buying something through the internet.

The argument in favor of an internet sales tax is even more compelling in today’s plague-mangled economy.  Hundreds of local businesses have closed because of stay-at-home orders. Many have not reopened and some never will reopen.  But one of our neighbors (yours and mine) who owns a brick-and-mortar business knows that customers who used to buy things at that store have been buying them on the internet while the store has been closed.

The problem of local folks visiting stores, checking the prices, and then buying the same thing from an internet vendor already was a problem before virus-caused closings forced consumers to increasingly rely in the internet.  Now the question becomes whether they will go back into the hometown stores when they open?

Passing a law requiring Missourians to pay the same sales tax on internet items that they have to pay for local in-store purchases is more symbolic than profitable for the merchant.  But at the same time, promoting the reopening of brick-and-mortar businesses without taking a step that offers a slight whiff of equality with internet vendors seems pretty inconsistent (although you might have a stronger word).

The need to do this has been increased by an executive order signed by our president that he says will resume the expired supplemental unemployment payments.  The executive order will pay $400 but the states will have to contribute $100.

The legality of the executive order aside, Missouri’s general revenue fund needs every penny it can generate whether for supplemental unemployment payments, virus-fighting efforts or maintaining services even at their reduced levels.

Our state leaders have insisted time after time that testing is the key to controlling the Coronavirus in Missouri.  At this point, it’s anyone’s guess whether Congress and our president can agree on a stimulus package that will include billions of dollars for state testing. Lacking that, it’s hard for someone well detached from the ins and outs of the statehouse these days to imagine where the state will find money for that testing without further wrecking the state budget, let alone where it will find money for its share of unemployment payments without the same result.

Where the state of Missouri would find $100 multiplied by several thousand each week is a troubling question.  The governor already has withheld or vetoed hundreds of MILLIONS dollars to balance the state budget.  Schools are opening and education at all levels has been badly bruised by the necessary budget actions. Inflicting deeper cuts to the biggest places to cut, education and social services, could be tragic at a time when schools, in addition their normal expenses, have to face the costs of keeping students, faculty, and staff safe from the virus.

By making Joe or Josephine Missouri pay the same sales tax on a coat from a Internet Inc., as Sarah and Samuel Showme have to pay for the same coat from a Main Street store, Inc., Missouri’s leaders and lawmakers can send a little positive message to the businesses they want to reopen despite health uncertainties at home by collecting needed funds from consumers who want to avoid a few pennies in sales tax by buying online.

The virus has produced all the justification needed to finally impose an internet sales tax. It won’t entirely solve the state’s financial problems. But it could at least partly equalize the competition for the local dollar, provide at least some of the funding for the state’s contribution to the supplemental jobless benefit, and/or ease the depth of any additional budget cuts or withholdings.

Unfortunately, this is a campaign year and candidates will stampede away from advocating anything that can be called, however erroneously, a tax increase no matter how desperate the virus causes the state to be for additional funds. Perhaps we’ll have to wait until January to see if those whose political futures have been determined by then will screw up the courage to take this step.

Great

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(One of the most mis-used words in our vocabulary is “great.”  It is thrown around cheaply—from the sports announcers who constantly refer to a “great play” to a cartoon tiger that proclaims a sugary breakfast cereal is “grrrrreat” to those who proclaim greatness for themselves or for others in this campaign year.  Dr. Frank Crane’s century old words give us some guidance in this year when “great” is easily abused about what to look for in—)

THE GREAT MAN

The great man feels with the people, but does not follow them.

He maintains his independence of thought, no matter what public opinion may be.

He is quiet. He does not strive nor cry out.

He knows and trusts the cosmic spiritual forces and is not impatient.,

He thinks clearly, he speaks intelligently, he lives simply.

His ethics are of the future, not traditional and of the past, nor conventional and of the present.

He always has time.

He despises no human being, nor any other creature.

He impresses you much as the vas silences of nature impress you, as the sky, the ocean, the desert.

He has no vanity. Seeking no praise, he is never offended. He always has more than he thinks he deserves.

He is teachable, and will learn even from little children. He is not anxious to teach others,

He is not welcome in any sect, cult, or party, for he is more desirous of understanding than of opposing the other party.

He is rarely elected to anything.

He works for the joy of it, not the wages.

He cannot retaliate, for he cannot descend to the level of them that love to do harm.

He lives in a certain self-sufficient aloofness, so that your raise or blame does to seem to reach him.

Yet his isolation is warm, and not cold.

He is keenly alive to human relationships and influences. He loves. He cares. He suffers. He laughs.

