Category Archives: people

It’s always a surprise

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—to return from a trip that is incredibly stirring to find that nothing has changed when you get home.   When we rolled into Jefferson City about 1:30 a.m. today (Saturday, October 9), the businesses we drove past were the same as they had been two weeks earlier. The Jefferson City Oil Cartel was still charging twenty cents more a gallon for gasoline than the people in Fulton were paying. McDonald’s drive-through window was still open, serving the McMuffin that was a welcome bit to eat for travelers who hadn’t had anything since lunch at the Miami airport after our flight from Guayaquil, Ecuador that morning. American Airlines didn’t even drop its usual paltry package of pretzels on our drop-down tray tables on the flight from Miami to St. Louis. And if you expect to find any place to grab a quick bite at Lambert-St. Louis airport when your flight arrives sometime after 10 p.m., forget it. Lambert is a ghost town after 6.

Our day that started in Guayaquil ended in our own bed in Jefferson City about 2:30 this morning. We don’t know if today’s younger generation finds nothing remarkable about that. But our generation, or many in our generation, still have a “Gee Whiz”–a phrase of our generation–feeling about this sort of thing. We started our day on the south side of the equator trying to sort out what the Spanish-speaking airport attendant was saying over the loudspeaker in our gate area (among other things, I was summoned to the TSA security office downstairs because my checked bag had been randomly selected for a search—I have great sympathy for those people who have to search through bags of rank clothing that had clothed travelers for two weeks.). We finished it in our home in Jefferson City.

We might post some pictures from these two weeks some time later. Nancy already has been sharing some things on her Facebook page. But your correspondent doesn’t do Facebook or LinkedIn, or other internet stuff like that. Too much going on in the real world. And the “what I did on my autumn vacation” slide show isn’t what this series of observations is for.

The big bags have been unpacked. The two remaining clean shirts and one pair of clean socks are back in the drawers. The new washing machine will be getting a big workout this weekend. Sometime in the next few days, Nancy and I will go through the hundreds of pictures we took, considering how we have been changed by these last two weeks.

We met someone whose parents likely were alive during the French and Indian War. I hiked an ancient trail 9,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains to look down on a mysterious village. Nancy stood with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern. We both explored a unique ecosystem populated by hundreds of species found nowhere else in the world, a place where studies done almost two centuries ago continue to produce massive angst among those who believe understanding of our world should be limited to the words written by the author of Genesis.

We were among our fellow creatures of brown skin, yellow skin, white skin, red feet, yellow feet, blue feet, claws, and scales. We walked among the living and the dead. We heard the music of man and the music of nature. We walked on modern and ancient paths. We spent two weeks eating only things that had been cooked or peeled, washing our teeth with bottled water, and throwing toilet tissue in wastebaskets because leaving it in the toilet would damage the sewage system. We rode planes, trains, boats, and buses. And we drove a car to start the whole thing. We wandered in societies that seek God through the sun, the puma, the crucifix, and through being one with nature’s god. We lived with a country that uses currency requiring calculation of value with purchases that often involve bargaining and in a country that imports United States currency to use as its own money and gives back coins in change that are a mix of United States coins and the local country’s coins. We stayed in rooms that were unlocked with cards that fit into slots, or unlocked doors with a wave of the card, or with great big skeleton keys. Some restaurant menus listed various forms of beef, pork, chicken, or guinea pig. Some of our group sampled dozens of beers you won’t find in the liquor section of the grocery store. I was in a place that didn’t have any Coke or Pepsi products, so I had had a bottle of Inka Cola which was kind of a light cream soda.

Peru and Ecuador. Machu Picchu and the Galapagos. And other places.

We didn’t talk to a single person in any of those places who gave a tinker’s dam about Donald Trump or John Boehner, Obamacare, Governor Nixon’s veto of a right to work bill, and the insane pursuit of millionaire campaign donors by people thirsting for power.

And then we came home, changed people returning to a seemingly unchanged community where “Gee Whiz” experiences are unlikely. Travel once again has made us realize that the comfort of sleeping in one’s own bed has its value. But travel makes sure that sleeping in one’s own bed does not turn into living in a rut.

The villain’s censure is extorted praise

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We’ve read a lot of histories that include biographies of families and founders and most of them are pretty, well truthfully, either dull or so full of platitudes that we don’t stay with them very long.  But one we have enjoyed for many years was published in 1878 by W. V. N. Bay (William Van Ness Bay), a tome that needed 611 pages to live up to its title:

Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar of Missouri: With an Appendix, Containing Biographical Sketches of Nearly All of the Judges and Lawyers who Have Passed Away, Together with Many Interesting and Valuable Letters Never Before Published of Washington, Jefferson, Burr, Granger, Clinton, and Others, Some of which Throw Additional Light Upon the Famous Burr Conspiracy.

Bay’s writing style is graceful, respectful, and honest.  While most books of the era were often written in a stilted or flowery language, his was conversational and genteel.

Here’s an example from Bay’s book.  As I read it, I was reminded of a recent conversation with an acquaintance who is considering whether to get into politics but has had trouble dealing with some of the things said about him in his business.  I’ve suggested that thinking of entering the political realm will expose him to much worse. Bay’s story addresses that and also has a certain resonance with contemporary events.  Bay has a couple of quotes, too, that respond to a part of the world of politics that never seems to get better.  Here’s Bay:

Thomas Reynolds.

Many of our readers will recollect the deep sensation produced upon the public mind by the announcement of the tragic death of this gentleman, who took his own life while governor of the state. He was not only one of the profoundest jurists of the West, but possessed a versatility of talent that would enable him to adorn any position to which he might be called.

Governor Reynolds was born March 12, 1796, in Bracken County, Kentucky. But very little is known respecting his early education, but it was, no doubt, as good as could be obtained in the schools where he resided. He certainly was not a classical scholar, though he had some knowledge of Latin. He was admitted to the bar in Kentucky, about the time he became of age, but in early life he removed to Illinois, where he filled the several offices of clerk of the House of Representatives, speaker of the House, attorney-general, and chief justice of the Supreme Court.

In 1829 he moved to Missouri, and located at Fayette, Howard County. He brought with him a high reputation as a jurist, and soon secured a good practice. It was not long before he was chosen to represent Howard County in the Legislature, and became speaker of the House. After leaving the Legislature he was appointed judge of the judicial circuit comprising the counties of Howard, Boone, Callaway, et al.

In 1840 the Democratic party met in convention at Jefferson City, to nominate a ticket for state officers, and Judge Reynolds was nominated for governor almost by acclamation.

It was at this time we made his acquaintance, and formed a very high estimate of him as not only a man of ability, but of undoubted integrity and honesty of purpose. As a delegate in the Convention we gave him our support, and had occasion frequently afterwards to meet and transact business with him, as we were in the Legislature during most of the time he was governor. He was elected over J. B. Clark by a handsome majority.

No very important event transpired during his administration. He was the first governor who strongly urged the abolition of imprisonment for debt, and probably to him more than any other person are we indebted for this humane enactment.

Governor Reynolds had few superiors as a jurist, and hence it is that most of his life was spent on the bench. There was nothing superficial in his law learning. He drank from the lowest depths of the legal well, and there secured the gems which can be nowhere else found.

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls must dive below.”

He studied the law as a science, and we have heard him say on several occasions that he had read Coke, Bacon, and Blackstone a dozen times. His mind was as clear as a bell, and his power of analysis very great. As a forensic speaker few excelled him, and in canvassing the state for governor but few were willing to encounter him.

At the time of his death his prospects for distinction were greater than those of any man in the state, for his genial habits, pleasant demeanor, and unquestioned integrity had made him exceedingly popular, and it was a mere question of time as to his elevation to the Federal Senate. He had a dread of being thought disloyal to his party, which often induced him to appoint men to office unfit for the position. A noted instance of this will be found in our memoir of James Evans.

Shortly after breakfast, on February 9, 1844, the report of a gun was heard from the executive mansion in Jefferson City, and some persons passing by at the time went into the governor’s office to ascertain the cause of it, and there found the governor weltering in his blood, with the top of his head blown entirely off, and of course dead. He had just before sent for a rifle, the muzzle of which he placed against his forehead, and by the aid of a strong twine tied to the trigger, with one end wrapped around his thumb, he discharged it. On the table near where he fell was found a letter addressed to his most intimate friend, Colonel William G. Minor, in the following words:

“In every situation in which I have been placed, I have labored to discharge my duty faithfully to the public; but this has not protected me for the last twelve months from the slanders and abuse of my enemies, which has rendered my life a burden to me. I pray God to forgive them, and teach them more charity. My will is in the hands of James L. Minor, Esq. Farewell.

“TH. Reynolds.

“Col. W. G. Minor.”

Here we might stop, and throw a mantle over this mysterious and tragic event, but truth and candor force us to state that many of Governor Reynolds’ friends attributed the suicide to a very different cause from that designated in his letter to Colonel Minor. To be more explicit, they believed it grew out of his domestic troubles. It is certainly a very great draft upon our credulity to suppose that a man who had been a quarter of a century in public life, and who was an old and experienced politician, would take his own life because of the ill-natured squibs of the opposition press, which every public man has to encounter. No greater truism was ever uttered by man, than was uttered by Dean Swift when he said, “Censure is the tax a man pays for being eminent.”

That he may have been more than ordinarily sensitive in this respect is not improbable, but the comments of the press respecting his administration were no more uncharitable than those which had been aimed at the governor who preceded him. He should have found some consolation in the words of Pope:

“The villain’s censure is extorted praise.”