When you find him it is as if you had found are real human being among myriads of animals. All of the simple, strong qualities of the normal soul shine in him, with no pettiness.

You feel that what you have, such as your money or position, is nothing to him, only what you are; and that if he likes you it will be not at all of anything you do, say or pay, but for what your soul is within you.

He is not deceived by the two arrant humbugs of the world, Success and Failure.

He changes his opinion easily, when he sees his error. He cares not for consistency, which is the fetish of little minds, but for truth, which is the sum of great souls.

He believes that every man comes at last unto his own, and is not impatient.

Bitterness, cynicism, and pessimism, which are tempers of pettiness, he has not; but love, cheer, and hope abound in him, for these are always the by-products of greatness.

When you love him, you yourself become great; for there can be no greatness that is not the cause of greatness in others.

Who should represent Missouri?

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(Before we plunge into this week’s issue, we’d like to update last week’s post.  The Kansas City Star reported last Saturday that the federal prosecutor had announced the influx of federal agents in Kansas City had produced 97 arrests for homicides (5), illegal possession of firearms, various forms of drug trafficking, carjacking and being fugitives with outstanding warrants against them. In Portland, Homeland Security agents withdrew from the federal building area and although protests continued in the area they were described as “mostly peaceful.”)

In our last entry we suggested that our president and his allies on the right have spoken with forked tongues on the issue of states’ rights.  On the one hand, the president has maintained it is the states’ responsibility to fight the coronavirus but in this campaign year when it suits his purpose to override states’ rights, he has sent federal militarized forces to cities with Democratic mayors presumably to fight violent crime although no local or state officials asked for that help.

A recent incident indicates the left side of the aisle is not immune to politically-oriented efforts to ignore the rights of states and to try to capitalize on the public mood. Our example is not as severe as our entry was last week, but it shows, we hope, that neither side has clean hands on this issue.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently asked the Congressional Joint Committee on the Library to remove eleven statues from Statuary Hall in the Capitol because they are men associated with the Confederacy.  The House has approved a resolution formalizing that request and it is before the Senate as we compose this.

Our senior Senator Roy Blunt, a former history teacher and a Vice-President of The State Historical Society of Missouri, has objected.  Almost 160 years ago, the federal government agreed to let the states decide which two famous state figures should be in the hall.  Some states already have replaced statues of white supremacists and confederate leaders with figures deemed more appropriate.  Blunt thinks a hearing would be good and he wants to know what states want to do.

The two Missourians who’ve been in Statuary Hall since 1895 are Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Francis Preston Blair, Junior, a Union General who represented the state in the House and in the Senate.  Last year, the legislature passed a resolution to replace Benton with a statue of Harry S Truman.  It hasn’t been done yet and we have suggested that the legislature has targeted the wrong man for replacement.

Given these times, the legislature might want to reconsider which of our statues is replaced.  Benton represents the self-contradictory figure of which we find many in our pre-Civil War history. He owned slaves but came to oppose the institution, and refused the legislature’s orders that he follow its sentiments on protecting slavery, especially as the frontier expanded. That position cost him his seat in the U. S. Senate. We have found no record that he freed his slaves.

Our other statue is that of Francis Preston Blair Jr., who was a Union General but also an undeniable racist. He owned slaves and when the issue of emancipation came up, he proposed sending freed slaves to Central and South America. When he was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1868 his anti-emancipation speeches weakened the party’s effort, including his theme that African-Americans were “a semi-barbarous race…who are worshipers of fetishes and polygamists (who wanted to) subject the white woman to their unbridled lust.”

Harry Truman would be a fitting replacement for either man, Blair in particular.  Truman has a bust in the National Capitol already—with the others who have served as Vice President.  We have our own suggestion for proper representatives for Missouri. (At the end we’ll have a list of most of the statues that, though of marble and bronze, have feet of clay).

We have no problem with a Truman statue representing Missouri and we realize a lot of people have contributed a lot of money to create one.  But we think our idea says much more about our state and the qualities of the people who should be in that hall and the qualities of the people who represent Missouri.

Other than a few women and Native Americans, the figures in Statuary Hall tilt heavily in favor of politicians and generals. But we think of two men who were neither but would better symbolize everything our state should always strive to be than any political figure or general ever has or could.  Not that anybody would listen, but we would love to see our state represented by statues of

Stan Musial and Buck O’Neil.