If the letter to Colonel Minor was worded with the view of drawing the attention of the public from the true cause of the suicide, he had a motive which others can conjecture as well as ourselves. We express no opinion in relation to it.

—In months to come, we shall wade thigh-deep through censure, “the tax a man pays for being eminent.”  It is most often the product of those with little to offer for themselves or those they support and is, when you think of it, a form of “extorted praise.”

February, 1844 and February 2015.  Tragedy comes when the “villain’s censure” seems to be the only part of the equation that is recognized and the tax paid for eminence becomes unbearable.

Let’s see in the election year of 2016 whether our lawmakers will do anything about cutting this tax.

What were they thinking? Part Two

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Some folks at the Capitol who have checked the Benton Mural say they can’t see any damaged caused by the thoughtless use of it for a couple of people to write information on the backs of some business cards a few days ago.   But those thoughtless actions appear likely to change some access to that room.

The House Lounge has become a popular place for groups to hold rallies or press conferences such as the rally to override the Right to Work bill veto last week where this incident took place.

But because of this, it appears likely the House will put some limits on activities in the Lounge and will require a House or Capitol staff member to be present for all of those events just to make sure that someone else doesn’t pull a stunt like that one.

That’s not bad.  The great fear after something like this is that over-reaction will severely limit public access to that incredible piece of art.  While the policy has not been fully implemented yet, it appears to be falling short of the more severe policies that could have been employed.

The lady in the picture has apologized.  The schnook with her who also was writing on a business card hasn’t had the guts to step forward and do the same.  He continues to display bad manners and lack of character, to say the least.

What were they thinking?

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

Sometimes you just can’t find the words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a religious objection

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….to religious objections.

But I’m rooting for Kim Davis, the Rowan, Kentucky County Clerk who spent five days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses that the United States Supreme Court says are legal under the Constitution.  She’s out now and still has her job.  She remains “religiously opposed” to issuing same sex marriage licenses but is under a federal district judge’s order not to keep her employees from issuing the licenses she opposes.  If she does, she could be on the wrong side of the bars again.

Her lawyer says, “She loves God, she loves people, she loves her work, and she will not betray any of those three,” a statement that seems from this distance to advocate an interesting dance.

She does not want her name on any same-sex marriage license. Her attorneys say the licenses issued by her deputies while she’s been away are not valid because they don’t bear her signature.   However Kentucky law says any act she is entitled by law to do can be legally done by a “lawful deputy.”

Of course, some political candidates are quick to hitch their campaigns to Davis, who has become a symbol to an important voting segment of our population. Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee have gone to Kentucky to sand by Davis. Other Republican hopefuls are keeping some distance.  One of our Missouri Attorney General candidates already has claimed that, if elected, he will have the power to issue an opinion that will protect those who have sincerely held religious objections to state and federal laws.  Apparently this candidate for Attorney General does not realize that an attorney General’s opinion does not have any force of law and is, as a judge said many years ago, is just another lawyer’s opinion.   Interestingly, none of the other candidates for Missouri Attorney General have claimed they also could be a savior.

Kim Davis is the darling of the Religious Right today and, should she wish, could make a lot of money on the speaking circuit.   Her release was a disappointment to many people, not because they believe she is wrong in her position but because her case could set up a court test of the Religious freedom Restoration Act movement.   But she and her supporters are fighting the same-sex marriage issue on more than one front, so her case is likely to get to the United States Supreme Court one way or another.

Some see this case that was, to be blunt, inevitable when RFRA started gaining popularity in increasingly conservative legislatures.  It has been framed as a question of whether government can force someone to violate their personal religious beliefs. The mirror image of the question is whether one person can impose their religious freedom as a way to limit the religious freedom or the secular civil rights of fellow citizens in a nation that has a history of trying to keep church and state apart.

We saw a cartoon the other day portraying the chaos that can result if RFRA is fully sanctioned in society.  A person in a supermarket checkout lane wants to buy some condoms but the checkout clerk says she cannot ring up that sale because it would violate the clerk’s sincerely-held religious beliefs.  “You have to go to register ten,” the clerk says.   So the customer takes the groceries to register ten and has no problem buying the condoms but is told, “I can’t ring up that ham because my sincerely-held religious beliefs do not allow me to sell ham.   You’ll have to go to register eight.”

There is another story that might provide some guidance.  Might.

The ancient historian Josephus, a Pharisee, has written that followers of that movement were supported by the common Jewish people in the time of Jesus.  They claimed to be guided by the law of Moses in their interpretations of Jewish law.  If your correspondent’s understanding of Jewish history is correct, the Pharisees claim to be the founders of today’s Rabbinic Judaism.   Josephus contrasts them to the Sadducees, an upper class whose authority came from the high priest in the times of Solomon.  We fear we have over-simplified the difference, but over-simplification of religion and government is so common today that we hope our indiscretion has not been a serious one.