I met both of them, briefly.  In 1985 on the World Series Special passenger train Governor Ashcroft arranged to travel across the state from Kansas City to St. Louis for the third game of the Series, I asked Musial to tell me about the last time the Cardinals traveled by train.  It was the trip back from Chicago after Musial had gotten his 3,000th hit.  We talked for a few minutes.  He laughed.  My God! What a wonderful laugh!  I still have that interview somewhere.  And the day his bust was unveiled for the Hall of Famous Missourians at the Capitol he spent time talking baseball and other things, laughing often and then playing the harmonica he always carried.  It was easy to love Stan Musial.

I cannot tell you a single thing John Ashcroft did or said as Governor—-except that he arranged that train trip during which I got to talk to Stan Musial.

When President Obama presented Musial with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Bernie Micklasz wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“We’re a polarized nation in many ways. We dig into our respective corners. Republicans vs. Democrats. Liberals vs. Conservatives. We snarl at each other. We don’t seem to agree on much. But we can agree on this: Stan Musial transcends all of that. When it comes to The Man, there are no differences in ideology or opinion. It’s unanimous: We love The Man. Even at the late innings of his life, Musial still brings people together and makes them happy.”

“He’s been doing this for what, 70 years? I don’t believe Musial has ever received enough credit for the way he conducted himself during an extremely sensitive time in our history, during the period of baseball’s integration. Musial didn’t make speeches. He didn’t use a media platform. He simply went out of his way to show kindness and concern to African-American players who had to deal with intense hostility in the workplace.”

Buck O’Neil, the great symbol of Negro Leagues baseball (and so much more than that), finally got his bust in the Hall of Famous Missourians, too, at the State Capitol although he still deserves a full plaque in Cooperstown.  The great Cubs player, Ernie Banks, advised us to, “Just follow Buck O’Neil. This man is a leader. He’s a genius. He understands people. He understands life…All of us should learn from this man. He’s an ambassador; he’s a humanitarian. We should follow him…”  Buck had plenty of reason to be bitter because he was never allowed to play a major league game.  But I heard him say one day, “Waste no tears for me. I didn’t come along too early—I was right on time.”

I sang a song with him one day.  A lot of people in a lot of meetings with him got to sing with him, too. He recalled in his autobiography, “Sometimes at the end of my speeches I ask the audience to join hands and sing a little song. It goes like this: ‘The greatest thing in all my life is loving you.’ At first the audience is a little shy about holding hands and singing that corny song, but by and by, they all clasp one another’s hands and the voices get louder and louder. They give it up. Got to give it up.”  I gave it up, holding hands with strangers, that day.

It will never happen of course, the placement of these two men in Statuary Hall as representatives of our state. But I can’t think of two other people who could represent what all Missourians should want to be and to serve as representatives of the best that Missouri could be than these two men.

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Although Speaker Pelosi refers to eleven statues, there are more that might be candidates for removal.  We’ve looked at the list and here are those whose places of honor might come under scrutiny:

Alabama—Confederate General joseph Wheeler.

Arkansas—Judge U.M. Rose, supporter of the Confederacy, slave owner; and Senator James Paul Clarke, white supremacist.

Florida—Confederate General E. Kirby Smith

George—Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens

Louisiana—Edward White Jr., Confederate soldier who as member of the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the “separate but equal” concept.

Mississippi—Confederate President Jefferson Davis and James Z. George, Confederate Colonel and member of the state’s secession convention.

Missouri—Blair Jr., and Benton

North Carolina—Abraham B. Vance, Confederate officer; Charles Aycock, white supremacist

South Carolina—John Calhoun, defender of slavery, Wade Hampton, Confederate officer and post-war leader of the “lost cause” movement.

Tennessee—Andrew Jackson, slave owner and president who forced the Cherokees off their lands in the Carolinas and onto the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.

Virginia—Robert E. Lee, Confederate Commander

West Virginia—John E. Kenna—Confederate officer at age 16.

In addition, Speaker Pelosi wants the bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney to be removed from the busts of Supreme Court justices because of his authorship of the Dred Scott decision.

 

Dr. Crane appreciates our imperfections  

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(For the next ninety days or so we will be subjected to hour after hour—in 30-second bites—of attacks and counter-attacks on those seeking our support at the ballot box.  In fact, probably we’ve already had some of that in the primary campaigns. We know it will become intolerable noise until the November elections, though.  Dr. Frank Crane, however, suggests we might find something redeeming in our imperfections as he is—)

IN PRAISE OF FLAWS

The old priest’s pale face lit up with a curious one-sided smile. It was a find face, of a certain marble composure, as if he were a living carven stone rather than flesh and blood; yet there was a glint of humor in his eye, and of wisdom, for the two are akin, though one be the gift of God and the other the harvest of experience.