Three of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, record the day that some Pharisees hoped to trip up a young rabbi with a challenging question.  Matthew and Mark say they were Pharisees.  Luke says they were “spies pretending to be sincere.”   Luke says they were trying to set up Jesus so he would say something that would make him vulnerable to prosecution by the Roman governor.

They first flattered him: “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.”  Then came the zinger: “Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”  The Jews objected to paying those taxes, of course.   Matthew says they asked the question maliciously.  Mark says they asked it hypocritically.

Jesus, who was born at night but not last night, recognized immediately what was afoot.  And he got a little testy because, as Luke says, he saw through their craftiness.  “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites,” he said in Matthew’s version.

“Show me a coin,” he demanded.  And when they gave him a denarius, He asked them, “Whose face  and inscription are on this coin?”  The scriptures don’t say if there was any hemming and hawing although there might have been at least some of the Pharisees who might have immediately seen where their strategy was about to go out of the wagon tracks.   “Caesar’s,” they answered.

We wonder if Jesus paused for dramatic effect or if he flipped the denarius back to the person who gave it to him as he said, “Therefore, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”   The Pharisees, the scriptures say, were stuck silent and after a while got up and walked away.   They still didn’t like this guy.  But they couldn’t argue with him that day.

The Pharisees, common people like Kim Davis today, had a strong religious objection to the edicts of their government.  And they didn’t want to obey that government.   And some perhaps curried favorable public opinion by opposing them.

We’re not scholars of the Bible in our house.  But we are unaware of any similar statement in the Old Testament, which was the foundation for the Pharisees’ positions in those times.

What Jesus did that day was define the line between church and state.

Many of those who side with Kim Davis argue that she should not be persecuted in this Christian Nation for standing up for her Christian beliefs.   Others say it might not hurt for the Christian Nation to remember the day Jesus Christ defined the line between church and state.   And perhaps the Kim Davis case, if it works its way through the legal system, might determine how much the definition in the First Century of the Common Era remains the same these twenty centuries later.

 

Too bad you’re not a bigger number.

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Your faithful observer once owned a business. It was a little tobacco shop on Jefferson City’s main street that opened with real Cuban cigars for sale. My partner and I opened the place at a time when a thaw seemed likely in American-Cuban relations and distributors who’d bee hoarding Cuban cigars for many years let loose of a few boxes here and there and we got some. It was good for the opening of the business.

It might seem odd that someone who never smoked owned a tobacco store. But a lot of people have gotten rich by catering to other people’s vices. Not us. My partner moved to another town. The fellow we hired to run the store took off to sell insurance and by the time we found someone competent to work in the store, the customer base had weakened. We dipped into our own pockets for several months to make the payroll before I had the regrettable duty of telling our employee that we were closing. The next mortgage we took out on our home was several thousand dollars larger than the cost of the house because the extra money helped pay off the store’s debts.

The experience comes to mind because the legislature will be back at the Capitol in a few weeks to consider whether to override some more vetoes by Governor Nixon. The legislature has discovered that overriding Nixon vetoes is great sport. Nixon has become the most overridden governor in Missouri history. Some lawmakers already are showing confidence that they’ll override Nixon’s veto of a bill that puts some of the toughest limits in the country on unemployment benefits.

Right now, Missourians who lose their jobs and who qualify for benefits can get as much as twenty weeks of payments. That’s already one of the least-supportive standards in the United States. The bill in question would cut that to only thirteen weeks if the state employment rate stays below six percent. A person who has lost his or her job could only get twenty weeks of coverage if the employment rate hits nine percent or more—levels we saw during the recession and, thankfully, recessions are not frequent.

Your observer spent his working life as a salaried employee. Being half-owner of a one-employee tobacco store the size of a moderate walk-in closet hardly qualifies one as a corporate mogul althoughit was enough to get us into the Jefferson City Chamber of Commerce which is mostly non-moguls. So the view from this side of the table is that of a worker, an employee, the person likely to be laid off while the managers get bonuses for holding down costs, often by laying off people.

So the view here is from the standpoint of the future person who loses his job, whether with the closing of a little tobacco shop or when a huge business downsizes. Unless the economy is in the tank, he or she will only qualify for thirteen weeks of unemployment benefits under the bill facing a veto override. But if the economy IS in the tank, the person might get twenty weeks. If the jobless person is one of the, say, 5.8% of the workforce considered unemployed (the latest Missouri rate), that person better find a job in thirteen weeks. But if the person is one of the 9.1% unemployed, there might be twenty weeks of coverage.

Everybody I’ve ever known who has lost a job wants to get a new one right away. But finding one isn’t always easy. Sure, you can point to the classified ads as indications that there are jobs out there. But that’s a pretty simplistic response that seems to imply that any job will do if you’re looking for work.