He spoke to her, a disheveled mass of self-pity and helpless remorse, one of the kind that picks at sin like a child at a hangnail, and said,

“Do not lacerate yourself, lady. Sack-cloth and ashes have virtue when applied to the body, according to tradition, but I know of no warrant for applying irritants to the soul. Your fault is the fault, it is true, and for sin, even the smallest, there is no excuse, but I question if you are the worse for it.

“Far be it from me to say a word that might encourage one to evil, condone heresy in the slightest degree, or justify imperfection. But the smooth polish of angelic sanctity is not for mortals. To be human is not the unpardonable sin.

“So, while I may not say a word for wrongdoing, yet I may speak in praise of flaws. For it is not by their strength but by their weakness that human creatures get their hold on one another.

“No one has a mightier grasp of love than a baby, that holds its mother in a grip of steel and binds strong men to its service; and the secret of this strange influence is but the child’s sheer helplessness….

“And doubtless it is because we are so blind and helpless, stumble and grope so pitifully, and are altogether so marred with ignorance that the divine hand is reached out to help us.  Thus the Almighty is the servant of the feeble, as it is written, He is servant of all, for it is ever the business of the strong to serve the weak.

“It is not the classic beauty in a face that moves us. Hearts hang upon the little pegs of imperfection. If we were perfect no one would love us; we might be admired but not loved. Let us then be thankful for our tentacular blemishes. They are like the little tendrils of climbing vines; by them we cling and rise.

You recall what the cardinal said, in Ariadne in Mantua.* ‘There is, I notice, even in yoru speaking voice,’ he said to the singer Diego, ‘a certain quality such as folk say melts men’s hearts; a trifle hoarseness, a something of a break, which mars it as mere sound but gives it more power than that of sound.’

“Hate not yourself, dear lady, because you are mortal; but rather study to make use of your limitations, that you may weave all your little failings into a strong web of success. Souls can go forward even by falling. Walking has been called a succession of forward fallings. And more people slip and blunder into happiness than capture happiness by shrewdness.”

Whereupon the lady went her way, a little heartened and much puzzled, while the good priest murmured to himself: “Heaven forgive me if I have said anything she could understand.”

(*Ariadne inMantua, a Romance in Five Acts, was written in 1903 by prolific supernatural fiction British author Violet Paget 1856-1935), who wrote under the pen name of Vernon Lee. Thomas B. Mosher wrote in a foreword to the book:  “As for her vanished world of dear dead women and their lovers who are dust, we may indeed for a brief hour enter that enchanted atmosphere. Then a vapour arises as out of long lost lagoons, and, be it Venice or Mantua, we come to feel ‘how deep an abyss separates us—and how many faint and nameless ghosts crowd round the few enduring things bequeathed to us by the past.’” The work is available to read on the internet.)

Dr. Crane appreciated being alive

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(In these times of sickness we might find ourselves dwelling on the things that we miss more than we spend time dwelling on the things we don’t realize we have. When conditions might prompt otherwise repressed thoughts of our mortality, it can be better for us to dwell on the day we are given.  To do so, Dr. Frank Crane suggests, makes us something we might prefer NOT to think we are—)

THE SENSUALIST

Do you know, said my old friend Miss Dean, professor of English literature in Blank College, and about the last person in the world you would accuse of being gross, she being a typical highbrow, blue-stocking, and all that sort of thing—Do you know, she said, that the older I grow the more I am getting to be a sensualist?

I am duly shocked, I replied, but suppose of course you intended to shock me so as to bring out some unusual truth. So go ahead.

What I mean is that I am more and more inclining to the belief that we do not emphasize enough the sheer delight of merely being alive. If we would oftener take stock of our little satisfactions, the unnoticed sensations of pleasure that we habitually slur over and take for granted, we would increase the average of our contentment.

I got to thinking this morning of how many things there are in my daily experiences that are agreeable.  I was amazed at how many ways there are in which Nature contrives to make me feel good.

For instance, to begin at the beginning of the day, I like to get up.  I dearly love the first minutes of being awake. To stretch my limbs and shake off sleep, to roll out of bed and put my nose out of the window and drink in the fresh early air, and see the young sunlight, not yet glaring and hot, but full of the promise of life, a sweet light and soft, and to see the trees seeming so glad and virile—oh! It’s great!

And then I like my bath. I like to get all my clothes off and enjoy the touch of the air on my skin as if I were an animal.  We are all animals, but it does us good to go back healthily to animality some time during the day—touch, like Atlas, our mother Earth and the elemental air and light from which come our tides of strength.