Unemployment hurts. Does it hurt less if you are one of the 5.8% than if you’re one of the 9.1%?   Is it easier to get a job when unemployment is low than it is to get a job when unemployment is high?   On the one hand, you’re looking for work when jobs are filled. On the other hand, you’re looking for a job when there are no jobs.

So if this bill becomes law despite the governor’s veto, a jobless Missourian isn’t as important when times are good as that Missourian is when times are bad. If you’re one of the small number, that’s tough cookies. You should have waited to lose your job until the unemployment rate is much higher. You should have waited for the next recession. Your failure to do so means we will penalize you seven weeks of unemployment insurance. Conditions will be better for business if you aren’t expecting the state to write you checks for seven more weeks.

You know how it is, don’t you?   And the people with your mortgage and the members of your family will be completely understanding and supportive because you’re only a 5.8 instead of a 9.1 and we all know that losing your job is less painful when you’re just a small number.

Apples and oranges

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Kansas City’s council has voted to require an increase in the minimum wage paid to hourly employees working within its city limits and some members of the legislature, believing the sky will fall as a result, are threatening to punish the city.  Because Kansas City wants to give some people a bigger bite of the apple, the legislature wants to take away an orange. .

The statewide minimum wage is $7.65 an hour.  The Kansas City Council wants to increase it by eighty-five cents an hour this month with annual increases until the wage is thirteen-dollars an hour in 2020.  Critics contend the increases will cause businesses to provide fewer minimum-wage jobs.  Does that mean the people with corner offices will become the ones to re-stock the grocery shelves at night?  Or flip the burgers?  Somebody is still going to have to do that work.

Because Kansas City has mandated that its lowest-paid citizens get raises, some lawmakers want to end the earnings tax the city collects from all of the people who work in Kansas City, even those lowest-paid folks.  Maybe that’s the real problem.  Giving people raises means they’ll pay more taxes on their earnings and we know that tax increases are bad, bad, bad.  Even if the tax increase is less than eight-tenths of a cent an hour.

Let this long-time observer of legislative apples and oranges suggest an alternative to those legislators who think putting more money into people’s pockets is under this circumstance such a dreadful thing that it merits draconian retribution.  Normally the idea that people should have more money in their pockets (because they know how to spend it better than government does) is a concept the legislative majority likes to trumpet when it wants to cut taxes.  But here it’s some kind of municipal capital offense if those taxpayers earn that money.

So, in the spirit of being helpful, we offer an alternative that will improve the image of our lawmakers, particularly those who propose taking a guillotine to Kansas City’s municipal budget. And we can pretty much guarantee that this idea will produce bigger, more positive, headlines than the proposed orange penalty.

Instead of trying to punish Kansas City for having gone through a lengthy process to determine what the city council thinks is a fair phased-in step to take for the lowest-paid workers, the legislature should adopt a position of humility and comradeship.  It would be better for these lawmakers to say, “While we don’t believe lowest-paid workers in Kansas City deserve raises, we support them.  To show that we are in close sympathy with those workers who get the present statewide minimum wage, we are introducing legislation that calls for members of the General Assembly to receive the minimum wage, too.   In doing so, we will lead by example and in that way we will convince Kansas City to repeal its ordinance.”  It’s better to build a bridge than to build a bunker. Or in this case, it’s better to join together with workers at the apple barrel than to yank away a municipal orange that contains a lot of healthy fiscal vitamin C.

Just for grins, let’s calculate how much our lawmakers identified with those making $7.65 an hour.

Floor debate is often 4-6 p.m. on Mondays, 10 a.m. to, say, 6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday and let’s say nine to noon on Thursday, which is roughly the schedule for a good part of a legislative session.  That’s twenty-one hours.  Some committees meet at 8 a.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.  Some meet for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. Let’s be charitable (501(c)4 so we don’t have to report who provides the money) and calculate the average legislator works twenty-five hours a week.   That’s $191.25 for a short work week.   The legislature is in session for three weeks in January, four in February, March, and April, and three more in May, generally.  That’s eighteen weeks.  That puts their earnings at $3,443.50 for the session.

Oops.  We forgot the veto session in September.  Two more days.  Let’s say these folks work eight hours each day.  That’s another $122.40.

Of course, they’re doing constituent things while they’re at home so they’re never really completely off-duty.   So let’s just multiply their weekly wages by fifty (including the September veto session) and that’s an annual salary of $9562.50.  We multiplied by fifty because they’d probably want two weeks off for a vacation or something and we know minimum wage people don’t get paid when they’re not working.

Zowee!!! At minimum wage our 197 House and Senate members would earn $1,883,812.50, total, for a calendar year.  The basic payroll for the members of the legislature is about $7.1 million a year under the present annual salary of $35,915.  That doesn’t count the $105 per diem that each member gets to pay for motel rooms, apartment rents, meals that lobbyists don’t buy for them, drinks at the local bar (ditto), and so forth.  And that doesn’t calculate the cost of state health insurance coverage they get.  By going to a minimum wage, our smaller government legislators could save about $5.2 million taxpayer dollars every year.  That’s another $5.2 million in business taxes that could be cut for all those companies flocking to Missouri and creating all those new jobs we keep hearing are being created because of an improved business climate.

The news just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?

Of course, most people earning $7.65 an hour don’t have health insurance provided for them.  Maybe the altruistic lawmakers would want to save the state millions of dollars more by not taking part in the state health insurance program, showing even greater support for minimum wage earners in Kansas City, and elsewhere, who don’t need to earn more while at the same time increasing opportunities for more tax breaks for those job-producing businesses.   Plus, most of our legislators moonlight with second jobs when they’re not in Jefferson City and they can use the money from those second jobs to buy health insurance, just like minimum wage workers do—don’t they?

See, folks, crippling our largest city financially because it has done something for low-paid workers is the wrong way to go.  It’s better to set a positive example by showing that those workers don’t need a higher hourly wage because legislators can get by on the same thing the minimum wage workers get now.

In a time when so many people have a negative impression of government, this would say the Missouri legislature truly is government OF the people.  The best way to change Kansas City’s mind is to show through personal leadership that a minimum wage increase is not needed.

It is only fair that we note that the legislature time and time again has rejected recommendations by a state commission that legislative salaries, already more than double the amount a minimum-wage worker could earn for fifty 40-hour weeks, be increased.  Imagine how much prouder their constituents  would feel if the lawmakers said, “We want nothing more than the hourly wage paid to Gladys who checks things out at our supermarket cash register or Phil, who works behind the counter at our convenience store, or the teenager who takes our money at the fast food place pay window.”

And what would make perfect sense would be a law that says any increase in the minimum wage paid to our legislators beyond increases provided by law would trigger the elimination of the state income, or earnings, tax.

Makes perfect sense.

Of course it does.

No thanks needed.  This proposal is just part of being a good, helpful, citizen who has had the good fortune for many years to hear our lawmakers praise themselves as citizen-legislators.

 

It is NOT the Fourth of July

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A lot of folks traveled during the holiday weekend and many found themselves in communities that held special festivals to observe the holiday.  We attended one of those events.

The banner on the downtown stage read, “Salute to America.”  But the master of ceremonies corrected that impression almost immediately by announcing the event was a salute to veterans, especially Vietnam veterans.  And through various pieces of music and introductions, veterans stood up and sat down more times than in a church praise service.

No such ceremony is complete without an inspirational speaker, of course, and the speaker in this event was a veteran who tried to touch on every patriotic cliché he could in a 15-minute jumbled speech that I hope he wasn’t paid for: Mom (applause), apple pie (applause), hot dogs (applause), home (applause).   The event was partly sponsored by a Chevrolet dealer but he didn’t mention it so there was no applause for that one. There was a brief mention of the Declaration and five seconds later he was talking about the Constitution and he finished by reciting the Preamble to the Constitution to emphasize that government could only do so much.

And after the rifle salute by the American Legion and taps, the emcee closed things out by redundantly exulting, “God Bless the USA. God Bless America.”  And there was some applause and some people went home to a late dinner and others stuck around for a stage show.

As I folded my chair and wrestled it back in its zippered bag, I grumbled to myself and some nearby friends about (this will get me in trouble) how veterans had hijacked the event.

On further review, as they say in some sports these days, I realized that was a rash evaluation of something done with good intentions and for those whose neck instantly grew red in reading the preceding paragraph, I offer my apologies–although one of those friends suggested having veterans stand up at such events is a pretty shallow gesture, given the problems thousands of veterans continue to have getting help for the burdens they have brought back from the battlefield.

The problem with the event we witnessed is that the wrong veterans were honored.  And behind that problem is the matter that the event was a celebration of July 4th.

The holiday is not July 4th.  It’s Independence Day.

It’s the day our country was born–at great risk by men of incredible vision and courage.   We as a nation cannot forget what this holiday is really all about. But by holding a “July 4th celebration,” we do.

We would not think of calling Veterans Day by its calendar date, November 11th.  We wouldn’t think of calling Memorial Day by its calendar date, whatever Monday that might be year-to-year. Those are days honoring veterans and we refer to them by their currently correct names (although they were once known as Armistice Day and Decoration Day).

July 4th is Independence Day.   And if we are to honor veterans that day, let us honor veterans such as David Bedell, Thomas Kennedy, Christopher Casey, William Ramsey, James Parks, Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Steele, Stephen Hempstead, and Edward Robertson.