I love a good souse in the water. I love the feel of the towel when I rub dry. I like dressing. Putting on clothes with me is always an interesting ceremony.  From lacing my shoes to coming my hair, it is more than a routine—it is a ritual.

I love breakfast.  Thank goodness, I have an appetite. I don’t eat much, but I love to eat.  And when I think of all the living creatures upon the earth, oxen and sheep, birds and horses and fishes, that share with me this delight of taking food, I have a sense of intimate communion with the universe.

Why do some people speak contemptuously of eating?  To me it’s wonderful to think of the infinite ministries of matter to our spirits by way of the palate. Eggs and butter, fish, flesh and fowl, grains and fruits, honey, cream, and, best and most angelic of all—water!  What are those all but Nature’s children vying with each other to please their human guest?

Then there are a thousand other things I like. I like the sun, and to sit in the shade, to walk, and to rest afterward. I like colors, the reds, browns, and blacks of my books, the green of my blotter, the yellow of my pencil, the blue of my rug, and all the other numberless shades, with their blendings and contrasts, that make up the vast orchestra of color continually playing for my benefit.

I like breathing.  Did you ever stop to think how delicious air is?

I like the thousand and one things that we usually refer to as boresome. I like to have my hands manicured. I like to ride on the trolley-car. I like my favorite rocking chair. I like my pen and my pad of paper, and to see words grow under my hand. I like a good novel. I like a good road and a hedge and a clump of bushes. I like to ride in a taxicab through the crowded streets. I like to look at multitudes. And I like to be alone.

I like walls and pavements. I like new gloves and nice underwear. I like, oh! Passionately, a new hat and a gown fresh from the maker. I like for a man to talk to me as if I interested him. I like little children. I like old folks. I like big husky workmen lifting loads. I like people who get excited over purely intellectual problems. I like to make money and to spend it. I like to see young people in love. I like a church, and a theatre, and bridge, and a roomful of chat and laughter. I like jokes, and music, and soldiers marching.

I fear I am a hopeless sensualist. For Stevenson’s jingle grows on me:

“The world is so full of a number of things

I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.”

Us vs. It—Part X, Becoming Invisible

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When you were a child, did you at one time believe you could become invisible if you closed your eyes?   Or that some evil being (a parent with discipline on its mind) would go away?

We learned the hard way sometimes—-didn’t we?—that closing our eyes was not a good strategy.

We are going to dive deeper into current political/health issues than we like but the thought won’t go away.

Our president appears to still believe that closing his eyes to a deadly situation will make it go away.  If it wasn’t for all those tests, we wouldn’t have a problem, he seems to say.  In this case, the old saying that “Ignorance is bliss” is most certainly not operative.

The Washington Post reported this week that the administration is trying to block a proposal from Senate Republicans for billions of dollars in the next stimulus bill to be spent on conduct testing and contact tracing.  This comes at a time when the number of cases is steeply climbing in many states and the rate of increase is clearly more than the number of cases found through testing. The increase is so steep that some states are struggling to get test results done in any kind of a timely manner.

The effects of the virus on the economy have driven states such as Missouri to make extraordinarily painful cuts to services to their citizens, especially in education at a time when there is heavy pressure to reopen schools to in-person classes. If the new stimulus bill does not include money for improved testing, what will happen at the state level?

Testing likely will not improve and might decline because the states have no way to finance critically-needed improved testing while maintaining even low-level services. That will mean more undiscovered carriers of the virus, more hospitalizations, and more deaths.  It is difficult to see any more hopeful scenario.

Of course, we have been assured, this virus will just go away some day?  But how many people will it take away with it?  And should not this be a concern of our president?  The answer is “yes,” and here’s why it’s important to him that he realizes that.

Let’s see if we can frame this situation in language that our president can understand by changing the focus from cases to deaths. If the stimulus bill does not include billions of dollars for testing, more people will die because their illness will not be recognized in time for them to receive life-saving treatment. That’s not a stretch. It’s a simple A plus B equals C.

As we compose this observation, Johns Hopkins University (as of 11:27 yesterday morning) counted 141,426 Coronavirus deaths in the United States.  The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington is projecting 224,546 deaths nationally by November 1, a week before the election.

The Gallup Organization, a polling company whose numbers have been respected for decades, found last month that only 39% of likely voters approve of our president’s job performance.  If that rating holds until November, that would translate (using the IHME projection) into 87,572 Trump supporters who will be dead by then. Can our president risk losing that many potential voters?

If his attitude does not change, he will not have become invisible by closing his eyes although 87,572 of his possible voters will have become invisible because the virus will have closed theirs.