These men are among several dozen soldiers of the American Revolution who came to and died in Missouri.  Some are buried in our oldest cemeteries.  Some are buried in remote countryside burial grounds.  The grave of at least one has been plowed over.   These men fought in the war that gave us a nation free of foreign control and then moved west with the frontier to live out their dream of a free country.  Some became respected elders in their communities.  They were the original Sons of the American Revolution.

Independence Day is when the delegates to the Continental Congress approved a declaration declaring the thirteen colonies are “free and independent states…absolved from all allegiance to the British crown…and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.”  And furthermore, they were united in this position.

It was the first time that the thirteen independent colonies declared that they were the United States of America, not a series of colonies of the British crown.

It was not a document drafted on the spur of the moment.  Movements toward independence had been underway in several places before the declaration of separation, even before the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre.  But this document was when those colonies decided enough was enough, scattered protestations of oppression were not adequate.

The closing line of that declaration is an important one to ponder on Independence Day.  It is an unmistakable statement that these congressional delegates were prepared to risk everything to achieve the status of an independent nation to be respected by other nations, including England, as equals.  “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” they said.   In the years to come before that independence was finally wrested from England, those words came starkly true for many of those who signed the document.

Those men knew exactly the risks they were taking.  On the day Congress declared independence, July 2, the British fleet and the British army arrived in New York, not that far away from Philadelphia even then.   That threatening presence did not keep the delegates from adopting the Declaration of Independence on the morning of July 4, when John Hancock signed it.  Later that day, printer John Dunlap printed the first copies of the document, of which two dozen are known to still exist.  The first newspaper publication of the Declaration of Independence was on July 6 in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and two days later, the document was read to a public audience for the first time, at a Philadelphia park. It didn’t take long for word to reach New York.

The delegates who had adopted the document on July 4 did not gather to sign it until August 2, the day a large force of British troops arrived as reinforcements in New York after colleagues of Bedell, Casey, Hempstead, Ramsey and the others had repelled them in Charleston, South Carolina.

If we only have a July 4th celebration, we lose the importance of Independence Day.  If July 4th becomes another day just to honor veterans, we lose sight of the courage and intelligence of those who knew they were risking everything to throw off oppression and declare their thirteen colonies to be worthy of respect as a nation by the other nations of the world and we slight those who rest in Missouri graves who came here to live the dream they fought to create.  If Independence Day is just July 4th, we fail to honor those who gave us a nation to celebrate.

It’s not too much to realize Independence Day deserves to stand on its own values.  It’s not July 4th.  It is so much more than that and we do a disservice to ourselves, our freedoms, our possibilities, and our country if we make it anything less.

And for the benefit of the speaker at the event I attended, the Constitution has its own day on September 17.  It is known as Constitution Day and is not widely celebrated with festivals and speeches, organized or jumbled.  And it is not celebrated as just September 17th.   Those who advocate for Constitution Day say it is intended to commemorate “the formation and the signing of the U.S. Constitution by thirty-nine brave men on September 17, 1787, recognizing all who, are by being born in the U.S. or by naturalization, have become citizens.” Some might argue that Constitution Day should have a broader meaning than that, but that argument is for another day and perhaps for another place.

Constitution Day deserves better than it gets.  And so, certainly, does Independence Day. It’s not just July 4th.

 

Missing in action at Vicksburg

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Vicksburg National Military Park has more than 1350 monuments, plaques, tablets, and markers commemorating people and incidents during the Civil War siege that ended today in 1863.  Many of those markers note places where the 27 Union and 15 Confederate units from Missouri were based or fought.  The large Missouri monument is at a place where two Missouri units fought each other.

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The monument was dedicated in 1917 after a special commission was appointed by the Governor to determine the position of Missouri troops during the siege, which began after Union attacks for a week in mid-May left 110 Union soldiers from Missouri and 113 Missouri Confederates dead.  The report says 971 Missourians from both sides were wounded, 525 from the attacking Union side. More would die during the siege.  Total casualties at the end of the Vicksburg engagement reached 19,000 killed and wounded.

The Missouri monument is situated between opposing army positions.

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And the Union side under Francis Preston Blair Jr., is marked just over the crest of the hill tot he right of the memorial.

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Frank Blair Jr., was the son of one of Lincoln’s top advisers and the man who built Blair House, across the street from the White House.

The Missouri Memorial is one of the biggest state memorials in the park and is one of two Missouri memorials on Civil War Battlefields—the other one is at Shiloh and was dedicated in 1971.  It’s the only memorial that is dedicated to soldiers on both sides of the battle.

Not far from the Missouri monument is another symbol of Missouri’s presence.  It’s the remains of the ironclad U. S. S. Cairo, which was built at Carondelet, south of St. Louis at the time, by James B. Eads, who is best known for building the Eads Bridge several years after the war.

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The Cairo was one of six ironclads that made up the first ironclad ships of war in the history of the U.S. Navy.  It was sunk in the nearby Yazoo River in December, 1862 at a time when Union forces were trying to figure out the best way to attack Vicksburg.  The remains of it were raised a century later and re-assembled on a wooden frame so visitors can walk through the boat today and get an idea of what the first American ironclad ships of war were like.

When General John Pemberton finally surrendered to General Grant on July 4, 1863, he mused that he might have won the battle if he had had 10,000 more Missourians.

But there’s something a little odd about a couple of the markers at the battlefield.  Visitors arriving at the visitor center parking lot are likely to walk past two stone monuments that list the states that had troops involved in this battle.  The one for the Union Army lists eight states.

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And the one for Confederate Army lists seven states.

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But Missouri is MIA on the monuments that visitors first see at the park.  Generals from Missouri– Grant, Sherman, and others–were on the winning side.  And the Pennsylvanian who commanded the losing side wished he had ten thousand more men from Missouri.

It’s a curious part of the park which has memorials within it honoring soldiers from fourteen Confederate states and eighteen union states and tombstones for a number of Missouri soldiers buried at the Vicksburg Military Park Cemetery.  We don’t know how many are there because seventy-five percent of the Civil War dead buried there are unknown—13,000 of the 17,000 burials of casualties at Vicksburg and at other battle sites in the southeast United States during the war. No Missouri Confederates are buried there although two or three Confederate soldiers were mistakenly buried there in the late 1860s.  It’s the nation’s largest cemetery for Civil War Veterans.

Confederate soldiers who died of bullets or disease at Vicksburg are in the Soldiers Rest section at Cedar Hill Cemetery in the city of Vicksburg. That includes Missouri General Martin Green, who was killed by a Union sharpshooter on June 27, a week before the surrender.

The Cedar Hill Cemetery also contains the remains of “Old Douglas,” a Confederate camel.  He was assigned to a Mississippi unit at the time of his death.  He originally was part of a War department experiment with using camels as beasts of burden in the Southwest in the 1850s, replacing mules that couldn’t go without water for long periods of time. He belonged for a time to Missouri’s own Confederate General Sterling Price who used him in the Iuka Campaign and the Battle of Corinth in 1862.  He was transferred to the Mississippi regiment soon after.  A Union sharpshooter killed him at Vicksburg.

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There’s some doubt about how much of Douglas is there.  Conditions inside the Rebel lines in the latter part of the siege were pretty bad. Some reports say Douglas provided some much-needed meat for the troops.

The reason for the separate cemetery burials for Union and Confederate troops explains why Missouri has a Confederate Cemetery at Higginsville.   Congress passed a law in 1862 establishing national cemeteries for soldiers who shall die in the service of the country.”  That excluded casualties from the rebelling states.  As years went by, Congress modified the law so that it would cover former Confederates who later honorably served in the United States military.  The National Cemetery in Springfield, Missouri is said to be the only such cemetery where Union and Confederate soldiers are buried side by side.

Arlington National Cemetery, which was installed on the front lawn of Robert E. Lee’s mansion, has a special section for Confederate soldiers. They’re clustered around the Confederate Memorial was dedicated in 1914.  Before the memorial was established, several Confederate dead were buried along with Union soldiers but for many years, decoration of their graves on Decoration Day, or as we now call it, Memorial day, was forbidden.

President McKinley changed the policy in 1898 when he announced that decorating Confederate graves represented “a tribute to American valor,” starting the process that led to the memorial dedication in 1914.

The Missouri Memorial at Vicksburg is almost a century old and shows the signs of its age with some cracked and crumbling stone and damaged to its bronze panels. The legislature has appropriated $375,000 dollars for those repairs and Governor Nixon has signed the bill.

A great nation

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As we’ve watched, read, and listened to the verbal bombasts after a couple of recent U. S. Supreme Court decisions and hearing some inflammatory rhetoric from a fairly-recent presidential candidate, we are left with some unfortunate questions.

Does a great nation always have to have some citizens it can consider inferior, someone less qualified to seek the same life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that most of us feel we automatically inherit as American citizens?

Does a great nation always have to have some citizens to disparage because they are different—in color, in gender attitude, in origin, in occupation, in intellectual or physical ability?

Does a great nation need to have so many people assuming God’s authority to decide which of us will be saved and which of us will be damned?

Does a great nation have to have some people profiting by peddling fear?

Does a great nation always have to be looking out the corners of its eyes at others, asking if they can be trusted?

Does a great nation need to curry a climate of suspicion within its populace?

Does a great nation need to portray entire segments of its population as unworthy because of the actions of a few?

Be careful how you answer these questions. Each of us is one of or descended from one of or knows one of those we asked about. And sometimes that makes it harder to proclaim greatness.